September 2011
Ella held Jude’s hand so tightly she was sure she was leaving marks. “Wake up,” she told him. “Don’t sleep.”
He nodded at her, drawing his shoulders up. It was early morning and so hot and humid, their sweaty T-shirts were pasted to their backs. Central Park was alive, especially where they were, by the Columbus Circle entrance, surrounded by people hawking bike and city tours, the vendors selling ice cream from carts, the stream of tourists already steady. The more noise the better—they couldn’t risk falling asleep. They needed each other, and the time they had left was slipping away.
In four days, Andrew Stein would be moving himself and his son to Philadelphia. From the moment Jude’s father had told him about the move, Jude had decided that he and Ella would spend every minute together that they could, to have more time to think what to do, how to stop this. Fueled by adrenaline and need, they usually stayed up most of the night on their cellphones. Other nights, Jude snuck out to be with Ella at her apartment, the two of them prodding each other awake whenever one of them drifted. Jude even bought some Adderall from a Dalton classmate, but when it just made them more exhausted, he tossed the rest. When they were apart, they practiced telepathy, Ella concentrating so hard she sometimes gave herself a headache. They set their alarms so they could take catnaps at the same time. Fifteen minutes. No more than twenty.
Now though, with just days left, with school starting soon for both of them, they were desperate.
“My mom keeps harping on the dark circles under my eyes. She keeps reminding me that there are trains to Philly, that it doesn’t take that long to get there.” Ella scoffed. “She doesn’t get it. Or she doesn’t want to.”
Now the park bench felt as if it were whispering to Ella, pulling her down to lie on it, so she stood up.
“Wait,” Jude said. “We’ve been skimping on sleep since July. And we got through the last two days without real sleep. That means we can do another.”
Ella put her hand against his face. “We can do anything,” she said.
He pointed to a cart. “Espresso,” he said. “Maybe this time it’ll work.”
They gulped down several, until Ella’s heart was pumping in her chest. She placed a hand on her ribs. “Fuck,” she said. “It feels like it’s coming through my skin.” Four more days, she thought, and she went to buy another coffee.
“C’mon,” Jude said. “Let’s go to your place. If we keep moving, we’ll stay awake.”
AT HELEN’S, THEY went out to the garden so that Jude could water the plants, which were wilting in the steamy weather. He sprayed them carefully, spreading the water evenly. “I’m going to miss this,” he said.
“No, don’t say that,” Ella said.
Jude squinted at the garden. “Oh my God, I swear I’m hallucinating from lack of sleep.” He smacked a hand against his head.
“What’s the record for not sleeping?”
“I don’t know, but I bet we beat it.”
Ella blinked. She plucked some red flowers, the petals like little faces. Jude was pulling up plants and putting them in plastic bags, saying he was going to replant them, put them in pots instead of the ground if he had to.
“I’ll call you constantly,” Ella said, leaning closer to the flowers, her hair brushing the ground. “We’ll text. We’ll telepathize.” She laughed. “Is that a word?”
“We’ll be eighteen soon, and then no one can stop us.”
“Not that soon,” she said.
“Maybe the elevator will malfunction, and he’ll be in it,” Jude said.
Ella knew this game, all those possibilities swimming around them like a school of playful fish. Sometimes they made her feel better. Sometimes they didn’t.
“I can’t stand it,” Jude said. “I can’t do this. I can’t be without you.” His eyes grew red with tears. “I’ll run away. He can bring me back and I’ll run again. And you can run with me. You will, won’t you?”
“Jude—” she said. “You know the answer to that. I would do anything for you. Anything. You know that.”
Ella watched him stuff basil into a plastic sandwich bag, then rosemary, and then foxglove leaves.
Jude frowned. “He can’t separate us.” He looked suddenly stern, then almost afraid. “Come to my house. We’ll give it one last try. Maybe today is the day he’ll listen to us, together. He’ll see what this is doing to us.”
The sun was going down, but the humidity lingered, making Ella feel like a wrung-out dishrag. She couldn’t remember if they had eaten lunch, but now it must be past dinnertime. “What time is it?” she asked, and Jude showed her his phone. Seven.
They stood, woozy, and held hands. Ella thought of what she had learned in science, that everyone is made of atoms, but that the subatomic particles that comprise them never really touch one another. No matter how tight she held Jude, there would always be space between them.
