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it is of course, but does this mean Geoffrey was there that night ? Did he write me the cat letter because he is finally ready to talk about what happened?
     
     
    I suspect Jeremy had a hand in arranging the media waiting outside on the day of my release. I am only the second female exoneree in the last twenty years and the first with no drug history or prior arrest record. I am an example for one of Jeremy’s favorite arguments: This could happen to anyone. In truth, I don’t know if I’m a good candidate for this role. I look nervous and tongue-tied on camera. My glasses reflect the spotlight, making the headline that will roll beneath footage of my release—LIBRARIAN FOUND INNOCENT OF CRIME AFTER TWELVE YEARS IN PRISON—superfluous, I fear. I’m wearing an outfit Jeremy chose from my boxes of old clothes. A peach-colored sweater with a lace collar of the sort Viola, my old boss and the head librarian, favored.
    “There’s also your hair,” Wanda pointed out last night. For two weeks, she avoided any mention of my release by focusing on her exercise regimen and the letters she writes to various men across the highway. For Wanda, who lived too long in a prison of monogamy, juggling three beaux at a time is not unusual. I hadn’t known how this night would go—if we would ignore the box I’d packed in the corner, or if we’d say a proper good-bye to each other.
    “What about my hair?” I said.
    “Well, you can’t see it.” She didn’t mean it unkindly, only as a fact: We have no mirrors in prison. Some women put up tinfoil, others used windows after dark. Later that night, Wanda got permission to use a pair of scissors and give me the first real haircut I’d had in a decade. She cut away all the frizzy gray and left me with a cap of silver white. I could tell from my reflection in the window that I looked much better, like a sprightly Peter Pan.
    This morning when I walked down our corridor for the last time, carrying my box, everyone whistled when they saw my hair. “Better than the braids! ’Member those?” Justine called out. She’d been in twice as long as I had and she was right. For a few years in the beginning, I grew my hair very long and wore it in braids. “You go and have a good life for all of us,” she said, and laughed, her eyes watering a little.
    “You’re a bitch if you think you deserve this,” Taneesha snapped from the corner.
    “Let her go, Taneesha,” Wanda called, standing beside me. “You go on.”
    That was all we said for a good-bye.
    Stepping outside the prison fence for the first time in twelve years, Jeremy at my side, is dizzying in a way I didn’t expect. We walk silently up to the gate and to a crowd of reporters waiting just beyond. We need my picture in the morning paper, Jeremy has said, making no comment about my new look except to say, “Betsy, my God, your hair,” which I take to mean this isn’t the style he would have chosen for me.
    The reporters ask if I’m angry that the state has offered me no restitution for the years I spent wrongfully incarcerated. Jeremy and I have gone over my answers. I’m supposed to sound grateful that a justice system capable of such errors is also capable of correcting its mistakes. I’m supposed to say, Yes, I will fight for restitution, without sounding too angry. The best exonerees are the ones who talk about their imprisonment as a spiritual awakening. “My body has been in prison, but not my heart!” the last one screamed into the microphone at his press conference, one fist raised in the air. His name was Bruce Whitman and he was white, too, imprisoned sixteen years ago for the murder of a girlfriend when he was nineteen years old. Now he’s a bespectacled, balding thirty-five-year-old who has spent his adult life in a jail cell writing poetry that recently found a publisher. I heard that his picture was in Time magazine, and that on the day of his release, seventy people gathered and cheered for so long the