A claustrophobic, powder-blue room, more monks’ cell than bedroom, was Irma’s only sanctuary. A straw-mat bed covered most of the stained floor. Next to the bed, a plastic bookshelf held six well-thumbed novels, a Bible, and a threadbare I Ching; next to her books lay a toothbrush and a hairbrush. Her raggedy clothes and a small towel hung from two nails, which she had scraped clean of rust with a piece of cement from nearby rubble and pounded, with that same tool, into the flimsy wall.
In her tattered nightgown, Irma lay awake, gazing at the grim light of dawn streaming through a cracked window. She had not slept, and she nearly always slept well. She sat up and looked out the tiny window. The morning fog obscured the naked trees and high fences of the drab compound. The marine vapors slowly thickened, and for a moment not even the bare oaks and sycamores were visible; then a slight breeze stirred, and the shadow world came in to relief. Irma stood. She bent down and grabbed her toes, bent her head to her knees. She held the position for thirty seconds. She repeated the stretch. She stretched her arms, legs, neck, and torso. She lay down. She did fifty sit-ups. She did thirty push-ups. She sat, full lotus, and meditated on her breath for what she guessed was forty minutes. Her exercises ate up a bit of her long, lonely day.
Once finished, Irma picked up her toothbrush and undid the door latch (which would not prevent anyone from entering but merely kept the door closed). Barefoot, she pattered over the wooden floor in the empty room, which, with a modicum of decoration, could have been a living room.
Upstairs, in an equally austere ten-by-ten room, a yellowed eye opened quickly at the sound of her feet, even as she tiptoed. Major Rollins listened closely as her steps crossed the room below. He heard her undo the latch on the back door. The guard sat straight up, fully alert. He looked out his window to see his prisoner dimly in the rolling fog. She moved toward the dirty-pink outhouse. When he heard her shut the outhouse door, he lay back down and listened. He heard nothing. In the night, when she did not bother to go to the outhouse, he could hear her pee. A few moments later, the outhouse door flopped shut and the girl shuffled back toward the house. She stopped too soon.
"Is everything all right?" the guard called. He touched the weapon with which he slept.
"I'm going to sit out front for a while," she cried back.
"Are you all right?" He decided that she must be troubled by her shameless uncle’s eagerness to offer her up for her enemy’s pleasure. Rollins did not believe that Todd Wentworth would harbor such an unsavory design on the girl; he felt sure that her uncle was using this absurd story for some nefarious aim.
"Yeah, sure," she sang. “I’m fine.”
Scrawny cats lay about the hard brown-dirt yard. A high hurricane fence, topped with razor wire, enclosed the rocky ground. No plants grew inside the fence. No birds sang. The only sound was the wind in the empty November trees. The vicinity was covered with the flat ruins of houses that had been destroyed sixty years ago. The wood had rotted with time, and incessant rain had the turned stucco into a dark slush; most materials had been washed over the great palisade that dropped down to the iron-black sea.
Irma walked in circles; her once-tender feet were now too callused to feel the ground’s cold. She came to a stop next to the high fence. On the other side of the fence, a miserable path eventually led to a road that eventually led to town. Irma leaned her soft face against the hurricane fence. She appreciated the feel of the galvanized steel: it had become familiar, and familiarity comforted. She closed her eyes and felt her fatigue. Weariness pushed her worries away. Soon, bright dreamlike images of green fields in the park sprang up vividly in her exhausted mind. She slid down and sat in the dirt; the earth’s cold came up through her thin hemp gown. Irma ignored the cold. Her cheek reddened against the rusty fence as she slept. Rollins watched her from his window. Later, he went out and draped a blanket around her. She did not wake or stir. She slept on and on.
Over the next hour or two, Rollins kept an eye on her from his window while he sat on his bed playing solitaire. This lonely card game was the big man’s passion. When he was a teenager, his favorite uncle, a militia lieutenant, had given him a book: Bart Bellamy’s 101 Solitaire Games. The book was his prize possession. He thought the book particularly wonderful in that it was not merely to be read but provided him with a pastime that had given him great joy throughout his life. During the long, slow months since he had been assigned to guard San Francisco’s most famous detainee, he had played day and night. Previously, his last chance to spend hours playing the games he loved had been during his six-month hospital stay. Then, he was recuperating from the loss of his arm and other grievous wounds he had received at the hands of one of the innumerable roving war bands that infested the countryside long before the Angelenos had arrived.
