States of Grace

by Mandy Miller

  I step into the cave-like space to find Zoe seated at a metal table, not one inch of which is free from graffiti, her scrawny body dwarfed by a baggy orange jumpsuit, feet restrained by leg chains bolted to an iron bail cemented into the floor. Rubber shower sandals peek out from beneath her pant legs, the type worn by old men who sit in ancient recliners when style is no longer of concern. Her long, dark brown hair is matted and draped around her pale face like a curtain—no hair ties allowed in jail.

  Before I have the chance to say a word, she attempts to spring from the chair, which results in her being ratcheted back by the leg irons. “Who the hell are you?” She juts her chin out. “Hey! I asked you a question. Who the hell are you?”

  Resisting the urge to flee, I pull a once-white plastic chair back from the table, but as soon as my rear hits the seat, the uneven legs tip me to the left, shifting my weight onto Oscar and sending me face down onto the filthy table top.

  I right myself as she continues to yell at me, her top lip curled back to reveal a row of metal braces.

  She emits a mocking grunt. “Hey, don’t ignore me! Who—”

  There’s one thing war and the law have in common—the best defense is a strong offense. I bellow back, “Shut the hell up!”

  Her head snaps back.

  I count to ten. “Let’s start again, shall we?”

  I extend my right hand, but she continues glaring, hands locked under armpits.

  “My name is Grace Locke. I am an attorney. Your mother asked me to come.”

  She sucks her neck into her shirt at the mention of Gretchen.

  When I retract my hand, she launches another attack, the words rushing out in a manic torrent. “Why would I talk to you? Guard! Get me out of here!”

  Through the observation window, I see the guard reclined in his chair, feet on the desk, smiling. He makes a circular motion with his index finger by his ear and mouths the word “crazy.”

  I lean back and wait her out.

  “What you lookin’ at?” she says in a tone I assume she thinks sounds fierce, but comes out whiny, her energy spent on the first two outbursts.

  I point the pencil at her. “You are definitely not cut out for prison.”

  She grunts, “I’m not going to prison!”

  I motion the guard to let me out, pretending I’m on the verge of leaving. “I’d agree if you were my client, but since you don’t want my help—” I stop mid-sentence, but the reality of her situation hits her like a brick to the head, fear taking the place of rage in her eyes, which are now clouded by tears.

  The guard cranes his neck around the door. “You ready to go, Miss Locke?”

  “Please stay,” she whispers. “I didn’t—”

  I clamp my hand onto her shoulder. “Not another word.”

  Her shoulders tense up under my grip.

  I wave the guard off. “Sorry, false alarm. I’ll be staying.”

  He shrugs and rebolts the door.

  I slide back into the chair, making sure not to lose my balance again. “Zoe, right now, I don’t want to know if you did or didn’t do what they say you did.” I say this, because if I know for a fact that she shot Brandon Sinclair, I won’t be able to put her on the stand to say she didn’t, if it comes to that. Suborning perjury is a big no-no, and I don’t need any more problems with the Bar.

  “But I didn’t kill him! I wasn’t there. You have to believe me!” she yells, spittle spraying.

  “Calm down. We’ve got plenty of time. Today, I just want to—”

  She grabs my hands with her cuffed hands and squeezes it so hard I can’t pull away, her ragged fingernails digging in. “I need to tell you what happened. How can they do this to me? I don’t belong in here!”

  Her escalating rant is cut short when the guard rushes in. In a flash, he uncuffs her hands from in front and recuffs them behind her back and to the back of the chair .Without warning, the memory of Reilly floods in, his pinning my arms behind my back so hard I had no choice but to sink to my knees in the road, the taste of whiskey coming back up my throat.

  I gasp for breath. “I…I can’t…”

  “Ms. Locke, Ms. Locke. Are you okay?” the guard asks, dipping his head to my level. “Maybe that’s enough for now?”

  I suck in a gulp of air and attempt to refocus. “Sorry. No. Yes. Fine. I’m fine.”

  The guard steps to the door. “Maybe I should call the psych unit, get something to calm Miss Slim.”

