I told her, “Yes.”
Felicity said, “Oh, Reenie...” and stepped up and took me into her strong, skinny arms, while Sparrow hovered close and finally put her own arms around our waists. “This is all you,” Felicity kept saying. “This is all your goodness, Reenie. You wouldn’t give up.”
And yet, how many times had I tried to do just that?
I finally said, “Wouldn’t you have told the truth? Eventually?” Felicity shrugged. “But why not?”
“I guess I felt like I deserved to be punished. Maybe like I was doomed and all I could do was try to save the only good thing in my life.”
Once Sparrow had an early dinner and quieted down, insisting that Felicity and I stay in the same room at least until she was asleep but preferably all night, we opened the adjoining door to what had been Nell’s room and sat quietly, me sipping tea, Felicity a glass of Chardonnay. It was still light.
“That’s a Carolina wren, that’s a gray catbird, that’s a pine warbler,” Felicity said as the birds bombed the feeder in the fading light.
“You sound like my Grandpa McClatchey. He used to say, ‘That’s a Toyota Camry, that’s a 1990 Mustang, that’s a Buick Regal, they don’t make them anymore.’”
We both laughed then. “I’m out of jail,” Felicity said, softly, to me and to herself. “I’m free. I’m with my daughter. I’m having a glass of wine.”
People don’t ordinarily see those events as miracles. Maybe they should. “No one would blame you if you got hammered,”I said. “You’ve been through a lifetime’s worth of crazy in the past week.”
“It’s the crazy I’m used to,” she said. “I’m the opposite of Occam’s razor. With me, it’s always zebras.”
“Did you think you would get out of jail ever?”
She closed her eyes tight. “I really thought I would never get convicted. I know that’s hard to believe. Then I thought I would get parole first try. But then I read about women forced to commit murder, like by cult leaders, at gunpoint. And they were never, ever going to get out! It was a double murder. A carefully planned double murder for profit. How could I prove that I was a good person who made one terrible mistake? That’s true for most people who kill, by the way, except professionals or serial killers. I could do good for twenty years and maybe it wouldn’t matter even then. And then, I thought that I’d tell Sam the truth when my mom died. But then Ruth got new medicine. And it worked. She’s not even fifty. She could live twenty more years.”
“All this is so strange and, if I can say this, not very well planned. For somebody like you?”
“Well, gee, Reenie, I really did never plan what I’d do if I was ever charged with a double murder... and then I was in a prison van!” Felicity shuddered. “It was so much worse, not just cold and dirty. I expected that. The people, they weren’t just women who did wrong because of men. It wasn’tAnna Karenina. Some of them were pathetic. But some were vicious women, child killers. Not everybody who has a hard life ends up bad.” She went on, “I was bad, but I wasn’t bad like that. Remember when we were kids and we used to say, he wasn’t all bad, just middle-evil? That’s what I was.”
I tried to visualize Felicity, beautiful, neurotic, and refined, facing a ladle of beans, a slice of white bread, and a few strings of meat, repurposed from a previous meal, while across from a woman who wanted to eat her for dinner.
“They respected me for killing those poor men. I was their hero, a murderous hooker. They just wished that I’d gotten away with it. They wanted to be my friend; they wanted to have sex with me. They suggested all kinds of things even I’d never done.”
I tried to smile. I don’t think I managed. This was something I had not expected. The Felicity I knew was reticent, even with people she cared about. This Felicity was flayed bare.
“What did you do?”
“I pretended I was born-again. I pretended I was like a nun, always reading my Bible, always praying in the chapel. Either they thought I was holy or they thought I was nuts.”
“How did you not actually go nuts?”
“I’m not sure I didn’t,” she said. She seemed to look down a dark corridor, into a cave, her eyes adjusting to what she saw. “I would wake up and forget where I was. The women laughed and screamed and fought and screwed all night long. They just never stopped. There was no silence. They wouldn’t let me have earplugs. When somebody stole my headphones, they said I had to wait three months before I could get more because I was careless. If I really were a nun now? One of those people who could only speak once a week for the rest of her life? That would be okay with me.”
“Why wouldn’t you talk to Sam? Or anybody?”
She avoided Sam, fearful that any human kindness would crack her wide open. She was afraid that she would confess that she’d made it all up and that Ruth had done it and please, please save her. Some nights, she thought she was dying, and some nights, she wanted to die. Her brief encounters with the no-nonsense psychiatrist helped her.
That doctor was clearly down on his luck as well. He wasn’t doing this because he was tired of a three-hundred-dollar-an-hour practice and wanted to serve humanity. He must have done something bad to end up in a nauseous green concrete windowless room at Manoomin, facing a woman whose ankles werechained to the floor. “Practice denial,” he said, “until you can retreat into yourself and go to a meadow or a lake. Meditate. Do yoga. Take four naps a day. Do anything to give yourself some mental distance.” Eventually, she got permission to eat alone in her cell or in the library. She wondered how many other “middle-evil” women were fighting for their sanity with small spoonfuls of privacy.
She lied to Sam.
She let him think that the conditions were tolerable.
The few clients of Sam’s who’d been convicted of crimes were mostly white-bread people, corporate fraudsters, none of whom ended up in a maximum-security lockup. But even they complained of the degradation. So when Felicity sent him a single note, about starting a book club and learning to paint, he suspected that the big picture had big holes in it. He also suspected that Felicity’s story had been suspicious from the jump.
When she ended up on IVs in the hospital, dehydrated to the point of collapse for the second time, Sam sat by her bed and grilled her: “What really happened, Felicity? What really happened? I promise that I won’t betray your confidence. I just need to know the truth, Felicity...”
“But he couldn’t really keep my confidence!” she said now. “He couldn’t let me go to prison for life if he knew the truth!”