WHEN THEY REACHED his townhouse, Ella realized she was so exhausted she couldn’t feel her feet anymore. Their subway car hadn’t been air-conditioned, and it was so crowded with people, she had felt the steam of their breath cooking her.
All she could think about was Jude’s bed, the expensive down comforter, the soft pillow. Stop, she told herself. As they entered through the carved wood front door, Ella felt the shock of the central air-conditioning against her sweaty face. And then, there was Jude’s father, standing in the midst of boxes. She could only think how much she hated him.
Judge Stein didn’t yell. Instead, he just stared them up and down.
“What is she doing here?” he asked quietly.
“I need to talk to you,” Jude told him. “We both need to talk to you.”
“You look terrible,” he said.
Jude didn’t move. Ella waited.
“So, who’s hungry?” Judge Stein finally said. His shoulders relaxed. “Let’s have a last supper?” He grinned when he said it. Ella wanted to hurl herself against him, to beg him to reconsider moving.
“We both need to talk to you,” Jude said again.
“After dinner,” he said. “Not on an empty stomach.”
His father ordered pizza, but not the kind she was used to—the greasy dollar slices you could grab just about anywhere in New York—but something fancy, with artisanal layers of vegetables Ella didn’t recognize. They sat in the grand dining room, the table set with china plates and cloth napkins. It’s just pizza, Ella thought. She didn’t need to be afraid.
She heard herself chewing. She felt her lids closing and she jerked them open again. She concentrated on Jude, how beautiful he was, how she loved him.
“I know what you want to talk about,” Judge Stein finally said. “Let me save you the trouble. We’re moving. I already got you into a good high school, Jude, and it starts soon. And Ella, you’ll be starting school, too. No more of this nonsense. You’re too young to be in a relationship like this. I won’t change my mind. End of story.”
Ella blinked hard. His words seemed to cut a path through the air, a road leading to nowhere she wanted to go. Then she thought of a movie she had seen once in which the closing credits read: The End? Or is it just the beginning?
“Wait,” Ella said. “Listen to us.”
“We have a lot of packing to do, and I could use your help, Jude. Let’s just have tea and dessert—I’ve got some black forest cake here—and then off you go, Ella.”
He knows my name, she thought. He had never addressed her by name before. She wondered what it meant that he did so now. And the off you go, like she was a child who’d obediently do his bidding. It made her feel madder and more helpless.
“We’ll make the tea,” Jude said. “But then I have things to say to you.”
“Make sure it’s decaf,” Jude’s father said.
“It’ll be herbal,” Jude said, and he looked at Ella when he said it.
They were in the kitchen alone. She could hear his father in the other room, leafing through the newspaper, the rustle as he turned the pages. Her mind flooded with opportunities.
“Let’s just run away,” she said, grabbing his arm. “Right now. No one will find us.”
Jude was putting water on to boil. “He’ll find us. And it will be worse when he does.”
“What are you two doing in there?” Jude’s father called from the other room. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
This show. That was all it was to him. Beginning. Middle. End.
“I wish he would just die,” Jude said. The words hung in the air. They both froze.
“Me too,” she whispered.
She was so tired, so, so exhausted. Every surface looked like a place she could sleep, but she knew there was so little time left with Jude. When she thought of him gone from her life, all she could envision was an endless trail of black stretching out forever. She didn’t want him to go, and she didn’t want to go back to school without him. She grabbed his wrist and saw his scars. He wouldn’t try to kill himself again, would he?
What if he did? What if he couldn’t live without her?
“What’s the point?” he said, rubbing his eyes.
“Us. We’re the point.” She touched his wrist, then his scar, and brought it up to her lips and kissed it. “You won’t try again, will you? Promise me you won’t. Without you, I’ll die, too. I swear it.”
He started taking things out of his pockets. A flower, the petals flattened. The sandwich bag filled with herbs. He took out the sprigs of foxglove and gently smoothed them on the counter. “I grew these,” he said.
“I know. We did.”
“I thought it would help his heart. The right dose could help it… the wrong dose could stop it.”
The kettle boiled and Jude shut it off.
“He has no heart,” Ella said.
