She flushes. “I don’t know. When the first one arrived, I couldn’t believe it was actually…real. Like, how did he get to me? He’s in jail. You’re not supposed to be able to do that when you’re in jail.” She shakes her head. “I was dumb. I didn’t realize that it’s easy to do things in jail if you know the right people. But with that first one, it’s like I didn’t even want to think about the fact that it existed, so instead of saying anything, I shoved it into the back of my closet.” Her mouth is set in a line.
“But they kept coming?”
She bites her lower lip. “Yes. They kept coming. And coming. And your mom never stopped him.” Her mouth is set in a line.
“Did she know?” I sound skeptical. I can’t help myself. There’s no way my mother knew about that shit and didn’t try to stop it. I might have major personal issues with her, but I have to admit that she’s really good at her job.
She looks at me like I’m an idiot. “Why wouldn’t she? He’s her fucking client.”
I can’t believe I’m about to defend my mother, but here we go. “Yeah, but I doubt she knows everything he does. If there’s one thing I know about my mom, it’s that she’s obsessed with following the letter of the law.”
The expression on her face gives me the chills. She purses her lips. “Do you think that fucking matters, Zach?” She growls my name. “She should have known. She should have done something. She should have done her job. She should have protected me. Someone should have protected me.” Her voice has been growing louder and louder, and on that last word, it shatters into a million pieces and she starts to sob. “Did you read the last one?”
I nod.
“I never read them before tonight. I hadn’t even opened them. But last night, when I read that last one, about Jordan, I just…I need to know. What he’s talking about? Does he really know something about Jordan? Did Jordan tell him something?” She pauses, takes a ragged breath. “Look, you wouldn’t understand. The weekend before my brother died…I was an asshole to him. A total fucking asshole. He probably hated me. And then he was gone. We never made up. If David”—she chokes on the name—“knows something—anything—about what Jordan was thinking before he died…if it was something about me…I have to know.” Her hands are clenched into fists and her fingers are losing their color. She looks up at me with wide eyes full of sorrow, and I know that I’m going to help her, no matter how bad an idea I know this is. “Zach, why did he leave me alive?”
I take a deep breath, sensing that this is one of those moments I’ll remember forever, one of those moments that will stick in my brain, that will split my life in two. And then I ask:
“What do you want to me to do?”
The morning after I call Zach, we’re in the car heading to the one place I never would have thought I’d be going: the fucking Twin Towers jail in downtown Los Angeles. I cannot believe this is my life. There is something very wrong with it.
Everything in me is balled into a tense knot: my stomach feels like it’s trying to escape my body and run down the freeway, back home.
After we decided to go last night, I googled the Twin Towers jail. It has the honor of being named one of the top ten worst prisons in the United States. All I know about jail and prison is from Orange Is the New Black, and I’m pretty sure the place we’re going is nothing like that.
It was surprisingly easy to make an appointment to see him. Scarily so. I guess as long as you’re on someone’s approved visitors list, they don’t care who you are. I read that there are eleven thousand inmates at the two jails downtown, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it’s that simple.