As the morning lulled on, the fog broke. The fresh ocean air and a brilliant blue sky with scudding clouds dispelled the morning gloom. Irma slept soundly through it all. But the crisp air produced in her a dream of flying over the Bay, and she smiled in her sleep.
A short, fat finger squeezed through the fence. "Irma? Irma? Are you all right?"
She awoke without moving. She smelled the hand that lightly touched her shoulder, and the scent comforted her. Irma smiled wanly at her uncle. Slowly stretching her arms, she looked with puzzlement at the blanket in which her doting jailer had wrapped her; she said in a small sleepy voice, "I’m enjoying my front yard."
Spicer looked at the bleak plot of dirt. His face grew grim. He had only recently awoken himself was not yet on guard, so his emotions were soft. Again, it grieved him to see her conditions. Like the book was to Rollins, Irma was the thing the councilman most loved. From the first time he’d seen her as a baby, seen the spirits of his sister and his mother in her blue eyes, Spicer had feelings for his niece unlike anything else in his jaded world. In his heart’s eye, she was exquisite and good. When near his niece, he felt himself to be a better man. It tore at his small heart to see her so reduced. At the same time, his compassion made him think better of himself. His mind drifted from concern for Irma to the pleasing thought that he was capable of deep feeling.
Although she did not notice his pride, Irma saw the pain in his eyes as he looked back at the dusty lot and the ugly shack. She could always read through him. "Elegant, isn’t it?” She saw the old man’s lip quiver. She kissed his small fingers. Then, as always, feeling it her duty to keep up everyone’s spirits, she beamed with a child’s openness. “What brings you by?”
Spicer shook his head. After a split second, he gathered himself. Then he, too, contrived a rosy tone. "I thought you might be up early."
She shook her head ruefully. "Actually, I just got to sleep. This ground is softer than my mat."
"Things will look up," her uncle said with a sad and tender smile.
Irma shook her head and patted the fingers, still squeezed through the fence, that were touching her shoulder. They sat in silence for a moment, touching as best they could. Rollins stood in the upper story window, watching the interaction. Though his face was hard, he saw that Irma was pleased, though sitting in the dirt. He watched as Irma again kissed her uncle's fingers.
She breathed in deeply. She had to try. This was not life. She grimaced, then said in a breaking voice, "Will I have to let him do it to me?"
"Good question," said Spicer. He put his finger to the side of his nose, then made a show of deep concentration, as though he were weighing out the likelihood of the carnal thing. Irma knit her brow, but soon, seeing he was teasing, she began to smile. He grinned and said, "No. He won’t force that." He paused, then said playfully, "But you might let him kiss you and fondle your breasts. Make it worth his while.”
Irma smiled, closed her eyes tightly, and shook her head. Though chaste in conduct, her humor was bawdy and had always been so. "That would do it, wouldn’t it?" she sighed. Men were so simple.
The thing had been agreed on, for when she phrased the question, “will I have to” rather than, “would I have to,” her kinsman understood: She had resolved to meet Wentworth. They were silent for a moment. Then Spicer told a story about the doings of the food-market people. Apparently, the cabbage lady was nursing a wounded soldier and after some time had fallen in love with the nondescript man. Everyone gossiped about her: They said she gave him bad medicine to ensure his continued dependence on her. Catcalls and lewd asides from her fellow merchants were her daily fare. One day, the soldier came down to the market, still using a crutch, and punched the onion man in the eye. The soldier and the cabbage lady then walked back to her flat, hand-in-hand. Faced with this proof of his consent to be hers, her neighbors whispered that he was only out for her money. The onion man, a churl in his sixties, now baited her mercilessly, as though hoping for another round with the much younger and larger soldier. After Spicer finished the story, while Irma was still laughing, he quickly added, "I think you'll like him."
Her smile dropped and she firmed her jaw. After a pause she said, “I guess we’ll find out.”