“We have to do something,” Jude said, his voice cracking in desperation.
Ella sat for a just a moment before she leaned her head against his back. She was so tired, so very, very tired, but she pinched her thigh to hurt herself awake, to stay there, with Jude.
TIME JUMPED, AND she was suddenly upstairs on the third floor of the townhouse. She couldn’t figure out how she had gotten there. Or when. Did she tell Jude where she was going? She felt her bladder, heavy in her body.
This whole top floor seemed to have changed. She couldn’t remember which door led to the bathroom. She kept one hand on the wall until she opened a heavy wooden door at the end of the hall, and there it was, the big tub, the skylight wedged in the white ceiling so you could look at the stars while you were bathing.
She couldn’t find the light switch, so she peed in the dark, then washed her hands, trying to make out her face in the dark mirror. She sat on the edge of the tub, huge and claw-footed. She had never been in a tub that large, so she stepped in and pulled the curtain from the rod and spread it over her like a blanket. She reached for her phone. To her surprise, Jude had sent her a dozen texts and she wanted to read them immediately and text him back, tell him where she was. She settled against the tub, and as her fingers found the letters, her leaden eyelids seemed to crash down. Jude, she thought. Jude. And then the phone tumbled, and she slept.
SHE AWOKE WITH a start. She couldn’t remember when she had come upstairs. How much time had elapsed? She had stopped checking the time, because she didn’t want to know how fast time was passing, how every second was against them.
She crept down one flight of stairs and then another. When she was just above the first floor, she crouched and looked down. She could see the dining room from this angle, the table cleaned up—but who had done that? Then she crept down the rest of the stairs, and she even checked the basement, but no one else was home.
Maybe Jude was outside. She went to look, but to her horror, as soon as she opened the door, it closed behind her, automatically locking.
Fuck. She didn’t see either Jude or Judge Stein anywhere. In fact, she didn’t see much of anyone out here. It was so dark and still, and she still wasn’t sure what time it was. The Upper East Side seemed to get to bed earlier than any other part of the city, the quiet over the neighborhood like a comforter. She didn’t even see the usual pet owners walking their dogs, didn’t hear the usual noises from windows—music, conversations. She blinked hard, thinking maybe she was asleep. Maybe she was dreaming. She hadn’t learned much in school this year, but she remembered science, the teacher telling the class that some quantum physicists believed that there was no time, that it was a manmade construct. When the teacher had told the class time would start to go backward and eventually it would stop altogether, that everything was happening at the same time, someone in the back had quipped, “Oh, imagine the never-ending blow jobs!” and the teacher, disgusted, had ended the period.
What if it were true, though? What if she and Jude were here right now, and at the same time she and Jude were married in California with a baby and a dog and no one to bother them? What if she and Jude were both ninety-nine and holding hands on their porch, rocking in their chairs, remembering the gorgeous, beautiful life they had shared?
ELLA REACHED FOR her phone to text Jude, but it wasn’t in her pocket anymore. Panicked, she searched herself again, and then she remembered. She had been about to text him when she was in the bathtub, and then she had fallen asleep. Her phone must have fallen to the floor, or into the tub, and she hadn’t seen it with the light off. She dug in her pockets, finding only her MetroCard—she had nothing she could use to even leave a note.
She hit her fist against her thigh, to test again if she were dreaming. It hurt. There was nothing else to do but to return home before Helen started to worry.
She walked over to Lexington and into the subway station, asking a tired-looking woman in the customer service booth what time it was. “Two a.m.,” the agent said, and Ella, stunned, stood there, not knowing how it could be so late, how much time had passed. Her mother would be livid, but she wasn’t scared of anything now except not seeing Jude.
She had no memory of how she got home from the subway to her bed in Queens, how her comforter had snuck up to her chin. She lay on her back, begging Jude to hear her thoughts, to come stand under her window again. She’d know if he was there. She’d feel his presence.
“SLEEPYHEAD,” HELEN SAID the next morning when Ella stumbled to breakfast. “Where were you for dinner? I tried to wait up for you, but I conked. What time did you get in?”
Ella shrugged, said she was packing boxes with Jude.
“Next time, call,” Helen told her. “You know how I worry.”
