Tortured Teardrops

by P. D. Workman

  “Tell him it’s urgent.”

  Kirk rolled his eyes. “You’re not special, French. He’ll get to you when he gets to you.”

  “He’ll want to see me first. If you tell him it’s urgent.”

  “Sorry. You’ll get him when he decides the time.”

  “If you don’t tell him it’s urgent, I’m gonna tell him that I told you to, and then he’ll write you up for not passing it along.”

  Tamara didn’t know if this was true. She knew Sutherland was very strict about the proper reporting being done. He would have to have some kind of consequence in place if the security staff neglected to follow the rules, leading to inmates potentially being traumatized. They didn’t want to cause permanent psychological damage and turn them into worse, more hardened offenders. Glock and Vernon were ten times worse than Tamara was. Did the guards want her turning out like them?

  Kirk shook his head, letting out a breath. “You’re a piece of work, French.”

  She didn’t know whether that meant he would tell Sutherland she needed to see him urgently or not.

  Tamara was still pacing, her breakfast meal mostly untouched, when one of the newer guards opened Tamara’s cell door.

  “You’ve got an appointment with Dr. Sutherland,” he announced.

  “About time!”

  He raised an eyebrow. It probably wasn’t the usual response to having an appointment with Dr. Sutherland. Tamara and the other inmates didn’t generally look forward to sessions with him digging around inside their brains and dictating everything from when they should sleep to what they should think and how they should breathe.

  Tamara walked to the door. She paused, unsure of whether he was going to insist that she be handcuffed for the escort to Dr. Sutherland’s office. But he just motioned for her to continue and walked beside her on the way there.

  Tamara walked into Dr. Sutherland’s office and was assaulted by a rush of memories and sensations. She paused in the doorway, trying to get her bearings. Neither the guard nor Dr. Sutherland noticed anything wrong. Tamara staggered to the designated chair across from Dr. Sutherland’s desk.

  “Tamara French. Good to see you again.” Dr. Sutherland smiled. “Have a seat,” he encouraged, when Tamara didn’t immediately sit down. He made a sign to the guard, who was still standing by, and the guard withdrew, pulling the door shut.

  Tamara sat down slowly. She hadn’t thought through what she would tell Sutherland once she got in to see him. She hadn’t considered what it was he would need to hear in order to convince the security staff and administration that Tamara should be free to follow the usual routine instead of being locked in her room. But Dr. Sutherland took up the slack in the conversation.

  “Since you came back here… you seemed a little… distant. Not quite the same Tamara French that we are used to here.”

  “Yeah. It’s been… weird.”

  “From the reports I’m getting, you are having a significant amount of difficulty settling back in to the routine. Would that be accurate?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And why do you think that is?”

  “Because…” Tamara trailed off. She had no idea what to tell him.

  Dr. Sutherland waited for a while, seeing if she could formulate an answer, before proceeding any further.

  “Maybe you could tell me a little bit about what happened when you were… away. I know that a lot must have happened in a very short time. You’re still trying to process that.”

  Tamara nodded.

  “Maybe you could tell me about how you felt being with Vernon. Was that something you had planned on and expected?”

  She knew that he wasn’t allowed to tell the administration or the police any of the details that Tamara divulged, but she was still leery about giving him any details. Especially when it made her feel so vulnerable and raw.

  “I didn’t know what was going to happen. Not any of it. I wasn’t in on it. Not on the fight, and not on the prison break. I was… just a bystander. I was as shocked as anyone.”

  “Probably more so,” Dr. Sutherland suggested.

  “Yeah. I wasn’t expecting any of that.”

  “And so you found yourself a hostage of Olivia Vernon. I don’t imagine that was a pleasant experience.”

  Tamara shook her head. Her face warmed. Her feelings toward Vernon and Sly were so confused, she couldn’t put them into words. They had held her at knifepoint and gunpoint. They had abused and threatened and beaten her. But they had also taken care of her, had given her advice and helped her. She didn’t know whether they were enemies or friends. None of it made sense.

  Sutherland nodded, watching her, waiting for her to elaborate. Tamara shrugged.

  “You can probably guess most of it,” she said as casually as she could manage. “They kept me until they were sure the cops weren’t on their tail, then they let me go. Then…”

  “Then you didn’t turn yourself in.”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t you think that was the right thing to do?”

  “Yeah… but… I had to find out about the Bakers.” Tamara looked down at her feet. What exactly had made her think that coming to talk to Dr. Sutherland was a good idea?

  “What about the Bakers? I would have thought that you would want to stay as far away from them as possible.”

  “They never served a day,” Tamara snapped. The heat of her anger suddenly flared through her chest, so substantial that it hurt to breathe. “You said that they were punished for what they did to me, but they weren’t! They never had to serve a day for what they did. They just went on, having another baby to abuse and letting him hit on the babysitters. How is that right?”

  “Unfortunately, the justice system doesn’t always impose what we would consider to be justice, does it?”

  The answer was just a little too glib. How long had he been waiting for her to return to recite it? How many other girls had he said it to? Dr. Sutherland didn’t care one bit about justice.

