By the time I have traversed the fifty feet to the door, I’m ready for the local wet tee-shirt contest. I shiver in the frigid waiting room. A grim-faced guard hunches in a glass cylinder. My husband places the paper with the number in steel a tray. The woman studies my face as if I’m an escapee masquerading as a visitor, or I’m at the airport security point trying to smuggle a gun onto a jet bound for France.
“Where are the tents?” I ask.
“That’s not for you to worry about, Ma’am. The tents are on the premises.” She pushes the paper back into the tray and says begrudgingly, “Take a seat until your number is called.”
Someone knows the whereabouts of my daughter and that is good enough for the time being. I can leave now. The narrow room heaves and throbs like a rocking subway car. There’s a nauseating, co-mingled odor of hygiene products, cooked meat, and sweat. A string of orange molded chairs holds family members three-deep. The oldest children lean back on their mothers’ laps and balance smaller siblings on wobbling knees. Visitors cram into corners and fill the nooks between the rows of lockers. Every departure or arrival causes a shift in the terrain until the visitors settle in once again. I inch towards the door.
“Where do you think you’re going?” my husband asks. He places a hand on the small of my back and steers me to the empty corner next to the bathroom door. I study the poster forbidding gang insignias, visible tattoos, shorts more than three inches above the knee, and tank tops. Unnaturally subdued children meet my eyes as if I hold the answer to their boredom.
After our daughter’s tearful phone call two days before, long hours were spent on hold or listening to recorded messages. When I finally acquired the all-important booking number, I wrote it in two places, maybe three, for that series of golden digits was the only connection I had with a daughter lost in a system I never imagined having to navigate. Then I barged through every office door demanding an audience with the bureaucrat in charge. I felt trapped in a Russian story by Gogol or Chekhov while going from the city Drug and Alcohol Education Department, to the police station, to the Justice Court and back again asking, why, why, why was my daughter in jail?
“Why?” the various clerks queried. “Because, Mrs. Idiot-Mother-of- Spoiled-Rotten-Child, your daughter lied along the way and you’d better believe it. We don’t make mistakes around here. Only ten days in the county jail? A piece of cake. We deal with liars everyday.”
Liars every day? “But she shouldn’t be there,” I protested. “She took your classes. You must have a record of it somewhere. Look on that computer in front of your nose.”
“99223827, 337326121, 93723634, and 428574421?” My husband nudges me from my reverie. We are finally the chosen people. The warden blocks the door as he matches each name to a number on his list. He moves aside to let us pass and we bob along in a mostly female sea to a long wide hallway where small television monitors sit on a counter that stretches the length of the hall.
At first I stare at the blank glass transfixed, then say to my husband, “Go ahead and sit down.” I point to the steel stool as if he hasn’t noticed its presence.
“I think she’d rather talk to her mother first.”
“No, you. Please.” I shouldn’t be allowed to talk to her. I might make everything worse. I feel a serious lack of self-control creeping up my arms, across my shoulders on the way to my mouth. It might be the heat or the situation but I know I will blow it regardless of the reason. All I can do is melt against the lumpy block wall and shut my eyes.
In a few minutes I hear her muffled voice. My husband asks all the right questions, the questions I’d be asking if I were in my right mind. Has she been drinking enough water? Yes, there are faucets and spigots. It all tastes like crap but she drinks it just the same. What does she do all day? She works in the laundry housed in an air-conditioned building handling the most disgusting sheets imaginable. She wears rubber gloves. Is she eating? She tries to eat their slop. After all she doesn’t want to starve to death. She’s not that stupid. They are supposed to get orange sherbet on Friday. She heard that the last time it was too hard for the cheap plastic spoons but some of the women gorged and puked anyway. My husband asks if there is anything we can do. There’s a long silence and I know that she’s searching for my face.
“Mom,” she says into thin air. “Listen. I am not lying about how I got into this mess. I know that you don’t believe me. Please sit down. I need to talk to you and there’s only a few minutes left.”
I open my eyes, rise and exchange places with my husband. I center my bottom in the middle of the stool, but I’m terrified to look up, afraid of the nine-year-old liar I’ll find in the screen.
“Mom. The certificate for the class is somewhere in my closet. Look for it in one of the old backpacks, the blue or the black. Please.”
She could have asked her father, but she asked me instead. Now she sniffs and swipes at her nose with the back of her hand and I wonder if she’ll be wiping snot this way for the rest of her life. Her skin glistens with perspiration. Her ponytail, dark with oil, pulls at the temples.
“Yes,” I say, moving closer to the screen. “Alright.” I stretch my fingers on the smudged glass and she does the same. “I’ll find it.”
I’m surprised to find that I almost believe what I say. I will try to find this certificate deep in the landfill of her messy closet. I will return to the city offices clutching the document and demand my daughter’s early release from captivity. I find it is easy to believe that this sheet of paper exists because I want it to exist more than anything in the world.
It occurs to me that this mode of thinking might hold the overdue answer to the candy question, too. Our daughter chose to believe in her own innocence despite her actions and subsequent proof to the contrary. Ownership of guilt might be something she was simply not capable of accepting at the time and this childhood episode must not taint all future situations.
Moses, in the Sinai, struck the stone at Horeb and the water flowed. In our desert, I believe that I will find what I need without a flashlight, and for the time being, that is enough.
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