"Caleb brought him yesterday. And . . . he's signing."
Fisher considers this. "If we get Caleb down here to testify, and Nathaniel's psychiatrist-"
"You'll have to subpoena him."
"The psychiatrist?"
"Caleb."
If this surprises him, he doesn't admit it. "Nina, the fact is, you messed up. I'm going to try to get you out. I still think it's unlikely. But if you want me to give it a shot, you're going to have to sit tight for a week."
"A week?" My voice rises. "Fisher, this is my son we're talking about. Do you know how much worse Nathaniel might get in a week?"
"I'm counting on it."
A voice cuts in. This call is being made from the Alfred County Jail. If you wish to continue, please deposit another twenty-five cents.
By the time I tell Fisher to go screw himself, the line has already been disconnected.
Adrienne and I are given a half hour together outside in the exercise courtyard. We walk the perimeter, and then when we get cold, we stand with our backs to the wind beneath the high brick wall. When the CO goes inside, Adrienne smokes cigarettes that she makes by burning down orange peels she collects from the cafeteria trash, and rolling the ash in onion-skin pages torn from Jane Eyre, a book her Aunt Lu sent for her birthday. She has already ripped through page 298. I told her to ask for Vanity Fair next year.
I sit cross-legged on the dead grass. Adrienne kneels behind me, smoking, her hands in my hair. When she gets out, she wants to be a cosmetologist. Her nail makes a part from my temple to the nape of my neck. "No pigtails," I instruct.
"Don't insult me." She makes another part, parallel to the first, and begins to braid in tight rows.
"You've got fine hair."
"Thank you."
"It wasn't a compliment, honey. Look at this . . . slips right out of my fingers."
She pulls and tugs, and several times I have to wince. If only it were that easy to tighten up the tangles inside my head, too. Her glowing cigarette, smoked down to within an inch, sails over my shoulder and lands on the basketball court. "There," Adrienne says. "Ain't you the bomb."
Of course, I can't see. I touch my hands to the knobs and ridges the braids have made on my scalp, and then, just because I am feeling mean-spirited, begin to unravel all Adrienne's hard work. She shrugs, then sits down next to me. "Did you always want to be a lawyer?"
"No." Who does, after all? What kid considers being an attorney a glamorous vocation? "I wanted to be the man at the circus who tames the lions."
"Oh, don't I know it. Those sequined costumes were something."
For me, it hadn't been about the outfits. I'd loved the way Gunther Gebel-Williams could walk into a cage full of beasts and make them think they were house cats. In this, I realize, my actual profession has not fallen that far off the mark. "How about you?"
"My daddy wanted me to be the center for the Chicago Bulls. Me, I was angling for Vegas showgirl."
"Ah." I draw up my knees, wrap my arms around them. "What does your daddy think now?"
"He ain't doing much thinking, I imagine, six feet under."
"I'm sorry."
Adrienne glances up. "Don't be."
But she has retreated somewhere else, and to my surprise, I find I want her back. The game that Peter Eberhardt and I used to play swims into my mind, and I turn to Adrienne. "Best soap opera," I challenge.
"What?"
"Just play along with me. Give your opinion."
"The Young and the Restless," Adrienne replies. "Which, by the way, those fool boys in Minimum don't even have the good sense to listen to on their TV at one p.m."
