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fantasy. But now there were diapers to change, clothes to be bought, doctors to be seen, child care to find. There was a real live and tiny person who could not speak for herself.We had to speak and think for her in ways we never did for ourselves, because there is nothing more real than a hungry or sleepy or wet child crying.
    Rashid and I spoke then in very confident and definite terms about his preparation for parole. Unlike the appeals process, which can be capricious—judges do not like to overturn the decisions of other judges—parole and who is eligible for it has clear guidelines that govern who can and should be considered for release. Are you remorseful? Have you done good time? Have you taken advantage of what the state deemed rehabilitative? Do you have a post-release plan and a post-release support system? Is there anything that indicates that you might be a future danger to society? If it was a test, Rashid would have achieved a perfect score.
    â€œThere are a lot of people, asha,” Rashid told me one afternoon, “who have agreed to consider supporting my release. But I know they need time to weigh things over, get letters written. All that. That’s why I want to start early. So I have a whole real package together by the time I go before the parole board. By then I should be finished with my master’s too. So they’ve got to see I’m not the same kid I was then. I mean, you know?”
    â€œYup. I know,” I agreed. But really, did I? Did he?
    He went on to emphasize how important his studies were, the master’s program he had just been accepted into at Sing Sing Correctional Facility. “You know brothers who do that program don’t come back?”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œI mean the rate of recidivism is so low among those brothers it doesn’t even rate. It’s like less than one percent.”
    I shook my head in disbelief and felt assured. How could I not? How could I, how could Rashid, ever have imagined that anything would stand in the way of his release? He’d done what the system had demanded he do. He’d become a person who let the time serve him, as we say, rather than simply just serving the time. This is why I knew he would be granted parole and why I did not think of myself as single. Rather, I thought of myself as I was: married, partnered, and claimed. I was not a woman who had been fucked one hot night and then discarded. I was claimed, me, asha. I was claimed and I was loved. So too was my baby. I felt this with everything that breathed inside of me, felt that with her breathing inside of me.
    Even when I went up to the prison, taking Nisa for the first time when she was fifteen days old, and the guards, with their angry, their suspicious eyes, looked over me and looked over my baby and told me the number of bottles and diapers I could bring in—three was the limit on both—I did not think of myself as alone. Or when I argued with the guards, explaining to them that my daughter sometimes drank more than three bottles of milk over the course of six hours, which was the length of the visit, and I knew I was the only person in the whole world who knew just how much milk my hungry little baby drank, what her sleep habits were, what she needed—because no one else was there with us, so no one else knew—but even then I thought of myself as somebody’s wife. I never thought of myself as a woman sort of swashbuckling it alone out there against monsters and general ne’er-do-wells, all to secure the life of her child.
    Nor did I think it later, when we had been processed into the prison and my hand had been stamped with the invisible inkthat identifies me as a visitor rather than a prisoner, and I then had to fight with the guard about how he could not, absolutely not, stamp my daughter’s fifteen-day-old hand. Even then, I felt connected.
    And I felt it when my breasts filled with milk and Rashid,