The Difference Between Giving and Taking
May 2034
The mandatory minimum for murder in juvenile court in Connecticut was twenty-five years, with parole eligibility after fifteen. Her first application for parole was denied; her second was approved. Perhaps it was the use of the technique at the hearing, perhaps it was just the whims of people who happened to be in a good mood when thinking about her application. It didn’t matter. The whole process had been put in motion by her lawyer on her mother’s request. Amanda had very little input whatsoever.
At the hearing, she just stood in the too-bright courtroom and shivered, the air conditioning roaring so loudly that she couldn’t hear the muffled words of people deciding her fate. She let the tears come, leaving little trails of ice against her skin. She resisted the urge to flick her tongue out and lick them as they crawled down her face and collected at the corners of her mouth.
When they said that her request for parole was approved, she didn’t hear the words until her lawyer leaned closer to her and repeated it in her ears.
“Oh,” she said. “Okay.”
She stopped crying on cue, and thanked everyone at the hearing in a mechanical voice at her lawyer’s prompting.
If someone had asked her if she wanted to leave the prison, she would have needed to lie to answer the question. Luckily, this was not a question that anyone bothered to ask— they assumed that they knew the answer already. They didn’t even bother asking her if she was happy that her request for parole had been granted.
She didn’t mind the facility they kept her in, although she knew that she should have resented the highly regimented days and the lack of freedom. Any normal person would have. It was funny, in an abstract way, that a place with an ostensible goal and treatment plan to make her a more normal and well adjusted member of society, if they succeeded at that goal, would make her less able to cope with the world inside the walls. Of course, that wasn’t the goal, even if they said it was. The goal was to make the residents compliant. There was a difference between compliancy and normality— that was something that Amanda knew very well.
She didn’t like the ward, but nor did she hate it. She considered herself incapable of having a visceral reaction to it either way. All she could do was make a list of the facts of the situation. If phrased as “When you’re in jail, you can’t ride horses,” people understood that to mean “I hate being here,” imbuing the phrase with meaning it didn’t exactly have. Not that Amanda minded lying. When someone asked how she was feeling , she would oblige them, the little social lies that made the society of the prison function.
Some other facts about the ward: her medication made her dizzy and made her hands shake; it gave her heart palpitations and severe headaches that lasted for days at a stretch, and as one faded out the next one faded in, so that there was no boundary between them; it dulled her thoughts further and further, to the point where when someone spoke to her it could take seconds for her to realize it and form a response; they were all vegetarians in the ward now: soy protein was the order of the day, now that meat had gotten prohibitively expensive for the prison’s budget; the air conditioners broke in the summer, and the sweat made it hard to breathe; she had gotten her GED while in there; since the residents were only allowed to keep a certain number of possessions, every few months Amanda did a ruthless pruning, throwing away her art-therapy paintings and giving her knitted projects to anyone else who wanted them; someone had gotten concerned about knitting needles as a safety threat, despite Amanda never once having caused trouble while in the ward, and so she had been reduced to finger knitting; if her hands didn’t shake so much, she might have asked to take up tatting instead; they were only given limited time and privacy to shower, so she had started getting her hair cut short to make it faster to wash.
All of these things formed the fabric of her life, facts upon which her day-to-day decisions (such as they were) were made. She tried to be conscious of making decisions: today I will choose to walk on the left side of the hallway, today I will reverse the position of my pillow and sleep facing the other direction, today they are serving peas at lunch and I will not eat them. These motions had as little meaning as any other, but she thought that if, when they let her out, she did not maintain her capacity to choose to do things, she would stand outside, watching the light shift through the leaves of the trees, doing nothing and thinking nothing and saying nothing, until she froze or starved to death.
She lived a meaningless life, in prison or out of it. It wouldn’t matter in any way if she died. She felt like she had even less of a life than an animal did— even less meaning. Animals would seek to continue their lives, would seek to escape from intolerable cages, would seek a mate. She did none of these things, just placidly accepted what happened to her.
She sometimes thought about attempting to find a meaning in her existence. There must be some kind of grand project that she could dedicate her life to: youth sentencing reform, or raising money for victims of tsunamis in poor countries, or something like that. She thought about writing all the possibilities down and putting them in a hat, and pulling one out and pursuing that goal monomaniacally. The type of person that she was would be a boon to any organization; she could get anything done.
The trouble was that she already had given her life to something, or she thought she had. Seventeen years of her life had been devoted to a single purpose, and she had expected that the whole rest of it would be as well. Being let out of prison, she was unmoored without the scapegoat’s tether around her neck.
But the idea of seeking out anything else exhausted her, though perhaps it was the medication, and so in the final days after her parole judgment had come in, the last days she would spend in the ward, she simply slept, and she dreamed about horses.
When they released her, they made it clear that she would need to live with her mother for some amount of time, per the terms of her parole. This was to make sure she was on good behavior, and that she wouldn’t murder anyone else. Fine.
Her mother fretted over her like she was a child as they left the prison, despite her being in her thirties now. It was clear that she was only doing this because it was the thing she ought to do— she didn’t care about Amanda except as a task to check off a list. But that suited both of them just fine. Amanda spoke to her like she spoke to the therapists at the ward, with answers to questions that people wanted to hear that probably did ring a little false, but there was no sense in worrying her mother. She was providing her with a place to live, and money enough that she would never have to work a day in her life, if she didn’t want to. This was for the best, because she doubted she would be able to find gainful employment in a traditional career, with a murder conviction and almost half her life (more than half of her conscious life) spent locked away.
