“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 bigBirds of Americahardcover 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.