  “They beat me and got me pregnant and neither one ever served a day!” Tamara raised her voice in outrage.

  Dr. Sutherland studied her. “That wasn’t fair to you, was it? But you were responsible for killing their children. I imagine the judge took that fact into account.”

  “They didn’t care about those babies. They didn’t care that they died.”

  He took a while to answer her. Tamara kept repeating the words to herself, justifying what she had done. She had saved Julie and Amy from the same fate as she had suffered. It hadn’t been the best choice, she admitted, but she’d had her reasons. And Mr. and Mrs. Baker didn’t care about them. Not really.

  “Were you around when Mr. and Mrs. Baker found out about their children’s deaths?” Dr. Sutherland asked.

  “Him, not her. She was still out stripping. He was the first one to get home. In the evening, when he knew it would be just me and him and she wouldn’t be around.”

  Dr. Sutherland either didn’t catch her insinuation, or he ignored it. “And how did Mr. Baker respond when he found that his children were dead?”

  “Only Corrine was dead. Julie wasn’t, but she was sick. He attacked me, hit me and swore at me.”

  As soon as she put it into words, she was back there. As the cops had come back into the bedroom where Tamara was, there was a ruckus downstairs. Mr. Baker’s voice, angry at the police for not letting him in, not telling him what was going on. Outraged and self-righteous.

  Tamara gulped, frozen in place, looking at the policemen, Harney and Fram. “That’s him. Mr. Baker. He’s gonna kill me!”

  “Nobody’s going to hurt you,” Harney, the cop who had been first on the scene, reassured.

  “Let him up,” Detective Fram called down the stairs. “I’ll talk to him.”

  Tamara held on to the side of the crib to steady herself, terrified.

  Mr. Baker came charging up the stairs. “What’s going on here? What did that little tramp do?”

  He pushed int
o the bedroom, restrained by Fram’s hand on his arm.

  “What did you do?” he demanded, seeing Tamara. “I leave you alone for a few minutes and come back to a house full of cops! What the hell is going on?”

  Of course, he hadn’t just left her for a few minutes; that was for the benefit of the police. Tamara had been there taking care of the babies since she had gotten out of school and Mrs. Baker had left for work.

  “Mr. Baker,” Fram said, pulling him back and trying to get his full attention. His voice was low and grave. “Mr. Baker… there’s been a tragic accident.”

  The florid color drained from his cheeks. “An accident? What kind of accident?”

  “I’m afraid that Corrine…”

  “What? Where is she? What did she do to Corinne?”

  Fram tried to hold Mr. Baker’s attention. “Corrine drowned, sir. I’m very sorry.”

  Baker lunged towards Tamara. Fram held him back. Harney grabbed for him as well, pinning him between them.

  “Get your hands off of me!” Baker shouted, trying to jerk free. “I’m not going to hurt the little whore. I won’t touch her. I want to make sure the baby’s okay!”

  “Julie’s sleeping,” Tamara whispered.

  “I’m not talking to you. Let me go pick up my baby,” he growled at Fram.

  Fram and Harney slowly let him go. Tamara backed away from the crib, getting out of his way. Mr. Baker leaned over the crib and pulled back the blanket Tamara had covered Julie with. He let out a startled exclamation.

  “What did you do to her? What’s wrong with Julie?”

  Harney jumped forward and looked at the baby. She lay there as Tamara had left her, flaccid, eyes dilated, lips blue, spit and vomit dripping out of the corner of her mouth.

  Harney swore. “Are the medics still here?”

  Fram shook his head. “I’ll call them.”

  Then Mr. Baker went after Tamara with an incoherent shout of rage. Fram and Harney were too slow to stop the initial blow from connecting, but managed to pull him back after. Fram shouted for an officer to help and had Baker put in cuffs and taken back downstairs. Tamara was once again left alone with the police.

  “And you think that was an act?” Dr. Sutherland asked. “You think he didn’t care?”

  Tamara tried to pull herself back to the present. She was shaken by the images and tried to push them away from her consciousness.

  “Maybe he cared he wasn’t going to have anyone left to abuse,” she posited. “Or maybe he wanted to put on a good show for the cops. Maybe he just wanted to hit me one last time.”

  “When we talked about this before, you said that you believed he had some feelings for his little girls, but maybe not as deep as they should be.”

  “I thought… because he liked to cuddle them, and changed their diapers and all… I didn’t remember… that he… did that to them.”

  “Molested them.”

  Tamara’s stomach turned. She tried to swallow back the acid rising in her throat. She did not want to throw up in front of him. She pressed her hand over her mouth, trying to keep her breakfast down.

  “Why do you think you didn’t remember that part?” Dr. Sutherland asked.

  “It’s…” Tamara shook her head. “It’s awful. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t want to think that he… did that to babies.”

  “Why didn’t you tell the police?”

  “The police didn’t believe anything I told them. Why would I tell them that? If I said he did that to the girls, they might think that he… did that to me.”

  “He did.”

  “But I didn’t want to tell. I just wanted them to let me go so I could get away. I still thought that they were just going to put me into emergency respite and I could run away, and then I could just be on my own and not have to worry about any parents, any home.”