Stepping outside the walls for the first time in years, Amanda couldn’t immediately see what had changed. She hadn’t watched the news while in the ward; the world might as well have stopped existing aside from the tiny slice of it that the prison contained. The trees outside were the bright green of spring, and the sky was blue. These were universal constants.
But cars were electric now, and they were so quiet that when she started to cross the street to get to the parking lot across from the prison, her mother grabbed her arm and shrieked as she almost walked directly into the path of an oncoming vehicle. It would have been darkly funny to be hit by a car the instant after regaining her freedom. Poetic. Her mother’s fingers digging into her upper arm hurt, and she shook the touch off.
Looking out the passenger window of her mother’s car on the way home, she thought about how she hadn’t gotten her driver’s license, and had forgotten everything about how to use a car. She would be trapped in her mother’s house, or within walking distance, unless her mother wanted to drive her somewhere. Perhaps it didn’t matter; she had nowhere in particular to go. She doubted that her mother would sign her up for driving lessons.
The town nearly looked the same as it did in her memory: none of the roads had shifted position, though the grass of the golf course had gone brown and scraggly. This sight, a snatched glance through the trees as her mother took the corner too quickly, reminded her of a dream she had once had.
“Did Murray’s close?” she asked her mother, naming the course.
“What?”
“The grass— it doesn’t look right.”
Her mother glanced over at her. “The drought,” she said. “The county doesn’t let them use the municipal water for it anymore.”
“Oh.”
Once that had been pointed out to her, she noticed similar signs of decay across the town. Houses stood empty; pools that should have been filled this month were drained; the highway, even when they were turned towards New York, was freakishly empty. She soon noticed why: when they drove past a gas station, the price on the flickering sign read fifteen dollars a gallon.
She pictured horses trampling over the landscape of the dry and dead golf course, leaping over the potholes in the roads, racing the lonely electric car as they drove down the wide streets. The vision was so clear to her that her breath caught in her throat.
Home was the same as she had left it, though some of the furniture was new, and her mother had taken down the picture of her and Lily (and Honeymooner) that had previously adorned the wall in the den. That was fine. She had brought her own creased and battered copy of the photo, and she taped it up in her bedroom, which was completely untouched, all her clothes hanging up in her closet like she had been gone just a weekend and not half a lifetime.
The past seventeen years of her life had vanished; she was a child again.
Over dinner, her mother nervously picked at her pasta and watched Amanda, in the dim but warm mood lighting of the dining room.
“Is something wrong?” her mother asked. Amanda was carefully separating out the pieces of chicken from the meal, pushing them to the side of her plate.
“I haven’t eaten meat in four years,” she said.
“You’re a vegetarian?” her mother asked faintly. “You should have said. I would have…” She trailed off, unable to find a way to fill the silence. She was in her sixties now, the wrinkles sagging around her jowls, and Amanda studied her with her piercing gaze.
“No,” Amanda said. “The prison didn’t feed us any. I should reintroduce it to my diet slowly. Maybe I don’t like it anymore.” She speared a single piece of chicken on her fork, held it up to the light, and put it in her mouth, chewing contemplatively.
“Oh. I didn’t know that.”
Amanda had no response. Her mother had visited rarely, and on the rare visits it had never been worth discussing in detail the dietary habits of prisoners (which often would have scandalized and disgusted her), so it had never come up.
The silence stretched on, long and painful, interrupted only by the wet sounds of creamy alfredo being pushed around their plates.
“Do you have anything that you want to do, any thoughts on what you’re going to do with yourself, now that you’re home?” her mother asked finally.
“No,” Amanda said.
“Well, you’ll have time to think about it. You could go to school— community college, or UConn. I can make some calls, find you someone to help you put together an application— I don’t know how it works for non-traditional students. You could live here while you did that, and then maybe…”
“Why?”
Her mother pinched her lips tightly shut, the withered expression like she had licked a slice of lemon. “It would be good to make something with the rest of your life. Didn’t your parole application mention that you had plans for what to do with yourself?”
Amanda let the silence stretch on. She was a little too used to stringing her therapists along, pushing them just to the edge of anger, that she had almost forgotten that her mother was a much less professional person than they were, that she was liable to break into tears or yell, or otherwise try to twist Amanda with some sort of guilt-inducing speech. None of that fazed her at all, but she could avoid it for now.
“Maybe,” she said, which was enough to let her mother sigh and deflate, rather than holding herself like a scarecrow with a wooden pole for a spine.
“Or maybe you could start a business,” she said. “You always loved Steve Jobs. Always talking about him. You’re smart—”
“Maybe I’ll go into acting,” Amanda said. “Or art. I think the infamy would give me a leg up.”
Her mother couldn’t find anything to say to that, though she turned several different colors, first pale white and then red.
Amanda changed the subject. “Is Lily still living around here?”
Her mother choked on her diet soda. “I wouldn’t know.”
“Oh. Too bad.”
“You aren’t thinking of… speaking to her.” It wasn’t phrased as a question— it seemed to be a condition that her mother was laying out.
“I used to write her letters,” she said, as though her mother hadn’t said anything. “But the only address I had for her was her family’s house. I don’t know if they moved, and so the mail never reached her, or if she got them and just didn’t write me back.”
“I don’t know why you would do a thing like that,” her mother said. “It’s really— obscene.”
“She’s my friend. I think. Why shouldn’t I write to her?”
Her mother was unused to the laws of prison life, and so she failed to watch Amanda take her pills after dinner. She flushed one day’s worth down the toilet, idly wondering what antipsychotics might do to the fish and the frogs when the chemicals leeched their way out of the septic tank and into the groundwater.
