I looked over my shoulder every so often, as I went back to my cell with big steps. Although I only walked by one person—an old woman with dementia—on my way, Sánchez's words forbade my heart to stop pounding. I feared that, as soon as I allowed myself to take the edge off my tension, something would jump right out of a corner and attack me.
And the nauseating fear only deepened, once I got the hanger in my pocket and stepped out of my cell. The hallways seemed darker now. The cold length of wire would be, if caught right there, a smoking gun. I began to sweat, as the chilly air in the entrance hall stroked my face. The only consolation was that most of the staff seemed too busy to even glance at me, to notice the tremor inside me. The guy in the guard room had his face buried in a magazine, and the only patient there was Rudy, the chronic masturbator.—He was a man of few words. No need to worry about him. Nobody seemed to care what I was up to, even when I stood next to the door to the old ward. With my back against the wall, I looked around for the last time, and slipped in.
The darkness welcomed me first, and then a pungent smell came second. It was a mix of old rain water, corroded walls and dead rats inside them, and piles of dust. I could feel the particles of the filth in the air, invading my throat, sticking to the walls of my lungs for good. I coughed into my elbow once.
At the far end of the corridor, Grace popped her head out of the cell. "Over here," she said. "What took you so long?"
I felt alive again at last. I walked to her. "Sánchez stopped me. That old rat thinks we're a thing."
"A thing, as in lovers?"
I nodded. "Harassed me like I slept with his mother and broke his happy family." I passed her the hanger, and leaned against the wall, as she fiddled with it for a while. "But I guess, it's better than him knowing about this, right?"
"This isn't as thin as I imagined." She stuck it in the lock hole. The clatter of the metals echoed, too loud in the empty hall. "His dad left his mom for another guy, though, apparently."
"Really?"
"He's always been a homophobic douchebag."
I shrugged. "Who isn't?"
She got down on her knees, peering into the hole, and moved the wire in there again. "Yeah, but he's extreme."
"And Jude is a mild homophobe?"
She threw me a rather detached glance. "We had this guy who liked wearing dresses a couple of years ago. Called himself Greg. Not sure if he was gay, but—" A sigh escaped her lips, either at the fruitless attempt or at the recollection. "Sánchez hated him. Absolutely hated him."
The image of his hateful eyes returned to me—his hand on the baton, with disgust in every wrinkle of his face. And another image, of him and other guards hitting Kit with their batons—the sound of human bones fracturing, and the pinkness of the flesh in the crevice of his gaping wound.
"What happened to him?" I said.
"He died," she said. "They said he killed himself in his cell at night, but that's total bullshit." Her voice, despite her words, sounded calm, as though she was reciting a poem.
"Do you think Sánchez killed him?"
"I don't think. I know. Everyone knows, and they got away with it."
"They? Plural?"
Stopping her hands, she gazed at me. "This is not the perfect world where people always get what they deserve. You should know better than I do."
She had a point. I should've known that by now. The world of black and white, as I'd dreamed of as a child, did not exist in real life. And the idea that all wrong doings would go punished seemed like such blind optimism. The evil and malice wore the mask of the good, claiming their actions were justified by the law of God. In this world, especially when you were in the marginalized group, being good gave you nothing, got you nowhere.
Grace's expletives filled the air. She pushed the edge of the wire against the wall. "I really don't know if this works," she said, as her fingers stroked the bent edge. "It's not too thick at least. I can stick it in, and it goes in like half an inch, then gets stuck there."
"Maybe the angle is bad?"
"Yeah, so maybe, if it curls up a bit . . ." She neared the lock again. "I've seen a person do this on TV. It didn't look so hard."
I asked her if she meant a TV show, and she hummed.
"You know they don't actually do it," I said.
It felt so long since the last time I'd seen TV or a motion picture. It might be more than a year ago. Although we had a television in our house, there were only few occasions where we actually sat down and watched anything.—Wendy was more of a radio type of girl, and I was always up to my ears in work. But last spring, I took her to the movie theater to watch Hitchcock's The Birds. It was a huge hit that everyone at my work was crazy about. "Can we watch something less gruesome? How about Bye Bye Birdie? It looks fun." Wendy did not fancy thriller. But Psycho was one of my favorite films, and I liked the way she held my hand tight during the film. In a short period of time, in the dark, with everybody's eyes on the screen. It was the only place we could hold hands in public.
"Why didn't you go with her last night?" Grace asked.
"Who?"
"Mary Eunice," she said, almost whispering into the lock hole.
I had no clue what she was talking about at first. Then, the spoken name broke into tiny molecules in a flash, and dissolved into the air. I breathed in, and felt my head spin.
"What?" I said. My heart thumped hard against the wall.
She glanced at me. "Y'know, human senses are a funny thing. Even with something as random as someone's footsteps or breathing, if you spend a long time listening, your ears will be able to detect small differences. This person jingles her keys, this person drags his feet, blah blah." She breathed out through her nose. "Mary Eunice walks like a . . . mouse, and clears her throat. A lot actually."
I thought about lying through my teeth. I thought, if I put up an oblivious presence, she might buy it. But we both knew, it was an observation too detailed to be mere bait. She knew it. I would just make a fool of myself, and even worse, cause her mended trust to shatter into pieces again.
"Does Kit know?"
"No." She shook her head. "I'm not telling him unless the situation calls for it."
I let out a snort. "How generous of you." Whatever that meant, all I heard was that I was at her mercy, that she had a say in when my—and Mary's—demise should be. She was the god to us, and if I did not displease her, we could be pardoned.