Ella waited until Helen left for work. They didn’t have a landline, so all she could do was try to text Jude in her mind. I’m sorry. I miss you. Where are you? She dragged herself through the morning, washing her face, throwing on clothes, sure that Jude would come to the house. He’d be worried she hadn’t called—although maybe he’d find her phone in his bathroom. She knew she very much did look like shit, with shadows like half-moon stains under her eyes, her hair matted because she hadn’t yet showered, but she didn’t care. Jude, she knew, would always find her beautiful.
She kept staring out the front window down to the sidewalk, waiting for him. There was the usual traffic, the sprawl of people on the street, and then she saw it from the front window: a black police car double-parked on her street; two men in dark jackets and suit pants coming toward her apartment building, one tall and burly, the other so blond he looked whitewashed. The burly cop stared up at her and beckoned her to come downstairs. Ella felt his eyes on her, like rubber ink stamps punched on her chest.
Something happened to Jude, she thought, and she felt herself go white with terror.
She ran all the way down the stairs, remembering to lock the outside door. The two cops looked at each other. “Ella Levy?” one said, and she nodded.
“Let’s go to the squad car,” the burly officer said, and Ella followed.
“Is my mom okay?” she asked.
“Sure, she is,” he said. “But we need you to come with us.” The blond cop opened the car door.
“We just need to talk to you at the station,” the burly cop said. Ella felt her mouth drop open. “About an attempted murder.”
“What?” she said. “I don’t understand. Is Jude okay?” She looked around her, panic rising in her throat.
The burly cop’s eyes were steely. “This is about you trying to poison Judge Stein.”
“Jude’s dad?” she said.
“In you go,” the cop said, his hand on her head, guiding her into the backseat. Then they got in, too, the pale cop driving.
“I have to call my mom!” she said, starting to cry. “I need a lawyer!”
“First, you need to talk to us.”
“We’re going to read you your Miranda rights,” the driver said once the car was moving. She stayed silent and he began in a monotone, but she couldn’t focus on the words. “Do you understand the rights I have just read to you? With these rights in mind, do you still wish to speak to us?”
She stumbled on the word still because she couldn’t tell if that was a bad thing or a good one. “I want a lawyer,” she blurted. “I want my mom.”
The whitewashed cop sighed. “Of course,” he said, “but like I said, you need to talk to us first.”
AT THE POLICE station, they fingerprinted her and then brought her into a cramped room, empty but for a metal table and two chairs. Two glaring lights hung from the ceiling, so bright they made her squint.
The detectives gave her a Coke and a package of cheese crackers. When she was finished, the burly cop pulled a latex glove over his hand and gingerly took the can. She wondered why but was afraid to ask.
It was then that they began to batter her with questions. I want my mom. You have to call my mom. The things they kept asking made no sense. How did she feel living in a poor Queens neighborhood? What did she think of Judge Stein’s huge townhouse? How did it feel to be there? What was Jude doing that night? Why did she hate his father?
“I didn’t hate him—” she said, but they were peppering her with other questions, their faces grim. They kept asking her, again and again, insistent. What did you do? What did you do? And sometimes they said, We know what you did. We know.
And then they began to tell her, over and over, like a story they seemed to believe. You put the foxglove in the cup, didn’t you? You gave it to Judge Stein, didn’t you? You made him drink that tea and then you skedaddled out of there.
The interrogation went on forever, and she was afraid to ask them anything. The two detectives came and went from the room, but she stayed at the table. When she started to fall asleep, the burly cop prodded her arm to wake her.
“I want a lawyer! I want my mom!”
“Are you really sure you want that?” he said. “Because a lawyer means a trial, and a trial is difficult. A jury. A judge. All of that. It never turns out well.”
She froze. Was this true?
“If I were you, I’d waive my rights to a lawyer, to seeing your mom and upsetting her. If you tell us what you did, we can make this a lot easier on you. We’re here to help you. If you bring in a lawyer, the first thing he’ll do is try to stop us from doing that.”
She blinked, confused. “I want to talk to Jude!”
“Well, he’s right next door in the next room, and, I’m sorry to tell you this, but he already told us what happened. What you did.”
“What happened? What did he say?” She shut her eyes, trying to feel Jude in the next room, but all she could feel was her heart ramming against her chest.