Her head was feeling clearer already, though that was maybe just the newness of being out of prison. Novelty made it easier to focus, easier to fix the world around her as real, rather than beige walls that slipped forwards and backwards, the routine that never changed shape in years and years.
When the sun had gone down and the whole house was quiet, she stood in her bedroom and looked at herself in the floor-length mirror, stripping her clothes off and dropping them to the floor so that she could investigate her body in the glass, in a way that she hadn’t been able to do for a long time. She craned her neck and looked at her backside, smoothed her hands over the skin of her chest and stomach, picked at a cyst on her thigh, combed her fingers through her tangle of pubic hair.
Thirty-three. She didn’t look it, she decided. The strange slackness of her emotionless face had kept it young, and her body hadn’t changed much in prison, at least not any more than it would have anyway when she finished puberty. She could pass for twenty-four, twenty-five, and if any stranger asked her age, she decided that would be what she would tell them. Not vanity— people just treated young women better than old ones. That was a lesson the prison taught, too. If she needed a favor from a stranger, she would be twenty-four.
She turned herself around and around in the mirror, twitching her face into different expressions, holding her hands out and watching them shake. She watched the tremors until she clenched her hands into fists, and dropped them to her sides.
She tried to sleep, but found it difficult in a bed that was too soft, and without the snoring of five or six roommates. She closed her eyes and pictured floating over town, visiting empty mansions.
Lily’s house was probably empty, the pool was probably drained. Honeymooner stood in the bottom of it, hooves clattering against the chipped tiles, trapped. His neighs echoed against the walls of the pool, crashing in Amanda’s ears like waves.
Her mother was gone during the day. Although she was more than old enough and rich enough to retire, she considered relaxation a kind of professional and personal failing, and retirement was kin to death. She might not have said this out loud to Amanda, but it was true and easy to read in every aspect of her behavior. She made herself a pot of coffee and left for her office in the city every morning at the exact same time, a prisoner’s routine for a free woman.
This left Amanda in the house by herself. She broke into her mother’s computer (easy) and read the news. She watched an old movie on TV. She stood in the backyard like a statue for hours, watching the birds and the peculiar red bugs that she had never seen before land on the trees in great numbers.
This went on for several days. Her mother made vague attempts to get her to do something productive with her time, but Amanda found ways to brush her off, and was expecting to continue to do so for as long as possible.
But after several days, she began to feel the physical effects of going cold-turkey off her medication hit her like a truck. Her nose ran, and she ached like she had a fever, but she wasn’t running a temperature. And she felt a simultaneous tiredness and restless energy: her mind was lethargic, but her legs had to move.
She left the house and started walking in a random direction, striding down the center of the road. There were hardly any cars on the street, and when one wailed its horn at her, she stepped just enough to the side to allow it to edge by her. The novelty of walking down the middle of the street made it feel like a dream, and she started running, galloping like a horse.
It was a hot day in late spring, the summer just beginning to crest the year, and the air was still and thick around her. She generated her own breeze running, closing her eyes for long stretches of flat road, the asphalt an endless, empty track with no obstacles to interrupt her. Sweat crawled sideways across her forehead, and her breath and heartbeat were painfully fast. She was out of shape— unsurprising, since the prison had no space to run in. She kept running past the point of exhaustion, wondering how far she could go before her legs gave out underneath her, picturing herself crawling across the asphalt until her arms gave out too, and she would have to lay on the road like a dead animal. She didn’t quite reach that point, since she arrived at where she was going, even though she hadn’t had a destination in mind when she started.
Lily’s house, exactly as she had pictured it.
The realtor’s sign out front swung in the tepid breeze, and the lawn and once-carefully pruned shrubs were overgrown. One of the windows on the bottom floor was boarded over with plywood; someone must have broken it. The exterior walls needed to be power-washed, and the roof looked like it had been damaged in a hurricane— some of the shingles were missing or torn, and there was a curious place where it sagged. It had been a new house twenty years ago— built this millennium— but it hadn’t been taken care of for an unknown number of years.
Still, the damage still seemed too much for just neglect. Perhaps it had been poorly constructed in the first place, a beautiful facade over a cheap skeleton. She stared at it for some time, memorizing the gestalt, the dark and empty windows like eyes.
In the time that she stood there, no cars drove down the lonely road, and the birds squabbling in the trees were the only signs of life.
Without any fear, Amanda strode up the empty driveway, walked up the stairs, and leaned sideways to peer in through the closest front window. The interior of the house was dark and completely deserted. The sunlight falling in through the windows let her see the curve of the stairwell in the front entryway, but little else. There were no rugs on the floors, no photographs hanging on the walls, no furniture at all.
She continued around to the back of the house, hopping over the low locked gate, though she was clumsy, and scraped her thigh for her trouble. The blood dripped down her leg, red blood on white skin inverting the white on red stripe of her shorts. Idly, she touched the shallow wound and rubbed the blood across her fingers, thinking about smearing it across the lintel of the house.
The back patio was covered with the remains of last year’s fallen leaves, clumped up into a thick mat. She was tempted to break the sliding glass doors into the house, like a robber, just so that she could go in and look around. She even hefted a decorative rock for the purpose, but she decided that it wasn’t worth another five years in prison, which was what she would get if she immediately broke her parole. So, instead, she just walked around the house and let the decay overwrite her memories of the place. There was nothing in the building now, but Amanda tried the handles on the doors anyway.
