“Help me,” Gulu yelled. “Guard! She’s got a piece. She’s going to cut me!”
With the grace of a stage actor, Gulu stumbled backward, clutching Marydale to her as she fell slowly. They barely made a sound when they hit the floor, but Gulu screamed, “It hurts. Get off me. She’s going to kill me!”
Marydale felt a cold scrape of metal as Gulu slipped something into the waistband of her pants. She tried to rise, but Gulu squeezed her, even as she thrashed around beneath Marydale. An alarm sounded. The lights in the pantry brightened. Someone hit an emergency lockdown switch. Guards’ footsteps pounded the floor.
Gulu whispered in Marydale’s ear, “Ronnie Holten says to say hi, Scholar. We missed you.”
11
The first days of the DataBlast class action went so smoothly Kristen barely remembered them. No, it wasn’t that she didn’t remember; she hadn’t been there. Some other woman with her face had walked back and forth in front of the jury. When a corporate giant like USA DataBlast enters into a contract with private citizens…Her heels had kept time with the beat of her words. A trust that binds our business community together…The fact that each individual transaction was practically invisible…hundreds of thousands of dollars stolen. A fraud…recognized at the highest levels of the company…All the while, she had seen Marydale in her mind’s eye. Marydale standing in the snow. Marydale naked in the moonlight of her farmhouse bedroom. Marydale bruised in a prison uniform. This kind of injustice…Kristen had finished the sentence but only because it was written in her notes.
And she was brilliant. Everyone at the Falcon Law Group agreed. At the end of the fourth day, even Falcon wanted to go out for a drink at Huber’s. He and Donna kept up a steady replay of the case. When Kristen said nothing, Falcon exclaimed, “Damn, look at her. She’s just cool as a cucumber.”
“I told you Kristen’s got this,” Donna said, and caught Kristen’s eye and smiled.
When they had finished their drinks, Kristen headed back toward her rented parking spot in the lot behind the courthouse. She turned onto Burnside as if to head home, but before crossing over I-405, she took a quick turn onto the freeway on-ramp. She wasn’t thinking about visiting Sierra. She hadn’t planned to, and she was surprised that she remembered the exact location of the HumAnarchist headquarters without consulting her GPS. But there she was.
The garden in front of the bungalow was conspicuously weedy. Old cornstalks lay in piles, probably sheltering kale starts or fledgling artichokes. The columns in front of the house were wrapped in moldy knitting. A hand-painted wooden sign rose from the garden’s wreckage: THE HUMANARCHIST: SUBVERSIVE SELF-IMPROVEMENT FOR THE NEW REVOLUTIONARY.
Kristen rang the doorbell, which sounded with the lugubrious voice of a didgeridoo. Frog answered the door, his curly black hair fashioned into two pom-poms on either side of his head. He appeared to be wearing a chain-mail shirt made out of bottle caps.
“Is Sierra here?” Kristen asked.
Frog beckoned her in. Inside what had once been the living room, two women tapped away at Mac desktops, one speaking rapidly into a headset. A copier chunked out flyers in the front hall. Somewhere in the back, a fax dialed. Everywhere the walls were covered in paper. Classic punk-rock band posters overlapped with pesticide-usage-by-county charts. An ad for a lecture on healthy BDSM relationships overlapped a calligraphied quote from Emma Goldman.
Frog hurried upstairs, calling Sierra’s name. From somewhere above them, Kristen thought she heard Sierra say, “What does she want?” A moment later, Sierra descended the stairs, ducking to miss a Donald Trump piñata with dollar signs for eyes. She held a stack of papers in one arm and a cell phone in the other. Despite her knee-length sweater and striped socks, she looked like a businesswoman interrupted before an important meeting.
To Frog, she said, “We need a high-res logo for the Hemp Association, and tell the folks at Out in Southwest Portland Coffee we’ll run their ad for free for three months if they donate the space for the Purple Tie fundraiser. Get that urban goose farmer on the line, too. I want to sell his handbook in featured merch.” Sierra made no move to step off the last stair. To Kristen she said, “Yes?”
