Saltus by Tara Gereaux

Author:Tara Gereaux
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: identity, Métis, motherhood, transgender
ISBN: 9780889714014
Publisher: Nightwood Editions
Published: 2021-04-24T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

The cell is smaller than she expected. Cleaner, too, though she’s never been inside a cell before. She’s never even visited anyone in jail. A few people she’s known have done time. Her own father for one. That was one of the first things the officer who dragged her down here wanted to discuss. He dug up info on her parents, then called the detachment in their hometown, where Nadine grew up. When she was a kid, her father spent a night now and then drying out in the tank. Mostly he’d be picked up when out at the bar or partying with his friends, but a couple of times the cops came to the house and took him in. Neighbours had called.

The officer didn’t stop there. He seemed to have found everyone who was willing to spill shit about her. He even found out about the time her own neighbours called the cops on her. She wasn’t even nineteen at the time and was living in a trailer outside Beauville with that asshole. It wasn’t unusual for there to be yelling and screaming, maybe a hole punched in the wall or a broken stool, but after one particularly bad night, he tossed her out the front door and locked it. She was practically naked and the kids next door watched her through their bedroom window as she trudged through the pathway between their trailers to the back door, her feet squishing in cold mud. That was after she left home, when she hated her parents but was still heading down the same road as them. It was also before Aaron, before she changed direction.

“You’ve had some difficult men in your life,” the constable said, as if pitying her. As if his mock sympathy was going to win her over. Like all the therapists and psychologists who tried to use her past to make sense of the present. They always seemed to distill it down to the same explanation: she hated all men, including her son, and therefore, wanted him to be a daughter. It was mind-numbingly stupid for such highly educated people.

She’s not cold but she pulls the brown woollen blanket around her anyway. It’s sometime in the middle of the night, but the light in the hall is bright enough to keep the inside of her cell well illuminated.

It’s been around twenty-four hours since Aaron was taken to the hospital and she has still not heard a word. She consoles herself that surely she would have if things went really wrong, though that’s hardly comforting.

She doesn’t want to think about it, but if things were to go badly, she’d rather just stay in a cell. Sitting here now, there is something appealing about it. She wouldn’t have to make any more decisions and worry about whether they were right or wrong. There’d be a set of regimented rules to follow. The cell is small. Tiny, even. But it would contain her. Hold her in.

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