The Captives Read online

  She moved up toward the door and peeked out its little porthole, a piece of reinforced glass about the size of a kitchen sponge. All she could see was the cell door across the hall: beyond it was Patti, who’d murdered a surgeon in a dispute involving Blue Cross/Blue Shield payments.

  She pressed her ear to the little metal flap that popped open three times daily, when meals were delivered. Through the thin steel, the rumbling continued.

  She lowered herself to the floor, slicked with lumpy gray paint and eternally chilly, and pressed her mouth to the inch-high gap beneath the door. “Patti.”

  No answer. She tried again. Then, suddenly, she pegged the rumbling sound. Patti was snoring, deep and snuffly. She snored just like Miranda’s dad had, nights when she’d woken from dreams as a little girl. Patti was asleep. Patrizia Melvoin, transgender HIV-positive swindler from Morrisania, the Bronx, snored in precisely the same key and rhythm as Edward Greene, onetime congressman from Pennsylvania’s Twenty-Eighth District.

  Miranda sat back on the floor and giggled. She giggled and the noise of her giggle was alien to her ears and snapped her back into silence. The snoring pressed on.

  It was her final day in the lock, and it had stretched for eons already. She squinted up at the patch of sky. It was certainly after noon.

  Usually the COs released prisoners from the shoe in the morning. Why the delay? She thought about her photos, her clothes, her Cup-a-Soup waiting for her in a locked storage bin back on the unit. She unbelted her flannel wrap, which was dull yellow and reminded her of the bathrobes she and Amy used to get at Christmastime from Grandma Rosalie—always to their great dismay. They would have much rather received those dolls whose hair and makeup you could style, or drum majorette batons, or pet rabbits. The wrap had been issued to her when they took her standard yellows away as she’d been admitted into the lock. She shrugged it off and slipped off her state-mandated briefs. In the shoe, you weren’t allowed your own clothes, so it was NYS DOCS even across your ass.

  She contemplated the steel toilet, lidless, seatless, a gawping frozen gullet. She sat. And began to bounce up and down. Fast.

  Fourteen days ago, Miranda couldn’t do this. When Patti had told her about this peculiar pastime, she’d said, “I’ll never be that starved for entertainment.”

  Patti had chuckled. “No cable TV in here. No Reader’s Digest to read.”

  But the first few days had been okay—she’d suitcased four sleeping pills that Lu had pressed on her when it was clear that Miranda was doomed to the shoe, tucking two tiny pills in each nostril—she’d been sure her mouth breathing would give her away, but it didn’t. The pills kept her nicely conked. But they ran out and she was left staring at the patch of sky and wisps of Lewis Patterson began to drift across it, and Duncan, and worse, and soon she was in an agony of replays and desperate for anything to occupy her mind, to fill it and extinguish all thought.

  And so she perched on the toilet and she bobbed. She bounced. Skeptically, at first. She even laughed. How ridiculous. She laughed, but she continued, as if riding English saddle, as she did at Camp Piney Top in the Allegheny front range, age nine. And then she heard a reverberating gulp, and sure enough, her bouncing had created a plunger effect, and the water had suctioned back down into the pipes, leaving them clear. She knelt beside the toilet, squeezed shut her eyes, plugged tight her nose, and lowered her head into the bowl.

  She heard voices.

  DARK CUSTOM SUITS, BRIGHT ITALIAN TIES SPUN WITH THICK SILK and tied in swollen knots. Plus matching pocket squares. One day peacock blue, the next day deep crimson with gold fleur-de-lis. Miranda sometimes wondered if that’s why she’d ended up with the mind-fogging sentence. Her lawyer exuded money. The members of the jury—the line cook at a pizza parlor, the snowplow driver—imagined they were shooting down a princess perched on a lofty mountain of cash. They didn’t know that the inherited capital talked up in the newspapers, the Greenes of Pittsburgh fortune built upon decades of drop-leaf dining tables and convertible settees and barrel-back patio chairs, had long since been depleted, the bulk of it bled out in advertising fees incurred during her father’s final, losing campaign. Alan Bloomfield, connoisseur of exciting Italian ties and pocket squares, was an old family friend, a frat brother of her dad’s, and in love with her mother, and providing his service at a steep discount.