“I…Can you come out for a drink or coffee?” Kristen asked.
“Our newsletter is going live tonight,” Sierra said.
Kristen wanted to protest that it was an anarchist website. They had posted a recipe for placenta. What could deadlines mean to the HumAnarchist?
Instead she said, “I know. I’m sorry. I need to talk.”
“Okay,” Sierra said with less enthusiasm than Kristen expected for a woman who had, just six months earlier, suggested they try living in a micro-house together to reconnect in adult sisterhood.
“Where?” Sierra asked.
“Anywhere you like,” Kristen said.
The last time she let Sierra choose the bar, they’d ended up in a vegan coffeehouse featuring an art exhibit of multimedia sculpture made out of dildos. A few minutes later, they arrived—Kristen by car, Sierra by adult-sized tricycle—at the bar Sierra had selected. The Port Call, it was called, and the interior was decorated with kitschy paintings of shipwrecks and an unnerving quantity of philodendrons.
Sierra sat by the window, her blond dreadlocks piled on top of her head and secured with a purple scarf.
A tendril of philodendron touched Kristen’s shoulder. She lifted a snifter to her nose, smelling the familiar burn of Poisonwood.
“I’m sorry I didn’t stay for breakfast with your friends on New Year’s Day,” Kristen said. It suddenly seemed strange—no, inexcusable—that she hadn’t talked to Sierra since that morning. So much had happened, and she had thought about Sierra and talked to her in her imagination, but she hadn’t called.
“You got a cab,” Sierra said. “You didn’t even say goodbye.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I called to see if you were okay, and you texted me back. Are you too busy to talk to me now?” Sierra took a large sip of her beer. “I saw you with that woman. You know you could tell me if you’re gay or bisexual or trans or something. You know it doesn’t matter to me.”
“I didn’t really think the owner of America’s most successful online anarchist magazine would hate me because I was gay.”
“So you’re gay?” Sierra turned away, tilting her chin up slightly, as though the subject was suddenly beneath her.
“No. I’m not gay,” Kristen said.
“Bi?” Sierra offered. “We’re all bisexual in some way, especially women. There’s a fluidity to our sexuality even if we don’t act on it.”
She sounded like she was reciting something from the HumAnarchist advice column.
“Bisexual.” Kristen sounded out the word. “It’s not even that. It’s not…”
Sierra pulled the lemon off the side of her beer and chewed it.
“It’s just her,” Kristen said.
Kristen longed for Sierra’s cheerful, We have to catch up! She wanted her to lean forward, to say Talk to me, to say, What’s wrong, Kristi?
“You didn’t just meet her at the bar, did you?” Sierra asked.
“Do you remember my roommate in Tristess?”
“That’s her?”
Outside, a spit of rain marked the sunny sidewalk. Somewhere there would be a rainbow, but not here. Kristen took a deep breath. She was suddenly aware of a film on her glasses, like tears blurring her vision.
“We were together in Tristess.” She tried to piece her memories together. “Law school was hard for me. Everyone was driving Saabs and working at their father’s firm. You remember. We were broke, and you were at the Portland Night High School. Then I got that job at the school, and I felt like I was the kid who never left home. Then all of a sudden I was in Tristess, and I was this big-city lawyer everyone hated. And Marydale got it. She got what it felt like to always be on the outside. I knew she was gay, and I wasn’t, but I was attracted to her. I was attracted to who she was. I think I was in love wi
th her.” She saw beautiful Marydale Rae with her tattoos and her perfect smile. “I’m in love with her now.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Sierra asked.
Kristen continued. “I left Tristess because people found out.”
“They found out that you were with a woman?” Sierra’s voice softened but only a little bit.
“They found out that I was living with her. That I was sleeping with her. She has a past.”
She tried to lay out the story the way she would present a case at the partners meeting, but she kept starting over. Did the story begin with Aaron Holten? Or with Marydale’s parents? Or with the first Holten to arrive in Oregon and claim it as his own? All she knew was that all versions of the story ended with the Aldean’s voice on the phone as Kristen huddled in a corner of the University Club trying to catch a good cell signal. Marydale’s been arrested.
