Chapter 6 Mute Swan #7
As I talked, I watched Sam. I heard him thinking, as if he had spoken the words aloud, that his hunch might be correct and,
despite all the indications to the contrary, Felicity might be entirely innocent—just as I, despite all the indications to
the contrary, was very nearly guilty. There was a break in the storm, but the sky was signaling a second act, smears of gray
clouds hanging low, lightning flickering in their fat depths, like lamps snapped on and off.
Something was wrong in his face. Something was changing. He didn’t say a word. Minutes. A minute is a long time if your life
depends on it.
Somebody’s done for.
Sam finally said, “That is a hell of a story.”
Now he would leave me, I thought. Now for sure. Could you blame him? I thought. If the tables were turned, as it were, wouldn’t you leave him?
“Felicity was right. Thinking about it is not the same as doing it. You would have stopped.” He made a tent of his two hands
and pressed his index fingers against his eyes. “I just don’t know . . .”
The tables have turned, with a vengeance. Whoever said that? Who the fuck cared? I was sick of being the woman with the suitable quote for every occasion. I was losing
the only man I ever loved.
How many nights had I asked myself, had I truly wanted to end her life? Or to humiliate and terrify her as she humiliated
me? Was my brain back then even formed enough to fully encompass the enormity? A seventeen-year-old still doesn’t possess
the long view. How smart you are doesn’t matter. I still lived as a teenager lives, in dog years, in which each week is a
month, each month a season, each season an era. There were nights when I almost forgave myself. There were nights when I was
certain that I should never be forgiven.
It was long ago.
But not really. I was still wearing the same Shinola Bixby watch my grandmother bought me for high school graduation.
An anemic sun was out by then. The stolen night, at the end of the stolen weekend, was gone. Sam got up to make coffee. Then
his phone rang.
“It’s the jail.”
“Is it Felicity?”
He didn’t answer. But moments later, he was slipping into jeans and a white shirt he left untucked. I admired the curve of
his hip as I pulled on my own clothing. He was as beautiful to me as a statue, my own shrine.
He is mine, I thought.
He was mine, I thought.
“Are you okay staying here alone?”
“I’ll come with you.”
Sam stopped, regarding the screen of his phone like an oracle. “You can’t. It would be inappropriate. You’re not part of Felicity’s
defense team. You’re just a reporter writing about her . . .”
“I’m not just that.”
“You know what I mean, Reenie. You can’t go with me to see her unless she asks to see you.”
“Will you tell her about you and me?”
“No, why would I do that? Why would that be relevant?”
It wouldn’t be relevant, not unless he liked her better. What was wrong with me? Why was I jealous of a sick woman facing
a life sentence? A sick woman who had never shown me anything except loving kindness, since the day in first grade when she
gave me half her cheese-and-pickle sandwich because Miranda put so much butter on my peanut-butter sandwich that it was like
a lard-wich?
“Why does she want to see you right now?”
He tucked his shirt in. “That wasn’t Felicity calling me. It was the assistant warden. Felicity had a seizure . . .”
“Can your mom go see her?”
Oh god, I was horrible. I was selfish and horrible.
Sam didn’t shout at me but it felt as though he did when he said, “No!”
“What?”
“She’s being taken to the hospital. I’m going to meet the ambulance there.”
“Let me just ride with you.”
“No,” he said. “No. It’s not a good idea.”
“Is it usual to call a prisoner’s lawyer if she gets . . . sick?”
“Yes, and the lawyer calls the person’s family. But that’s not an option. Her brothers aren’t even driving age yet, and the
father, the stepfather . . .”
“That wouldn’t be a great idea. Why would she have a seizure? Did she fall and get hurt?”
“She was outside,” Sam said as he gathered up his coat, his keys. “She was in the exercise yard, with her binoculars, and
the guard saw her fall. I don’t know how badly she’s hurt.”
“What was she doing?”
“She was watching the swans. In that little marshy place next to the lake, right behind the municipal building? She told me
that they had babies . . . signals . . .”
“Cygnets,” I said. “That’s what little baby swans are called.”
“How do you know?”
“Obviously, from the birdwatcher herself. Felicity told me that.” I shared the story with Sam, of our one-and-only camping
trip.
We were juniors, maybe sophomores, watching swans gliding decorously across Green Lake. She had decided to go camping and
dragged me along. We were the only guests at the campground except for a huge trailer with a TV antenna and an awning depicting
the Confederate flag. It was so cold and stormy that the guy who ran the office didn’t even have the heart to charge us anything.