  “You must have realized at some point that they had arrested you and were not going to let you go free.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you still didn’t tell them.”

  Tamara rubbed her head. She had sat in that dully painted room, no one to speak for her or support her, her thoughts so foggy and confused… she couldn’t remember anymore what she had and hadn’t told them. Maybe she’d told them everything and they just chose not to use any of it.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know why you didn’t?”

  “I don’t know if I did. Maybe I did. Maybe I told them.”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t know,” Tamara protested. “You weren’t there!”

  “No, I wasn’t. But I’ve been present at a lot of interrogations. And I don’t think that you gave them that information.”

  “Would it have made any difference if I did? What would they have done? They still would have let the Bakers go scot-free.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  Tamara slumped back in her chair, giving Dr. Sutherland full-on bad attitude. He ignored her body language and smiled politely.

  “You are here because you wanted to see me today,” he said. “Urgently, I understand. Here I am, controlling the conversation and not giving you the chance to talk. What was it you wanted to see me about?”

  Tamara kept her silence for a full thirty seconds, but couldn’t manage any longer than that. What if he signaled the guard to take her back to her room because she refused to talk?

  “They’ve locked me up two days in a row,” she complained. “I’m going crazy! I gotta walk around, get some air. They’re not supposed to lock me up two days in a row, are they?”

  Dr. Sutherland looked down at the folder in front of him, and Tamara wondered how much information he had about what had been going on the last few days.

  “It’s not my fault,” she tried to head him off, “it’s other girls threatening me. What am I supposed to do, wait for them to beat me up?”

  “Why do you think these other girls are getting on your case? Why would they be threatening you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they’re jealous, thinking I was having a good time on the outside. They gotta attack whoever is different. I don’t know. You’re the shrink.”

  “What happened today?”

  “Tabby was threatening me in the showers. Dumas throws a fit over it. Look what she did to me.” Tamara pulled up her sleeve to show Dr. Sutherland the black bruise.

  Dr. Sutherland grimaced. “Ouch. That looks painful. Did you go to the infirmary to have it looked at?”

  “No. I’ve been locked in my room all day!”

  Dr. Sutherland’s eyes went to the clock on his wall. Tamara realized it was not even noon. While morning started early at juvie, ‘all day’ was obviously overdramatizing.

  “All day yesterday and all morning today,” she clarified. “I’m only here now because I kept telling them to let me see you right away.”

  “Yes. That was clever of you. So today, because Tabby was threatening you—with what? What did she have to say?”

  Tamara shifted uncomfortably. “She didn’t say what… she was getting in my face. Came over to me. She’s not even supposed to talk to me in the shower and Dumas didn’t stop her. She hit me for defending myself. I got the right to defend myself.”

  “The security staff are here to deal with any problems you might have. If Tabitha had attacked you, they would have defended you.”

  “So I should just take it? I should let myself get beaten up?”

  “You were not beaten up.”

  Tamara pressed her lips closed. She wasn’t getting anywhere with Dr. Sutherland. What she needed was for him to lift her segregation. Instead, he was focusing on all the wrong things. She covered her face with both hands and summoned tears. They came even more quickly than usual, as if they were waiting just under the surface, waiting for her to break.

  “I want out,” Tamara sobbed. “I can’t stand being locked in my cell any longer. It’s driving me crazy. I feel like… I’m going to fall apart.”<
br />
  Dr. Sutherland pulled a tissue from the box on his desk and handed it to her. He nudged the box closer to her so that she could take her own when the first wasn’t enough. He waited for her to get control of herself before continuing with the session.

  “Why don’t you tell me what happened yesterday?” he suggested.

  “Yesterday?” Tamara tried to reach back through the fog to remember what had happened the previous day. I seemed like it had been years ago. “It was… yesterday…”

  Dr. Sutherland was looking down at the notes on his file. “I understand there was an incident in the canteen at breakfast.”

  Tamara tried to grasp it. Just a day before… it shouldn’t have been so hard to remember.

  “I was…”

  “You apparently got into a fight with Lewis.”

  It came back. How could she have forgotten so quickly?

  “They made me sit down at Lewis’s table. I don’t belong at her table, I’m not in her gang. She didn’t like me being put there.” Tamara shrugged. “I didn’t start the fight, she did. Wouldn’t have happened if they hadn’t stuck me at that table.”

  “So that was the security staff’s fault too.”

  Tamara didn’t like the edge to his voice. “I didn’t say it was their fault. It was Lewis, she wouldn’t leave me alone. Didn’t like me sitting there.”

  “You need to take responsibility for your part in these incidents, Tamara. You have been here for three years. You know how to handle these tensions. You never used to get into these kinds of fights.”

  “I used to have someone watching my back.”

  “I see.”

  He made a note on her file. Tamara tried to see what he was writing. What observation had he made that was so important it needed to be committed to paper? Was he making note of something that was wrong with her? His decision on whether to take her out of segregation or not? Something to follow up with the security staff about?

  “I’m not going to get into one of the gangs,” she told him, worried he was taking her words the wrong way. “I’m not looking to join up with someone. It’s just… what am I supposed to do when someone is giving me grief? Just take it? Get beat up?”