“Douglas Grady, this defense lawyer I met in Tristess, he thought it was self-defense,” Kristen went on. “He thought she was the real victim. Now she’s stuck out there, and I’ve got this fucking case I’m supposed to try.” The words tumbled out. “I remember driving away. I stopped at this little town. It’s just a gas station. It was night, and they were closed, and I stayed in the parking lot and cried and cried. I thought she didn’t count. I mean, she meant everything to me, but she just wasn’t part of…my life. And now I’m doing it again. I should be there with her.”
She felt a cold knot tighten in her throat. She blinked quickly.
Sierra’s pixie face was set in a look so cold, for a second she was unrecognizable.
“She’s not a killer,” Kristen pleaded.
“You never told me,” Sierra said.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“I’m your sister!” Sierra scooted her chair back.
“I didn’t tell anyone. I couldn’t.”
“Even me? You dated a lesbian murderess, and you didn’t tell me? After everything we’ve been through with Mom and all her shit?”
“We’ve been through?” Kristen stopped. “I took care of you while Mom was off singing ‘Free Bird’ at some bar in Gresham. I set a good example. I couldn’t tell you about Marydale. I didn’t want you to end up like Mom.”
“You thought I was like Mom?”
Sierra’s lips had straightened into a thin fissure, and Kristen suddenly saw the woman Sierra was in business. Her dreadlocks might actually contain live birds, and she might ride a tricycle when she wasn’t driving an SUV powered by French-fry oil, but she had built an empire of HumAnarchist merchandise. She employed a staff with benefits. She owned property in one of the best neighborhoods in Portland. And she was—except for this exact moment—happy.
“You didn’t. You aren’t,” Kristen said.
“Mom was an addict,” Sierra went on. “She did meth and God knows what else. She didn’t love herself enough to say no to all those sleazy guys. You really don’t get what I’m doing with the HumAnarchist. I mean, that’s what it’s all about, giving people another option, to be free enough and happy enough and whole enough to come into their own, to love themselves, for society to break out of the habits that are killing us.”
“By making dream catchers?” Kristen didn’t mean it as a dig. It just seemed so sad, and she couldn’t help picturing Marydale is some bleak cell, tying feathers to a wicker hoop, waiting for society to change.
“Dream catchers are a sacred Native American tradition,” Sierra said. “The HumAnarchist would never appropriate another culture like that.”
“I’m sorry.”
Sierra pulled a pair of fingerless lace gloves out of a pocket in her jacket.
“I think it’s a beautiful story, you and this woman. You loved her. You fucked up. Maybe it’s karma.” Sierra yanked on the gloves and planted her elbows on the table. “Did you not trust me? Or did you just hate it that you didn’t get to be the perfect sister who did everything right?”
“Sierra, I don’t think that,” Kristen pleaded.
She could feel the old men at the bar watching them. She pressed her knuckles against her lips.
Sierra stood up. “I know we don’t have a lot in common. I know you think the magazine is stupid, but I followed my dreams, and you followed yours, and we made it. I knew we didn’t always understand each other, but we didn’t understand each other at all, did we?”
A moment later, Kristen was alone with the burn of cheap whiskey in her throat and no one in the world to talk to.
The next morning found Kristen sitting in the courtroom with Donna. Donna was wearing a navy suit with a red pocket square and pearls. Red, white, and blue like a politician’s wife. Without any preplanning, Kristen had worn a matching outfit.
“Today’s the real deal.” Donna leaned over. “Rutger wasn’t going to come, but he said you were so good yesterday. You were damn good!” Donna nodded toward the men sitting in the gallery to their left. “And look who’s here.”
Kristen didn’t need to know their faces to recognize the CEOs of Tri-State Global. On the other side of the aisle, the defense had lined up a phalanx of men in suits.
“They’re all interns,” Donna whispered. “The DataBlast shareholders are selling off as fast as they can. They can’t afford this.”