  Bethanne Bloomfield, Alan’s daughter, had been the same age as Miranda’s sister, Amy. They’d been best friends for a time; they’d go to Twin Oaks Mall, the movies, they’d lock themselves away in Amy’s room. A pair of fourteen-year-old adventuresses. Miranda remembered standing at the door to the room once, the teens primping for a junior-high dance. Blow-dryers, curling irons—the place sounded and smelled like a small factory. The adults weren’t around. The primpers decided to raid Barbara Greene’s vanity table, with its chunky flasks of perfume. They lingered over the dark interesting names, Opium and Skin Musk. Then Bethanne opened Edward Greene’s dresser and discovered a box of Trojans in the bottom drawer. She shrieked. “They use rubbers?”

  Amy snatched the box. She studied it, then said with a frown, “I think my mom has an IUD.” Bethanne grabbed the package back from her, took out one of the little envelopes, and pocketed it. Then Amy took one, too, before shoving the box back into its hiding place.

  Miranda didn’t know what an IUD was, and when she asked Amy about it later, she wouldn’t tell.

  Miranda could pass hours like this, chasing down moments from her earliest years, scenes from a safe sliver of the distant past. But somehow the memories would meander to dangerous places. Bethanne was a lawyer herself now, and married to a lawyer, and they were leasing in a townhouse complex in Bethesda. From Bethanne, her mind would skip back to Alan Bloomfield, sitting stiffly to her left, gently thumping his pencil on his legal pad, watching their case fall apart.

  From there, again, though she tried to stop it, to the woman on the stand, her commanding yet tremulous voice, her mounded body, a dignitary of nerves and grief. “My brother was a lifelong bachelor. An army clerk in Saigon. Captain in the volunteer hook and ladder. My brother was a fine man.” The woman would explode into tears. The woman would never look Miranda’s way.

  THE STATE KNEW HER AS 0068-N-97, BECAUSE SHE WAS THE SIXTY-EIGHTH prisoner admitted to NYS DOCS Facility N, a.k.a. Milford Basin Correctional Facility, that year. She lived in C Unit 109 in cell number 34, the last cell on the south side of East.

  There, CO Beryl Carmona was her Old Testament God, stern but often loving, all-powerful and terrifyingly unpredictable. Lu had sidled up to Miranda her very first day on the unit, eased an arm around her shoulder, and murmured to her about the lead guard. “Carmona is a very smart kind of stupid,” warned Lu. “Watch her.”

  Ludmilla Chermayev, late of Moscow and Sheepshead Bay, was right about this, as she would be about almost everything at Milford Basin, Miranda found. In her first month on the unit, Carmona had ticketed Miranda twelve times.

  Barb Greene couldn’t fathom how her daughter had accumulated enough discipline violations to be one ticket away from being tossed into the shoe. “In school, all I heard was how well behaved you were. Best comportment in your fourth-grade class,” she’d sniffled, hunched in the din of the visiting room, shredding a paper napkin. Miranda’s mother had struggled not to weep that time, but once again she did. Copious tissues, dislodged contact lenses. “Can’t you just follow the rules, sweetheart?” Barb had pleaded. “Can’t you just try?”

  But Miranda did follow the rules, she did try. Stay sane and stay out of trouble’s way, just minding her own business and doing the time: this was the pact she’d made her very first week. She’d even written this vow in April Nicholson’s paperback copy of the abridged Bible, as April, who commanded the cell across from Miranda’s in reception, had insisted. “You’re just like me,” she’d said, that first awful night, a deadly solemn expression on her round face, the polished-bronze cheeks and lovely dark eyes and red-plum mouth tha
t provided a bit of comfort, of beauty, across the dim corridor. “I am not street and I have never been and I never will be street,” April had said, in that voice Miranda grew to rely upon, low tones swirled with vague southern softnesses. “You just do the same as me, and you won’t have a problem here.”

  And Miranda was not the problem. The problem was Beryl Carmona. That very first night she’d moved out of reception, dragging her prison-issue garb in a black plastic bag, April following with her books and stationery, Carmona had been waiting for her in 109C. “You’re looking at the head CO on this unit,” she said, pointing to her badge. Curly brown hair framed a long jaw, and when she walked, her handcuffs and flashlight flopped around her wide hips, the front pockets of her khakis popped open like little ears. She glanced at the pile in April’s arms, then turned to Miranda with a grin. “You read? I do, too. That’s great. We can have discussions. But don’t let me see you wearing those foot thongs.” She gestured at Miranda’s blue rubber flip-flops.

