“That. Right. Well, I hope you’re patient,” she says with a sigh. “Because you’re probably going to be in here for a while. The backlog on cases right now is outrageous.”
At the arraignment, the judge sets my bail at $80,000. It might as well be a million dollars, because I have no way to pay it. When I look around the courtroom, I see no one I recognize: Lachlan hasn’t come, nor has my mother. I realize that they probably don’t even know that the bail hearing is taking place—I have no funds in my prison account to make phone calls, so I haven’t been able to get in touch. Secretly, I’m glad that they aren’t seeing me like this, uncombed, exhausted, sticky with guilt and drowning in my yellow jumpsuit.
My public defender pats me sympathetically on the back and then races off to her next client, a pregnant teenager who shot and killed her rapist.
I go back to county jail and prepare to wait some more.
* * *
—
The days crawl past and still no one comes for me. Where is Lachlan? I wonder. He’s the only person I know who might have the money to bail me out. Surely my mother has tracked him down by now, told him what happened, sent him to find me. But after one week passes, and then another, and he still doesn’t show up, it dawns on me that he’s not coming, ever. Why would he show his face anywhere near a police station, and risk being identified? Quite possibly he thinks that I’m planning to implicate him in order to save my own skin.
Or worse. I think about his muted fury when I left Lake Tahoe; his suggestion that I’d somehow screwed up everything for us both. And I wonder: How did the police know that I was in Los Angeles, anyway? It seems an unlikely coincidence that they showed up at my house, less than an hour after I’d arrived in town. Someone must have tipped them off.
Only two people knew that I was home: My mother and Lachlan. (Three, if Lisa noticed my car in the driveway.) Of the three, I know exactly which one was most likely to have made the call.
Of course it was Lachlan. Our time together ended as soon as I stopped being useful to him, and started being dangerous. The minute that safe was empty, my fate was sealed. He never had any loyalty to you, I think as I walk the dusty square of the prison yard, razor wire glinting in the pale December light. You knew that. He was always going to toss you aside eventually. You’re just lucky it took this long.
So then: Who else might come for me? My mother? Lisa? The landlord of my neglected antiques shop in Echo Park, who has surely tossed my stuff on the street by now? I feel untethered, entirely cut off from the world outside. As I lie on my lumpy plastic mattress, trying to make myself invisible to anyone who might be spoiling for a fight, I see for the first time how isolated I’ve become, how small the circumference of my existence really is.
* * *
—
Finally, after three weeks in county, I get summoned to visiting hours. I make my way to a room jammed with folding chairs and chipped linoleum tables, a garish beach-scene mural painted on one wall alongside a chest of broken toys. The room is packed with life: children and grandparents and boyfriends, some wearing little but their tattoo sleeves and others in their beribboned Sunday best. It takes me a minute to pick out my visitor: It’s my mother. She sits alone at a table in the back, wearing a bright green dress that gapes around her neck and hips, with a silk scarf wrapped around her head. Her eyes are red-rimmed and fixed on a point on the wall across from her, as if she’s trying to center herself amid the madness.
When she sees me, she lets out a little cry and lurches up from the table, her pale hands fluttering in the air like little birds that have fallen from their nest. “Oh, baby. Oh, my baby girl.”