Was Lily aware that the house looked like this? Would she enjoy the decay? It had been Mark’s house, and they had moved into it after her mother married him.
Lily might even have the same dream that Amanda did, about the whole suburb collapsing in on itself. The weight of the lichens finding perch on the walls, the wind and rain bearing down on the houses, these forces enough to bring every building down, the roofs caving in on the people inside.
Amanda pictured Lily still inside, her shape moving like a ghost from one window to the other, and then she pictured the house falling down like someone separated it out at the seams, walls tumbling apart silently, crumbling or unfolding. In the center of the ruins was Lily, in the shape of Honeymooner. She rose out of the rubble and trampled across the sky, flattening other houses on the way.
Amanda ran after her ghost, leaping the fence back to the road, and running, letting the exertion drive every thought from her mind.
It probably wouldn’t be impossible to hunt Lily down. Check Facebook— did people still use Facebook? — check the graduation records of all the Ivies and call the alumni offices with a contrived excuse to contact her — text her old phone number and see if she answered.
She kept thinking over the idea of trying to speak to Lily. She didn’t want it, there was no pressing reason to reach out to her, but she was used to having the purpose of giving her life to Lily. Having her life be her own again made it even more pointless than before. If she spoke to Lily, perhaps there would be some other task for her to complete, some other sacrifice to make. At the very least, she wondered if it would stir something within her to learn if her sacrifice had been worth anything. She doubted it would, but it was worth an attempt.
As a child, she had tested herself quite a lot, trying to stir some feeling inside herself: reaching for the hot stove to try to generate fear, denying herself candy to manufacture want. None of it had done much, and she had stopped most of these self-experiments as a teen, and there was no need for them in prison. After all, prison was the ultimate test of desire, and it had failed to move her much at all.
But after several days of deliberation, she pilfered one of her mother’s credit cards, and then walked the six miles to Walmart to buy a burner cellphone. It was worth having, in case she needed to do something without her mother’s knowledge.
Six miles was a long way, through the winding suburbs. She got a close look at the decay, walking past mansion after mansion. Even the ones that were still occupied had a weary sense about them, and she never saw any people, not even children in the backyards or faces in the windows. The fences were taller than they used to be, and the stone walls had metal spikes across the top that she hadn’t seen before. The only voices she heard were from the security systems making noise at her as she passed, chirping out an alert for her to keep moving. She might have been the only living thing in the world.
Clouds were gathering above the trees, thick cumulo-nimubs shapes moving in from the ocean and blocking the sun. By the time that she reached the expanse of the Walmart parking lot, in what passed for the center of the town, where the highway met the suburban streets, it had started to rain. Thick, hot drops of water hit her nose.
The parking lot was almost empty of cars, but overturned shopping carts randomly littered its furthest reaches, and the seagulls sat on them and laughed at Amanda as she passed. Huddled under the overhang at the front of the building were some hundred people, milling around or looking down the road, waiting for a bus that may or may not be on the way. Most of them were wary of the rain, which was coming down harder and harder. By the time Amanda reached the storefront, it was descending in sheets. Pigeons cooed in the rafters above, littering the ground with feces.
Inside the store, it drummed on the ceiling, dripping down in a few places where employees ran to put buckets to stop the leaks from forming puddles. The sound of it hammering on the roof drowned out the tinny announcements and advertisements overhead.
Amanda wandered down the bright aisles, picking up items at random and putting them back down, adjusting her mental model of prices after nearly two decades of inflation at work. In the clothing section, she pulled on rain jackets and baseball caps, trying them on in the mirror and pulling faces at her reflection, ignoring the eagle-eyed employee stationed at the corner of the section, watching her every move.
Fashions weren’t that different from when she had been put away. Things moved on a twenty year cycle, she remembered someone saying once. Her generation was now nostalgic enough to want to buy things that had been in vogue when they were younger. She fingered a jean jacket with an embroidered horse’s head on the back, and flower motifs on the arms and collar. She slung it over her arm— if her mother needed her to explain the charge on her credit card, she should buy something reasonable as an excuse.
And potato chips (sour cream and onion) in a family sized bag.
And an energy drink (blue watermelon).
And, at last, the burner cellphone, which required her to sign her full name for at the register.
Outside Walmart, the bus had come and gone, taking away all the people who had been waiting. Amanda sat down on the sidewalk, far enough away from the rain that she remained dry, and ate her potato chip feast, watching the parking lot fill with water. It wasn’t draining, or it wasn’t draining faster than the rain was coming down. By the time she was halfway through her bag of chips, it was lapping in waves driven by the wind against the edge of the sidewalk, and the sky showed no signs of letting up. Thunder cracked in the distance. The seagulls were bobbing across the water, floating on it with their heads held high and nipping at whatever garbage happened to rise to the top of the floodwaters. When one drifted by her, Amanda threw some potato chips in its direction, and it greedily snatched them from the water.
Perhaps all of Walmart would be washed away, lifted up from its foundations and carried in one piece down to the sea. And the seagulls would be the only survivors. The pigeons above her wouldn’t make it. They weren’t as good swimmers. Any of them who flapped out into the rain came back looking defeated and bedraggled, and they sat in their high perches and shuffled back and forth, or strutted about the dry sidewalk like they owned the place.
Someday they would own the world, she thought. The meek shall inherit the Earth. Ha ha.
She should start walking back home. Six miles would take her two hours to walk, maybe even longer if she had to fight the rain all the way. Her mother would be home soon, and would almost certainly call the police if Amanda didn’t make it back.
