Come Out Tonight (44 page)

“Of course,” I reply.

“No,” Rhonda breaks in.
 
“We’ll be in town a few more days.
 
We’ll have to charter a plane.”

“But we have our tickets, dear,” Phillip says. “We’re going out tonight.”

“No, we won’t be using those,” Rhonda replies, a new look of determination on her face.

Phillip opens his mouth, but Rhonda isn’t finished.
 
“We are taking Sherry back with us, Phillip.
 
I don’t care what you say.”

“Yes, dear,” her husband says with a little smile.

“I’m ashamed of both of us,” Rhonda goes on.
 
“How can parents abandon their daughter when something so horrible has happened to her?
 
Now is when….”
 
She turns to him.
 
“What did you say?”

“I’m not fighting you, Rhonda.
 
You’re completely right, just as you always are.
 
It just took me a little longer to come around.”

Rhonda reaches over and squeezes her husband’s hand, a single tear trickling down her cheek to her smiling mouth.
 
“I love you,” she says.

HENRY

There’s a bright light in front of me.
 
I wonder where I am.
 
Is it heaven or hell?
  
But then I open my eyes to see I’m lying cockeyed on a dirty, soaking floor, a rumpled sheet on top of me, with a naked cot in the middle of the room alongside an upended chair.
 
Above me is a blinking fluorescent bulb, flaking cinder block ceiling and a broken pipe leaking brown, oozing shit.
 
“Hell,” I say.
 
“I’m still here.”
 

The light I thought was heaven is blazing through the small, barred window over to the filthy encrusted thing they call a sink.
 
It flickers on the small tarnished thing above the sink they call a mirror, bringing to light some streaky writing in what looks like wax or soap.
 
I pick myself up off the floor and approach the mirror.

“Fuckin fight for a change,” it says in soap.

All of a sudden, I’m laughing.
 
I mean, look who’s giving advice.
 
But then the whole thing kind of gels in me: how I’ve got to reassemble every bit of myself, every last, brave piece of brain and heart to fight this thing.
 
Henry’s not guilty of anything, except being dumb as dirt, but the way it stands, Henry’s going down with Edward.
 
Well, Edward or no Edward, Henry isn’t going to take it anymore.
  
I jump up from the bed and rattle the bars on my cell, shouting, “I didn’t do it!
  

A sleepy-eyed officer saunters down the hall towards me.
 
“Sure, sure.”

“I want a new lawyer!” I yell at him.

“I’ll tell the warden,” he says, walking away.

I rattle the bars like King Kong.
 

“Yo, asshole!
 
Keep it down!”
 
I hear from one of the other cells.
 

“No way, man,” I shout, grinning.
 
“It’s just not gonna fucking happen.”