Donna Has Left the Building

by Susan Jane Gilman

  “Oh, those are my samples,” I said. “Part of my inventory. I’m in sales.”

  “You’re in sales?” he enunciated.

  I started to panic. Somehow, everything suddenly sounded damning. Strainers, meat thermometers, scales: Could those in any way be used for illegal activity?

  “They call us ‘culinary ambassadors’? I do cooking demonstrations,” I said quickly. “For a company called the Privileged Kitchen. ‘High-end cookware at bargain-basement prices.’ Everything from spatulas to nonstick casserole pans to lemon zesters—and not just any lemon zesters. They have little patented ‘catch-sleeves.’” Good God: Why was I prattling on like this? Who talks about lemon zesters to a drug enforcement agent? But already, Officer Petty had stopped listening. His colleague was waving him over to the front of the Subaru.

  “I found something here, Matt. Stashed in the guitar case.” He held up the Walmart pharmacy bag. “There’s a whole bunch of pills, and none of the names on the prescription bottles match the one on her license.”

  “Look,” I said pleadingly, “you can see right there on the vials. Austin and Ashley Koczynski—it’s the same last name as mine. Their dates of birth are printed right there on the labels, too, see? Do the math. They’re sixteen and nineteen years old. They’re my children, Officers—and these are my children’s prescriptions. I’d filled them just a few days ago, but then, well, I got diverted and I didn’t drive home right away. Here, see?” I said. “I’ve got the original prescriptions right here.” Pulling out my wallet, I sorted through the billfold and located scripts with the receipts stapled to them from the Walmart in Ohio to submit to our insurance company.

  “Well, here’s the problem,” Officer Petty sighed, holding the bottles up to the light and shaking them. “These were filled three days ago. Two of them have been opened. And the labels are smudged. And are any of these children right here with you in this car right now?”

  His question was obviously rhetorical.

  “Unless and until you can get a confirmation from your children’s pediatrician that these prescriptions did, in fact, come from her, and that they are in fact legitimate, we have to assume, ma’am, that you are not in lawful possession of them.”

  “Excuse me? Officer, I’m their mother. Plus, it’s Adderall. That’s like, Tylenol practically. Half the kids I know in Michigan are on it.”

  “Adderall is not at all like Tylenol, ma’am. Adderall is a form of amphetamine. It’s a Schedule II controlled substance with a molecular structure similar to methamphetamine.”

  “Crystal meth? Are you kidding me?”

  “What’s more, ma’am”—his colleague was speaking now, a young, heavy-footed man with a blond caterpillar of a mustache and a nametag reading T. DEVEREAUX—“the volume of pills you have here well exceeds the limit for personal use. You’ve got how many here?” He rifled through the Walmart bag. “One vial of sixty Adderall and, gosh almighty. Three vials of Ativan, sixty count apiece. That’s 240 pills total. That amount suggests intent to resell or distribute. That’s a felony offense, ma’am.”

  “A felony?” I cried. “Oh good God. I’m not selling my children’s meds. Please, Officers. I mean, why would I do such a thing?” Yet as soon as I said this, I knew: People everywhere were selling off bottles of medication, pill by pill. In locker rooms, PTA meetings, church parking lots. AA was full of prescription drug addicts now; the opioid epidemic was all over the news. Just a week earlier, in fact, a woman had been busted in Sterling Heights for selling Vicodin at a hair salon not far from Austin’s school.

  “My daughter, she’s studying in London. I was just sending her a supply for the semester,” I said faintly. “She forgot to pack it, and the cost of shipping one vial overseas every month—”

  “Well,” said Officer Devereaux, “unless her doctor can confirm it—”

  “Absolutely, of course,” I said. “But it’s two o’clock in the morning—”

  “And if you don’t mind my saying, ma’am,” Officer Petty interrupted, motioning to my wallet, “that seems to be an awful lot of cash you have in your possession. May I?” With a rising feeling of nausea, I surrendered it. What else could I do? I wished I’d kept it rolled up in my bra, as I had earlier—though I suspected that if they decided to search my person in detail, well, that would only look worse.