But she didn’t feel like moving, and so she kept sitting on the sidewalk, watching the rain. She idly looked at the internet on her phone, looking up Lily on Facebook. She didn’t seem to use it often, but it confirmed that she was still alive— the most recent posts on her page were from her aunt wishing her happy birthday several months ago. Amanda scrolled through her photos, intending to go back to high school, but stopped at one taken just after Lily’s college graduation in 2024, the last period of time for which there were recent photos— the abrupt thinning of the photo record made Amanda suspect that a lot of the newer ones had been deleted. In the picture, Lily sat proud on a young horse, wearing her graduation robes and mortarboard, holding her diploma in front of her. The caption was just “graduation gift.”
The photo was taken at the stables where Amanda’s family had boarded Honeymooner. Amanda had a lifetime ban, of course, but she zoomed in on the photo, looking into the horse’s eyes, and wondered if she would get a chance to see the creature in person.
She hovered her fingers over the text messenger app, typed in Lily’s number, pulled from the depths of her memory, and said,
AMANDA: hey lily, this is amanda.
AMANDA: just letting you know i’m in town
The response took so long to come that she began to assume Lily had changed her number, or she had misremembered it. She watched the rain and the flood, which was now creeping up over the edge of the sidewalk and threatening to get her wet. Even those who had arrived in cars were hesitant about walking out to them in the rain, and most stayed behind the sliding glass doors of the store.
LILY: They let you out?
AMANDA: parole. you’re eligible after 15 years
AMANDA: as long as i don’t murder anyone else, i’m free
AMANDA: haha
LILY: It’s not funny.
LILY: Why are you contacting me?
LILY: My lawyers advised me never to speak to you.
AMANDA: are you still living around here?
LILY: Why?
AMANDA: i need a ride home from walmart.
AMANDA: it’s the least you can do.
She was being manipulative, and she knew it, but Lily was smart enough to not be manipulated if she didn’t want to be.
LILY: Fine.
Amanda smiled— it was a ghoulish expression, but the only creature that saw it was the seagull that was in the process of stealing her bag of chips. She let the bird have it, let it rip the waxed paper bag apart from end to end to get at the meal inside. It screamed with pleasure, and defended its winnings from all comers: the pigeons that tried to waddle up to it, and its fellows that flapped down towards it on the ground, spraying Amanda with grimy rainwater.
It didn’t take long for Lily to arrive, and when she did, pulling up in her silent electric car, she sprayed a tail of water up into the air. She rolled down the window and yelled at Amanda, still sitting on the ground cross-legged. “Well, get in!”
Amanda didn’t need to be asked twice. She slipped inside and got the fine leather seat wet. The people gathered under Walmart’s roof, waiting for the bus, looked at them both with no small amount of hatred as they drove off. The rain beat down, drowning out the radio. The interior of the car smelled like cheap cigarettes, and there was a pack of them crammed into the cupholder.
“I thought you just smoked to get back at Mark,” Amanda said, picking up the pack and opening it, counting how many were left (five).
“Luckily, not everything in my life has revolved around that for the past two decades,” Lily replied. She yanked the carton out of Amanda’s hand as she turned out of the parking lot, making the seagulls scatter.
Lily looked— ageless was the best word for it. She was obviously a woman and no longer a teen, but it would have been impossible to guess at an age for her without already knowing it. She had bleached her hair, and wore it in a flattering braid, pinned up at the back. She was dressed casually, jeans and a white button down blouse. She wore no jewelry, except for gold stud earrings. Amanda studied her hands on the steering wheel— no rings.
“You’re not married.”
“And you’re not delicate.”
Amanda shrugged. “Prison isn’t meant to improve your social graces. Do you want me to be polite?”
Lily said nothing for a while. The light at the intersection in front of them changed from green to red, and she skidded the car to a stop.
“Some weather, isn’t this?” Amanda asked.
“You can do better than that.”
“Can I? My mother said there was a drought. This doesn’t look like a drought to me.”
“It’s not like your prison was that far away from here. You know exactly what the weather’s like.”
“There weren’t many windows, and we weren’t allowed to go wander around outside very often,” Amanda pointed out. “It’s prison. I didn’t pay attention to what was going on outside.”
“This will probably be one of the only rains we get this summer,” she said. “Until hurricane season, anyway. We’ll be lucky if we don’t get bad fires in August. We did last year.”
“Really? Here?”
“No, in Texas,” Lily said. “Yes, here.”
“What was it like?”
“I don’t know. I left town when it started.”
“Did you take your horse with you?”
Lily looked over at her. “How do you know about my horse?” Her voice was suspicious and sharp.
“I looked at your Facebook. Graduation present. Where’d you go to school, by the way?”
“Ivy league.”
“So, Cornell?”
Lily scowled. “That trick doesn’t really work, you know. Sometimes people just don’t actually want to brag. I went to William & Mary.”
“I didn’t know you’d ever miss an opportunity to brag. That one’s far away.” She half wondered if Lily was lying, but it would be too easy for her to check where she went to school, so she didn’t.
“Yeah.”
“I’ve got my GED,” Amanda said, injecting cheer into her voice. “Figured it would be good for my future prospects.”
“Do you have any of those?”
“No. Of course not.”
“I didn’t mean that.”
“Yes, you did. I don’t mind. It’s true.”
There was silence again in the car. “I’m divorced,” Lily said finally.
“Ah.”
“You won’t ask me why?”
“Why are you divorced? A better question is usually why you got married to someone in the first place.”
“The minute I started dreaming about what he would look like without a head, I kicked him out of my house.”
