Bumblebee's Story - Abigail's POV
Women call the Suffolk County House of Correction “South Bay,” or “The Bay,” but there are no views of water from this eleven-story tower that overlooks "Mass and Cass".
From the tenth floor, Bumblebee can see the side-streets off the AvENUE where she did dates and gave all her money to King. These are also the streets where we originally met two years ago, where therapeutic conversation is infrequent and clipped. But I have met with Bumblebee in person every week for the five months she has been detained at the Bay. She was arrested after an incident with King in Downtown Crossing, a shooting which could have meant real time for her. She wouldn’t tell the police what really happened, she would never do that to King, but for once circumstances are going her way and their cases will wind through the legal system separately. She will not be charged with his crimes and will likely be released this week.
Tonight, at South Bay in a harshly lit visiting room, Bumblebee tells me that she has started to refer to King as her “ex.” She did this on the phone with a friend and even tried it today on the unit, where a girl from the Ave who knows them said, Shut-the-fuck-up, Bumble, you will always be together!!! But even practicing this change of language for Bumblebee is a seismic shift after four years of living together with King in motels, tents, and most recently an apartment that the City of Boston leased to her trafficker after they took down the tents. When they first met, she was 21 years old, and he was 45.
As she tolerates sobriety and lets herself contemplate leaving King, Bumblebee feels more emotional overall. She mentioned Christmas, stating simply, “I lost it this week.”
“I was talking on the phone with my friend, who spent the weekend with his parents. I heard the Christmas music in the background. They just bought a tree and were decorating, which was weird because my dad always made us let it settle first, like the branches and shit? But when I heard that music, I just lost it. About my mom.” Bumblebee’s mother died of cancer last spring. She had not seen her mom for years before due to active addiction co-mingled with trauma, homelessness, and King.
She and King went to see her mom in the hospital before she died, but Bumblebee was still using, “I was so numb.”
But Bumblebee is not numb at South Bay, and tonight she is experiencing grief without crack or dope. She says that this will be her first Christmas without her mom then catches herself, “Wait, no. I haven’t seen her for Christmas in years.”
Bumblebee pauses, momentarily thwarted by time, reorienting to a world without a mother. She gets quiet and seems to study a crack on the table between us. I had also planned to discuss Christmas with Bumblebee tonight, and so the holiday unexpectedly frames our meeting. I shared our plans to celebrate Christmas with gifts this year, that we bought a tree for our space and we – like her father – let its branches fall before decorating.
“What would you like for Christmas?”
Bumblebee smiles widely, and then looks dumbfounded. “I haven’t gotten a Christmas gift in four years.”She is genuinely stumped, and for a moment she looks younger than her 25 years of age, I catch a glimpse of a girlish BUmblebee, before she was Bumblebee at all, the most attenuated flash of vulnerability from a woman with otherwise robust psychic armor.
“The only gifts I got out there was half-a-basket of crack, or a gram or two of dope.” These were gifts from King or gifts from a date, one of her regulars that fancied himself an intimate as opposed to a hustle. Tonight, behind a locked door, Bumblebee
thinks hard, and she adjusts her glasses.
“What can I ask for?” she asks. More uncertainty.
“What would you like?”
“Honestly, I don’t even know.”
This was not merely “not knowing” to be polite, or not knowing how to choose among infinite options. This was actually not-knowing, a split between herself and a choice, between herself and pleasure that years of living with King outside and trading sex for cash has whittled down. These capacities are not completely gone, but I can tell in this moment that Bumblebee’s own desire, her very subjectivity, feels frighteningly remote.
I choose my words carefully, aware that restoring choice is imperative for someone like Bumblebee following the kinds of trauma she had endured. I don’t want to push but nor do I want her to stay calcified in this moment of not-knowing. Part of my
role is to help her reconnect with choice, the possibility of self, agency or desire even through a holiday gift.
“Would you like some ideas?” I offer, ready to go quiet if she needs more time. Relief flashes across her face. “Yes!”
“You bought yourself new sneakers from canteen. I know you like sweatsuits. What about a sweatsuit?”
She beams, I guessed correctly. “Yes! That’s perfect.”
“What color?
She pauses but this is easier. “Pink or gray.”
“Light pink or hot pink?”
“Light pink. To match my shoes,” she brings her foot up to the table to show me her pristine white, lace-less Reeboks that she bought for $40 from canteen because she didn’t want the “bad juju” of her South Bay bobos when she walks into Court this week. Buying herself sneakers also strikes me as auspicious – a concrete demarcation between Life Before (South Bay bobos) and the possibility of After (fresh Reeboks). Bumblebee wants to stay clean, we have an appointment at MGH for her to get Sublocade, an injectable medication for opioid use disorder, where we will head together immediately after Court.
“Light pink it is,” I take notes for Linn.
Gifts are rarely just gifts; over the course of this hour, talking about the holiday started to rehabilitate a capacity still alive in Bumblebee but which feels inaccessible without her usual anchors of fentanyl, crack, or King. This is, of course, how therapY works, and it is possible even in this most untherapeutic and ugly institution. Just before the CO brought Bumblebee down, an officer chastised me for not using the right form, the same form I have used countless times before when visiting
women. Jail is Alice’s Wonderland; the answer is always different, but protesting is futile and even dangerous. And so I apologized to the officer, I deferred; yes, I will use the correct form next time. I acquiesced in the manner of Bumblebee, the careful deference with which she entered a date’s car on Mass Ave, coupled with readiness to sting if he changed the rules. We both move in spaces not designed to support us, Bumblebee with much more alacrity. But I am learning.