When She Woke

SUNLIGHT BOUNCING OFF concrete, glinting on razor wire and steel, bathing her face in warmth. Cool wind buffeting her skin and stirring her hair, vivid blue of sky piercing her eyes. Sounds of cars whizzing past, a snatch of song from a radio, the tweeting of birds, the chirping of locusts, the crunch of two pairs of feet on gravel. The sensory input was dizzying, overwhelming. Hannah stumbled, and the guard walking beside her took hold of her upper arm to steady her. As he did so, his fingers brushed against the outside curve of her breast. Intentionally? She gave him a sidelong glance, but his wide brown face was impassive, and his eyes were staring straight ahead.

They approached a large, windowless building six stories tall: the prison. As they passed beneath its shadow, Hannah felt a chill that had nothing to do with the weather. Only the most violent felons were kept behind bars—first-degree murderers, serial rapists, abortionists and other offenders deemed incorrigible by the state. Most of them served life sentences. Once they went in, they almost never came out.

As they neared the gate, it began to move, sliding into the wall with a mechanical groan.

“You’re free to go,” the guard told Hannah. She paused on the threshold. “What’s the matter, pajarita, you afraid to leave the nest?”

Giving no indication that she’d heard him, she squared her shoulders and stepped through the opening, into the world.

She stood in a short driveway leading to a parking lot. She walked to the edge of the drive and scanned the lot, one hand shielding her eyes against the morning sun. There was no movement, no sign of her parents’ blue sedan. She fixed her eyes on the entrance, willing the car to appear, telling herself her father was just running late.

“Hey, gal.” The voice, a man’s, came from behind her. She turned and saw a small booth she hadn’t noticed to one side of the gate. A guard was leaning against the doorjamb with his arms folded over his chest. “Guess your friend ain’t coming,” he said.

“It’s my father,” Hannah said. “And he’ll be here.”

“If I had a dollar for every time I heard that, I’d be rich as an A-rab.” The guard was tall and skinny, with a smug, pimpled face and a protuberant Adam’s apple that bobbed convulsively when he swallowed. He looked like he was about sixteen, though Hannah knew he had to be at least twenty-one to work at a state prison.

She heard the sound of a vehicle. She spun and saw a car pulling into the lot, but it was silver, not blue. Her shoulders slumped. The car stopped, backed up and exited.

“Looks like somebody taken a wrong turn,” said the guard. Hannah glanced back at him, wondering if the irony was intended, then decided he was too stupid for that. “What you gonna do if your daddy don’t show, huh? Where you gonna go?”

“He’ll be here,” Hannah said, a little too emphatically.

“You could bunk with me for a while, if you ain’t got nowhere else to go. I got a real nice place. Plenty of room for two.” His mouth twisted in a half-smile. Hannah felt her skin prickle with aversion as his eyes slithered down her body and back up again. How many other women had he propositioned like this, and how many had been desperate enough to take him up on it? Deliberately, she turned her back on him.

“I’m just trying to be friendly,” said the guard. “I think you’ll find the world ain’t such a friendly place for a Chrome.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Hannah saw him go back into the booth. She sat down on the curb to wait. She was chilly in her thin summer blouse and skirt, but she didn’t care. The fresh air was divine. She breathed it in and lifted her face to the sun. From its position, it had to be close to noon. Why was her father so late?

She’d been waiting for perhaps twenty minutes when a yellow van pulled into the lot and headed toward the gate, stopping right in front of her. A sign painted on the door read: CRAWFORD TAXI SERVICE, WE’LL GITCHA THERE. The passenger-side window rolled down, and the driver, a middle-aged man with a greasy gray ponytail, leaned over and said, “You need a taxi?”

She stood up. “Maybe.” In Crawford, she could get something to eat and find a netlet to call her father. “How far’s town?”

“Fifteen minutes, give or take.”

“What’s the fare?”

“Well, let’s see now,” said the driver. “I reckon three hundred ought to just about cover it. Tip included.”

“That’s outrageous!”

He shrugged. “Ain’t many cabs’ll even pick up a Chrome.”

“See what I’m talking ’bout, gal?” drawled the guard from behind her. “It’s a tough ole world out there for a Red.” He was standing in front of the booth now, grinning, and Hannah realized that he must have called the cab. He and his buddy the driver had no doubt played out this scenario many times, splitting their despicable proceeds after the fact.

“Well?” said the driver. “I ain’t got all day.”

How much money did she have left? There couldn’t be much; almost all her savings had gone to pay for the abortion. Her checking account had had maybe a thousand dollars in it when she was arrested, but there would have been automatic deductions for her bills. The three hundred dollars she’d gotten from the state of Texas could very well be all she had to her name.

