Gathering Dark

very wealthy before I was locked up. I treated the kids of the stars, drove a Mercedes-Benz, vacationed in La Jolla. Once, I went to Oprah Winfrey’s house in the middle of the night to treat the child of a friend of hers who was staying over, suffering a fever. All that was before I shot my neighbor in cold blood and stood watching him bleed out on his dining room floor, doing nothing, while his girlfriend screamed at me.
“I don’t even have any money to offer you to—”
I stared into my empty wallet. I’d had a twenty-dollar bill, all that was left to my name after I’d paid for Sneak’s daughter’s theft. Now it was gone. Sneak had probably snagged it when I went to close the curtains. I tossed the wallet on the counter.
“Okay, I’m good now.” Sneak swallowed her third vodka, gasped, and exhaled hard. “Let’s get rolling.”
“We’re not—”
“We can talk on the way.”
In the cab I leaned against the window and wondered how on earth I’d let myself be abducted into a fellow ex-con’s personal troubles, and how I could best extract myself. Sneak rambled beside me and wrung her hands. The confidence and determination I’d seen in my apartment was draining away from her. She had me now, and was gearing up for the next challenge. Prison does that to you: gives you the ability to put up a tough front to get what you want, but then it burns out and moves on, like a grass fire. I was looking now at the face of a terrified mother, something I’d seen in hospital hallways and in the mirror plenty of times. Sneak was drunk and high, but she was wavering on the edge of screaming panic.
“You never even told me you had a kid,” I said.
“I’m not lying. Not this time.”
“All that time in Happy Valley together. All those hours you listened to me talking about Jamie, you never once mentioned it.”
“We only just got back in touch.” Sneak shifted in her chair. “I gave her up as a teenager. It was kind of embarrassing, okay?”
Sneak had been a good friend of mine on the inside. Good enough that I’d overlooked her constantly stealing my things, coming up with grandiose lies to entertain herself, waking me up in the winter with her ice-cold hands on my face. I could feel those hands now, slapping at my cheeks and brow. Her big blue eyes peering at me over the edge of the bunk. Hey. Hey. Neighbor. Wake up. I’m bored. That cute guard on seven just got here. Come be my wingman.
“She called me from a pay phone,” Sneak said. “This morning, maybe one a.m. She said she fired a gun at the woman behind the counter. I figured it had to be you. There couldn’t be too many women stupid enough to work a night shift in a place like that.”
“Desperate enough, I think you mean,” I said. “It was the only place that would—”
“She would hardly let me speak.”
“I know the feeling,” I sighed.
“She said I should watch my back, that someone was coming, something real bad was going down.” Sneak chewed her nails. “Then we got disconnected. Like, fast. She went quiet suddenly and the line went dead.”
“Why did you wait so long to come get me?”
“I had to see what the street was saying first. Get a feel for what Dayly was telling me about someone being after her. But nobody’s heard anything. Usually if there’s some kind of hit out, people will know.”
“Where are we going?”
“To Dayly’s apartment.” Sneak blocked a nostril, inhaled, made a snorting sound. Irritated sinuses from bad coke. “I’ve been there a couple of times. Like I said, we’ve been trying to make good with each other. She looked me up. She’s angry, I guess, but it wasn’t my fault, her childhood. My parents made me give her up.”
I knew some things about who Sneak had been before she turned to a life of drugs and prostitution. Walking by her bunk one day at Happy Valley, I’d spotted a newspaper cut-out on the floor. A yellowed picture of a lean young girl in a gymnast’s outfit. The resemblance to Sneak was minimal—the girl was fresh-faced, grinning broadly, blonde ringlet curls held up in an elaborate scrunchie, and a sculpted, muscular frame shining in spandex. The headline read “Dreams Shattered.” Sixteen-year-old Emily Lawlor had been warming up for her performance at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney when she landed wrongly after back-flipping off a floor beam. She suffered a traumatic fracture in one of her cervical vertebrae. I’d stuffed the newspaper article back under Sneak’s pillow, where I assumed it had come from. Another inmate told me Sneak had got hooked on oral Vicodin after the accident, then moved to heroin when her insurance ran out.
“I don’t know who the father is,” Sneak said. “I was knocking boots with a lot of bad guys. Some of them are in jail now. Like, forever.”
I watched my former cellmate from across the cab. She looked older than her years, her mouth downturned with worry. I realized she and I had both given up our babies unwillingly; her as a teen being pushed by disappointed parents, me in the Happy Valley infirmary only an hour after giving birth to him. Though Sneak and I hadn’t been able to be there for our kids, the idea that they might fall into peril still throbbed, in the back of my mind, at least, like a burn that never really healed. From the moment our children had left our hands they’d fallen into the big, bad world, and it looked as though Dayly was in the grasp of some of that badness.
“What do you think your daughter’s into?” I asked.
Sneak pursed her lips and looked away from me. “I don’t know. It can’t be drugs. She’s so disgusted with who I am as a person, she’d never go there.”
“Don’t bash yourself up