Page 81 of Rooster's Remorse
She climbs to the roof and hands it up without a word.
Roy Hoyt. Dead four months ago.
Picked up last spring on a parole violation with a weapons charge stacked on it, and he made it eleven weeks inside before a yard fight between two factions turned into a war.
Somebody put a shank in his kidney, and he was gone before the guards locked it down.
Nobody charged. The kind of death that finds men like him and gets a single paragraph.
I read it twice, and both times something in me goes looking for a feeling and doesn't find one.
I wanted to kill him. I've had two days to want it.
And the page says a stranger already did it in a yard over something neither of us will ever know about, and all I've got is my hands going cold on a piece of paper.
"He's already dead," I say.
"He's already dead." Imani sits down on the ledge beside me, which she's never once done. "I wanted to tell you before Mila reads it because I need you thinking about what it means for her, not only what it means for the run."
"It means she doesn't get him."
"It means she never gets him." Imani looks out at the desert going gold. "The man who did the worst of it. The one she crawled out from under, the one who knew exactly whose girl she was. He didn't die because of her. He died in a yard fight over something that had nothing to do with her, and she doesn't even get to know what it was about." Her mouth goes tight. "Some people need the one who hurt them to be afraid at the end. She doesn't get that sort of closure. He was probably worried about his commissary account."
I sit with it.
She was nothing to him at the end. She was nothing to him the whole way through.
That's what I can't get past, sitting up there.
Not that he's dead.
That she spent nine years being the center of the worst thing in the world, and to the man who did it she didn’t mean a damn thing.
"How do I tell her?" I say.
"You don't dress it up. She hates that worse than the truth." Imani stands. "You tell her he's dead, he died, and it was never going to be him at the end of this anyway. Because it wasn't. It was never one man. You kill Roy Hoyt and Trask hires the next one by Friday. That's how a place like La Nada works. The men are interchangeable."
She goes back down the ladder and leaves me with a page off the Department of Corrections, the cold coming up out of the ground, and I understand what she's telling me.
This was never going to end with a body I could hand Mila.
It ends with a building, or it doesn't end.
***
My mother brings the cards out that night.
She doesn't want to. I can see it in her hands, my mother, at the table in the main room with both of them folded on top of a shoebox like it might spring open, Imani across from her being careful, me behind my mother's chair with a hand on her shoulder.
"I never opened them," Marie says. "Ten years. Every December one comes, and I know the hand before I see the postmark. I couldn't throw them out and I couldn't open them. Throwing them out would've told him I was scared. Opening them meant reading whatever he—" She stops. Her thumb works at a corner of the lid. "So I put them in a box. And when Finn said grab one bag, I don't know why, but I grabbed the box."
"You grabbed it because some part of you knew we'd need it," Imani says. "May I?"
Marie pushes the box across, and then she puts both hands in her lap where I can't see them.
Imani opens them oldest first, and they're Christmas cards, and that's what crawls under my skin. They're only Christmas cards. A cardinal on a snowed-in branch. A lit-up church at dusk. Inside every one, the same warm looping hand:
Thinking of you this season, Marie. Wishing you peace. — Wen.