“You know what he said. You were there,” the burly cop said.
She had no idea how many hours had passed when they thrust a paper under her nose and handed her a pen, insisting that she write out a confession. “You could be sent away for a long time if you don’t,” one of them said.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “I don’t know what this means.”
“We have your phone,” the burly cop said, and Ella started. He took it out of a jacket pocket and slid it toward her. “Unlock it, please,” he said.
She did, punching in her passcode—the day she and Jude had met. She handed it back to them, watching as they swiped through her messages. The blond cop raised his eyes at the burly one, who nodded. The blond man stood and carried the phone out of the room.
“Can’t I have it back?” she said.
“It’s evidence. You’re not getting it back any time soon.”
“How is it evidence?”
“I would do anything for you,” the burly cop said. “I hate your father.”
He sighed. “It’s incriminating stuff…”
She stared at him, stunned. “Do you have Jude’s phone too?”
“This isn’t about Jude.”
She looked down at the paper and saw her name, and then Jude’s—Jude’s!—but everything else looked like hieroglyphics. “What is this?” she asked, sobbing.
“It’s for your confession. We need you to state what you did. In your own words.”
“I want to call my mother!”
“You can call her after we’re through here,” he said.
There were no windows in the room. No clock on the wall. She wanted to sleep so badly, to vanish into a dream, where she could be with Jude. But every time she started to fall asleep, one of the officers would wake her with a question that made no sense to her.
“It’ll look better for you if you just cooperate with us. Judges always look kindly on cooperation. And under the circumstances, no judge is going to be on your side here.”
Every time she heard a noise, she tensed expectantly, sure it would be Helen breaking into the room, coming to rescue her.
But her mother never showed. Instead, the officers kept badgering her, goading her to pick up the pen. They told her it was nearing nighttime already, that everyone had news of this now, including the media who had condemned her, and that was all it took to send her away for years and years. No jury would buy her story because she had no story. There was only the truth.
“What truth?” she said.
One cop leaned over her. “We know it was you. We’ll put in a good word for you if you confess.” He tapped the paper. “Go ahead now. Start with On the night of…”
They kept telling her what to write, over and over, until she began to doubt her own memory. But every time she said, “Wait, that’s not true,” one of the cops would say, “Really? Write it down and I bet it will jog your memory.” They kept assuring her that they knew what happened. She and Jude had been at the house. They had a small bag of foxglove. Jude had confessed that he hadn’t done anything, that it was Ella who had urged him to boil the water. And then she remembered the gurgle of the water, those pretty glass cups, and she wrote it down. “What did Jude say?” she asked. The words kept scrambling in her mind.
“That you did it.”
She felt her body shaking, and she gripped the edge of the table. “He said I did it?”
“Didn’t you? Are you sure it isn’t true? Are you one thousand percent sure?”
She shut her eyes. She smelled the pizza and then heard the crumpling of the newspaper his father was reading.
“I don’t remember! I really don’t remember!”
“You tried to kill a superior court judge. You want to put your fate in the hands of jurors? Trust me, no one is going to be on your side here. The judge in your case will probably know Judge Stein personally, will have known him since law school.”
That was when her world went dark, when she felt as if her arms and legs were made of cement.
“Judge Stein nearly died. He told us what you did.”
“What did I do?” she cried. In her mind she saw it again: Judge Stein reading the paper in the other room, then standing. His anger boiling like the water for the tea. She heard herself telling Jude, I would do anything for you. That was true. It had always been true.
“Jude told us you did it,” the burly cop said again.
When they fit the pen more firmly into her hands, she tried to let it drop from her fingers, but she couldn’t move them. She didn’t know who she was anymore, how she could have done such a thing. She started to write, one cop leaning over her shoulder. “That’s good,” he said, reading. “That’s very good.”
AND THEN, after what seemed like the tenth time she had rewritten the confession, the cops stood up. “All you have to do is sign.”
She scribbled her name.
“I want my call,” Ella said, and this time the cop said, “Sure, why not.”
HELEN ANSWERED ON the first ring, her voice tense with worry. She had been working late and hadn’t heard from Ella since breakfast that morning. Jude hadn’t answered, either. Growing more and more anxious, she had called the hospitals, and then the NYPD, and that was when she found out that Ella was in custody.
