Chapter 6 - The Cell
Cedarbrook Correctional smelled like industrial soap and something underneath it that never quite went away, no matter how much soap was used.
Genevieve had been there eleven days, and in eleven days, she had learned the particular rhythm of a place designed to erode people slowly — the meals at the same time, the lights that dimmed but never fully darkened, the sounds of other women crying at night in a building where everyone pretended not to hear it, out of a strange, unspoken courtesy.
She had not cried.
Not because she was strong, exactly, though the women around her seemed to have decided she was, based on nothing more than the fact that her face didn't crumble the way theirs sometimes did. She hadn't cried because crying required a kind of surrender she wasn't ready to give, not yet, not while there was still a folded piece of paper's worth of hope sitting somewhere in the world, doing whatever it was doing.
She thought about the note constantly.
She had memorized it before a guard took it from her during intake, unfolding it with bored efficiency and reading it without any apparent interest, because a phone number scrawled on a scrap of paper meant nothing to a guard processing her hundredth inmate of the month.
555-0187. Ask for Ada. Say Frank sent you.
She had said the number to herself so many times in eleven days that it had stopped feeling like digits and started feeling like a small, private prayer.
She didn't know who Ada was.
She trusted, with a faith she couldn't entirely justify, that Frank Doran — a police officer she had spoken to for exactly ninety seconds in a marble hallway — had given her something real, because the alternative was unbearable, and because his eyes, in that hallway, had held the specific widening of a man recognizing a name that mattered.
Her cellmate, a tired woman named Rosalind serving four years for a check-fraud charge she readily admitted to, unlike Genevieve, watched her with tired curiosity.
"You keep moving your lips," Rosalind said, on the eleventh night. "Like you're praying."
"I'm not religious."
"Didn't say you were praying to God." Rosalind shrugged, settling onto her bunk. "Some people pray to numbers. Court dates. Release dates. Phone numbers they think are gonna save them."
Genevieve said nothing.
"I had a number like that once," Rosalind continued, staring at the ceiling. "My sister's number. Called it every week for two years hoping she'd finally pick up and forgive me for what I did to get in here. She never did."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. Some numbers don't work out." Rosalind turned her head, studying Genevieve with an expression that was neither unkind nor particularly hopeful. "But some do. You got that look, though. The one that thinks it's gonna work."
"What look is that?"
"The look of somebody who's got somebody on the outside who actually gives a damn." Rosalind closed her eyes. "Most of us in here don't have that. You should be grateful, whatever happens."
Genevieve lay awake long after Rosalind's breathing evened into sleep, thinking about her father, about a man who had, for the last two years of her marriage, felt distant in a way she'd attributed to his age, his workload, the natural drift that happens between parents and adult children building their own lives.
She had not called him nearly enough.
She had told herself, in the years leading up to the arrest, that she was giving him space, that a grown woman with her own marriage and her own child didn't need to check in with her father every week the way she had as a college student.
She understood now, lying on a thin mattress in a cell that smelled like industrial soap, that some of that distance had not been natural at all. Marcus had discouraged it, gently, the way he discouraged everything, with small comments about her father's controlling nature, his need to be involved in everything, his difficulty letting his daughter live her own life.
She had believed those comments.
She had let them put a wall between her and the one person who might have noticed, years earlier, that something in her marriage had gone quietly, catastrophically wrong.
On the twelfth day, a guard came to her cell during a time that wasn't meal time or exercise time, which meant something had happened, because nothing outside the schedule ever happened without something having happened.
"Zukowski. You have a legal visit."
"I don't have a lawyer visit scheduled."
"You do now."
She was led down a corridor she hadn't walked before, into a small visiting room with a table and two chairs and a woman she had never seen sitting on the other side of it — sharp-eyed, professionally dressed, a leather folder in front of her thick enough to contain a small book.
"Genevieve Zukowski," the woman said, extending a hand across the table. "My name is Adaeze Mensah. Frank Doran sent me."
Genevieve's whole body went still.
"You got the message."
"I got more than the message." Adaeze opened the folder, and Genevieve saw, upside down, pages of financial records, photographs, what looked like a printed email chain highlighted in yellow. "Your father has spent the last twelve days taking apart your husband's life one thread at a time. I'm here to tell you it's working, and I'm here to ask you some questions that are going to help us finish the job faster."
Genevieve looked at the folder, at twelve days of evidence assembled by people she had never met, mobilized because a police officer in a marble hallway had recognized her father's name.
For the first time in twelve days, her eyes filled with tears.
"He came," she said, very quietly. "He actually came."
"Ms. Zukowski," Adaeze said gently, "your father never stopped coming. I don't think he's slept more than three hours a night since the trial ended."
May you like
Genevieve put her cuffed hands — still cuffed, even here, even now, protocol demanding it for legal visits in maximum-security intake — over her face, and for the first time since the marble hallway, she let herself cry.
---
