“Ruth Jefferson?” one of them yells, and I can’t find my voice, I can’t speak at all, so I just jerk my chin: Yes. Immediately he pulls my arm behind my back and pushes me facedown onto the floor, his knee in the small of my back as he zips a plastic tie around my wrists. The others are overturning furniture, dumping drawers onto the floor, sweeping books off the shelves. “A grand jury has charged you with murder and involuntary manslaughter,” the policeman says. “You’re under arrest.”

Another voice pierces through the tinny echo of these words. “Mama?” Edison asks. “What’s going on?”

All eyes turn to the doorway of the bedroom. “Don’t move!” shouts another cop, aiming his gun at my baby. “Hands in the air!”

I start to scream.

They are all over Edison, three of them wrestling him onto the ground. He is handcuffed like me. I see him straining toward me, panic lining every muscle of his neck, the whites of his eyes rolling as he tries to see if I am all right.

“Leave him be,” I sob. “He has nothing to do with this!”

But they don’t know that. All they see is a six-foot-tall black boy.

“Do what they say, Edison,” I cry. “And call your aunt.”

My joints crack as the policeman who is holding me down suddenly yanks me upright by my wrists, pulling my body in a way it doesn’t want to go. The other policemen file behind, leaving the contents of my kitchen cabinets, my bookshelves, my drawers in heaps on the floor.

I am wide awake now, being dragged in my nightgown and slippers down my porch steps so that I stumble and scrape my knee on the pavement before I am pushed headfirst into the back of a police car. I pray to God that someone will remember to cut my son’s hands loose. I pray to God that my neighbors, who have been awakened by the hullaballoo in our sleepy neighborhood at 3:00 A.M., and who stand in their doorways with their white faces reflecting the moon, will ask themselves one day why they remained dead silent, not a single one asking if there was anything they could do to help.

—

I HAVE BEEN to the police station before. I went when my car was sideswiped in the grocery store parking lot and the fool who did it just drove off. I held the hand of a patient who had been sexually assaulted and couldn’t get the courage to tell the authorities. But now I am brought into the station the back way, where the bright fluorescent lights make me blink. I am handed off to another officer, just a boy really, who sits me down and asks me for my name, my address, my date of birth, my Social Security number. I speak so softly that a few times he has to ask me to be louder. Then I am led to what looks like a copy machine, except it’s not. My fingers are rolled one by one across the glass surface and the prints appear on a screen. “Pretty awesome, right?” the boy says.

I wonder if my fingerprints are already in the system. When Edison was in kindergarten I had gone with him to a community safety day, to get him fingerprinted. He was scared, so I did it first. Back then, I believed that the worst thing that could ever happen was that he might be taken from me.

It never occurred to me that I might be taken from him.

I am then placed up against a cinder-block wall and photographed straight on, and in profile.

The young cop leads me to the only cell that our police department has, which is small and dark and freezing cold. There’s a toilet in the corner, and a long-necked sink. “Excuse me,” I say, clearing my throat as the door locks behind me. “How long do I stay here?”

He looks at me, not without sympathy. “As long as it takes,” he says cryptically, and then he is gone.

I sit down on the bench. It is made of metal, and the chill goes right through my nightgown. I have to pee, but I am too embarrassed to do it here, in the open, because what if that’s the moment they come for me?

I wonder if Edison has called Adisa, if even now she is trying to get me out of here. I wonder if Adisa has filled him in, told him about the baby that died. I wonder if my own boy blames me.

I have a sudden flash of myself just twelve hours ago, dipping strands of a crystal chandelier into an ammonia solution while classical music played in the Hallowells’ brownstone. The incongruity makes me choke on a laugh. Or perhaps it is a sob. I can’t tell anymore.

Maybe if Adisa can’t get me out of here, the Hallowells can. They know people who know people. But my mama would have to be told what happened first, and although she would defend me to her death, I know there would be a part of her thinking, How did it come to this? How did this girl, whose lucky life I broke my back for, wind up in a jail cell?

And I wouldn’t know the answer. On one side of the seesaw is my education. My nursing certification. My twenty years of service at the hospital. My neat little home. My spotless Toyota RAV4. My National Honor Society–inductee son. All these building blocks of my existence, and yet the only quality straddling the other side is so hulking and dense that it tips the balance every time: my brown skin.

Well.