"You think I'm a maniac, don't you?" she said.
And a psychic, apparently.
"I'm not," she said. "I don't take pleasure in threatening and telling on people, okay? If I don't have to hurt anybody, it'd choose that way. All I want is freedom— I need it." Then, with a sigh-groan, she dropped the hanger on the ground. She stood up, and almost slammed her back against the wall next to me.
"It's not working?" I asked.
She took out a cigarette and lit it, flipping back her hair so it wouldn't catch fire. "No," she said, after taking a long drag.
I took my cigarette pack out and did the same, and for a few minutes, that was all we did. It seemed like we were at a dead end. But I knew, there was one way left, an easier path than any deceptive methods we might come up with—and I knew she knew. I looked down at my toes. I still felt her burning gaze on my skin.
Grace dropped her cigarette, putting it out with her heel. She continued to trample it down, hard, until the filter and the leaves spilled out. "It's almost the end of the year, isn't it?" she said, as if she was talking to herself.
"I think so."
"Almost Christmas."
"Perhaps."
She let out a lengthy breath, like a child trying to see her breath on a cold night. Then she began to talk about her hometown in France, Troyes, and how rare it was to snow there.
"But when I was eight, right before my mom died, it snowed," she said. "Only just a little. We had this tall tree in our backyard. The branches were covered by snowflakes when I woke up in the morning, and it was so . . ."
She didn't try to hide the nostalgia in her voice. And if she'd been with the right person, like Kit, she might have allowed herself to shed a few tears there.
"There's something quite frightening about snow," she said, "but we can't resist the breathtaking beauty still. It was the first time my sister and I ever saw snow." She rested her head back against the wall, with her eyes closed. And when she opened them, she looked me right in the eye, not accusing me, but simply begging. Begging to be understood. "I want to spend my life there again, not here. I want to start over in the city that holds my happiest memories. Don't you? Don't you want to go home?"
I couldn't find anything to say, so instead stared at a dark spot on the ground.
She lit another cigarette. "What's going on between you and Mary Eunice?" she said, as she threw the dead match against the wall before us.
"Nothing's going on," I said.
"She isn't worth protecting."
"Don't say that."
"Why do you like her?" It wasn't so much a question as a statement—we both knew it. "She's no different from the people you loathe."
"She is," I said. "Her heart is purer than anybody else's."
She snorted, shaking her head as she took a drag. "Purity," she said. "A human could be as pure as an angel and still be cruel at the same time . . . Just like snow."
"She is not cruel."
"Because you don't know her."
I got my back off the wall and faced her, close. "I don't know if you two have a history," I said, "or if you're just trying to get me to turn my back on her, but stop. Just stop." I glared into her eyes, and the condescending glint in them got on my nerves even more. "It is because of her I'm still alive. She saved my life—and still does, every day. You're the one who doesn't—"
"Saved you." She brought the cigarette to her mouth, exhaling as if my face wasn't right in front of hers.
Although the smoke stung my eyes, I didn't blink. "Do not talk about her like that, ever again."
Then she let out a laugh, a sound void of any emotion, as if she was a simply machine. And like a machine, the fire in her eyes vanished abruptly. She looked down. "I had a friend—a mentor, when I first came here," she said. "She wasn't much older than I was, but seemed so much wiser, carrying the burden of the whole world on her shoulders." She looked down at her toes, as she took another drag. "She knew pain, how it feels to be misunderstood, too well for someone that young."
"What does she have to do with this?"
"Everything," she said. "Olga and Mary Eunice were close. They were like sisters—only except, they weren't. No. Olga was in love with her." As her shining eyes stared into mine, a tear ran down her cheek. "And she told Mary Eunice—I told her not to, told her it'd only get her in trouble. But she didn't listen." Her pale cheeks grew pink, a deep crease between her brows. Taking a deep breath, she wiped her nose with her sleeve. "All she wanted was for Mary Eunice to know." She shut her eyes tight. "And you know what happened? Do you? Has your sweet Mary Eunice ever told you anything about her?"
"I—" I swallowed. "No."
"She told Jude about it." She raised her cigarette to her mouth, only to find it'd died a while ago. She threw it to the ground. "Jude. Fucking Jude! And guess what happened. Just guess."
I bit my lip.
"She died a week after that, in her sleep, just like the other guy."
It was almost physically impossible to breathe, with the lump in my throat so big. Every second of my effort to find words ended with more tears in my eyes, with dizzy nausea. I thought I was going to black out right there. "But—" I heard myself say. "She— Mary didn't know that was gonna happen. She only— Only—"
"Only told her boss about the thing that was bothering her?" she said. "And her family, too?" She breathed in, so deeply I felt like she'd never breathe out. "She told Olga's family about that, too, Lana. When they came to claim her body, Mary Eunice told them—"
I shook her head. "No—" But what I was saying no to, I didn't know. To the ugly face of Mary I never knew? To hear any more of her past?
"She did," Grace said. "She told her mom, her dad, her brothers— Humiliating her even after death!" She gritted her teeth. Her tears fell to the ground, making a small dot near her toe. "They left without her body, left her here to rot by herself, because— Because the shame was way greater than their grief. And everybody understood it, thought nothing of it, and—"
I stood there still, as the world seemed to be closing on me.
"I don't even know what they did with her body. There was no funeral or anything," she said. "It's the kind of world we live in." She took a deep breath, for the last time. "And Mary Eunice is part of it."