“I’ll walk,” she said.

“Suit yourself.” He rolled up the window and pulled away.

“Changed your mind yet?” the guard said. He sauntered over to her. She tensed, but he merely handed her a scrap of paper. On it was scrawled a name, Billy Sikes, and a phone number. “That’s my number,” he said. “If I was you I’d hang on to it. You might decide you could use a friend one of these days.”

Hannah crumpled it in her fist and let it fall to the ground. “I’ve got enough friends.” She turned and started walking toward the road.

She was halfway to the entrance when a familiar blue sedan pulled in. She broke into a run. It stopped a few feet in front of her, and she saw her father behind the wheel, alone. She’d known better than to expect her mother or Becca, but still, their absence cut deep. For some time, neither he nor Hannah moved. They gazed at each other through the glass of the windshield, worlds apart. Her mouth was dry with fear. What if he couldn’t stand the sight of her? What if he was so repulsed he drove away and left her here? She’d lost so much already, she didn’t think she could bear to live without her father’s love. For the first time since she’d entered the Chrome ward, she prayed. Not to God, but to His Son, who knew what it was to be trapped, alone, inside mortal flesh; who’d once known the terror of being forsaken. Please, Jesus. Please don’t take my father from me.

The driver’s door swung open, and John Payne got out, keeping the door between himself and Hannah. She approached him slowly, carefully, like a bird she was afraid of startling into flight. When she was still a few feet away, she stopped, uncertain. Her father stared at her without speaking. Tears were streaming down his face.

“Daddy?”

His chest heaved and he let out a choked sob. The sound lacerated her. Only once, at her grandmother’s funeral, had Hannah ever seen her father cry. Her own eyes welled as he moved from behind the car door and held his arms out to her. She walked into them, felt them enfold her. She had never been more grateful for anything in her life than for this tenderness, this simple human warmth. She thought of the last few times she’d been touched: by the guard earlier, by the medic who’d strapped her down and injected her with the virus, by the bailiff in the courtroom, by the horrid police doctor. To be touched with love was a kind of miracle.

“My beautiful Hannah,” her father said, stroking her hair. “Oh, my sweet, beautiful girl.”

HE’D BROUGHT A cooler of food: turkey sandwiches, potato chips, an apple, a thermos of coffee. Plain fare, but after thirty days of nutribars, it tasted ambrosial. He was silent while she ate, his eyes fixed on the road. They were heading north on I-35, toward Dallas. Toward home. A tendril of hope unfurled in her mind. Maybe her mother had forgiven her, at least enough to let her move back in.

As if he were following her thoughts, her father said, “I can’t take you home. You know that, don’t you?”

The tendril turned brown, crumbled to powder. “I do now.”

“If you would just talk to us, Hannah. Just tell us—”

She cut him off. “I can’t. I won’t.” It came out shrill and defiant. In a milder tone, she said, “Telling you wouldn’t help anything anyway.”

Her father’s grip tightened on the steering wheel, turning the knuckles white. “It would help me track the bastard down, so I could beat the living daylights out of him.”

“Adjusting. You are out of your lane,” said the pleasant voice of the computer. The steering wheel jerked slightly to the left under her father’s hand, and he made a frustrated sound.

Hannah looked down at the half-eaten sandwich in her lap, her appetite gone. “I’m sorry, Daddy,” she said. The apology was rote to her ear, a dying echo that had traveled too far from its original source, its meaning all but lost from overrepetition. She had said those words so many times—to him, to Becca, to her mother, to the ghost of her child, to God—knowing they weren’t enough and never would be; knowing she’d feel compelled to keep saying them over and over again even so. Her life had become an apologetic conjugation: I was sorry, I am sorry, I will be sorry, with no hope of a future perfect, an I will have been sorry.

Her father let out a long breath, and his body relaxed a little. “I know.”

“Where are you taking me?” she asked.

“There’s a place in Richardson run by the Church of the Risen Lord. It’s called the Straight Path Center.” Hannah shook her head; she hadn’t heard of either. “It’s a kind of halfway house for women like you. If it works out, you can stay there for up to six months. That’ll give us time to find you a job and a safe place to live.”

The “us” reassured her, and the fact that the center was in Richardson, just south of Plano. “When you say ‘women like me’ …”

“Nonviolent Reds, as well as Yellows and Oranges. They don’t accept Blues, Greens, or Purples. I wouldn’t send you there if they did.”

“Have you seen the place?”

“No, but I spoke with the director, Reverend Henley, and he seems like a sincere and compassionate man. I know he’s helped many women find a path back to God.”