  “They were issued by the storemaster.”

  “They’re for the shower. I don’t like to look at toes.”

  Several women were standing around, watching with good-natured curiosity. All of them were wearing flip-flops on their feet. The unit was hot and airless, after all.

  Carmona followed her gaze, then heaved an exaggerated sigh. “Please don’t look on these ladies as inspiration. They’re sorry, without a doubt, but born sorry. You, I’m holding to a higher standard.” Winked and hoisted her giant knot of keys. “I just like the idea of you. I do. Now let me show you to your room.”

  Carmona often called her Missy May. Other COs called her Miss Lady. The ladies usually called her Miss Prell or Lady Prell. “She has got Prell hair,” observed Chica in the unit kitchen one day during Miranda’s first week, looking up from the beans she was stirring and waving her wooden spoon in the direction of Miranda’s thick, glossy, russet hair. It had grown long, past her shoulder blades at that point. “Like my brother,” said Chica. “Shiny Prell hair. He shampoos twice a day. Always Prell. Always.”

  “She Prells her hair, you can tell,” added another.

  The ladies talked about each other in front of one another like that. Miranda knew her input wasn’t required or desired. She’d just shooed a fly from her grape-jelly sandwich and continued to read about Tess of the D’Urbervilles. She hadn’t minded being dubbed Lady Prell, not at all. She’d always been, admittedly, just a touch vain about her hair and was kind of glad it still shone. She hadn’t conditioned it in weeks. Those instructions—apply generously, comb through, wait five minutes, rinse—don’t really float in a prison hygiene room.

  Chica was the lady with the bath mat, in fact, the thing resulted in the thirteenth ticket, the one that landed Miranda in the lock. Powder pink, and shaggy, and just a bit dirtied up around the edges. Miranda had coveted this bath mat from the moment she first saw it, because it evoked for her the Hotel Flora in Rome. Age twelve, with her father speaking at some conference. All expenses paid. Dad, Mom, Amy, and Miranda, put up for free in a hotel with floors of dark green marble, and white molded babies winging across the ceiling. Every evening a maid came in and turned back the beds and laid a thick pink towel on the cool floor by her nightstand. “For your feet,” said her mother. “So the last thing at night and the first thing in the morning is gentleness on your soles.” When Miranda saw that bath mat, she knew that if she could just feel gentleness on her soles, she might have a chance of retaining her sanity at least partway.

  She broached the subject at lunch one day. As usual, the Dominicanas were gathered around the microwave, with the woman they all called Mami, a withered lady who’d run a safe house in Inwood, serving up a meal of canned tomatoes and instant rice. Most of the unit’s Latinas did not eat in the Zoo, except for a few of the Marcy crew. Miranda was more or less welcome in the kitchen circle; she was grateful for that, the food was decent, and she only wished she’d studied Spanish rather than French and German in high school, so she could follow all the conversation.

  Anyway, on this day she’d gathered that Chica’s appeal had gone through, and she was to be out in a week’s time. Before Miranda knew it, she’d piped up. “Could I have that bath mat, Chica?” The ladies tittered.

  “Lady Prell wants your mat, Chica,” one of them said.

  Chica smiled at her, a very kind, gap-punctured grin. “Come by my room on my day. I think yes.”

  The ladies and even the COs called the cells “rooms,” as if they were all in the Hotel Flora.

  On Chica’s day of release a particular tension permeated the place, because during the night a woman in D unit had been found convulsing from a fermentation of torn toast, sugar cubes, the skins of Red Delicious apples, and a splash of peach-scented body spray. Everyone had been locked in and subjected to cell searches all morning. Four ladies had been found with the hooch and sent to segregation. A bruised anger pulsated along the corridors into the afternoon, when Miranda walked to the far end of the block, to find Chica packing up her things. Across the hallway, a woman called Dorcas, lanky and powerful with a face as hard and burnished as a chestnut, provided commentary: “Judge turned down my appeal. Give Chica a go. But COs wouldn’t have shit to do if Dorcas got a go.”