  Officer Petty leafed through my billfold, counting quickly to himself. There were an awful lot of twenties. “Eight hundred and twenty-four dollars. That’s an awful lot of money to be driving around with, don’t you think, ma’am?”

  He nodded at me so vigorously I found myself nodding, even as I managed to concoct what I hoped was a plausible explanation. “The thing is, I just prefer to pay for things in cash. That’s not a crime, is it? You see, well, I already maxed out my credit cards for this month.” I decided to add, “On shoes?”

  “So, you’re selling pills and kitchen utensils to finance a shoe addiction. Is that really what you’re telling us?” Officer Petty crossed his arms irritably.

  “No, I, what I am saying is that—” But before I could elaborate, Officer Devereaux called from the passenger side, “I found another vial here, Matt. In the glove compartment.”

  Sauntering back around toward us, he held out another bottle of pills. Borrowing Officer Petty’s flashlight, he squinted at it. “Who is Alonso Jimenez?”

  For a moment, I had absolutely no idea. I felt a bolt of horror: I was being set up. I was being framed.

  Officer Devereaux handed the vial over to Officer Petty. “Well, this bottle here, ma’am, says it comes from a Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.”

  Brenda’s medicine cabinet. The bottle I’d filched impulsively.

  “It says here that it’s a prescription for—Propecia?” Officer Petty looked first at Officer Devereaux, then at me. He shook his head, took off his hat, and ran his hand over his scalp, as smooth and shiny as oiled leather. “Well, now I’ve seen it all. Ma’am, would you like to tell us why you’re driving around with someone else’s prescription for male-pattern baldness drugs?”

  I stared at him. I felt myself short-circuit. Somewhere deep in my brain, I felt a pop of relief that I’d just happened to grab something so innocuous—I could even picture one of Brenda’s fellow interns, Alonso, worriedly studying his hairline in her bathroom mirror—but then, I realized I had to come up with some plausible explanation. Suddenly, all I could think to say was:

  “Um, vaginal dryness?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Uh, I read on the internet somewhere that for women, if you take male-pattern baldness medication, it can help you, you know, with the symptoms of menopause? Hot flashes and dryness and so on? And so I borrowed some from my friend.”

  Back when I was a drunk, I’d once told the cops that the reason I was speeding was because I was bleeding through my tampon and staining my car upholstery. They could not get rid of me fast enough. They didn’t even make me get out of the car; I was waved on without so much as a warning. The last thing any traffic cops ever wanted to hear about was a woman’s vagina. It was like kryptonite. It had become my foolproof way for wriggling out of speeding tickets and Breathalyzers.

  Now, Officers Petty and Devereaux glanced at each other. “Ma’am,” Officer Petty said, “I’d strongly advise you to watch your language here. Maybe you can talk like that up in Michigan, but down here in Tennessee, we’re Christians. If you’ve got problems with your lady parts, frankly, that’s your own business, and we’d prefer that you keep them to yourself. We don’t want to hear about that sort of stuff, you understand? And nor, I suspect, will the judge.”

  He instructed me to hold out my wrists. “Under the laws of the state of Tennessee, you are hereby charged with ‘possession with intent.’ You have the right to remain silent,” he began.

  Charlotte, Tennessee, might be a tiny, sleepy town nestled in the woodlands, but its Dickson County Jail remained open 24/7. A concrete, slit-windowed bunker, it gave every a
ppearance of being the sort of detention center that, if it were in, say, Guantanamo Bay or Argentina in the 1970s, no one would ever emerge from it once they set foot inside.

  A weary, sallow-faced deputy processed me quickly. He was polite enough to pretend not to notice how badly I was shaking, how palsied with fear I was as the forms to book me were filled out and my fingerprints taken. Possession with intent was a “Class E felony” that carried with it fines of up to $3,000 and sentences of between one and six years in prison. “Is this a dream? Please, tell me, is this just a bad dream?” I heard myself ask the air. My teeth were chattering so hard, in fact, that they had trouble getting my mug shot. “Ma’am, please. Take a deep breath. A deep breath, ma’am. There you go. It’s just a camera, ma’am.”

