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 outto 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.”