We somehow pitched the sagging dome tent, then dined in the car on Pringles, power bars, and cold pizza. We were by then soaking
wet and too filthy even for a woodsy restaurant, and, between us, we also had a total of seventeen dollars. In the tent, it
was as dark as I imagined the outback. After conversation and canned Beyoncé tunes on our phones ran out, for of course, we
had no car charger, we wrapped ourselves in sleeping bags that smelled of campfire smoke and mucky little brothers. I woke
every hour to bitch about which was worse, the mosquitoes or the ever-damper tent floor.
Then, as often happens, the rain stopped as the dawn broke in breathtaking violet and gold. As she took pictures, Felicity
told me that, despite their graceful, nearly mystical splendor, swans were fierce and dangerous, even to humans, especially
in defense of their downy, awkward chicks, the “ugly ducklings” of legend that grew up to be creatures of surpassing beauty.
She gave me a framed print of one of the pictures she took that morning, a swan just lifting its mighty, ragged wings as it
rose up from the still surface of the water.
Felicity. Felicity. Her name meant “happiness.”
We rode silently to my sister’s house, each of us shawled in our own thoughts. I had no idea what his were: I hoped they were
not regrets.
“The seizure was probably from a high fever,” he said when he stopped in his office parking lot for me to pick up my car.
“I guess she had the flu, and nobody noticed. She didn’t complain about it, and nobody is taking your temperature when you’re
in jail. She’s on IV fluids and medication now. I’ll have to ask for a postponement for two weeks, so she can recover. I mean,
people go on trial when they have cancer, but she would be infectious in a situation like this.” He pressed his fingers against
the line between his eyes. The silence was like waves in my ears, rising and receding, rising and receding: one wave my empathy
for her, the next my fear of losing him.
The binoculars had bruised her face. Even with youth on her side, she would start the trial with a lurid bruise. Those binoculars, as well as the big Birds of America hardcover book, came from me. The field glasses were the pricey kind, and now I would have to find new ones for her, if she
was even allowed to have them anymore. Clearly, they were breakable and could be fashioned into a weapon she could use to
slice her own wrists or a guard’s neck. Sam said prisoners could make anything into a weapon, the foil from a candy wrapper,
playing cards from a deck, even pebbles from the exercise yard slowly collected and stuffed into a sock for a handy cudgel.
He was saying now, “I need to find some clothes for her before the trial. She’s too thin now to wear anything she has . . .
Even her underwear is too big.”
“I’ll help,” I said. “I know how to make four things look like ten.”
This I was good at. A dress, a natural linen blazer, a Starbaby cardigan in muted green with purple buttons, wide-leg wool-and-linen
pants a subtle violet plaid, Moon in June midi-skirt, all from Such Sweet Sorrow . . . nude pumps in the size eight I knew
she wore, some sturdy Hanes bras and briefs from Target.
I told Sam, “It won’t cost much. Maybe two hundred dollars.” He gasped. “You think that’s a lot?”
“We don’t have much to spend, because Felicity doesn’t have much money. She can’t even sell her condominium because it’s tied
up with Cary Church’s estate. So we’re doing this pro bono,” he told me. “Thanks, Reenie.”
I assured him that I would pick up the clothing and send the things to his office. He could Venmo me the money. He nodded.
He made no response to that either.
“What’s going on, Sam? Are you afraid that something is really wrong with Felicity?”
“Not really.”
“What then? You’re acting weird. Is it what I told you?”
Sam said, “Maybe?”
Hardly breathing, I made a show of rummaging through my big purse, as if I’d misplaced something important, which I had—my
heart and my mind. I noticed a piece of linen and remembered that, sometime during the night, I had stolen a pillowcase. How
nuts I was by that point, I didn’t regret this at all, despite the fact that Sam, precision personified, would probably be
looking for it in his laundry for weeks. I said, “We agreed this wasn’t right for now.” Sam nodded. “But after the trial,
we’ll try again?”
“I don’t know.”
“So are you ending this?”
He kissed my cheek. Mourning sculpted the corners of his mouth downward. If my face was a mirror of his, we both looked like
tragedy masks. Then, slowly, Sam answered, “I can’t say for sure. I’m sorry. Remember that I promised to answer every question
you asked but I promised to tell you the truth.”
“Okay. I get it.”
He drove me back to my car at his office. He murmured that the snow had been cleared; that was good. I made a noise I hoped
sounded like agreement. I opened the door and stepped out. He didn’t stop me. I closed it behind me. He didn’t stop me.