  As they had me remove my jewelry and my pantyhose (as if I could hang myself with them? Did they understand how easily those things ripped and stretched out?), I heard myself insisting, “I’m just a mother of two. A forty-five-year-old kitchenware saleswoman from Troy, Michigan, nothing more. Nothing more. I promise you,” over and over. I kept waiting for someone to recognize what a hideous mistake had been made. Hell, practically everyone I knew back in Michigan was taking Ativan or Adderall or Ritalin or Zoloft or Paxil or Xanax or all of the above. Surely, someone could see that the prescriptions were for my children—and okay, yes, I was a mess, yes, absolutely, perhaps even in the throes of a nervous breakdown; fine, I’d happily sign a written confession to that in a heartbeat—and to being a shitty mother and to not being anywhere that a good Jewish girl should ever be at two o’clock in the morning—I was a bad wife and a bad friend and a lousy person overall—fine, yes—I’d swear to all of this in an affidavit. But a drug dealer?

  But when the magistrate set my bail after I was processed, it became all too clear exactly how the Tennessee judicial system regarded me. Because I lived in Michigan, I was informed, the court considered me a likely flight risk who’d inevitably skip town the minute I was released. And so, my bail was set at $100,000; in a small town like Charlotte, there was not a single bondsman who’d insure me for such a sum.

  If I couldn’t make bail myself, I would have to remain in jail until appearing before the DA—perhaps sometime the next day, but also, perhaps, not until the following Tuesday, given that we were approaching the Columbus Day weekend. (I might have to spend four whole nights in jail?) I was told I’d be assigned a court-appointed attorney the next morning if I couldn’t afford one on my own. I was asked if I understood, but although I nodded, by then my eye was nearly swollen shut, and I was shivering uncontrollably, and all the events from the past four days seemed to tornado around me in a furious vortex lifting me into a whirl of debris, the great, jagged wreckage of my life spinning around me in a great whoosh of misery—and I began having an out-of-body experience, in which I was seated at a metal desk in a dreary DA’s office with dropped ceilings and jaundiced fluorescent light but also watching myself from above, hovering somewhere amid the pitted ceiling tiles by the air duct.

  Just like in the movies, I was told that I could make a phone call. It was 3 a.m. now, which meant 4 a.m. in Michigan. On a cinder-block wall in the corner was a pay phone. Dialing our landline, I began to hyperventilate.

  As the phone rang on the other end, I imagined the electronic bleat of it echoing through our house. Our house! I saw the carriage light above the garage emitting its weak halo of warm coppery light over the driveway. I pictured Mr. Noodles twisted like a cruller on the linoleum beneath the computer nook in the kitchen, snoring and farting and slobbering fitfully. The refrigerator humming, full of discount half-gallons of skim milk and Mountain Dew, the magnets holding 2-for-1 coupons and school printouts. I saw our bathroom upstairs with its outdated vanity covered with kisses of goo from melty, fruity glycerin soaps and Barbasol shaving cream and dabs of toothpaste stuck to the side of the sink like paint on a palette. I saw Austin in his bed, the great, beautiful lump of him, and then Joey asleep across the hallway from him in our bedroom. He’d be curled on his right side, facing my empty space in the bed, perhaps gripping one of my pillows as a substitute for spooning me—and the love and the longing I felt at that moment was so fierce, it felt like a sharp blow to my chest.

  Our phone back in Michigan continued to ring.

  “C’mon, pick up, Joey,” I whispered.

  In a few minutes, it would be better. Amid the insanity of the world, I did have someplace. I belonged somewhere, imperfect as it was. Joey and I, we were not rich, but we had some resources—something that could serve as collateral, no? I was middle-aged, white, female without so much as an outstanding parking ticket or an overdue library book (okay, not that I read anymore). It had been a terrible mix-up, was all. Certainly, I could not be locked up in a Tennessee jail as a flight risk and a felon.

  On the seventh ring, Joey finally answered and accepted the reverse charges. “Yuuuh, hello? Hello? Ashley, is that you? Ashley, are you okay?”

  “No, Joey. Joey, it’s me. Donna. Sweetie, I’m in Tennessee. I’m in a little bit of trouble.”

