Chapter 2 American Crow
Two
American Crow
Corvus brachyrhynchos. Crows show remarkable intelligence. An eighteenth-century tale tells of “counting crows,” in which a crow proved it could
count to five with a logic trap set by a farmer. Crows demonstrate episodic memory, recalling events in order, as humans do.
Crows and magpies are curious, prone to stealing bright objects. They recognize their own faces in a mirror, use tools, and
engage in play such as midair jousting, which they need to stimulate their intellect. Researchers say there would be more
examples of corvid intelligence except that scientists measure only those ways that birds behave like human beings rather
than like birds. In folklore, these birds symbolize death.
I still believed that Felicity would talk to me. She had to.
After the arraignment, though, I had to admit that the odds weren’t great. One thing I knew was true. When Felicity said no,
she said it only once.
At the very least, I would be able to tell my editor that I had used every key to try every lock in every door.
There’s no limit to the number of times you can try the same key in a different lock until that key opens something, even though tenacity and ingenuity are two different things, and I had plenty of the former and not much of the latter.
My dad told me once that the number of permutations with the digits one through ten was more than three million and I still don’t know what he was talking about.
More usefully, my mom used to say that the answer to any question was in the question; the key was finding the right question.
I tried calling Felicity at the jail. Whoever answered told me to hold on, and then, after a minute or so, returned to say
that Miss Wild was unavailable. Like she was in a meeting? Or on another call?
I wrote six letters to Felicity, each one different from the one before it.
The first was just a greeting to inquire about her condition in there. Did she need blankets? Was I allowed to send her a
better pillow? Felicity was strong and athletic but fragile, one of those people who got strep every year but was so stoic
she always waited until she was almost too sick to go anywhere but the ER. I had to believe she was suffering. Dane County
jail might not be Alcatraz, but it stifled my breath even to imagine myself locked in a room that was maybe eighty square
feet, the size of an average bathroom, with the only window high above my sight line and crosshatched with steel wires embedded
in the glass. She had never been a good sleeper: I couldn’t count the number of sleepover nights I’d awakened to find her
reading or just looking at me in the darkness, her amber eyes like strange lanterns.
The next letter was about the case. That one came back to me inside a larger envelope from Damiano, Chen, and Damiano, Attorneys
at Law.
So I wrote again, this time drawing little scenes of some of our old memories, which I thought might give her some comfort.
There was the time Felicity agreed to babysit for a squirrel monkey, the pet of the people at her church.
Almost all animals were helpless with love for Felicity, but this one, which was named Bushman for some famous gorilla, was the exception.
The cage was the size of a Volkswagen and once we got it into the house and pulled off the towels wrapped around it, the creepy little creature peed all over Felicity.
Within an hour, we learned that Bushman could pick the lock on his cage too.
Of course, he escaped, then proceeded to bite Ruth, then climbed into the pantry to rip apart bags of dried beans and boxes of cereal—I never saw anything without wheels or wings that could move that fast.
Rev. Wild commanded us to take it back. As if we could even catch it. Even if we did, the owners were out of town, like . . .
Portugal out of town. By late afternoon, Felicity and I were exhausted. I had to go home for some reason, I don’t remember
what, but when I came back, the monkey was still at large. The next thing we heard was Felicity’s stepfather screaming. Apparently,
he went into the darkened downstairs bathroom. There, he experienced the terrifying sensation of tiny hands clutching at his
rear end. Felicity heard her stepfather’s strangled cries as though he was having a heart attack. Somewhere between hysterical
laughter and hysterical tears, she rescued Bushman from the toilet, where he had fallen in and was weakly treading water,
for who knew how long?
We used to make each other laugh by making little monkey hand motions across the classroom or the street. And I drew a stick
figure of a monkey poking its head out of a toilet.
There was no answer to any of those letters.
Finally, I went to the jail.
According to Sally, arranging a visit was this whole process and she said I might as well take my chances. So I just showed
up.
At the desk, I spoke to a wispy blonde woman who looked far too fragile to be a prison guard, although maybe she was just
a receptionist. Of course, she asked me if I was expected and made the same face I would have made if someone answered, Not exactly . . . Pulling a pen out of her messy updo, she pointed at a metal table where a guy was sitting with his back to me. “Ask her lawyer,”
she said.
