Marydale entered the visiting room Tuesday morning. It was never busy. She’d overheard the guards talking about visiting days on the men’s side. Sometimes there were lines around the building, sometimes a one-hour limit per visit. Today, on the women’s side, there were only five or six prisoners in the visiting room. Two women were seated at a round table talking to the same well-dressed man. One woman sat in the children’s play area while a little girl beat two blocks against each other. The rest were paired up with their visitors in facing plastic chairs.
Marydale looked around for Kristen, then for Aldean, then for Kristen’s sister and her friends. She recognized no one. She turned to the guard who had let her in.
“Over there.”
The guard pointed to two young women at the far end of the room. They looked about twenty. One sat in a wheelchair, but they both looked athletic and cheerful in pastel sweaters and stocking caps with earflaps and pom-pom tassels. Except for the wheelchair they could have just come in from skiing. The woman in the wheelchair waved.
Marydale approached slowly. “Are you here to see me?”
The girl in the wheelchair held out her hand. She had a firm, warm handshake. “I’m Nyssa,” she said. “And this is my friend Brit.”
They didn’t look like the kind of emissaries Gulu would send from the outside world, but Marydale couldn’t be sure.
“We came from Bend,” Brit said. “Nyssa wanted to meet you in person.”
“We’re on the staff of the newspaper at our college. The Broadside, at Central Oregon Community College,” Nyssa said. “We saw that article your girlfriend’s sister wrote. Shit! That was crazy what happened to you. I mean, I studied the criminal justice system in American society, but I hadn’t thought about it, not really, not until I read the article.”
The girl kept talking, and Marydale sighed inwardly. Some of the women at Holten Penitentiary got visits from strangers—preachers, fetishists, or liberals. The prevailing sentiment was that any visit was better than the routine of prison life, but there was something in the monotony of count and yard and work and dinner that made the hours pass. Standing at the counter folding laundry in the subterranean facility, she lost track of the minutes. If Gulu was out of sight and she felt relatively confident none of the women on her work crew were working for Gulu, she could escape into her thoughts. Visits from the outside world, even Kristen’s, made the prison days longer, her cell colder, her fate a fact, not an abstraction.
“As soon as I read about you,” Nyssa was saying, “I knew I had to do something. I mean, this is what journalism is all about. And I know our teacher at the Broadside says a reporter’s job is to accurately report the news, but journalists can do more. I don’t care if they say I’m a crazy millennial. I’m going to make a difference.”
When Marydale worked the tasting room at Sadfire, she had kept up an ever-flowing conversation with the customers. Were they following the Portland Timbers and did they hear about the emu farm out in North Plains? Was it unseasonably warm in Salem, too? Now she could not think of anything to say.
“What do you want?” Marydale asked.
“I got in an accident,” Nyssa said cheerfully, patting the arms of her wheelchair. “When I was little. Dad bicycled a lot. He was really into it. We had a tandem bike. And we got hit.” She shrugged. “It happens.”
“Are you going to tell her?” Brit asked.
“Do you think we can talk somewhere private?” Nyssa asked.
“I don’t think they’re going to let us do that,” Marydale said. “Unless you were my lawyer.”
“Just tell her,” Brit urged.
“I’m going to tell her.” Nyssa fiddled with the pom-poms hanging from her hat. “Okay. Here goes.” She took a deep breath like someone about to jump from a diving board. “I’m Nyssa…Neiben.”
It took Marydale a second to understand. “Eric Neiben was my defense attorney.”
“He’s my dad, and he’s, like, my best friend, too. He went with me to get this.” She pulled up her sleeve and pointed to a tattoo of a bicycle. “I still ride,” she added. “I’ve got one of those hand-power bikes. People at school couldn’t believe that my dad went with me to get a tattoo.”
Marydale’s heart raced. She hadn’t seen Neiben since the day she was escorted from the Tristess courthouse.
“Why are you here?” she asked.
Nyssa sat back. “He took a bribe.”
“What?” Marydale leaned in.
“He—” Nyssa rubbed at the tattoo. “He took a bribe to lose your case.” It came out all in one word.
The noises of the visiting room faded. Marydale stared at the girl.
“I was little,” Nyssa said. “My mom and dad were still together, and my dad and me, we’d just had the accident. Some guy called and said he’d give my dad ten thousand dollars to take this case…and lose. My dad told me years later.”
“My case?”
Marydale saw the Tristess courthouse. She remembered her Walmart separates suit drenched in sweat. She felt Neiben hugging her. I’m sorry. I did everything I could.
“My family had a ranch,” Marydale said. “I lost my house.”
“He and my mom fought about it,” Nyssa said. “That’s why she left him.”
Anger surged through Marydale, and she understood the women who tossed their cells, who ripped the metal shelving from the cement with their bare, bleeding hands.
“I had a life. I could have had a life. Who paid the money?” Marydale sank her head into her hands. “Ronald Holten. It was fucking Ronald Holten!”
She felt Nyssa’s hand on her knee.
A guard called out, “No touching.”
“I know,” Nyssa said. “I know. I read the article about you and everything that happened. My dad doesn’t know I’m here.”
“You have to tell someone.” Marydale looked up. Only the guards’ motionless stare kept her from grabbing the girl by the hand or by the neck. “Please. You have to talk to the court. Will you talk to my lawyer?”
“She wanted to meet you,” Brit said.
“I wanted to see you,” Nyssa said. “My dad could be in a lot of trouble if people find out.”
For a moment, they stared at each other, and the space between them expanded. Marydale felt like she was going to throw up. But behind the effort it took to sit still and not cry or scream or throw her chair across the room, she felt hope welling up inside her like oxygenated blood coursing through her arteries.
“You seem like a good person,” Nyssa said.
“If I give you my lawyer’s number, will you call her?” Marydale asked.
“Yes,” Nyssa said. “Today.”