That night Kristen pored over post-conviction relief cases and the court files from Marydale’s case, toggling back and forth between screens on her laptop, then standing up and pacing, then willing herself to sit down and focus. She highlighted every name in Marydale’s case file, and during the day she called each person.
The calls yielded one of two replies.
Aaron Holten’s father answered her from a pier in Atlantic City, the sound of the ocean growling in the background.
“They should have locked her up and thrown away the key,” he said. “If I ever met the bastard who let her out on parole! You know Texas brought back the firing squad. That’s what I say. Why should they get three hots and a cot? After what she did to my boy!”
The former Tristess police chief said, “Poor kid. With her father dying and her mother dying so young, bless her, and Marydale being, well, different.”
“Yes?”
“She was bound to get herself in trouble one way or another.”
“Did you think it was self-defense?”
“It might have been a fair fight, but that’s the problem, isn’t it? A girl’s got to be strong to throw a hay bale like that. You don’t do that by accident. I feel sorry for her, but she was at the wrong end of that throw.”
When Kristen called Marydale’s defense attorney, Eric Neiben, all she got was a voice mail in return.
“I lost, okay?” he said. “Lawyers lose cases. She didn’t appeal. That’s it. That’s final.” By nightfall on her fourth day in Tristess, the sky had cleared. Kristen stared out her motel window at the parking lot. The room felt cramped and empty at the same time. Kristen put on a coat, scarf, and hat and tucked her laptop under her arm and her phone in her pocket. Outside the air was cold and dry. Kristen walked around to the front of the hotel, stepping over the low, wrought-iron railing that surrounded the patio around the empty pool. She sat at one of the tables. The metal chair felt icy.
She checked her phone for the hundredth time, but the only new messages were from Donna. Donna had been calling, leaving a couple of messages a day. The Falcon Law Group had put Kristen on unpaid administrative leave. She had seventy-two hours to procure a medical diagnosis explaining her sudden change in behavior. Then she had forty-eight hours. Then she had twelve. Kristen had deleted the first half a dozen messages without returning them. Marydale’s case was more important. But with the case stalled and the night stretching out before her with nothing to do but wait and hope, it felt churlish not to speak the words: I quit. I’m sorry. There was no way to pretend that that part of her life wasn’t over. Kristen touched call back.
Donna greeted her with, “What the hell?”
“I know,” Kristen said.
“Kristen!” For once, Donna seemed at a loss for words.
“I’m sorry,” Kristen said.
“Everyone has a midlife crisis,” Donna hissed. “I don’t see why yours couldn’t have waited until after DataBlast. Are you crazy? Suicidal? Are you being blackmailed? Did you start doing drugs? Did some parasite get in your bloodstream and eat a hole through your…your…” Always precise, Donna searched for the exact neurological structure. “Your brain!” she finished, apparently deciding that fury outweighed medical specificity.
“I know I’m getting fired,” Kristen said. “But you’ll do great with DataBlast. You deserve that case. You did as much work on it as I did.”
“I won DataBlast,” Donna said. “DataBlast is over.”
“Already?”
“Yes, already. And we didn’t get the Tri-State Global contract. And yes, you’re getting fired. I had to talk Rutger out of an involuntary commitment.”
“You’d never get a four twenty-six on me. You can’t prove danger to self or others.”
“I’m kidding, Kristen, but, seriously, what happened?”
The stars overhead were cold. Kristen’s breath steamed before her.
“You want to know what happened?” Kristen had Google open on her laptop. Absently, she typed in the name of Marydale’s defense attorney for the hundredth time. “You ever take a lit class in college?”
“I don’t know. Probably.”
“You ever read one of those stories, like a Greek myth, where someone does one thing wrong? You know, they step on the sacred spring or something, and it ruins their life?”
“They sleep with their mother,” Donna suggested. “Kill their father.”
“You ever do anything like that?”
“No,” Donna said without hesitation. “I have not slept with Ma Hualing, and I’m pretty sure my father is doing just fine.”
Donna Li, Kristen thought. The daughter of Hualing and Junjie Li. Donna who wore three-inch heels to pick up milk at the Dairy Mart. Donna who got a score on the bar exam so high they had to readjust the curve. Donna who had grown up in the same squat, narrow-windowed apartments that Kristen had, only for different reasons.
“You’ve been in love. You know,” Kristen said.
“I have not been in love,” Donna said with indignation.
“What about the opera singer and the CrossFit guy and that military guy with the great jaw?”
“You thought I was in love with them?”
“Why would you go out with them if you weren’t in love?”
“Um, because,” Donna said in a way that made the answer obvious. “What’s this about?”
“I was in love,” Kristen said. “I am in love. Do you remember the job I had in Tristess?”
