Night Road

The judge looked up. “Anyone else?”

Jude felt Zach shift in his seat, and then, slowly, he stood.

A gasp moved through the gallery. Jude knew what they saw when they looked at Zach: his burns, the newly shaved head, the discolored skin around his eyes, but mostly those who knew him saw his sadness. The boy who used to smile was gone. In his place stood this paler, injured version of her son.

“Zachary?” the judge said.

“It’s not all her fault,” he said without going to the podium. “I was the designated driver that night. I was the one who’d said I wouldn’t drink. But I did anyway. I did. If she hadn’t driven, I would have. I should go to prison instead of her.”

He sat back down.

“Please stand, Ms. Baill,” the judge said. “Teen drinking and driving is an epidemic in this country. Toxicology reports confirm that you were intoxicated when you decided to get behind the wheel of a car. At the end of the night, a girl was dead and a community and a family are left to grieve.” He looked at Zach. “Others might share moral responsibility for this tragedy, but the legal responsibility for this crime is yours alone. Obviously, no amount of prison time can make up for Mia’s bright light or bring solace to the Farraday family. But I can make sure that other teens see this case and understand the risk they take when they drink and drive. I sentence you to sixty-five months in the women’s correctional facility in Purdy.”

And the gavel fell.

Lexi heard her aunt cry out.

Guards moved toward Lexi; one pulled her arms behind her and clamped handcuffs around her wrists. She felt her aunt’s arms come around her. Lexi couldn’t hug her back, and, after all that had happened in the last weeks, that was when it really sunk in.

For the first time, she was really, truly afraid. All she’d thought about was her soul and atonement, but what about her body? How would it be to spend more than five years behind bars?

“Oh, Lexi,” Eva said, tearing up. “Why?”

“You took me in,” Lexi said. Even now, with all that was happening, that sentence meant so much. Lexi found it hard to say more. “I couldn’t let you waste your savings on me.”

“Waste?”

“I’ll never forget what you did for me.”

Eva started to cry in earnest. “Be strong,” she said. “I’ll visit as often as I can. I’ll write to you.”

“That’s enough,” the guard said, and Lexi felt herself being pulled away, led out of the courtroom and down a long hallway and up two sets of stairs. Finally, they put her in a room that was about ten by ten, with cement walls; no window; a metal, seatless toilet; and a metal bench. The place smelled of urine and sweat and dried vomit.

She didn’t want to sit down, so she stood there, waiting.

She didn’t wait long. Soon, the guards came back for her, talking to one another about something that had happened at lunch as they led her out of the back of the courthouse to a waiting police car.

“We’re taking you directly to Purdy,” one of the guards said.

Purdy. The Washington Corrections Center for Women.

Lexi nodded and said nothing.

The guard shackled her ankles and snapped her handcuffed wrists to the chain around her waist.

“Let’s go.”

She hobbled along behind him, her head hung low. In the police car, she was buckled into the backseat. The chains around her waist bit into her back, so that she had to sit forward, with her nose almost pressed against the grill that protected the officers in the front seat. As they drove to the corner, they came to a stoplight.

In front of them, the Farradays were crossing the street; they looked like paper-doll versions of themselves, thin and fragile and bent. Zach was in the back, alone, his shoulders slumped downward, his chin dropped. From this side, his shaved head and burned jaw turned him into someone she hardly recognized.

Then the light changed, and they drove away.

Purdy prison was a monolithic slab of gray concrete set behind a wall of razor-wire fencing. All around it were green trees and blue skies. The surrounding beauty only served to make the prison look darker and more menacing.

As she moved toward this life she’d never imagined, Lexi wished suddenly, fervently, that she had pled not guilty as her lawyer had suggested.

Inside the prison, they put her in a big cage. Crouched inside like an animal, she could see some of the prison. Bars of steel and walls of Plexiglas and women in khaki gathered in groups.

Lexi closed her eyes and tried to make it all go away.

Finally, a guard came to get her, unlocked the cage, and herded her forward. She stood numbly beside him as he pressed her fingers onto an inked pad and rolled her prints onto paper. They positioned her in front of a camera, snapped a picture. Then someone yelled next! and she was moving again, shuffling forward into the loud, pulsing, clanging heart of the prison.

The guard led her into a room. “She’s all yours.”

Two female guards came forward. “Strip,” one said, resting a plump hand on the walkie-talkie on her belt.

“H-here?”

“We can do it for you—”

“I’ll do it.” Lexi’s hands were shaking as she unhooked her belt and pulled it free from the loops.

The guard took the belt from her, coiling it in her hands as if it were a weapon.

Swallowing hard, Lexi unbuttoned her pants and stepped out of them. Then she kicked off her black flats and unbuttoned her white shirt. It took every scrap of bravery she possessed to reach behind her back to unhook her bra.

