Here She Lies

handcuffs dangling off their belts.
    “I’m sorry, Annie. I really am,” Lazare said. “But now we have an eyewitness and evidence.”
    I guessed I knew then, but still I didn’t fully believe it.
    One of the officers approached me as he snapped open a handcuff. No, I thought, and against my will I started to cry.
    “That really isn’t necessary, is it?” I asked.
    “It’s the law,” he said, and the officer bound my wrists behind my back while Lazare spoke:
    “Anais Milliken-Goodman, you are under arrest for the murder of Zara Moklas. Anything you say can be held against you in a court of law...” The rest was a blur until he stopped reciting the legal catechism and paused to search for words. “Annie, listen, I’m—”
    “Don’t say you’re sorry!”
    He sighed and didn’t say it again.
    “The blood tests,” I said. “Tell me, because I don’t believe this is happening. Tell me.”
    “The blood is yours.”
    “So what you’re saying is that Julie and I aren’t identical?” I didn’t really believe that, either; nothing in me had ever truly questioned our inherent sameness. “Go ahead, Detective. Lay it on. Tell me.”
    “Actually, you and Julie are identical. But your blood shows a vital difference: lactation hormones.”
    “And you think you found my blood—”
    “No, Annie, we did find your blood — at the crime scene, and on the sweater with traces of Zara’s blood, and it’s conclusively yours.”
    My brain was whizzing through a maze, looking for entries and exits, desperate for release from this illogical knot. How had they found my blood at the scene of a crime I didn’t commit? How had my blood gotten onto the sweater? I thought of the moment, as I was leaving Bobby, when my elbow buckled the stained glass on our front door... but the glass itself hadn’t broken... I hadn’t gotten cut from that. It made no sense. How?
    “Wait a minute, Detective.” My wavering voice rose an octave; it was someone else’s voice, not mine. “Soiffer never said anything about a sweater when he saw Julie kill Zara, did he?”
    “So you took it off and then put it back on,” Lazare said. “There are various explanations for that.”
    “I didn’t kill Zara,” I said. “Please listen to me: I did not kill her.”
    “Those are only words, Annie.”
    “What if you’re wrong, Detective? I mean, peopleget sentenced to death on conclusive evidence that isn’t conclusive in the end.”
    “This isn’t wrong. It was double- and triple-tested. I didn’t want any mistakes.”
    “Detective Lazare,” I said, my shackled wrists burning, “before you go through with this, I want you to think about something really carefully: Why would I kill Zara Moklas?”
    “Good question.” The thin smile, the cool eye. He nodded to the cops to take me away.

Chapter 13
    When I first stepped into my cell at the Berkshire House of Correction in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, all I saw was hard surfaces: concrete floor, cinder-block walls, a low stainless-steel toilet with no seat, a tiny stainless-steel sink, bars on a slit of a window, a concrete slab with a thin, stained mattress that was to be my bed. But little by little I began to study the cell’s details and was surprised by how much I found. People had been here, proving that I was not really alone; and as the hours passed the ghosts of my cell kept me company. Their smells: sour, musky and a little sweet. Their stains: on the floor by the bed and in the corner near the toilet. Their scratches: on the sides of the sink, the corners of the slab-bed and every single bar. Especially their wall etchings: I will be stronger when this is done; I am a gif in a box, when they unrap me they will no I am good; pls forgive me mama. What had these women been accused of? This was a holding cell in the Department of Corrections, like the clipboard onyour computer that holds the cut before the paste, or the garbage can before it’s emptied.
    Correction. Department of. Who named it that? Never before had I thought about that term: correction. I had worked in a prison and never really thought it through! No one was perfect and in every society there were mistakes, errors, and these errors (these people) sometimes needed correction. Sometimes the wrong people were corrected. Sometimes the uncorrected were released still riddled by error. Sitting here, I kept thinking of my father’s old typewriter and how its individual keys leapt at the page to strike a