by Betty Webb
My usual black-on-black ensemble was acceptable.
Warden Bosham had done her best to cut through the standard red tape and procured a visitor’s pass for me, but getting inside the prison was a test of anyone’s endurance. After being waved through the outer gate, I parked my rented Corolla in the visitor’s lot and joined the long line in front of the Visitor Processing Center.
I wasn’t surprised at the number of children in the line. Every other visitor had at least one child in tow. Most of the inmates were mothers, just as most inmates in the men’s prisons were fathers, thus visiting days were family days. Still, it tugged at my heart to hear so many toddlers crying out for their mommies.
An hour and a half later, when I finally reached the head of the line, my ID was checked by a redheaded guard with a bad sunburn who reminded me vaguely of Ernie at Kanati. No relation, though, unless guarding killers ran in the family.
Younger and less jovial than redheaded Ernie, this guard took his time. While I waited for him to check my previously filled-out visitor’s pass on his computer and decipher the fine print on my Arizona’s driver’s license, a brisk breeze came up, carrying with it the scent of alfalfa and something else. I looked up at one of the guard towers, and saw a dark-haired man holding a rifle. He was singing an old song about a woman who kills her lover.
Bring out your long black coffin,
Bring out your funeral clothes,
Johnny’s gone an’ cashed his checks.
To the graveyard, Johnny goes.
He was Frankie’s man,
But he done her wrong.
Given the song’s current setting, it made me shiver. How many of the women here were responsible for their lovers’ deaths?
“Who are you here to see?” The guard’s voice, seemingly coming from afar.
“What?”
“I asked, who are you here to see?”
Irritated by my long wait, I snapped, “Can’t you read? It’s on the form.”
No answer.
The silenced stretched between us long enough that I began to worry. Recognizing that I wasn’t the person in power here, I finally said, “Helen Stocker Grant.”
He looked up from studying my ID. His eyes were brown, not the expected blue. “Grant, hmm?”
“Helen Stocker Grant.”
Sighing, he typed a few more keys on the computer, then handed me back my license and visitor’s pass. “Good luck, Ms. Jones.”
He let me in.
Thirty-five years earlier, a California highway patrolman had found my mother covered with blood at an abandoned rest stop. A few yards behind her lay two gunshot victims: Steve George Garabaldi, 37; and Lester Eagan Westerly, 29. Subsequent testing traced the blood spatter on her to each victim, the angle suggesting she had been standing less than two feet away from each man as she fired. Ballistics tests also tied the empty .357 Mag revolver found lying at her feet to the bullets in the men. Her prints overlaid Garabaldi’s, proving that although he had at one time handled the weapon—it was legally licensed in the state of New Mexico—she was the last to hold it.
When taken into custody, my mother had made no statement. She had remained silent while meeting with the defense attorney provided by the court. Eventually, Elmo Harris Krycheck, M.D., the state-appointed psychiatrist, declared her as being in a rare dissociative fugue state that in her case, led to catatonia. Considered too mentally ill to be tried in a court of law, she was sent to the Camarillo State Mental Hospital for treatment. More than two decades later, and the veteran of several sessions of electroshock therapy, she began speaking again.
She pled guilty to four murders, although the bodies of two of her victims—her daughter, and a man she called “Abraham”—were never found.
Pictures of Helen Stocker Grant were sprinkled liberally through the newspaper articles Jimmy dug up, beginning from the first time she had come into public attention thirty-five years earlier, when she appeared to be little older than my goddaughter, to ten years ago when a true-crime writer who claimed to be a relative managed to take a picture as Helen came through the visiting room door. In the earlier pictures, she had my face. In the last, her face was lined with age and despair. But despite the damage done to her appearance over the years, I think I would still have recognized her.
After that last dishonest snapshot—the true crime writer was denied further visits to the prison—my mother had refused all visitors. As if reverting to her former catatonic state, she stopped speaking, even to fellow prisoners. From what the warden had told me, Helen Stocker Grant’s voice could now only be heard when she was recording audiotapes of books for the blind in the prison’s “Voices from Within” program. One of the books she recorded was Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
Given all those children in line to visit their mothers, grandmothers, or aunts, I wasn’t surprised to see the toys in one corner of the visiting room I was ushered into. There was even an area where, for a small fee, you could have your photograph taken with your imprisoned loved one. Maybe if things worked out…
I turned in my visitor’s pass to another guard, and he relieved me of my driver’s license and other ID. While I fidgeted, he called my mother’s housing unit to advise her of a visitor, and to come to the waiting room. I took a seat at one of the many small tables, and watched as several corrections officers roamed between them, eyes alert for inappropriate behavior.
Ten minutes later my mother was a no-show.
Fifteen minutes.
Twenty.
Thirty.
I sat there for a full hour while around me other visitors reunited with their loved ones. Partner with partner, sister with sister, mother with child. Sobbing. Laughing.
My own mother never showed.
After calling Jimmy and telling him what happened, or rather what hadn’t happened, I spent the night at the motel in nearby Norco. The next day, I returned to the visitors’ area. When she no-showed again, I flew back to Phoenix and ran into Jimmy’s welcoming arms.
I repeated the same routine the next weekend.
And the next.
Each time I took the same Southwest flight from Sky Harbor, rented what looked like the same white Corolla, reserved the same motel room, filled out the same visitor’s pass, stood for hours in the same line, saw the same faces. I felt nothing anymore. You know what they call you when you keep making the same mistake over and over again while expecting a different outcome? They call you crazy, that’s what.
