Dragonfly Bones by David Cole Page A

awed.
    â€œYes, sir!”
    He snapped a salute and left.
    â€œWho are you?” I asked.
    â€œJust who I said I am. Okay. I’m going to leave you here. You’ll talk to the prisoner alone.”
    â€œNo way.”
    â€œThat was part of her condition. I’ll be right outside. Slap the door or holler, I’ll come in.”
    Â 
    Alone in the antiseptic room. Orange plastic chairs, tables bolted to the floor, the chairs burned with cigarettes and full of dings where they must have been hurled at the wall. The chairs looked as heavy as the tables, I wondered why everything wasn’t bolted down.
    A CO escorted a black woman in an orange jumpsuit into the room. She wiped down all the tabletops, mopped half the floor, never once looking at me once she caught me staring. She started on the second half of the floor, but the CO checked his wristwatch and told her it was time for her lunch break. They left.
    I fiddled, I breathed, I unbuttoned and rebuttoned the top of the tight shirt, and started as a door banged open at the opposite end of the room. Another CO ushered a woman in, took off her handcuffs, exited, shutting the door behind him.
    The woman didn’t move. Staring at me. Dark, curly hair, shoulder-length but not stylish at all, looked like she’d cut it hurriedly, not anything important, just had to be cut, keep it out of her eyes, probably. She wore institutional blue jeans, no belt, an orange tee shirt, sneakers without laces. She didn’t move.
    I got up, but she still didn’t move, so I started walking the length of the room. She looked somehow familiar, but I knew I’d never seen her before. As I got within ten feet I saw deep frown lines burrow into her forehead, just for a moment; she was steeling herself, getting ready for me. Five feet away, I stopped abruptly in shock. She smiled, a cynical hook at the right corner of her lips which flattened against perfectly white teeth.
    I dug into my purse, found the old picture my ex-husband Jonathan had given me two years before. A twenty-one-year-old woman, laughing, happy.
    â€œYeah,” she said, voice brittle with tension.
    â€œIs it…are you…?”
    I hadn’t seen her in twenty years. Shock waves. I had to reach for a tabletop, steady myself, my legs weak, felt like one of my old panic anxiety attacks, it was brutal, I tell you.
    I couldn’t stand and wobbled into a chair, mouth wide open, stunned.
    â€œHello, Mom, ” she said sarcastically, all the tension released in those words as though she’d been waiting to say that for years and years.
    It was my daughter from my brief marriage to Jonathan Begay.
    Spider.
    9
    â€œS pider,” I said, lips dry, tongue in knots, my whole head in knots.
    â€œDominguez.”
    She cut me off, her lips barely a pencil line, they were clenched so tight, the word emerging like a hiss, lingering onthe last ahhh syllable, teeth apart, for a moment I thought her tongue would dart out. Like a stinger. Like a snake.
    â€œHelp me here, Spider,” I said.
    She fingered the ID badge clipped to her orange tee. Waited for me to read it.
    Â 
    DOMINGUEZ, ABBE CONSUELO
    ADC 49-353424- F
    Â 
    Finally, not knowing what else to do, I took out the photo that Jonathan gave me two years before. I traced my finger over the smiling woman, trying to discover some link, some blood, some connection between my memories of her at two years old, when Jonathan took her from me and disappeared.
    Trying to make a connection between the smiling photo and the enraged face in front of me. I just kept staring at her, a tiny smile flickering on my lips, fading, more a twitch than a smile. I had so much invested in discovering this moment, meeting her for the first time in twenty years, I’d built this mythic meeting scene, I don’t know what I’d built, but the daughter I’d imagined was nothing like the woman across the table.
    Her concentration broke. Blinking,