“I’m on my way, but I’m stuck in traffic,” Helen said, her voice wobbly.
“You have to come!” Ella cried.
“I already called a lawyer,” she said. “He’s a friend of a friend. We’ll both be right there.”
But it felt like another hour before Helen arrived, her face chalky white. A man her mother introduced as Clark Royton strode in after her, in an ill-fitting suit, livid because he should have been called earlier.
“We have a confession,” the burly cop said.
“We’ll just see about that,” Clark said. He turned to Ella. “Don’t say another word, now,” he said. “I’ll handle everything.”
And, terror-stricken, she let him.
TWO DAYS LATER, a petrified Ella was seated in a prison van, her legs shackled, her hands in cuffs, sitting on a too-narrow metal seat so that no matter how she shifted, she couldn’t get comfortable. There were four other women with her, none of them speaking, except for one who kept saying she needed to pee. The driver, behind metal meshwork, acted like he couldn’t hear her.
Everything had happened so fast. Clark told her Jude had been freed, so she thought she might be, too. Ella had sat frozen through an arraignment, while the prosecutor had read the charges—attempted murder in the second degree—and did she understand the charges and still want to plead guilty? Because she didn’t want to go back into that room, she said yes. Yes. Yes.
To her shock, the judge then determined a sentence. Twenty to twenty-five years. She wouldn’t be let out on bail—because her guilty plea negated the need for a trial. Instead, he remanded her to the custody of the Department of Corrections, held in the local jail until they could arrange for a transport to a minimum-security women’s prison upstate.
“Your honor!” Clark had finally interjected, and Ella sobbed harder. The more she tried to meet her attorney’s eyes, the more he looked away.
Ella didn’t know what a real prison would be like. She had no idea what to expect. The exterior was squat and brick and industrial looking, spread out on an empty patch of land like a sprawling nightmare. Inside, there wasn’t much light. The floors were dark, too, and the whole place had an institutional smell. They gave her dark green pants and a dark green shirt, socks and underwear, and she was brought to what looked like a dorm of eight square cells, each one with a bed, a desk, a sink, and an open toilet. There was a door you could close but not lock. Only the main door to the dorm locked, and that was done by the guards. Her cell was toward the back, and she didn’t have a roommate, but even so, she felt the other women watching her, taking her measure. A few of them snickered, and she knew that couldn’t be good.
“You want me to fuck you up now or later, babyface?” a beefy blond woman said to her. Ella cowered in her cell, terrified for days. The tension only seemed to grow. She kept her head down. There wasn’t much silence, but when there was, it had a presence, as if it were waiting for her, some unseen force biding its time before it struck.
She missed Jude desperately. She missed her mom. She had only seen her once, before they took her here, her face puffy with sorrow. But when Ella asked her mother to find Jude, to make sure he was okay, Helen’s face darkened. She refused to talk about Jude, and instead told Ella that she was going to talk to Clark again and see what they could do, that she was never ever giving up on freeing Ella. She was going to visit every week and write her letters, and fight for her on the outside.
But all Ella could think about was that her mother wouldn’t be the one in prison. Ella would. And Jude was nowhere to be found.
SOMETIMES AT NIGHT she could hear screaming. Women got thrown into solitary for talking back to the guards or not moving quickly enough. She had thought that the shower, the gym, the cafeteria would be the scariest places because of movies she had seen, but to her surprise, she felt the most afraid in her own cell. That was when women could just walk in as if they had been invited, slapping her books to the ground just because they could, sometimes slapping her face too, and then leaving. There was a rumor about a guard who liked to rape inmates.
Ella learned to be a loner because it threw the other women off. They didn’t know what to make of her. She learned to keep her head down, to look hostile even when she wasn’t so that people would keep their distance, keep guessing about what she might do. She spent her time in the library and she watched, figuring out who the other loners were, whom she could talk to, whom she could trust.
The worst of it was the boredom. Every day was and would be the same—every hour accounted for, from waking up to breakfast to shower time to her work detail, which Ella came to dread. They put her in the prison garden, pulling weeds, and all she could think about was Jude. Every plant looked like foxglove to her.