Sam Damiano turned around to face me.
What do you say about a memory like that? The memory of a time when your throat felt filled with glitter hearts or honeybees
and would explode if you tried to speak? Watching Sam put the cap on his pen was like watching someone else serve match point
at Wimbledon.
I was that bewitched that instantly.
Certainly part of that was me . . . part of my own chemistry. Part of that, I would later learn, was Sam, Sam’s effect on
people.
“You’re her friend,” he said. “Reenie the writer. I would be happy for her to see you but she’s not going to talk to you or
me or anyone else, except maybe Jilly here at the desk.”
Jilly nodded. She clearly had such a big crush that if this were a cartoon, little blue birdies and stars would have popped
out of her eyes. Did Felicity’s lawyer just walk the world like that, among women who threw their hearts at him? Did he even
notice? Was it only women? Sam had that thing—presence maybe, or charisma—that made people not only want to be around him
but to do what he wanted them to do, probably a useful thing in a defense attorney.
“Could I ask her myself?” I said.
“Sure.”
And as if she’d been waiting for her cue, Felicity appeared in the lane between the rows of cells, three on each side . . .
even paler and thinner than when I had last seen her, her darting eyes the only living thing in her face. “Reenie,” she said.
“I thought I told . . .”
I made up things she didn’t say next.
I thought I told you to go away?
I asked Sam to tell you I didn’t want to talk to you? You especially?
You know that you have a lot of nerve coming here after not even bothering to reach out to me for years, not answering when I reached out to you, and you expect me to throw open the round tower of my soul to you and share everything with you because we were friends?
Felicity jerked her hands up out of the grasp of the guard (not Jilly, a much burlier woman with a grim line where most people
have lips), surprising him, who staggered back a little against the bars, grabbing at Felicity and missing as she jerked her
whole body toward me. Then, I was the one who shrank back, which I still think of, after all this time. For what did I think
she was going to do? Strangle me? Slap me? Take me hostage and threaten to slice everyone else with a sharpened blade fashioned
from a pop can? Instead, she whirled and stalked back to the locked doors she had just exited, banging on them with the heels
of her hands.
“Felicity!” I called out, and she didn’t stop banging. “Felicity! It’s Reenie! How can you think that I would ever, ever do
anything to hurt you?” But wasn’t I already hurting her? Wasn’t I already taking advantage of her disadvantage for my own
ends? Like my sister, Nell, said?
It was horrible, watching someone actually try to get back into jail. Once she was admitted, she didn’t look back.
“So that went well,” I said to Sam, to lob in a critical remark before he had the chance to do that.
“Even if she would talk to you, as her friend, she would never talk to you as the press, Reenie.”
“I’m not just press.”
“Are you writing a story about this trial?”
“Yes, I am, but—”
“Then you are press,” he said. “I never called you ‘just press.’ You said that.”
“But what I want to do is try to find—”
“Well, whatever that is, and I’m sorry to interrupt, I usually have better manners, you’re going to have to try to find it
without her help.”
“What about your help?”
“I’d do anything I could to help her or you, but my hands are tired.”
“You don’t look as though you use your hands that much.” We both started to laugh. “I knew what you meant.”
“Right. My hands are tied,” he said.
“But she must have talked to you about how she would explain that she could not have done this.”
“No, she hasn’t.”
“Why not?”
Sam sighed gustily and went on, “She thinks it’s obvious. She thinks that anything she says could make it worse.”
“I don’t get that.”
“Neither do I, but she’s afraid of the prosecutor, and rightly so. She’s also worried about how she comes across.”
I murmured something in agreement. Felicity’s appearance belied her true nature: she was shy, but that could read as disdainful.
She was practical, but to someone who didn’t know her, that could read as cold. She didn’t babble about meaningless matters,
and her self-possession could seem judgmental. Plenty of people might consider Felicity intimidating, through no fault of
her own.
I asked Sam, “Don’t you want her to say that she’s innocent? In her own words?”
“I do, but I don’t think it’s likely.” He gazed up at the ceiling. “Maybe she’s right. Maybe she doesn’t seem like the all-American