The story unfolded like her own personal creation myth. Five years earlier, she could have sat in the jailhouse visiting room and promised, We’ll make this work. Instead, she had left, and now she had to move back into the Almost Home, like some flying Dutchman of small-town law, and recount the whole absurd, tragic, starry-eyed story to practical Donna Li.
On the screen in front of her, she stared at a blurry photograph of Neiben at his wedding many years earlier, a slender man with dark, oily hair. Behind him, the wedding party wore an assortment of sport coats and gunnysack dresses.
“So that’s it,” Kristen said when she finished. “I came back to work her case. I’m going to practice under Doug Grady’s professional liability insurance. He does defense down here.”
She looked up. In the distance, headlights cut the darkness.
“You quit over a girl?”
“Yeah.”
“You were going to be partner!”
“Marydale’s the most important thing to me,” Kristen said.
Donna blew out a quiet breath. “Better you than me. You would have been a good partner. We could have taken the firm somewhere.” Donna was quiet for a moment. “How is the case?”
“It’s a dog.” Kristen tried to keep the panic out of her voice.
An SUV pulled into the darkness at the far end of the parking lot, and a small group of people got out and made their way toward the hotel lobby. They were barely visible in the nonexistent security lighting, but Kristen thought they looked happy. They moved with the loose-limbed gait of people on vacation.
“Statute of limitations ran out unless we can find evidence that wasn’t available at the time of the trial,” Kristen went on.
“You need a Jason Miter,” Donna said mildly.
Kristen looked around at the empty pool and the wide main road beyond.
“What if I don’t find one?” she asked.
“You lose,” Donna said. “That’s law.”
It took them a long time to say goodbye. Although Donna had been known to end a conversation in midsentence with That’s enough of us talking or Okay, I’m sick of this now, this time she demurred like a true Oregonian.
“Right on…” Donna hedged. “Well, keep me posted…Okay, good luck…We’ll talk soon.”
The longer Donna dragged out their goodbye, the more certain Kristen was that they would never talk again. Finally she touched end call.
The tourists had disappeared into the motel lobby. Now they emerged again, their silhouettes black against the yellow windows: a cowboy hat, two topknots, a woman whose outline suggested she carried a giant basket of twigs on her head.
The woman’s voice floated across the empty pool. “I can see the stars.”
Kristen knew that voice.
“Sierra?” Kristen said out loud.
The woman raised her hands to the sky. “Hello, stars!” she called out.
“Sierra!”
Kristen stood.
A moment later, Meatball appeared, as if from nowhere, barreling up to the wrought-iron fence, which—at three feet—presented an insurmountable obstacle to his bowling-ball weight and Samsonite girth. He wedged his froggy smile between the fence posts.
“Kristi!” Sierra called, breaking into a run and flying toward Kristen with her arms outstretched, her dreadlocks breaking loose from their scarf and flying around her like the hair of an energetic Medusa.
A second later, Kristen was engulfed in her sister’s embrace. Behind Sierra, Frog and Moss ambled over along with Aldean Dean, who touched the brim of his hat, looking slightly embarrassed.
“What are you doing here?” Kristen asked, still hugging Sierra.
“We’re here for you and for Marydale,” Sierra said. “We all are. And we’ll visit her every day in prison. We’ll take shifts. We’ll stand outside with a petition and signs, and if that doesn’t work…” Sierra dropped her voice. “Aldean will show us where to tunnel in, and Moss and Frog will get a drone and fly over the prison so we can get a blueprint of the layout. But first we’ll write a story about her. About injustice and homophobia and the prison industrial complex. The HumAnarchist is about social change.” Sierra pulled back, holding Kristen at arm’s length. “If you don’t think it would hurt Marydale’s case. I mean, maybe there’ll be a jury, and we can’t taint all the jurors by telling her story, but maybe we can! They’ll read the story, and then they’ll be on the jury, and they’ll acquit her.”
“There’s not going to be a jury,” Kristen said. She didn’t mention that the chances of a Tristess jury reading the HumAnarchist were about as good as the chances of the Heavenly Harvest running out of the sprouted tofu bowl.
Sierra said, “We’ll think of something.” Behind her, Moss and Frog nodded vigorously. “We’re HumAnarchists. We’ll think outside the box.”
Sierra squeezed her again, enveloping Kristen in the smell of essential oil, stale marijuana, and the failure of natural crystal deodorant.
“Are you mad that I’m here?” Sierra asked.
Kristen pressed her face into her sister’s dreads. “Sierra, I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what?” Sierra asked, as though she had not stomped out of the Port Call.
Everything, Kristen thought. “The other day at the bar,” she said instead, “you said we both followed our dreams. You followed your dreams. I followed mine. We had that in common.”
“Yeah.”
Above their heads, the stars sparkled in frozen abandon. The motel felt like a tiny enclave on a vast, alien landscape, a tiny trailer beneath a UFO sky.
“I didn’t follow my dreams,” Kristen said. “You followed your dreams. I ran away.”