Cheating at Solitaire(86)
“Well,” Gregor said, “if she wasn’t wearing a coat, and she wasn’t carrying a purse, and she was dressed in practically nothing and wearing strappy sandals, I don’t see how she was any more capable than Marcey Mandret was of carrying around a whacking huge firearm like that without any of you noticing.”
Chapter Four
1
Arrow Normand understood that the time had come to do something about her situation, and she understood this most clearly because her mother was waiting for her in an interview room down the hall. That was how the guard had put it when he came to bring her the news, “Your mother is waiting for you in the interview room down the hall,” as if she ought to know about interview rooms, and halls, and everything else that happened in this place. The news made her dig even deeper under the pile of rough gray blankets they had given her. It was up to four now, and lying underneath their weight she sometimes thought she was back at home on one of those days when it snowed so hard that there wasn’t any school. That was real home, not home as she was supposed to think of it now. Los Angeles never felt like home to her. There was too much sunlight, and too many people who looked as if they weren’t entirely real.
After a while, the woman guard came down to see her, standing just outside the bars as if she were waiting for a dog to do its business. Arrow didn’t understand why she had to make so many decisions. It was nice here, with the blankets, and thinking about things she hadn’t really brought to mind in years. She missed Halloween, with candied apples and cider in pumpkin shells and kids running around in costumes knee deep in leaves. She missed sitting at the kitchen table in their old house with her paper dolls stretched out all along the surface, trying to decide if Sophisticated Suzy or Marvelous Melanie should wear the Dutch dress with its little wooden shoes. On the other hand, that last memory wasn’t as good as it should have been, since it always included the sound of her parents fighting. Her parents had fought nonstop when she was a child, but it wasn’t until after her mother had taken her to L.A. that they had ended up divorced.
The woman guard’s name was Marcia, or maybe Marsha. Arrow hadn’t asked her how it was spelled. She stood at the bars and waited, patiently, as if she had all the time in the world.
“Your mother is here,” she said finally. “Don’t you want to talk to her?”
Arrow closed her eyes and wished that the blankets on top of her were heavier. If they were heavy enough, nobody would be able to get them off, and she’d be able to stay put until she wanted to come out and eat some food. She didn’t mind the food. They brought her whatever she asked for. Marcia had even brought her a latte that had been flown in especially from her favorite place in L.A. The truth was, though, that Arrow didn’t like lattes all that much either. She only knew she had to drink them. Milk shakes made you fat and, even worse, made you look like a dork.
She turned around on the narrow little cot and sat up, still keeping the blankets clutched against her chest. People thought she had killed Mark Anderman, and she knew it, but she didn’t think Marcia did. She didn’t think the other guard did either, the male one. She wondered if her mother did. It was one of those things she had been working very hard not to know.
“I’m tired,” she said, looking at Marcia, square and solid in her dark blue uniform. “I just want to sleep.”
“But it’s your mother,” Marcia said. “And it’s perfectly safe. There aren’t any photographers here. I can get you all the way down to the interview room and back without your having to see anybody at all.”
“Is my mother by herself?” Arrow asked. Her mother was almost never by herself, but there were different kinds and different degrees of having someone with her.
“She’s by herself,” Marcia said. “I heard the sergeant say that they think you feel overwhelmed by the lawyers, and that’s why you’re acting the way you are. Most people don’t want to stay in jail for days at a time. They want to go back to their own homes if the police will let them.”
“It’s not like real jail here,” Arrow said. “It’s not like on television.”
“That’s true,” Marcia agreed. “It never is like television here, and you’re all we’ve got at the moment, so we can be even more accommodating, but it’s still jail. I read about you in People where it said you love to take hot baths. You aren’t going to get a hot bath here.”
Part of the problem was that she was very cold. She was cold even under the blankets, but she didn’t want to say so, because whenever she did, they brought in a doctor to look at her. She didn’t think she was sick. She didn’t think she was going to run a fever or fall over or do any of the things that got you hospitalized for exhaustion in L.A. She just thought she needed more blankets, all the blankets that they had in the world.