True Colors

“Yeah,” she said, looking at her sister’s door. The whole landscape had changed with this ruling. A denied petition would have moved them all back to Start; in time, they would have reconciled and moved on, as they’d done before. This, though, was something else. This was the beginning of a new and specific hope. And suddenly she understood every word Vivi Ann had said to her.

She hadn’t been fully listening before: her twin flaws, ambition and certainty, had deafened her. She’d focused on undoing a wrong, righting her own mistake; redemption. Now she saw how Vivi Ann had been trying to protect her son. Her sister had understood all along that they could win the battle and lose the war.

Winona often wondered in the next few months how Dallas was holding up in prison. Waiting for the test results was like having a faucet drip constantly in the back of your mind. She knew Noah was as unnerved by it as she was. As Vivi Ann had predicted, he was falling apart a little more each day: getting in trouble, skipping class, failing tests.

But it was Dallas she really worried about. She made a point of visiting him every other week; more and more often, they sat there with nothing to say. April faded into May, which blended into June. The tourists came back to Oyster Shores, bringing noise and money and traffic with them, but here at the prison, nothing ever changed. Life could be vibrant and bright outside of these walls. It was always gray and dark within.

“You need to get some sleep,” she’d said to him on her last visit. It had been the only time he’d smiled that day.

“I guess I should have thought of that before we started this thing.”

“Are you scared?” she’d asked.

“Scared is a fact of life for me,” he’d answered, flicking the dirty hair from his eyes.

Winona had had nothing to say in response. So she’d changed the conversation, adding hope to the list of topics to steer away from.

How much the landscape could change in a week and a half. That was what she thought on this Wednesday afternoon as she followed the guard down to her meeting with Dallas.

Once in the room, she waited impatiently for his arrival, moving from one foot to the other, too excited to sit down.

Finally the door opened and Dallas was there. His hair was dirty and lank, his face was pale, and he moved awkwardly, as if his whole body hurt. As always his ankles and wrists were shackled. “Hey, Winona,” he said.

“You sound sick. Do you need a doctor?”

He laughed at that. The sound dissolved into a cough. “It’s just June. I’m allergic to something around here. Razor wire, maybe.”

“Sit down, Dallas.”

He stopped moving and lifted his chin to move the hair from his eyes. She knew he hated to do it with his hands—the shackles rattling in front of his face, the obvious awkwardness of the movement. Once he’d asked her to do it, and she’d found herself almost trembling as she reached forward. It had been the one and only time she’d looked into Dallas’s steely gray eyes and seen a glimpse of the abused boy he’d once been. The way she’d put his hair behind his ear was perhaps the gentlest she’d ever been with a man. “I’ll stand,” he said.

“We got the test results back. The semen isn’t yours.” She smiled, waited for him to do the same, but he just stood there. “Did you hear me? The DNA found at the scene wasn’t yours.”

“Now what?”

“You don’t look very happy.”

“You forget, Winona. I always knew it wasn’t my DNA.”

The power behind those few words struck her hard, and for a moment, she truly imagined what life had been like for him all these years. An innocent man in prison. Her voice softened when she said, “I’ve already called the prosecuting attorney’s office. I’ve asked them to join me in vacating the judgment and dismissing the case.”

“You’re kidding me, right?”

Winona frowned. “I know I could make the motion myself, but they’ll fight me on it. If we can get them to see the evidence, agree with our argument, and believe in a miscarriage of justice, we could do a joint recommendation for release. That would be a slam dunk.”

“You’re as naïve as Vivi Ann. Here’s what’s going to happen: they’ll admit I didn’t have sex with Cat, but maintain that I killed her. Maybe they’ll say suddenly that I had an accomplice. What they won’t say is, Gee, Winona, good save.”

She sat down on the hard chair. “If you believed all that, why did you let me start this?”

“For Noah,” he said simply. “He’s like his mom, I guess. I knew he couldn’t let go without trying.”

“So you let Noah and me start this thing, believing in your innocence, and then you say hasta la vista and go back into your cell until you die? That’s your plan?”

“That’s the way it is, Win. If you’d bothered to ask Vivi Ann, she could have told you what would happen. We’ve been here before, remember?”

“I don’t believe it. I don’t accept it. You’re wrong.”

“Later,” he said softly, “when you’ve figured this whole thing out, do me a favor, okay?”