Back to God. The words kindled a bright flare of longing within her, doused almost instantly by despair. She’d prayed to Him every day in the jail, before and during her trial, kneeling on the hard floor of the cell until her knees throbbed, begging for His forgiveness and mercy. But He’d remained silent, absent as He’d never been before. With every day that passed Hannah felt more desolate, like an abandoned house falling into ruin, cold wind whistling through the chinks. Finally, the day she was sentenced and taken to the Chrome ward, she acknowledged the inescapable truth: there would be no forgiveness or mercy for her, no going back to Him. How could there be, after what she’d done?

“But understand,” her father continued, “this isn’t vacation Bible school. They’ve got strict rules there. You break them and you’re out. And then God help you, Hannah. We can’t afford to get you a place of your own, even if your mother would let me pay for it.”

“I know, Daddy. I wouldn’t expect you to.” They had no family money, and his salary was modest. It occurred to her now that without her income to supplement his, her parents would have to live much more frugally—one more thing for which she could reproach herself. “But who’s paying for this center?”

“The 1Cs are sponsoring you. Reverend Dale himself appealed to the council.”

Shame scalded her, and she saw it reflected in her father’s face. Hannah, and by extension, the Payne family, was a charity case now. She remembered how she used to feel when she worked in the soup kitchen, putting trays of food into the hands of its ragged supplicants, people who stank of poverty and desperation, whose eyes avoided hers. How she’d pitied them, those poor people. How generous, how virtuous she’d felt helping them. Them—people totally unlike herself and her family, people who had fallen to a place she would never, ever go.

“He’s also the reason you got in,” her father said. “The center has a long waiting list.” When Hannah didn’t reply, he said, “We’re lucky Reverend Dale has taken such an interest in your case.”

She imagined how it must have felt for Aidan to make those calls. Had he pitied her? Felt benevolent? Thought of her as one of them?

“Yes,” she said woodenly. “We’re very lucky.”

WHEN THEY MERGED onto Central the expressway was jammed as usual, and Hannah and her father proceeded the ten miles to Richardson at a crawl. He turned on the sat radio and navved to a news station. Hannah listened with half an ear. The Senate had passed the Freedom From Information Act eighty-eight to twelve. Right-wing militants had assassinated President Napoleón Cifuentes of Brazil, toppling the last democratic government in South America. Continued flooding in Indonesia had displaced more than two hundred thousand additional people in October. Syria, Lebanon and Jordan had withdrawn from the United Nations, citing anti-Islamic bias. The quarterback of the Miami Dolphins had been suspended for using nano-enhancers. Hannah tuned it out. What did any of it have to do with her now?

A family of three pulled up alongside them, pacing them. When the young boy in the backseat saw Hannah, his eyes went wide. She put her hand over the side of her face, but she could feel him staring at her with a child’s unselfconscious directness. Finally, she turned and made a scary face at him, baring her teeth. His eyes and mouth went wide, and he said something to his parents. Their heads whipped around. They glared at her, and she felt a stab of remorse. Of course the boy was staring; she was a freak. How many times had she herself stared with morbid fascination at a Chrome, knowing it was impolite but unable to help herself? Though they were a common sight in the city, especially Yellows, they still drew the eye irresistibly. Hannah wondered how they endured it. How she would endure it.

Her father took the Belt Line exit, and they drove past the shopping mall where she and Becca used to go witnessing with the church youth group, past the Eisemann Center, where they’d seen The Nutcracker and Swan Lake, past the stadium where they’d gone to high school football games. These sights from her old life now seemed as quaint and unreal as models in a diorama.

They were stopped at a traffic light when out of nowhere, something thudded against Hannah’s window. She started and cried out. A face was smashed against the glass. It pulled back, and she saw that it belonged to a young teenaged boy. A girl his age with rainbow-dyed hair and a ring through her lip stood behind him. The two of them were laughing, jeering at Hannah’s fright.

“Hey, leave her alone!” Her father flung open his car door and got out, and the kids ran off down the street. “Punks! You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!” he called out after them. The boy shot him the finger. There was a loud honk from the car behind them, and Hannah jumped again—the light had turned green.

Her father got back in the car and drove on. His jaw was tight-clenched. He glanced at her. “You all right?”

“Yes, Daddy,” she lied. Her heart was still racing. Was this how it was going to be from now on? Would she ever know a day without mockery or fear?

Her father pulled over in front of a nondescript four-story building on a commercial street. “This is it,” he said. It looked like a medical park or an office building. A discreet sign above the door read, THE STRAIGHT PATH CENTER. A potted rosebush flanked the entrance. There were still a few late-fall blooms offering their fragile beauty to all those who passed by. They were red roses, once Hannah’s favorite. Now, their vivid color seemed to taunt her.