Free A Private Sorcery by Lisa Gornick

shopping list. Milk, fruit, stamps. I cannot think of anything else to buy. I cannot imagine what I will do once I get back to the house.
    Sometime after Newark, I doze off. When I wake, you are in my mind’s eye: a crescent moon on a thin mattress on the floor of your cell. Your eyes are open and there are water bugs and I worry that you are cold. That old feeling from when you and Marc were babies and I would spend the nights in and out of my bed going to lift one or the other of you crying from your crib. That anxious sleepy look on your face as you stood clutching the bars. Maybe that’s it. The bars. Are you clutching the bars?
    I WRITE YOU EVERY DAY . Long, struggling letters, some of which I know better than to mail. After a week, I see that they could be titled like country-and-western songs: How Could I Have Failed to See Your Pain, What Have You Done to Yourself, What Have I Done to You, You Must Be Strong: The Travails of Life Are the Iron in the Steel (this one I don’t send), I Will Stand by You Through Thick and Thin.
    You don’t respond. Morton reassures me that you’re receiving the letters, that you’re doing well with the barbiturate detox and that you’ve told him to tell me you will write when you feel able. I don’t believe you’ve sent such a message, particularly in the middle of the night when I lie in the dark, my routine now shattered so that like your mother I am up until three and asleep half the morning.
    In the middle of your second week in jail, Morton calls to tell me that the grand jury date has been changed to Friday, March 13.
    â€œGreat. Friday the thirteenth.”
    Morton doesn’t respond. As always, I am surprised that other people are not superstitious the way I am, that they don’t walk around saying touch wood and reaching down to tap the leg of a chair. Superstition has always struck me as not what it seems, not a belief in magic, but rather a belief that it is beneficial to be on guard. If you worry about even implying something might go well, you’re less likely to overlook that your wings are attached with beeswax that will melt in the sun.
    I hear Morton swallow. “There’s something else. If they return an indictment, which they’re going to do ninety-nine percent chance, I’m going to recommend he enter a guilty plea.”
    â€œA guilty plea?”
    â€œMost of them, by this time, are so eager to get out, they’d sell their mother. Saul, though, doesn’t have the heart to defend himself. But even if he did, I’d still say it’s the way we got to go. These guys have a rocksolid case. It’s like telling a terminal cancer patient to plan for a cruise next winter. Don’t make any sense.”
    I don’t like the analogy. Morton senses this immediately. He’s careless in certain ways, and then can turn around and be exquisitely perceptive.
    â€œOkay, bad metaphor, simile, whatever the hell you call it, but you get the point. If we give them a guilty, we can work on cutting a deal: they drop the state’s manslaughter two, we take burglary and conspiracy to distribute controlled substances. Judges go a lot lighter on a guilty plea than a guilty verdict at trial.”
    â€œIf he pleads guilty, what happens after that?”
    â€œHe stays where he is another couple of weeks while they do the presentencing investigation. That’s the report the federal probation department writes recommending sentencing parameters to the judge. They’d probably interview you, Rena, some people from the hospital. We’d have a good chance of painting him as a good guy gone astray. Then there’s another hearing when the sentencing is done.”
    Hearing probation , my hopes soar. “You mean he might get probation?”
    â€œNo. I’m sorry, Leonard.” It’s the first time he’s used my name. “That’s just the department that does the report. These are