Betsy heard the crying at night, sometimes wailing when someone was having a particularly bad time. She heard the swearing and the shrieking fights, the yelling at each other and the heated arguing with the guards. She heard the orders being barked, and she saw prisoners, some of whom were mentally ill, or who had become mentally ill in prison, dragged out by guards for the slightest infractions.

Her roommate, Rainbow, whose real name was Margaret Cholo, was back. She had to go to isolation when she hit the guard with three fingers who finally came to check on Betsy when Betsy was dying from blood loss after giving birth. But Rainbow was different now. She was scared. She muttered to herself one color after another, rocking back and forth.

Apricot.

Indigo.

Magenta.

Plum.

Sienna.

Violet.

Rainbow hid under her bed whenever she could. She wrapped her arms around herself and whimpered and shook in the corner.

Rainbow was dirty, her hair a wreck. She had refused to shower because she thought she would be dragged out of the shower and put in isolation again, only this time she would be “naked and white and in a beige cell alone with steel gray guards staring at me, touching me with yucky pink fingers.”

Betsy tried to comfort Rainbow as best she could, their tears blending together.

The abject loneliness and the hopelessness was a gaping wound within Betsy. She could hardly eat, hardly sleep, her mind crumbling from losing Baby Rose and Johnny. She worried about Tilly, too, sweet Tilly, Johnny’s little sister, who was now in foster care according to her attorney. There was no one to take care of her.

Betsy thought of her own mother, of her own father. They had never come to see her, and they never would, she knew that. She was gone to them, a humiliation, a curse from the devil. They had undoubtedly wrapped their arms around themselves in their fundamentalism and moved on. She wrapped her arms around herself, cold and alone.

* * *

When Betsy was younger, she got into trouble many times. Her father, Hansen, was a religious, hypocritical fundamentalist and her mother was weak, cowed and went along with everything he said. Now and then he would rage at her mother, insist that she obey, submit, behave. “Woman, do not break God’s law! I am the head of the household. You are my helpmate. You are one of my ribs. You are steeped in the sins of Eve. Do not question me.”

Her mother rarely questioned her father, but when he was in a bad mood, and he found her not obedient “enough,” he would sometimes slap her, Mary’s black hair flying out of her bun. “I am doing this for your own good! May Jesus forgive you for your insolence!”

Mary would tilt her head down in defeat and submission, her golden eyes closed.