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to take cover is in plain sight; no one ever looks twice at someone who acts like he has nothing to hide.
Believe what you want, but be prepared to answer this question: In my shoes, how do you know you wouldn't have done the same thing?
Believe it or not, there is a relief to finally getting caught. The moment I gave up my clothes for a baggy orange jumpsuit I also peeled off the skin of the person I've pretended to be. In a strange way, I belong here more than I did out there. Like me, everyone in jail has been living a lie.
For twenty-three hours a day, I stay in my cell. That last hour, I am granted a shower and a turn around the exercise yard, where I do my best to breathe in deep and get the smell of jail out of my nostrils.
I have asked twice now to call you; I thought that everyone was given a phone call upon arrival, but it turns out that's only true on television. I wait for Eric, but he hasn't come yet either. I imagine there are all sorts of knots made out of red tape he has to untangle before we are shipped off to Arizona.
The last time I was there, it was a state unlike anything in the Northeast. A place where the soil was the color of blood, where snow was a fantasy, where the plants had skeletons. Just falling off the abrupt edge of Scottsdale could land you in towns that consisted of a handful of people and a gas station; back then the West was still a haven for lawless rebels. I hear those towns are now the enclaves of the rich, who have built multimillion-dollar houses into the inhospitable red cliffs, but I imagine the part of Phoenix I will be seeing is still peopled with lawless rebels, the ones who have been arrested.
It never gets dark in jail, and it never gets quiet. The sound is a symphony: the wheezing snore of the guy one block down; the creak of a door being opened. Rain on the roof and the viper hiss of the radiator. The ping-ping-ping-ping of metal on metal as a corrections officer walks down the corridor side by side with his attitude, hitting his keys against the bars of a cell to wake up all the nearby occupants. The only way I am able to stand it is to think about you. This time, the memory that spreads across my mind is of the autumn weekend we drove to Killington and took a chairlift up to the top. It was October, and you were only five. When we got to the peak, the ring of Killing-ton's mountains rose to our left and right; the valley below was a lavish tapestry of reds and golds and emeralds, studded with church spires that looked like fallen stars caught in the folds of the landscape. The Ottauquechee River scalloped a blue seam down the center, and the air already smelled of snow.
It looked just about as different from Arizona as humanly possible. And I began to understand what New Englanders say, what I had learned long before I took refuge in New Hampshire: You never forget your first fall. When you're a parent you find yourself looking at the unknown that is your child, trying to find a piece of yourself inside her, because sometimes that is what it takes to stake a claim. I remember watching you making muddy mixtures in the sandbox, and wondering if a love of chemistry was something you might be born with. I remember listening to your tearful recollection of the monster in your nightmare, trying to see whether it resembled me.
What I saw most in you, though, was your mother.
You had an uncanny ability to find things: the diamond earring Eric's mother lost somewhere in her driveway; the old stash of comic books hidden behind a loose panel of wood in the basement; a buffalo-head nickel caught between the cracks of the sidewalk. Unlike Elise, who could discover parts of a person they didn't even know were absent, you specialized in the tangible, but that, I feared, was only a matter of time.
When you were seven, you found a chickadee's egg that had fallen out of a nest. The egg was cracked and the bird, still embryonic and developing, was pink-skinned and pale, oddly humanistic. You