“Practical,” Amanda said. “Though if you had waited for me to get out, you could have made your dreams a reality. I really would be the perfect scapegoat.”
“I’m not a murderer.”
Amanda laughed aloud at that, manufacturing the sound, though Lily hadn’t meant it as a joke. Somehow, her words sounded like she believed it. “What are you doing these days?”
“Working,” she said.
“Doing what?”
“Law.”
“Really?”
“I’m a public defender.”
“Interesting.”
“Why does that surprise you?”
“I’m not surprised. You didn’t seem the type to take on charity cases.”
Lily frowned— Amanda had gotten on her nerves immediately. She wondered what it would take to get Lily to stop the car and drop her off at the side of the road.
“Why are you still around here?” Amanda asked. “I saw your mom sold your old house— I figured you’d move away.”
“Why does it matter?”
“Why did you come pick me up if you didn’t want me to talk to you?”
Lily gritted her teeth. “As you said, it was the least I could do.”
Amanda leaned against the window of the car, smudging it with her forehead. “Payment for services rendered.”
The car slid along the roads, the water coming up almost to the fenders when they dipped into the hollow between two hills.
“How’s your mother?” Amanda asked.
Lily didn’t answer that either. “What do you want from me?”
“Nothing. A ride home so I don’t have to walk six miles in the rain.”
“You’re not planning to blackmail me?”
“If I wanted to get something out of you, I would have tried to get it before I spent half my life in prison.”
Lily didn’t say anything for a minute. They rounded the last corner to the road where Amanda lived. “Was it bad— in prison?”
“It was prison,” Amanda said flatly. “What do you think?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. It’s over, anyway— unless you need me to do something else for you that will get me sent back. Though— repeat offender, they’d probably bump me up one security level. Minimum is pretty cozy— I bet medium is worse.”
“Why would you say that?”
Amanda shrugged. “Why shouldn’t I?” She picked at her fingernail, and when it came off, she rolled down the window and flicked the piece out into the driving rain. “It’s not like I have anything else to do with myself. Might as well do something interesting to get sent back there.”
“Jesus— you’re such a freak.”
Amanda smiled. “Did that feel good?”
“No,” Lily said. She glanced over at Amanda, who was now sticking her fingers into her mouth to clean out the remnants of sour cream powder from beneath her nails with her teeth, and picking the sticky bits of chewed potato chips out of the cracks in her molars. “You’re so gross. Stop that.”
Obediently, Amanda took her hand out of her mouth and wiped it on her pants. “You didn’t have to answer my text message,” she pointed out. “I would have just thought you had changed your number.”
“You would have found some other way to contact me.”
“I’m not that desperate. You didn’t answer my letters. I figured there was a reason.”
“Mail to a prison gets put in official records,” Lily said, as if explaining it to a child. “I couldn’t have it look like—”
“I get it.” The car was still moving, pulling up into Amanda’s driveway, but she was already unbuckling her seatbelt and pushing open the car door before the vehicle had come to a complete stop. The car dinged urgently, but Amanda hopped out, stumbling on the asphalt as Lily slammed the brakes. “You can’t be seen with me. You’d better get going before somebody does.”
“You forgot your jacket,” Lily said. The jean jacket with the horse’s head on the back had fallen into the footwell of the car. Lily grabbed it and tossed it at Amanda out the open door.
“Thanks.” Amanda slammed the car door shut, and Lily backed away before either of them could say anything else— though what was there to say?
Amanda expected to hear from Lily again— her implied excuse of being worried about blackmail obviously wasn’t the real reason she had answered the text message and drove across town to pick her up— and it only took two days for Lily to text her. It was after midnight, but Amanda was having difficulty sleeping, so she was awake, the secret burner phone hidden under her pillow. It buzzed in her ear when the message came in.
LILY: I thought you would text me again.
AMANDA: you can’t be seen with me. no point.
LILY: Do you want me to not contact you?
AMANDA: whatever you want
AMANDA: do you want something from me
LILY: No.
AMANDA: ok
LILY: You kept writing to me even though I never responded to your letters.
AMANDA: who else was i going to write to? there was nothing better to do
AMANDA: did you read them
LILY: Yes.
AMANDA: why
LILY: I thought they might be important.
AMANDA: lol. what important thing could i possibly have to say.
AMANDA: after the first five or six you probably should have realized that i wasn’t living a glamorous and exciting life behind bars. all i did was tell you about my dreams
LILY: Yeah. I know.
AMANDA: did they entertain you
LILY: Nothing more boring than hearing about somebody else’s dreams.
AMANDA: prison
LILY: Are you trying to make me feel guilty?
AMANDA: no
AMANDA: what would i get out of doing that
LILY: I don’t know. Jesus Christ.
LILY: You have to want something from me! Why would you keep talking to me otherwise?
AMANDA: maybe because you want something from me?
LILY: No
LILY: What do you want, Amanda?
She wasn’t going to be satisfied with nothing, with silence, with a statement of the truth, that Amanda didn’t— couldn’t— want anything from her. She cleared her mind, let her thoughts drift across the blank slate of her imagination, let herself list things that she could get from Lily, what she could demand. She remembered the photo of Lily on Facebook, the young brown stallion with the lively eyes.
AMANDA: I want to meet your horse.
Amanda was banned for life from the stables where Lily kept her thoroughbred, so they snuck in at night. To avoid getting identified on the stable’s security cameras, in case anyone watched the footage later, Amanda wore a baseball cap pulled low over her forehead, and her mother’s reading glasses perched on the end of her nose. Amanda had to break out of her mother’s house, but that was easy— her mother was asleep by nine-thirty, and Lily didn’t pull up with her car until one in the morning. They didn’t speak as they drove, and the whole town looked even more ghostly at night than it did during the day, Lily’s headlights carving out the skeletal shapes of trees blocking the curves of the road.