  The reminder that of how it feels when you no longer have, and may never again have, control over anything, what you wear, eat, hear, or inject into your veins, turns the blood in mine to ice. “No. Leave her be. I’ll let you know when I’m ready to leave, okay?”

  “Whatever you say. It’s your funeral,” he says, a comment which makes me want to tell him to mind his own damn business.

  “Someone’s out to get me. They want to kill me. I need to tell you what happened,” she says before the door’s completely closed.

  “Look at me, Zoe,” I say, ducking my head to her level. “Look at me! I need to tell you something. Something very important.”

  She wipes her nose on the shoulder of her jumpsuit, avoiding eye contact.

  “Do not speak to anyone, and I mean anyone, about your case,” I say, enunciating every word as if it were its own sentence.

  Silence.

  “Do you hear me?”

  Screeching like a strangled cat. “I didn’t do it! I wasn’t there!”

  “I said—Do you understand?” Finger under her chin, I angle her blotchy face up. “I mean it. Not to anyone in here, no matter how much you want to. Not to any guard or investigator. Not to any cell mate. Not to anyone, no matter what they promise you. And say nothing, not even hello, ever, to any cop. Do you hear me?”

  The spark of recognition in her face at the word “cop” stops me cold. “You didn’t speak to the police, did you?”

  She closes her eyes. “They asked me a lot of questions.”

  “Who? When?”

  “The cops. When they arrested me. At school. In the principal’s office.”

  My hearts lurches. “Did you say anything?”

  She gives me a lopsided grin. “No.”

  “You sure?”

  A little light comes into her eyes, enough for me to see they’re green, like malachite, with flecks of gold. “Yes, I’m sure. I watch TV. I’m not a total idiot.”

  “Good,” I say, trying to laugh, but her self-professed clear-headedness is disturbing. “So, again, nothing to anyone, okay? Not even on the phone, not even your parents. Not one word.”

  Her eyes flit back and forth, as if she’s looking for an escape hatch to return her to her real life, the one where she goes to movies and the beach, where she’s what Manny said she is—a kid.

  “I’ll be back in a couple of days.”

  “A couple of days? You’ve got to get me out of here!”

  I squeeze behind her to the door. “I’ll set a bond hearing,” I say, willing the guard to hurry.

  “What? What’s a bond hearing?”

  “It’s where a judge decides if you should get out or if you should stay locked up until your trial.”

  “Trial? But I didn’t do anything!”

  I let my tone soften. Even if she did do it, I need this case, need her to trust me. “I’ll do my best to help you. That’s why your folks hired me.”

  Her shoulders sag. “It’s always about money. You’re getting paid, so you have to act all like you care and shit.”

  I pull a business card from my jacket pocket and drop it on the table. “Call me collect if you need to talk. Any time, day or night.”

  “Why? Like you said, you don’t want to hear the truth. You don’t care about my story. Get out of here and leave me to die, why don’t you?” she says, straining forward against the cuffs.

  I pick up the card and drop it into her chest pocket and slip out into the corridor.

  “Have a good night,” the guard say
s. “At least what’s left of it.”

  “Same to you,” I say, but the sentiment is nothing more than automatic, my thoughts consumed by the hope that Zoe didn’t notice how much my hands were shaking when I dropped the card into her pocket. A scared defense lawyer is no good to anyone, least of all a kid accused of murder. Least of all myself.

  Chapter 6

  “Hurry up, man! You’re driving like my grandma. Don’t give these Hajjis a chance to get a bead on us, dude.” Corporal Garcia claps Sergeant Jones, the driver of the Humvee, on the back and they both laugh with the carefree ease of friends cruising Main Street on a Saturday night looking for girls.

  Not one to miss a rare moment of levity in this hell hole, I ignore the racial slur and add my two cents from my post in the back. “Yeah, Jones, get a move on, soldier. You keep driving this slow, I’ll be on Social Security by the time you get us back to base.”