  “Yeah, yeah, Dorcas,” came a voice from behind her. Her sidekick, a doughy girl named Cassie, was lolling on Dorcas’s bed, doodling on her pasty foot with a ballpoint pen. “Only reason you’re here is to give COs shit to do.”

  “Chica,” said Miranda. “Remember what we talked about the other day?”

  “Look at that girl’s arms. She has got the skinniest arms,” said Dorcas, regarding her distastefully.

  “She thinks she’s something,” said Cassie.

  Chica picked up the bath mat, almost sadly. “I even washed it for you, lady. My sister gave this to me. A nice thing to have.” She stroked the pink fuzzy rug as if it were a pet and then handed it to Miranda.

  “I am so happy you’re leaving, Chica,” muttered Dorcas. “You don’t know.”

  Chica scowled and, with an annoyed tug, covered her doorway, a sheet of scratched clear vinyl—a privacy curtain, they called these flaps, which were designed to be transparent, though the ladies always had their ways of clouding the view. She reached around the back of her bed and pulled out a tiny razor blade. “It gets fuzzy sometimes. I used this blade to trim.” She pressed it into Miranda’s hand. “Keep that very hidden,” she whispered.

  Miranda put the razor into her pocket, then rolled up the bath mat and headed back to her cell. She hid the blade in the crack between the wall and the sink. Then she laid the mat out on the floor next to her bed, kicked off her sneakers, and put the soles of her feet to its warm gentleness. She lay back, her legs hanging over the edge, and passed two hours this way, thinking of the Hotel Flora and trying to recall every detail about that trip to Rome, the strange way the windows opened, the way she’d envied the Roman girls on the backs of their boyfriends’ scooters. Her mother would read to them from a guidebook in the Forum, the insane brilliant flowers everywhere, and orange trees. Amy all blond curls and tight jeans, drawing stares from men in the streetcars, her dad puzzling over the bills in restaurants. Twelve years old. Family together, intact.

  Just before the evening count Carmona appeared at her door, shadowed by Dorcas and Cassie.

  “What’d I tell you,” said Cassie. “There it is.”

  “Well, Missy May.” The CO strode over to her as she sat up on the bed. “I’m let down. Stealing a bath mat from this sorry-ass.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “You want me to charge you for profanity?”

  “I think you should charge that girl for profanity.”

  Carmona turned to Dorcas. “Shut the fuck up.”

  She faced Miranda again. “I will charge you for profanity if you don’t give me that mat. It doesn’t belong to you.”

  Miranda sat down on the mat. “Chica gave it to me.”

 
Cassie piped up petulantly. “Chica gave it to me, she always said she would and she did.”

  “I am trying so hard to actually believe this is happening. I am fighting over a bath mat.”

  “Not in the White House anymore,” observed Dorcas with satisfaction.

  “I am ticketing you for theft. You will be called to a hearing. Now give me that goddamn thing.” The CO shuffled toward Miranda, who clutched the mat with both hands as she sat on it.

  “I won’t.”

  Carmona grabbed for it, and Miranda dodged her. Shoulder swiveled, smacked into the guard’s flailing arm. By this time, a small crowd had gathered at the door to the cell. They shrieked in excitement, for they all knew what was coming next.

  “That’s assault!” cried Carmona triumphantly as she straightened and stepped back. “You are so fucked, Missy May.”

  The ladies were in a tizzy, onlookers at the scene of a thrillingly gruesome accident. Carmona pulled her ticket book out of her back pocket even as she began waving them all away from the door.

  “What about my bath mat?” wailed Cassie.

  “You’ll be getting it soon enough,” said Carmona. As the crowd dispersed, the CO strode back to the bubble, waving her mighty sheaf of tickets, taking a pen out of her pocket and pulling off its pointy cap with her teeth.

  MIRANDA SQUEEZED HER EYELIDS EVEN TIGHTER AND MOVED HER ear closer to the outflow. You will never occupy this particular spot ever again, she promised herself.

  “My mama loves John Wayne.” Miranda recognized this voice as belonging to Viv, the woman in the first slot, the one with the view of the desk. She cut in, asked Viv to check for any sign of an escort CO.

  Hoots flooded through the tubes. “Hang on. I’ll just look,” said Viv.

  Silence fell over the pipes, but for a low angry murmur: “That one gets out.”