Chapter Twenty-One
Twenty-One
Vending machine coffee in a plastic cup brought back memories.
Bad ones. Carol should have been in bed, falling asleep to Women Who Kill.
Instead she was sitting on a ledge, listening to the mindless yells of the shoplifting junkie in the neighboring police cell.
They all sounded the same. For years, the moans, groans, and ramblings of addicts had been her birdsong.
At least this time she’d been able to entertain herself with her phone.
That was one advantage of being the age she was.
The desk sergeant had taken pity on her and allowed her to keep her mobile.
She’d sat there, scrolling through Facebook, looking at old friends still in prison.
Perhaps she’d be seeing them again soon.
She saw herself in that moment, holding the bottle to Belinda’s throat.
That had been her opportunity but she hadn’t taken it.
There had been enough time, but she’d paused.
Carol was no longer a woman who killed. She was like Mike Tyson at the end of his career.
The murderous rage had left her, and it would never return.
That afternoon, she’d thought it was back, but it wasn’t.
That was just an echo. That was just, in truth, a sadness.
But she was no longer a woman who expressed her feelings through the medium of killing. She needed a new hobby.
The irony was not lost on her. On the evening she’d learned, definitively, that she could no longer kill, when she’d had it confirmed that she did not have it in her…she’d been arrested for murder. Funny old game.
A judder rising up from her chest caught Carol by surprise, and then…
Was she? She was. She was crying. Carol hadn’t cried this century.
Prison hadn’t allowed it. The shell she had grown for herself hadn’t allowed it.
Carol had retired her tear ducts at an early age.
They had had as much use as her appendix.
Crying was a weakness she could not afford, yet here she was, alone, in a police cell, blubbering like a little girl.
Carol did not want to go back to prison.
She found herself overwhelmed by all the forgotten feelings of crying.
The shame and embarrassment, then the relief.
She embraced the release and began to wail.
It felt good. Decades of tension leaving her body.
Carol was expressing her feelings without murdering.
Emotion without a death count. Was this what her prison counselor had called personal growth?
But prison was not a world in which she could do this, where this Carol could survive. She had to fight to stay on the outside. She had a life left to live.
The shutter on her cell door slid open, and Laura Welsh’s face appeared.
“All right, Carol. We’re ready for you now.”
Carol wiped her eyes with her sleeve and composed herself.