Free New York Nocturne by Walter Satterthwait Page A

mattress, a threadbare cotton sheet, a flat pillow in a shabby cotton case, and a stiff brown woolen blanket. In the corner, about four feet from the floor, hung a small metal sink with a single faucet. A metal cup, identical to the one in the room upstairs, rested on the sink’s ledge. Underneath the sink was a single small metal bucket. Next to that, upright on the floor, someone had carefully placed a thin roll of brown toilet paper.
    No other cells were nearby. Mrs. Hadley had led me down three flights of stairs, along a cinder-block corridor, and into a small basement area. The cell took up half of it. The rest was stuffed with a jumble of old furniture—desks, chairs, stools, tables—hastily thrown together and thickly layered in dust.
    â€œWhat is this place?” I asked Mrs. Hadley. I meant: Where are the other cells? Where are the other prisoners? Surely a building the size of police headquarters would hold more prisoners than a single sixteen-year-old girl.
    Until that moment, she had not spoken to me. Now she smiled sweetly and said, “This is where we put the little girls who don’t tell the truth.”
    Her voice was much softer than I expected. But the softness and the sweetness of her smile made the words themselves sound patronizing and spiteful—as they were meant to, of course.
    I flushed. Spite is something with which I have never dealt well. It is simple naked cruelty, and even now, years later, I am always startled when someone actually wishes to be seen as cruel.
    â€œI am telling the truth,” I said.
    â€œIf you were,” she said with the absolute conviction of a minor functionary, “you wouldn’t be here.”
    She reached for the chain hanging from her belt, lifted the ring of keys, immediately found the one she wanted, and unlocked the barred door to the cell. She swung the door open and then turned to me, holding out her hand. “Purse,” she said.
    I handed it over. She clamped it under her arm, and once again I smelled the sharp aggressive tang of old, dried sweat. She held out her hand again and nodded to my wrist. “Watch,” she said.
    I hesitated. Susan, my stepmother, had given me the watch on my sixteenth birthday, a lovely Bulova with a narrow rectangular gold case and four small emeralds notched into each corner. It was my very first wristwatch.
    Impatiently, the woman twitched her fingers. “Watch.”
    I would not beg. I unfastened the band and handed it over. The time then was two thirty.
    I felt bereft, as though a good friend had abandoned me.
    Indifferently, Mrs. Hadley shoved the watch down into the pocket of her uniform. She jerked her head. “Inside,” she said.
    I swallowed, took a deep breath, and stepped into the cell.
    With that single step, everything changed. I went from being one kind of person, in one kind of life, to someone entirely different, with an entirely different and uncertain set of ragged possibilities.
    I was abruptly weak and frail. My breath left me, sighed itself hopelessly away, and, beneath my blouse, a droplet of perspiration wormed down my side like a small sinister snake.
    Mrs. Hadley shut the door. It clanged loudly. She locked it— click click —and then without another word she walked away, her heavy shoes snapping against the cement.
    Breathing quickly now, hyperventilating, I glanced around. Everything was horrid and menacing. But that thin brown roll of toilet paper, standing at attention beside the drab gray bucket, seemed especially ominous. Someone had used it before I arrived, perhaps more than one person—what had happened to them? Where were they now?
    I could still hear the distant brittle snap of Mrs. Hadley’s shoes. I did not start crying until it had faded into silence.
    Without a timepiece to contain it, time expanded like vapor, thinning, dissipating, until finally it vanished altogether.
    After I had cried myself dry once again, I lay there on