  The remark might rankle some superiors, but months of driving around Iraq with Jones, hunting bad guys together, has made rank irrelevant and irreverent banter our only relief from war. Our shtick is I razz Jones about his by-the-book nature, and he keeps a close eye out for me, the only female MP in Muleskinner Squadron, 3rd Cavalry Regiment, United States Army. The entire 3rd left Fort Hood in January 2004 for Kuwait, then ended up here, Fallujah, after four private military contractors were killed and their corpses dragged through the streets then hung from a bridge over the Euphrates. Now we’ve got a front seat at the battle for Fallujah, an ancient city west of Baghdad, whose residents don’t much care for Saddam Hussein and his secular ways, but like occupation by us infidels even less.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Jones says. “Garcia, got some hot hoochie mamma in a burqa waiting for your sorry ass back on base?”

  “His standing appointment with the lovely, but equally untouchable, ladies of internet porn more like it,” I say, a comment which causes Jones to swerve and almost hit a goat.

  Like he does on every patrol, Corporal Allen, the gunner, is on the Humvee’s roof, belting out “Gangsta’s Paradise” and drumming on the M2 .50 caliber machine gun. Muleskinner Squadron’s regular mission is reconnaissance, hunting bad actors and providing logistical support to the 3rd while trying not to get killed in the process, but today our mission’s more festive—we’re picking up crates of Easter decorations from the airstrip.

  Garcia throws his arms up. “Man, this ain’t no Sunday drive, okay? Faster, dammit!”

  “If either of you two grunts wanna drive—”

  A roar from under the Humvee.

  Searing heat rising through the floorboards.

  Everything goes black.

  Clods of dirt fill my mouth and nostrils.

  The putrid smell of rotten eggs mixed with the metallic scent of blood.

  Something batting me in the face.

  I rub my eyes.

  “Shit!”

  Allen’s body, dangling upside down in front of me, a limp, bloody rag doll, suspended into the cabin by his ankles which are snagged in the morass of mangled metal that was the roof.

  I dive forward. “You guys okay?”

  Jones is slumped over the steering wheel, head twisted sideways, a gaping maw where his mouth used to be.

  “No! No!” It’s as if my screams are someone else’s in the silent vacuum.

  Garcia’s upright in the passenger seat. “Thank God!”

  But his arms. Where are Garcia’s arms?

  Move legs, dammit! Move! Why can’t I move?

  Ringing in my ears so loud.

  I clutch my head with both hands to stop the pain.

  Flames licking through the air-conditioning vents.

  Upright.

  One leg buckles.

  I collapse.

  Red seeping through my left pant leg. Tacky to the touch.

  The smell of blood.

  Dragging the injured leg, I crawl to the side door and pull up on the latch. Nothing.

  I remember bodies falling from windows, arms spiraling like windmills. Mushroom cloud of smoke.

  I’m not supposed to die here! Not like they did!

  I crawl forward on my belly and lever myself up enough to yank Jones’s body back off the steering wheel. I hoist myself onto the center console between Jones and Garcia. Using my right leg, I kick at the driver’s side door, the force sending me sprawling backward, into Garcia’s body which folds forward like an abandoned marionette, a seething crimson divot where his ear used to be.

  I draw my palm over Garcia’s eyes, fixed and black like bullseyes, and shove his body into the footwell to make room to kick the passenger side door open.

  It too, holds tight.

  Keep your wits about you, Grace! Keep your wits about you!

  I lose my balance again and topple into the back seat. Back where I started.

  The pain in my leg’s infernal, consuming me from the inside out.

  Up front, flames licking through the vents like tongues, ignite Jones’s fatigues.

  I drag myself to the far back, beside overflowing cartons of candy bunnies and eggs nestled in shredded paper grass the color of green food coloring. I curl into a ball. Silence so complete it hurts. Nothing moving, as if the bomb sucked out all the air, leaving only death in its wake.

  The fire will devour us all.

  I close my eyes and the scene replays in slow motion, the way it will play in perpetuity, whether I live or die.

  Boom!