They pulled up on the crunching gravel of the stable’s parking area, and Amanda got out and leaned her elbows on the car roof for a moment, just listening to the sounds of the wind while Lily went over to deactivate the security system to let them into the stables. The air was heavy and hot. It was only late May, and the middle of the night, but it was already in the eighties. Only crickets chirped in the tall grasses— Amanda couldn’t hear any of the spring peeper frogs— and there seemed to be no lightning bugs, no matter how much she strained her eyes into the darkness to see them. Lily pulled the gate open.
The stables smelled the same as they had when she was a child: manure and straw and the hot scent of living, sweating creatures. The only change was the huge HVAC unit on the back wall, which thrummed and rattled, and the fact that there were only a quarter as many horses in the stables as there used to be. Most of the stalls were empty, even when Amanda peered over their doors to see if there might be foals or ponies in the stalls where horses’ heads didn’t stick out over the woden doors.
Lily silently led her towards the back of the stables, where her horse stood. He was awake, and stuck his head out of the stall to accept a pet from Lily. A gentle creature, huge and warm. Amanda looked into his eyes, and held out the apple she had brought for him. She felt his breath on her hand as he reached for it, and the wetness of his lips when he delicately plucked it from her palm.
“What’s his name,” she asked.
“Island Getaway.”
“Nice.” But Lily’s words were barely registering in her brain— she was consumed by watching the horse. His ears and tail twitching, the sloppy, crunching sounds of him eating the apple. Gently, she touched his nose.
“You aren’t going to ask to ride him, are you?”
“No,” Amanda said.
“Good. It’s too dark out.”
She ignored Lily completely, until she stepped around to the other side of Island Getaway, and their eyes met over the bridge of his nose.
“Thanks,” Amanda said. For the first time in her life, she was completely sincere as she said it.
Lily shrugged and looked away. “Whatever— it’s fine. If this is all you wanted to do after getting out of jail…”
“I feel like I’ve seen him in my dreams.” She rubbed Island Getaway’s neck.
“Do you always dream about horses?”
“Mostly.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” Amanda said. “My shrink would probably say it’s, you know, yearning for freedom or whatever. Or that it’s PTSD from what I did to Honeymooner.”
“And would your shrink be right?”
“I think I just like them.”
“Like them for real? I thought you weren’t capable of that.”
“What’s that religion that believes in reincarnation? I should get one of their priests or somebody to tell me that I was a horse in my past life— that’d explain it. Probably easy to find a crank you can pay to tell you what you want to hear.”
“Too bad you can’t ever own one again.”
“It’s fine,” Amanda said with a shrug. “It’s a little weird to own them, anyway. Like, they’re alive. I wouldn’t want to be owned, if I was him.” She leaned on the wall of the stable, looked in Island Getaway’s big, sweet, black eye. “Do you think this is a prison for him?”
“He’s domesticated,” Lily said derisively. “He couldn’t survive in the wild even if he wanted to.”
“That doesn’t mean he likes it.”
“You’d do great on the board of PETA.”
“I think I’d do better as a loner ecoterrorist. Like, God, what’s his name— the Unibomber. I’d be so good at that shit.”
“Don’t joke like that.”
“Why not?”
“It’s—”
“I’m not actually a killer, you know,” Amanda said. “In case you forgot.”
Lily looked away. “I hope you don’t plan to release Island Getaway into the wilds of Connecticut.”
“Nah.” She paused. “I didn’t really know if you’d do it, you know.”
“What are you talking about?”
“When I drank your cocktail. There was a better than even chance I’d wake up and nothing would have changed.” She shrugged. “It was pretty interesting to wake up covered in blood instead.”
“Why didn’t you turn me in?”
“Why would I?”
“If you weren’t expecting to— I took seventeen years of your life.”
“And what was I gonna do with that time?”
“Be the next Steve Jobs.”
“Sure.”
“Or college, live your life for real.”
“Why bother? It’s not like it mattered to me one way or the other.” She looked over at Lily. “Do you actually feel bad about it? Like, for real?”
Lily’s hands convulsed in fists, and then relaxed. “Believe it or not, I am capable of caring about other people.”
“Oh my God, you do. You feel bad for me. Wow.”
“Why does that surprise you?”
“You clearly don’t feel bad about the actual murder.”
“I was putting everyone out of our misery,” she said. Her voice held seventeen years of self-justification in it, like she repeated it before bed every night like a mantra. “It was the right thing to do.”
“The shrinks would love you in prison. They’d have a field day with that.”
“Why?”
“That kind of reason is the thing that gets people to kill again. Kill one shitty guy— well, the world’s better off, might as well kill another. Me? Freak psychotic break— that’s not that interesting. They just drug you until you don’t have a psyche to break from.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Stop apologizing. I don’t care.”
“It sure seems like you do!”
“Why? Because I’m talking about it? Not much else going on in my life to describe. Unless you want to hear about my dreams again.”
Lily didn’t say anything for a moment. “Maybe I do.”
Amanda kept petting the horse. “Why?”
“I don’t ever remember my dreams. I don’t think I ever have, in my life.”
“Sad.”
“You feel bad for me?”
“No. It’s just the thing to say.”
“Of course.”