When she was naked, the heavier of the two guards came forward. “Open your mouth.”

Lexi followed one humiliating instruction after another. She opened her mouth, stuck out her tongue, lifted her breasts, coughed, wiggled her fingers, turned around and bent over.

“Open your cheeks.”

She reached back and held her butt cheeks open.

“Okay, Inmate Baill,” the guard said.

Lexi straightened slowly and turned to the guard again. She couldn’t look the woman in the eyes, so she stared at the dirty floor.

The guard handed her a stack of clothes: a pair of scuffed white tennis shoes, khaki pants and shirt, a used white bra, and two pairs of discolored underwear.

Lexi dressed as quickly as possible. The bra didn’t fit right and the underwear itched and she needed socks, but of course she said nothing.

“Be careful who you hang around with, Baill,” the guard said in a voice that didn’t match her gruff exterior.

Lexi had no idea what to say to that.

“Let’s go,” the guard said, indicating the door.

Lexi followed the woman out of the reception area and into the prison again, where the noise and the pounding and the catcalls seemed deafening. She kept her eyes downcast and followed, feeling the floor literally shaking beneath her feet from the hundreds of women stomping on the cell block before her.

Finally, they came to her cell, an eight-by-ten block of space hemmed on three sides by concrete walls and on the fourth by a solid metal door that had a small window, probably so the guards could look inside. The cell had two bunks with thin mattresses, a toilet, a sink, and a small desk. On the lower bunk sat a scrawny white girl with a cross tattooed on her throat. At Lexi’s entrance, she looked up from her magazine.

The door clanged shut behind Lexi, but she could still hear the stomping and the catcalling going on in the cell block. She crossed her arms across her chest and stood there, shaking.

“I got the bottom bunk,” the girl said; her teeth were brown and ruined.

“Okay.”

“I’m Cassandra.”

Lexi saw now how young her cellmate was. The lines in her face and the circles under her eyes aged her, but Cassandra probably wasn’t much past twenty-three. “I’m Lexi.”

“This is receiving. We won’t be cellmates for long. You know that, right?”

Lexi didn’t know anything. She stood there a minute longer, then she climbed up onto her rickety bunk that smelled of other women’s sweat. Lying on the coarse gray blanket, staring at the dirty gray ceiling, she couldn’t help thinking of her mother, of that one terrible prison visit.

Here I am, Mom. Just like you after all.

Sixteen

Before the accident, Jude would have said she could handle anything, but grief had overwhelmed her. Intellectually, she knew it had to be dealt with somehow, and yet she couldn’t imagine how to accomplish such a thing. She was like a swimmer in deep water who saw a great white approaching. Her mind screamed swim, but her body just hung there, paralyzed.

To everyone else, the so-called trial had been the end of the story. Justice was served; now go back to your regularly scheduled program. Jude had felt pressure from everywhere to heal now.

Instead, she’d gone gray. It was the only way to describe her life. A depression unlike anything she’d ever known or imagined descended. She could find nothing to look forward to, nothing to do.

One by one, in the past six weeks, people had given up on her. She knew she’d disappointed her friends and family, but she couldn’t care about it. Her feelings were either gone or buried in such a dense fog that they eluded her. Oh, sometimes she was normal—she might go to the store or drop something off at the post office, but she was always at risk of finding herself standing somewhere, in front of a row of plump purple eggplants or holding a letter, with no memory of how she’d gotten there or what she needed. She’d gone to the store twice in her pajamas, and once she’d worn shoes that didn’t match. The simplest tasks loomed like Mount Everest. Making dinner was beyond her.

She cried at the drop of a hat and screamed out for her daughter in her sleep.

Miles had gone back to work, as if it were completely normal to live with a frozen heart. She knew how much he was still hurting, and she ached for him, but he was already growing impatient with her. Zach hardly came out of his room. He’d spent the summer in his new gaming chair, with his headphones on, killing animated enemies.

They were doing their best, Zach and Miles, and they didn’t understand why Jude couldn’t pretend, why she couldn’t go out for lunch with her friends or work in her garden. Something. She saw how Miles looked at her in the evenings, over a dinner he’d brought home in Styrofoam containers. He would say things like, “How are you today, honey?” What he really meant was, “When are you going to get over this and come back to me?”

He thought that was the endgame. For him, the memory of their daughter was already becoming a treasured family heirloom that you put on a high shelf, behind a case of glass, and took down once or twice a year, at birthdays or Christmas. You couldn’t handle it too roughly or too often for fear it would break.

It wasn’t like that for her. She saw blank spaces everywhere—in an unused chair at the dinner table, in teen magazines that came addressed to Mia Farraday, in clothes left in a hamper. Mostly, she saw Mia in Zach, and it was unbearable. On good days, she could smile at her son, but there were so few good days; and on black days, when she couldn’t get out of bed, she lay there thinking what a shitty mother she’d become.