  Rat-tat-tat, rat-tat-tat—machine gun fire hitting the metal plating Jones and Garcia had jerry-rigged on the Humvee.

  The rending of metal.

  Shattered glass floating like confetti.

  I pull my sidearm from its holster.

  I will not be taken alive.

  I force my eyes open.

  I will not die a coward.

  I take one last look around at the smoking carnage, the demise of best intentions and even better men. The waste of it all drives me to rest my finger on the cold trigger.

  I’m being dragged, powerful hands under armpits.

  Unfamiliar voices.

  Radios squawking.

  “One extracted. Specialist Locke. Left leg’s hamburger.”

  Gusts of super-heated air, a blast furnace.

  Another voice. “Let’s get her in the bird fast. She’s alive. Hillbilly armor saved her. ’Bout time the brass up-armored these tin cans.”

  “Nothin’ woulda saved the others. IED enema right up their asses.”

  “Tourniquet!”

  “Tighter.”

  Thwump, thwump, thwump, thwump.

  ***

  Complete darkness. My face compressed against glass. Fists banging, clawing. Brain on fire.

  Where am I? Where are Jones and Garcia?

  Metal banging.

  A rush of damp air.

  An old man, back-lit with something long and black pointed at me.

  “Get away from me!”

  “Jesus, you okay? Did you have another one of your dreams?”

  I get on my belly and crawl.

  “It’s me, Gracie. Vinnie.”

  I freeze. The voice is familiar, soothing. Hand rubbing my arm.

  “Vin?”

  “Yeah, sweetheart. It’s me.”

  Hand reaching. “You okay to stand? Looks like you’re still wearing Oscar.”

  Oscar, hanging half-off like a doll’s broken limb. “What happened?”

  “You had one of your bad dreams. I heard you screaming, all the way down in my place.”

  “What?”

  He points at the banging noise coming from the window. “I’m sorry, I need to get to fixing those rusted-out tracks. A couple of the shutters are loose, and the storm was blowing them against the window.”

  “The storm?”

  “Ophelia, remember?” he says.

  I fumble to reattach Oscar. Together we hobble outside to look at the ocean. To breathe in the salt air. I lean on the railing and stare out at wave after wave battering the sh
ore. Palm fronds skittering across A1A. Torrential rain like liquid silver lashes.

  “Jesus, kid, let’s get you back inside, you’re shivering.” He lights a path with a flashlight. “Power’s out. Probably will be ’til this thing passes. Too dangerous to send crews out in this.”

  I take his hand and shuffle to the futon.

  “You don’t look so good. Why don’t you sit?” He drapes a blanket over my shoulders. “Them rickety old shutters clatter like a freight train, don’t they?”

  I pull the blanket tight around me. “Or a helicopter.”

  He sits beside me. “Ah, I see. War’ll do that to ya.”

  I reach a hand under the blanket to stroke the tattoo on my left upper arm. I visualize the multi-colored clapboard houses on stilts surrounded by a shimmering sea, a gilded moon on the horizon, and the coordinates 25.6546 N, 80.1744 W. Stiltsville. My oasis of peace. I got the tattoo before I left for Iraq. Before I was blown up. Before I spent five months in Walter Reed trying to hold on to my leg and regain what was left of my sanity, the former a failure. The latter? The jury’s out on the latter.

  “But better days ahead, baby girl. Better days ahead,” Vinnie says.

  “How do you figure that? You got a crystal ball?”

  He snaps his fingers. “Trust me, the great Vincenzo knows all. Just cos I’m old don’t mean I don’t got a plan.”

  I drop my head on his shoulder. “What plan?”

  “All in good time. But for now, anything I can do for you?”

  I wonder how Manny’s faring. Did the Intracoastal come up over the seawall into the yard like it did during our last hurricane together? The one we spent huddled under the covers, like kids in a pretend fort, telling stupid jokes to keep my mind occupied until the most spectacular dawn broke pink above the horizon as if nothing had happened.

  “Would you mind sitting with me for a bit? Until the storm passes.”

  “Whatever you need, sweetheart. No one should be alone in a storm.”