One day, one of the women near her started spilling dish liquid on the floor. Ella watched, tense, sure a fight was brewing. Then the other women stood up and took off their shoes and they began to slide along it, whooping, skittering, laughing—some of them falling on their butts. “Hey, Ella!” one of the women called. “Hey, babyface!” She motioned for Ella to join in. Tentatively Ella took off her shoes. She gathered her breath and then slid, and the women cheered. For a moment, she wasn’t in this prison at all. She was flying, and the feeling of wonder made her laugh out loud.
HELEN KEPT HER promise about visits, about sending letters. She’d stuff them with newspaper clippings on things she thought Ella might like—animal stories about dogs who had traveled hundreds of miles to find their owners, cats who seemed to understand language, changes in their neighborhood in Queens. When Helen visited, she brought food and yarn, money for the commissary, and other things that sometimes other women would steal just for spite—and that sometimes Ella would share to keep them from stealing everything. She lost weight. Her hair lost its shine. And she was extremely tired. By the end of September, she was throwing up every morning. It was the other inmates who told her: she needed to get a pregnancy test.
ELLA WAS STUNNED. Her period had always been erratic. She was used to missing it. And Jude had always used condoms or pulled out in time. She tried to remember the last time she’d had it, and she thought, July. Maybe July. Maybe August. Maybe she didn’t know.
She went to the infirmary and a nurse was with her when she saw the blue line coming in clearly on the test. The nurse sighed heavily.
“We don’t do abortions.”
Ella’s mind shut down. The nurse told her she’d get her prenatal vitamins and set a schedule for checkups. Then she asked Ella if she had family, someone who could raise a baby outside of prison. Otherwise the baby would be adopted through an agency or go into the foster care system.
“My mom,” Ella blurted. “I’ll see her this week. My boyfriend.” She was nauseous with hope.
She didn’t know what to do. How to feel. At night, she tried to telepathically get to Jude, to tell him they were going to have a baby, to ask him what he wanted to do. Would he raise their child by himself until she got out? But her telepathic skills felt rusty, and in the end, all she heard was the thump of her own beating heart.
THAT WEEKEND, WHEN Helen came to visit, carrying a bag full of magazines and books, Ella told her.
“Well,” Helen said finally. “You’ll have to give it up for adoption.”
Stunned, Ella stared at her mother.
“Why can’t you raise the baby?” she asked. “Why can’t you bring it in for visits—”
Helen held up a hand. “You know why not,” she said quietly. “I have to work. You have to get through this. It would be so much harder for both of us. And for the child. Twenty years is a lifetime—”
“Jude can be there, too,” Ella said. “Find him, find his dad, tell them I’m pregnant. Jude would never ditch his responsibility.”
She gripped her mother’s hand.
“Please, Mom. You have to do this for me.”
She wouldn’t let go until her mother slowly nodded.
IN THE WEEKS and months that followed, Ella’s nausea stopped, replaced by shortness of breath. She requested looser prison clothes. Her breasts hurt. Everything about her body was a reminder of the baby growing inside her—her baby, and Jude’s.
The other women became more approachable, friendlier. She began to know their names. Annie. Susan. Ruthanna. Beth. They were all ages. They were twenty-five or twenty-nine. They were thirty or forty. They gave her their yogurts at breakfast because she needed more calcium now. They wanted to touch her stomach, to try to convince her to keep the child because of the fierce yearning they had for their own children. They showed her photos of their little ones in party clothes, in jeans, sometimes perched on a father’s lap. “It’s all so worth it,” Susan told her. “The throw-up, the poop. The tantrums. None of that matters. You’ll never love anyone as much as you will your child.”
She didn’t know what to believe. Ella had never loved anyone as much as she had loved Jude.
AROUND CHRISTMAS, HELEN came for her weekly visit, her hair damp from snow, her cheeks burnished from the chill. She strode past the fake Christmas tree the prison had in the visiting room, the little green plastic Menorah on a table, and then told Ella the news. Jude would not be helping. He had given up his parental rights. Ella crumpled over the table between them, but Helen insisted that this was a good thing. She leaned across the table and took Ella’s hands.
“Clark Royton helped me find an adoption lawyer.”
At first Ella didn’t understand, and then Helen began telling her how this lawyer had already found a couple who wanted the child.
