A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [166]
I had not, up to that point in my stay, showed much emotion in front of Debbie, except in relation to her own troubles. I felt my mouth start to move. I wanted very much to control myself. Debbie had the sense to avert her eyes while I tried to master my poor trembling lips. For several minutes she stood looking out at the day room, pulling on her nose. To my dismay I found myself sobbing into my lap. I was apparently making enough noise to attract attention because pretty soon Sherry was poking her head around the corner. “What this fuss about? What you be doin’, Debbie girl, goin’ on and makin’ her cry?”
“I just asked her a question,” Debbie squeaked.
“You missin’ your babies? That it?” Sherry asked, sitting down next to me. She pointed at Debbie. “Go get some tissues.” Sherry was nineteen years old. She had been driving the get-away car when her boyfriend held up a Handy Pantry. He’d wounded two people and nearly gotten away with six hundred dollars. I couldn’t stop crying. I felt as if a ball bearing had come loose inside my head, that it banged from side to side, every time I blinked. If I was sent to prison and my children got a stepmother in due course, I would still be a blight to them. If there was a plea bargain and I pleaded guilty for a lesser sentence, Child Welfare might barge in and take the girls away from Howard. If I lost the trial, I would be in prison for years. My absence was a wound—I might just as well have cut off a limb or put out an eye.
“I miss my babies too,” Sherry said, slipping her arm around me. I was rigid in her arms as she moved back and forth, trying to rock me. “I got my three little dickens at my mama’s house.”
I remember wanting very much to protest, to insist that someone nineteen years old couldn’t possibly know my pain, that our ages, our experience, our upbringing were so dramatically different we were virtually not of the same species. I remember trying to say that. My head was throbbing and I couldn’t make the words to tell her that she knew nothing.
“You have three babies?” Debbie asked.
Sherry stared at her. “You in awe today or somethin’?”
“Well, I—”
“Ain’t she though?” Sherry said, trying to draw me out. “It’s like she noticing we made of bones instead of cee-ment. Congratulations, girl. Three babies, that’s right, Dante, Jamella, Michael J. One, two, three. They always say jail ain’t no vacation, but for me it is, that’s for sure!” She laughed her big belchy laugh. “Don’t let Dyshett fool you,” she said. “She had a baby boy when she was fourteen, a baby girl a year later, but they both got took away to foster care. She say she don’t mind, but that ain’t no shit but talk. She go out and bust herself buying fancy presents for their birthdays. She got her girl a gold necklace with a diamond the size of my butt.”
I stood up then, dried my eyes on my sleeve, and thanked Sherry. My head hurt so much I couldn’t see. I needed my children not to know me, not to remember that it had been I who made their world smash, as much as I needed to breathe near them, to encircle them, to keep them safe. I leaned over the toilet trying to choke down the grief, as if what was inside was likely to come ripping up my throat, as if it was something that could be purged and flushed away.
After Debbie and Sherry went into the day room I lay on my stomach and looked at the stack of drawings the girls had made. Claire made scribbles and Emma drew stick self-portraits in triangle dresses with funny little club feet pointing in the same direction. I smelled the drawings and I held them to my cheek because the paper always seemed as if it should be directly related to them. If I only could look more closely, or read in a way that was just beyond my ability, the girls would be there, underneath the paper. I didn’t ever seem to remember the keen disappointment I always felt, and each time there was mail delivery I opened their letters with great expectation. As I lay in bed I tried to study the pictures objectively, to see if I could tell if the girls were scarred in any way.