Gathering Dark

tell me if you’re in or you’re out, because if you’re out, I’ve got to find another running mate.”
I thought about Jamie. Pictured myself telling him goodbye for another five years, trying to explain to him that I’d been doing something good for a friend when I sacrificed my relationship with him for another half a decade. It had been hard enough to pitch my story about my crime to him when I was released; that I’d done something terribly wrong that I hadn’t meant to do, and that despite my acting with the best of intentions, the police had put me away. It seemed impossible for a kid to understand. Impossible still that I would risk all that for Sneak and her daughter, a girl I had known for mere seconds while she stuck a gun in my face.
But the fact was that Sneak had been the key to my survival in prison. She’d got me out of my stupor, and then she had simply been there—a woman sadly adjusted to the institutionalized life, someone who knew the routine, the language, the rules. She was my prison life tour guide. Sure, Sneak was bad company. She was constantly high, often embroiled in a feud with another inmate or an attempted romance with a guard, and she was so sticky-fingered that I had to keep anything I absolutely couldn’t afford to have stolen stuffed into my bra—emergency panty liners, pictures of Jamie, my postnatal medication. But every time she finished her stint at Happy Valley and disappeared from my life, I felt the ground crack underneath me. When she inevitably reappeared months or weeks later, it was like welcoming home my long-lost sister. Sneak never got down, no matter how long she was sentenced for, no matter how fruitless her attempts to go back into the real world seemed. She believed that if she let prison life break her, she might break others in turn, so she kept her head high. I admired that.
I also recognized a desire in me to join Sneak in the search for her daughter as the same kind of desire I’d felt during my time in the operat-ing room. I wanted to sew Sneak and her child’s relationship back together. Patch it with neat white bandages. I had the chance to save a child here. Help a mother. Be a hero. It was what I had been doing before I was locked up. This was a sign, a test, that, if I passed, would mean I still was the woman I had been before I was dumped in a jail cell. It would mean I was still good on the inside.
“I’m with you,” I told Sneak.
She smiled.
“Tell me what you found out last night about Dayly. The word on the street,” I said.
“She’s been slipping.” Sneak took out her phone and brought up something on the screen, pushed it toward me. “Friend of mine who works as a webcam girl showed me this. I’ll let you watch it. I need a cigarette.”
Sneak left and I examined her phone. She’d checked into a website called Rareshare-Hx.com. At the top of the screen a slick, shiny cartoon woman was giving a cartoon man a blow job in a dark room. Her head bobbed in an endless loop, big eyes locked on his, while a banner encouraged the viewer to “Try not 2 cum.” There was a list of categories above a collection of videos of real girls doing similar acts. In the thumbnail for the first video, the girl who had robbed me at the Pump’n’Jump was curled in the corner of a blue couch, a glass of wine in her hand. I tapped on the thumbnail and Dayly came to life, flapping a hand at the camera.
“Stop,” she said playfully. “This is so dumb.”
I watched for a while. The camera was set down, and from behind it emerged a small, lean man with a head of close-cropped black hair and an unreadable blue tattoo on his neck. Dayly and the man started making out on the couch. I scrolled down the screen and read the caption below the video.
Busty amateur teen blonde gets hammered hard on boyfriend’s couch.
The man in the video was peeling off Dayly’s shirt when a voice above me spoke.
“Refill?”
The waiter was muscular and tanned, the green Denny’s polo clinging to his chest. I snapped the mute switch on the phone and slammed it down, screen to the table.
“Yes, please,” I managed.
I toyed with the nice stainless-steel salt and pepper shakers that were on the table as he went away. It had been a decade since a man had touched me intimately. That included everything from full-blown sex to a pat on the shoulder, a warm hug. The closest I had got to a hug was from Henry, Sasha’s husband, when I left prison, and I had come no nearer to the act than its imagining in my mind: the slow, deliberate mental repeat of his arms closing around my shoulders, his breath on my neck, his hips against my hips. I imagined it for weeks on end as my release date neared. But he never actually hugged me. Sasha and Henry had picked me up at the prison gates, and Henry had stayed in the car, turning and smiling in greeting as I slid into the back seat. The waiter leaned over now and filled Sneak’s cup, and I caught a whiff of his deodorant, saw the thick tendons move in his neck. Big hands and forearms.
“Thanks,” I said when he was done. “Could we maybe get some ice water, as well? If it’s not too much trouble.”
The waiter nodded, smiled, and walked away. Sneak slid back into the booth with me.
“Did you just try to pick up that waiter?”
“I … What? No! No, I didn’t. Of course I didn’t.”
“You had a look on your face like you were gonna drag him home to your sex dungeon and chain him to a rack.”
“Please,”