In the spring of 1964 I worked the mangle in the Cinder Island laundry, feeding wet sheets through two steel rollers for eight hours a day, and that is where I came to know Evelyn Shaw and the Bellamy sisters, long before any of us spoke of leaving.
Evelyn ran the press beside mine. She was thirty-five then, lean and sure-handed, with the kind of patience that looked like calm until you noticed how closely she watched the guards' rounds. She had been inside longer than any of us and she did not waste words.
Nora Bellamy folded at the table behind us, and her sister Tess worked the line beside her, the two of them trading half sentences the way people do when they've shared a bedroom their whole lives. Nora was thirty-two, Tess thirty, and you could tell their closeness by how rarely they needed to finish a thought out loud.
I learned later, from pieces let slip over folded linen, that Evelyn had known the Bellamy sisters before Cinder Island, from some earlier trouble on the mainland neither of them discussed in front of me. There was an old debt between them, the kind that doesn't need explaining to be honored.
One July afternoon, over the thin stew they called supper, Nora said to Evelyn, low enough that I had to lean to catch it, I'm not waiting on anyone else's calendar for this. Tess doesn't go anywhere without me, and I'm not going anywhere without her.
Evelyn didn't look up from her bowl. Nobody said you had to choose, she said. I'm only saying it has to be soon, before the weather turns, and before anybody else notices what we've been noticing.
Tess caught me watching them and didn't look away. What, she said, not unkindly. You've got a face like you're doing arithmetic.
I said I was only listening. She said, you're always only listening, Ruth. One of these days somebody's going to ask you what you actually want.
I didn't have a ready answer, so I said nothing, and went back to my stew, and told myself it wasn't my business what the three of them were building between their silences.
But I was useful to them, and I knew it. I had access to the laundry stores, to lye and bleach and the long canvas bins the trucks used for linen transfer, and I had a steady pair of hands nobody watched too closely because I'd never given anyone reason to watch me.
It was Evelyn who finally said it plain, a week later, with Nora and Tess both at the table and nobody else in earshot. We're going, she said. Before fall. And we could use a fourth pair of hands who knows this building better than any guard does.
I asked her what happens to the fourth pair of hands once they're used. I meant it as half a joke and she did not take it as one.
She looked at me steady and said, you come with us, or you don't come at all. There's no in-between where you help us out the door and we leave you standing in it.
Nora added, quieter, we're not leaving anybody behind who doesn't choose that for herself. Tess didn't say anything, only reached over and set her hand flat on the table near mine, not touching, just near, which from Tess was its own kind of promise.
I thought about my sentence, still years from finished, and about the particular exhaustion of being useful to everyone and essential to no one. I thought, if I don't take this, I will fold linen in this room until I am an old woman and nobody outside these walls will know my name.
I said yes before I had fully decided to say it, the way you sometimes commit to a dive by leaning too far before you've chosen to jump.
Evelyn nodded once, like a transaction closing. Nora went back to her stew. Tess's hand stayed near mine a moment longer before she pulled it back to pick up her fork, and that was the whole ceremony of it, four women at a table deciding to risk everything together, and none of us saying aloud how little any of us actually trusted the other three.