“What about Jude?” Ella whispered, and Helen slowly shook her head.
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know. All I know is that he gave up his rights. All I know is you have to let this go now. Let him go.”
Ella’s mouth went dry. “Who will take the baby?” she asked flatly.
Helen could only tell her it was a closed adoption.
Ella walked out of the room and back to her cell, ignoring Helen’s voice calling out to her.
ELLA BURIED HERSELF in books from the prison library, losing herself in other peoples’ stories. She was a ballerina in Mexico or a doctor in France, not an inmate. She passed her days in even more solitude than before.
“Hey, Mama,” some of the other women called to her when she’d waddle by, hugely pregnant. Somehow, the women on her cellblock learned that the baby was being adopted, and they grew kinder to her, watching her tenderly, leaving little presents for her to find. All Ella wanted was to forget. Their kindness made her remember.
IN APRIL, WHEN Ella was eight months pregnant, Helen came in and told Ella she had an idea. She spread out information about getting her GED. “You could pass that test without even studying, a smart girl like you,” Helen said.
Ella sighed. “And do what with it?”
“You could go on and get a college degree if you want,” Helen said, “This prison has a program for young people like you, through Bard College. You could learn something and then when you get out—”
Ella laughed sharply. “I don’t know,” she said. “That doesn’t sound possible. It sounds scammy.”
“Do something with your time here. Don’t wallow anymore, baby girl.”
“I’ll think about it,” Ella said.
And she did, about all the days stretching out in front of her like the same dirty bolt of cloth that could never be cleaned. Doing this might break up the monotony, eat away at the endless time. She wondered if everything she studied, if she started now, would go to the baby too, by a kind of magical osmosis. In any case, it would be something to do, something to distract her from the discomfort of being pregnant day in and day out. She’d have to really think about it.
ON MAY EIGHTH, Ella gave birth via emergency C-section in the prison hospital, a procedure during which she was so woozy she felt as if she were hallucinating. The doctor put up a sheet so that Ella couldn’t see anything, but she felt it, as if aggressive hands were rummaging around inside her, rearranging her, making her different—and wasn’t that the truth? She had wanted Helen to be in the room with her, but all she had was this rough, efficient doctor.
And then the doctor said, “And we’re done,” as if it were a triumph, and he quietly lifted the baby. She tried to raise herself up, to see if it was a boy or girl, but a nurse gently lowered her down. She heard the child’s cry, a mewl like a kitten, but she saw nothing. Another nurse whisked her baby away.
SHE WAS LEFT with a scar, a reminder, so no matter how hard she tried, she’d never forget, and even if she did two hundred sit-ups a day, she’d never get her flat stomach back. Her breasts hurt, too, and sometimes leaked or sprayed milk without warning, branding her shirts with a yellowish stain that never came out no matter how much she scrubbed. The other women in the prison knew what was going on, and they brought her extra, clean T-shirts to wear, cupcakes from the commissary and cups of tea. Sometimes they just sat quietly beside her, mourning with her as if they were holding a kind of vigil for her baby and for theirs, as if things might get better for all of them. But everyone knew they wouldn’t.
It was Helen who came to her rescue again, pushing Ella to apply to the Bard Prison Initiative and get a degree. All she had to do was write an essay and go through an interview. “You can build something here,” Helen insisted.
Ella spent days writing the essay and landed an interview with a Bard professor who seemed to like her. To her surprise, she actually got into the program. Instantly, things changed. Night used to be the worst, the loneliest time, but now she couldn’t wait for it because the prison got quiet then and she could read or write drafts of her papers—longhand first, to be typed out later in the library. While she was studying, going to school, she could think of herself as a college student, not just a felon. She could stop obsessing about having given up her baby. She buckled down and studied for a degree in psychology.
And when she got it, four years later, in a small graduation ceremony at the prison, Helen was in the first row, crying with pride. Ella happy-cried, too. And then weeks later, the prison made her a peer leader, a position that usually went to the old-timers. Peer leaders advised inmates on how to endure in prison, or steered them to resources for legal research or counsel. What the women wanted from Ella was more private: How to get over a broken heart when your lover didn’t show up for visits. How to stop the panic that seemed to close in during the long nights.
And Ella, in a blaze of gratitude, using what she had learned, helped them.