  On the other end, there was a crackle of silence. “Fuck,” he said after a moment. “Well, can we please talk later, Donna? I’m waiting on a call from our daughter.”

  “No, Joey. No, I can’t. You see,” I said carefully, my heart pounding, “this is my one phone call. The one phone call they’re allowing me. As in ‘from jail’?”

  Again, silence.

  “You’re in jail, Donna?”

  “In Charlotte, Tennessee, Joey. There’s been a mistake.” As quickly as I could, I sketched out the broad circumstances of my arrest. “So, I need your help, Joey. I need you to contact our lawyer and also Dr. Seidel to confirm the kids’ prescriptions. And is there any way, I don’t know, we can come up with $100,000?” It seemed like a long shot, but there were second mortgages, our 401(k) accounts, maybe Joey’s practice as collateral.

  Before I could continue, he cut me off. “Why are you calling me, Donna? Why not go ask your boyfriend to rescue you?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “He seems to have plenty of talent. Plenty of skill.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Certainly, he’s a great photographer.”

  “What?”

  On the end of the line, I heard a great intake of breath. “Imagine my surprise tonight, Donna. Me and Stewie and Reggie, all the guys, we’re sitting down to watch Game of Thrones here in the den. And it’s all cued up for us on the Apple TV. All set up for us by Austin, so I won’t have to do anything. Because as we both know, Donna, me? I’m not so hot with the electronics. And so me and the guys, we’re all watching, and in between one of the episodes, we all get up, go to the kitchen to get ourselves some of Reggie’s tacos, and some beers, and when we come back, we’ve been gone long enough that the screen saver has come on, I guess. And first, all we see on the TV screen are photos of kitchenware, all your Privileged Kitchen shit—close-ups of bar codes on cheese graters and fancy bread slicers. A few from Vegas, of some sort of ceremony—pictures you’ve taken with your phone, apparently, for work. In fact, one of the guys, Stewie, I think, he goes something like ‘Wow. That Donna certainly knows how to have a wild time out there, doesn’t she?’ And we all laugh. But just as he says this, this nude close-up of a woman, Donna, pops up on the television. Full frontal. Squeezing her tits together, arching her back, like some porn star.”

  “What?” My breath suddenly felt like broken glass.

  “And it takes me a minute, Donna. It’s just from the neck down. So the guys, they don’t realize. But me? I know that beauty mark on your belly. I know that scar—”

  “No,” I said.

  “And at first, we can’t believe it, and the guys start hooting, ‘Is that on Donna’s phone?’ And me, I’m like an idiot. I’m going, ‘How is that on Donna’s phone?’ And Reggie has to explain to me that whoever’s account is used to log on to Apple TV, their photos are streamed directly from their iPhone onto th
e television as a screen saver.”

  “Oh no! Oh no no no no.” I actually slid down the cinder-block wall to the floor.

  “And I’m thinking, maybe you did it as a joke or something, or I don’t know? But then, another photo pops up, Donna, and this time, it’s you and some long-haired guy with tattoos, posing in a mirror, head-on, buck naked, and he’s holding your tits and kissing your neck, and you are staring directly at the camera. And there is no mistaking it now, Donna. It is definitely you. And then, our TV screen is suddenly full of you and that guy with his dick out. Full-on, one hundred percent porn. So congratu-fucking-lations, Donna. You wanted me to see, and I did. In fact, the whole fucking neighborhood did. My brother saw it, Donna. And Stewie.”

  I looked wildly around the corridor for a garbage can.

  “Oh no. I didn’t want that, Joey. Not at all,” I choked. “I swear.”

  “Sure. Right. Of course you didn’t. Abso-fucking-lutely. That’s why you gave our son your password, and had him set up the TV with your account—”

  “Are you crazy? Do you think I know how Apple TV works either?”

  “Wow. The funny thing is, Donna, revenge-porn? It’s usually supposed to be when someone posts nude photos of their ex-girlfriend or boyfriend to get back at them. They don’t take photos of themselves and use these to humiliate the person they’ve just left. I’ve gotta hand it to you, Donna, oh, you’re good. You are really fucking good.”