Amanda ran her hands through Island Getaway’s mane. He stamped his hooves on the ground and whuffed out his breath until she stopped and went back to just resting her forehead on his thick neck. “Since I’ve gotten out— I don’t know. It’s weird. I guess my dreams have been updating themselves with the way this place looks now. I’m always wandering through here as a horse, all these empty streets and the houses collapsing, and nobody alive— but I’m more alone in these dreams than I used to be. And walking around— sometimes it’s like I can’t tell if I’m awake or dreaming. It looks the same. Like the whole world has ended, or is ending.”
“Maybe it is,” Lily said.
“No, I think it’s just a side effect of quitting my meds cold turkey,” Amanda replied, switching back to practicality.
“This place is dead.”
“Well, it was never alive. I thought you knew that— that everybody was going through the motions for the sake of appearances.”
“But it’s worse now.”
“Is it?”
“Since you got put away, at least.”
“You can’t blame me for breaking your illusion that things were good and perfect in the world— I don’t know what you thought was behind the mask.”
“No— I don’t. I just think it’s all falling apart. Not just here. The world.”
“Yes, the world is a bigger place than the Connecticut suburbs.”
“Stop it,” Lily demanded.
“Okay.”
They were both quiet again for a minute, until Amanda said, “Everything that anybody builds— as soon as it exists, making it exist gives it a way to get torn apart. Some people try their best to shore it up, no matter what that takes, and some people want to collapse it. Your mother held the building up— you yank it down, or you did once. I guess you’re respectable now.”
“And you?”
“Hunh?”
“What do you do?”
“Nothing,” Amanda said. “I guess I’m just waiting for all the walls to collapse, for the doors to fall open. It’s what I’ve been doing, anyway.”
“And then what?”
“Nothing,” Amanda said again. “I don’t have any ambitions. I told you— I live a worthless life.” She reached for the lifting latch on Island Getaway’s stable door, and she pulled the door open, letting the horse have the opportunity to step out, but he didn’t move. “But I guess we’re domesticated creatures. Even if the door is open—”
Lily swung the door shut, hitting it closed a little too hard. “Maybe prison broke you.”
“Doubt it. Even before— I used to just stand outside and spend hours like some fucking statue. I didn’t have a reason to do anything, so I didn’t.”
“You’re not making me feel less guilty.”
“I’m not trying to.”
“Great. Thanks.”
“You really don’t have to feel guilty. I did it myself. Probably if you had told me to just kill Mark, I would have. I probably would have done a lot for you.”
“Why?”
“I dunno. You had a purpose— I borrowed it for a while. It was— something to do.” She ran her hands over Island Getaway’s neck one last time, then leaned back against the stall door. “Out of prison— I don’t have a purpose anymore. I guess that’s why I texted you— maybe you’d have something for me to do.”
“Jesus— I’m not going to take the rest of your life too.”
“Wasn’t taking,” Amanda said with a yawn. “I think there’s a difference.”
“If you say so.”
“You wouldn’t have gone through with it if I hadn’t drank that thing on purpose.”
“I wouldn’t have?” Lily asked. “You don’t think I’m capable.”
“Oh, come on— you picked the rape drug for a reason. It would have been way easier to just get me blackout drunk if your plan had only needed me unconscious. It was, like, a thing for you.” She paused, tilted her head. “If I hadn’t woken up covered in blood— I wonder what you would have done with me. Hunh.”
“Don’t accuse me of something I didn’t—”
“I’m not accusing you,” Amanda said. “I’m just wondering.”
Lily’s face was contorted in a vivid grimace, one that Amanda couldn’t read much meaning into. She tried imitating the expression on her own face, as if doing so, like the technique, would give her an insight into Lily’s mind. It didn’t work, and only made Lily turn away. Amanda dropped the expression.
“I wouldn’t have minded, you know.”
“Yeah, you don’t mind anything,” Lily said. “That makes it worse.”
“Why?”
“You wouldn’t even mind if I tried to kill you,” she said.
Amanda pursed her lips and thought about it. “Will you? I don’t know what I’d do. It would be interesting—” She tilted her head and looked at Lily. “No, I’d have to fight back. It would look like you were defending yourself from me. I waited here for you, or lured you out here, so I could kill you, and you only escaped by killing me.”
“Stop it!”
“Okay. I don’t really know why this upsets you.”
Lily was silent, and Amanda stared at her for a while.
“You know what, forget it,” Lily said. “Are you done petting Getaway?”
“Yeah, sure,” Amanda said. “Bye, Getaway.” She stroked his nose one last time, and Lily began to walk towards the door of the stables. She held open the heavy wooden barn door for Amanda, who scuffed her sneakers in the loose hay on the concrete floor on her way over, kicking the pieces towards the stalls.
When she reached the door, she stopped directly in front of Lily, who wouldn’t look her in the eye, and instead was staring out into the darkness— the empty gravel lot, the field where obstacles were positioned for jump training, the colder blackness of the distant trees against the sky.
“What?” Lily said as Amanda stopped moving.
She had figured out what Lily wanted from her. She leaned forward, until her nose was almost against Lily’s face, the rim of her baseball cap shadowing both their faces. Lily opened her mouth in surprise, her breath coming shallowly. Amanda kissed her, and Lily fell weakly back against the door, though her hands tugged on the sides of Amanda’s jacket, the jean jacket with the horse’s head on the back.
When Amanda pulled away, she stared at Lily, waiting for her to say something.
She touched her lip, like she was going to wipe away the kiss, but then didn’t. “Did you just do that because you thought I wanted you to?” Lily asked.
“No,” Amanda lied.