Chapter 29: Bail Review
They moved me out of holding on the twenty-seventh, up to a housing unit.
Forty-two women, two tiers, a dayroom in the middle with four steel tables bolted down.
The floor was painted concrete with grit mixed into the paint. You felt it through the slippers.
I had a top bunk, which I was glad about. Getting into one is a left-arm job if you plan it.
There is nothing to say about those four days that is interesting.
That is the part nobody tells you. It is not frightening. It is administrative.
You are counted at five thirty, at eleven, at four, and at nine.
You eat at a fixed time from a tray with compartments in it.
The lights go to half at ten and they never go off.
I did what I could for the shoulder, which was not much.
Isometrics against the bunk frame. External rotation, elbow pinned at my side, ten seconds, ten times, four times a day.
No load, no range. Just enough to remind the small muscles at the back of the joint that they still have a job.
Tobias made us do them at fourteen with a bicycle inner tube tied to a fence post.
I have not seen the man in twelve years and I still hear his count.
On the second day a woman called Ferne asked me if I was the judo one.
It had been on the local news. Twenty-two guests at a Christmas dinner is a story.
I said yes.
She asked me to show her something and I said no.
She asked again the next day and I said no again, and then she stopped, and was friendly afterwards, which surprised me.
In four days, nobody in that building asked me a single question about why.
The bail review was the thirtieth, in person.
They transport you in a van with a bench down each side and a cage between the driver and the back.
The restraints are a waist chain with the cuffs fixed to it at the front.
That is worse than behind the back, for me, because your hands cannot get above your navel.
The van has no suspension worth the name. Every brake had to be absorbed through the trunk instead of the arms.
By the time we arrived, the right shoulder had a hot line running from the front of the joint down into the bicep.
The courtroom was small and considerably shabbier than the video had made it look.
Wood veneer. Carpet tiles, one of them lifting at a corner near the jury box.
Ruth had a new folder. Grier had the same shoes.
He opposed the motion in four minutes.
He said nothing had changed since the twenty-sixth. He was correct. Nothing had.
Then Ruth said the thing that I had never thought to say for myself.
“Your Honour, my client cannot post seventy-five thousand dollars. She cannot post seven.”
“She has had no income at any point in the marriage. There is one account in her name with eleven hundred and eighty dollars in it.”
“A bail figure she cannot reach is not bail. It is detention, and the state has not asked this court for detention.”
Pelham looked at the papers for a while without saying anything.
Then he asked whether the state was seeking detention.
Grier said the state was not seeking detention. It was seeking an appropriate figure.
“Then give me a figure she can reach,” Pelham said, “or stop telling me this is about flight.”
It is the only sentence anybody spoke in that building in four months that sounded like it came from a person.
He set an unsecured appearance bond of ten thousand dollars.
Unsecured means you pay nothing now. It means you owe ten thousand dollars if you fail to appear.
He added pretrial supervision, weekly reporting, surrender of passport, and continuation of the protective order.
Then he said, “Same conditions as to address,” and called the next matter.
Ruth came to the rail while the deputy was waiting on me.
“You'll be processed out this afternoon,” she said. “Probably four. Maybe five.”
“Okay.”
“There's one thing they'll ask you at that desk and I want you to have thought about it before they do.”
I waited.
“They will ask for the address where you are going to be residing.”
The deputy shifted his weight onto his back foot, and I registered where it went, because that is a thing I cannot switch off.
I said, “The house is on the property.”
“Yes.”
“And the order covers the property.”
“Yes.”
“Then I don't have one.”
Ruth put her hand on the rail, not on me, which I noticed and was grateful for.
“That's the answer,” she said. “Say exactly that, in those words. Don't try to make it sound better than it is.”
I got back in the van at ten past twelve, a married woman of three years with no address.