Free Revived Spirits by Julia Watts

leads us in a long prayer. I open my eyes for a second and see that Lisa is staring off into the distance, her jaw set, like a person waiting for an ordeal to be over.
    After Mamaw finally says amen, Lisa’s expression relaxes, and she looks at her daughter. “So what’s up with you, Caylie June?”
    “Not much,” Caylie says, looking down like she’s shy all of a sudden. “School. Church. More church.”
    Lisa grins wide. “Welcome to my childhood.”
    “We raised you good,” Mamaw Prater says. “I never dreamed you’d end up in a place like this.”
    “Me neither, Mama. But I would’ve thought if I did end up in a place like this, you would’ve believed me when I said I was innocent.”
    I look into Lisa’s sad blue eyes and fall into them like a deep well until I’m inside her mind. I swim around in images: a younger, happier Lisa at a bar laughing and dancing the two-step with a handsome dark-haired man in a cowboy hat. Lisa and the man, now in a John Deere cap, and a younger Caylie —ten? Eleven?—sitting around the dinner table in a tidy trailer laughing and eating spaghetti. Lisa in pajamas sitting in the living room, watching the clock and smoking a cigarette. The door opening, the man looking nervous and twitchy. An argument.
    Sometimes if I concentrate really hard, I can go deeper into a person’s thoughts. I focus and try harder. The inside of the trailer isn’t tidy anymore. The man, who looks thinner and paler, sits on the couch. The coffee table in front of him is littered with beer cans, an overflowing ashtray, cigarette lighters, and some kind of white powder. He’s holding a small pipe which he offers to Lisa. Most of the scene unfolds like a silent movie, but I hear two words of Lisa’s: no and poison .
    Now I’m so deep in her mind I can’t see my way out. I hope nobody on the outside is talking to me because I’m blind and deaf to everything outside of Lisa’s head. I see her talking with a man in a worker’s uniform who takes the lock off the trailer’s front door and puts in a new one. I see her packing cowboy shirts and jeans and men’s underwear into a cardboard box and leaving it in the trailer’s front yard. I sift though other memories: the man beating on the door, the man trying to talk to her at the grocery store where she works until the manager makes him leave. And then there’s the memory I’m after: the police searching the trailer and opening the trunk of her car to find what looks like a couple of soda bottles to me but must be something much worse because all these police officers are looking at them and talking about them, and then Lisa is in handcuffs, and Caylie is screaming, “No!”
    “No,” Caylie says, bringing me back into my surroundings. “There’s no school chorus at Wilder Middle, but Mamaw’s got me singing in the youth choir at church.”
    “Is that where Caylie met you, Ruth?” Lisa asks.
    I hope this is the first question she’s asked me. “No, ma’am,” I say. “We met at school.” My voice sounds strange, shaky. I haven’t quite come back to myself, and somehow I feel hot and cold at the same time. I want to ask Lisa about all the things I saw in her head, but I can’t. Especially not with Mamaw Prater here.
    On the way home, Caylie rides with me in the back seat of her mamaw’s battered old Chrysler. She touches my hand so I look at her. Her mouth forms the shape of the words “Did you see anything?” but no sound comes out.
    I look to the front seat to make sure Mamaw Prater isn’t paying attention. Then I nod.

Chapter Nine
    “So what was it like?” Adam asks as we settle at our cafeteria table. “I’ve never been in a jail.”
    “You keep stealing those extra mustard packets from the lunch line, and that could change,” I say, watching him squeeze a disgusting amount of mustard on the ham sandwich he brought from home. “The jail was pretty grim,” I say, but then I see Caylie coming toward our table with a