Kristen stared at her phone resting on the desk in front of her. The wallpaper screen was a photograph of Marydale leaning against the railing of the Tristess. It took her a minute to realize that Rutger Falcon had appeared at her elbow and was speaking to her. Kristen looked up.
“She’s focused,” Donna said.
“Sorry,” Kristen said.
“You ready for today?” Falcon asked.
“Of course she’s ready,” Donna said.
At the front of the court, the door to the judge’s chambers opened and the judge emerged in his black gown. The bailiff began the familiar liturgy of the court. Across the aisle the CFO of DataBlast fidgeted with his pen. In the gallery, Falcon took his seat behind the Tri-State Global contingency.
“Spectator sport, isn’t it?” Donna added. Then she shot Kristen a quick smile. “Ream them.”
A few minutes later, Kristen called her first witness. She and Donna had gone over the question set a dozen times. The witness knew his answers like an A student. It all sounded perfectly natural.
“Cross?” the judge asked when Kristen was done.
On the desk before Kristen, her phone lit up with a silent plea. She glanced at the number. There were only four area codes in Oregon. Five-four-one could have been anywhere outside of Portland, but the sudden twist in her stomach told her no. Kristen stood up, touching accept without putting the phone to her ear.
“Your Honor, may I have a five-minute recess?” she asked.
Donna glared at her. What? she mouthed.
“Three minutes,” the judge said.
Kristen heard the courtroom murmur behind her as she walked out.
An automated voice on the other end of the line asked her if she would accept a collect call from an inmate at Holten Penitentiary.
“Yes,” Kristen said.
A second later, Marydale came on the line.
“I’m in court. I’ve got three minutes,” Kristen said.
Marydale gasped.
“What is it?” Kristen asked.
She hurried down the hallway, past the information desk, and out onto the street. The trees had leafed, and sun dappled the sidewalk, but Kristen couldn’t feel its warmth.
Marydale was sobbing.
“Slow down,” Kristen said. “I can’t understand you.”
For a second, Marydale was silent. She seemed to have expended all her breath and could not draw in another one.
“She tried to fight me,” Marydale finally managed. “I’m never going to get out. I can’t do this.”
“Are you hurt? What happened?” Kristen asked.
“She doesn’t want to hurt me. She’s working with him, or at least she says she is. She thinks she is. She’d do it for
commissary. They add time for bad behavior. I’ll get charged. She’ll tell the guards I hit her. I saw her cut herself with a shiv once, just to put another girl away. The girl got criminal charges. It added years to her sentence.”
“Slow down, Mary.” Kristen had never used the diminutive Aldean called Marydale, but now it felt like the only word that could calm the torrent of Marydale’s speech. “Who are you talking about? Who’s doing this? Talk to me, Mary.”
Marydale started to cry again. “Gulu always said once you go in, you’re always in,” she sobbed. “You never get out. She’s in for life. This is her whole world. She said Ronald Holten missed me. Gulu’s got nothing to lose, Kristen. Whatever they tell you, I didn’t do it. She’ll plant drugs on me. She’ll find a way to make it real. They’ll believe her. You’ll believe her. Kristen, I can’t—”
“Kristen!” Donna had appeared at the end of the block and was hurrying toward her. “What are you doing?” She waved a skinny arm across her chest in angry semaphore. “We’re in court!”
Kristen checked her watch. The three minutes were long gone. Inside, the fate of USA DataBlast hung in meaningless balance. If she won, the CEOs would parachute to safety. The plaintiffs would get checks for odd, useless sums of money. Twenty-nine cents. Nine dollars and one penny. The DataBlast staff would be absorbed into Tri-State Global or not. Some would quit. Others would collect unemployment. Only the color of the cubicles would change. And she would be made partner, and the Falcon Law Group would pay for an ad in the bar bulletin, a full-color photograph of Kristen standing in front of the Portland skyline, her hand on the corner of her desk. Welcoming our newest partner to the Falcon legacy.
“Mary, listen.”
Kristen was going to say, I’ll be there soon, as soon as I finish with DataBlast. I’ll rush the case.
Donna was talking over her. “What are you doing? You have to get back in there. Everyone is waiting for you.”
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