On my fourth Sunday visiting the California Institution for Women, I sat across from Lindie Sullivan, who three years ago had knocked over a Circle K to feed her heroin habit, then shot herself in the leg on the way out of the store. She was laughing at the jokes told by Trevor Puente, her ex-husband. Not all reunions were as happy. On the other side of the room, JoBelle Gudreax, doing time for three counts of arson, sobbed on the shoulder of Jane Graham, who’d come to tell her she was marrying someone else.
As for me, I wasn’t the crying type. Besides, this time my wait was made less onerous by Marie Lopez, who had burned her abusive husband to death. She was reading a book of nursery rhymes aloud to her great-granddaughter. Marie had just moved on to Humpty Dumpty when Officer Matt Hill approached me. He was the same redheaded guard who had wished me luck during my first visit. Since then, I’d learned that he had two children under five and his wife was battling breast cancer.
From the serious look on Matt’s face, I figured he was about to deliver an order from the warden for me to stop coming, to stop wasting everyone’s time, to go back to Arizona and forget about the sorrows at the California Institution for Women.
Instead, he whispered, “Brace yourself. She’s on her way down.”
“She?”
“Your mother.”
Ignoring my trembling knees, I stood up. I wasn’t certain if I c
ould even talk. Should I tell her I’d missed her, even though I could hardly remember what she looked like? Tell her it was okay she’d shot me because that bullet had freed me from The Children of Abraham? Should I lie and tell her my years in foster care had been a fourteen-years-long banquet of joy?
Ten minutes later, the door separating the visiting room from the inmate units opened, and two correctional officers I didn’t recognize walked through. Between them was a lean gray-haired woman, her face twisted in anger. She obviously expected to tell another journalist to get lost.
“I…I…” Thirty-five years of separation had stolen away my voice.
Her blue eyes narrowed, she strode through the crowded room to me, then stood so close I felt her breath on my neck.
“You’re not my daughter,” she hissed. “Christina’s been dead for years, and I’m the one who killed her, so you stay away from…”
She fell silent.
Stared at me.
Stared at my pale yellow hair: hers. My high cheekbones: hers. My straight nose: hers. My strong jaw: hers. My green eyes: my father’s.
She lifted an age-spotted hand.
Touched the scar on my forehead.
Whispered, “My baby?”
Then she slumped to the floor.
Chapter Thirty-three
Thirty-five years of institutional life hardens a woman, but not enough to make her numb when her daughter rises from the dead.
Matt Hill was the first officer to reach her, but I already held my mother’s head in my lap. She hadn’t fallen too hard. Wilted, really.
“Step back, Lena,” Matt ordered. “Let us take care of this.”
I gently lowered my mother to the floor and stepped back.
As the other corrections officers worked to keep everyone else calm, Matt spoke into his radio, requesting medical assistance. Looking up at me, he added, “She had a coronary last winter.”
The prisoners had fallen silent, some of them out of sympathy, the others enjoying the free show. Then the door burst open and three more staffers rushed in carrying a stretcher. The noise started up again, with inmates calling out suggestions. Some of their comments revealed surprising medical knowledge, although one harsh-voiced woman screeched, “Let the old bitch die. Even Hell be better than this place.”
I ignored them as Matt led me off to a tiny room I hadn’t noticed before, sat me in a chair, and said, “I’ll be right back.”
Thirty minutes later I was still staring at the blank wall when he returned carrying a plastic glass of cold water. “She’s going to be fine. Just a moment of shock, what with…well, you know.”
“When can I see her?”
“Drink that. You’re in shock yourself.”
“When can I see her?”
“The warden says for you to come back tomorrow. Ten o’clock. That’ll give your mother a day to process this.”
“Tomorrow’s Monday. Not a visiting day.”
“It will be for you, Lena. For now, go back to your motel and rest up. But drink that first. I don’t want another fainting woman on my hands.”
“I don’t faint.”
“Hmph.”
I drank the water.
As soon as I made it back to the motel, I went to the front desk and asked Sophia, the friendly desk clerk, to add another week to my stay. That accomplished, I got the motel’s fax number and went to my new room. The old one had already been booked.
Then I called Jimmy and told him what had happened.
“Want me to fly out there now?”
“Not if it would mean closing Desert Investigations on Monday, our busiest day, and it would.”
I told him what I needed.
After a long silence—so long I began to worry—he agreed.
Ending the call, I looked at my old Timex. It was six minutes after four. Seventeen hours and fifty-four minutes before I could see my mother again. I couldn’t sit around the motel doing nothing, my nerves wouldn’t let me. So I changed into my running shoes, then walked over to the lobby to ask Sophia for directions to a good running trail. Earlier, she’d wanted to know if I felt okay, and now she repeated the same question.
What was with everyone’s sudden concern for my health? I was fine. Perfectly fine. Never better. The fact that my right leg kept wobbling, the heel doing a rickety tap dance on the tile floor meant nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Sophia looked me up and down. “How fit are you?”
“Very fit.”
“That’s what they all say. But maybe some diversion would be good for you, so how about the Pumpkin Rock Trail? It’s not far from here, and makes for a pretty rigorous sprint. One and a half miles, all uphill. It overlooks some nice scenery, too, if you’re into the desert kind. That sound okay?”
“I’m good with deserts.”
She drew me a map. I snatched it up and ran out the door.
Seventeen hours and forty-five minutes to go.
Pumpkin Rock’s parking lot, well away from town and out in Norco’s scrubland, was empty. I locked the Corolla and began running.
Sophia had described the trail well. Surrounded by not much more than dirt, rocks, and scrub, it meandered up the hill toward a series of rock formations. The arid sparseness resembled the Sonoran Desert so much that I felt almost at home. The only jarring note was the smell. Unlike the herbal scents of the Pima Reservation, the air here smelled musty and acidic at the same time, probably because of the nearby cattle ranch and the ever-moving freeway. I didn’t mind. My brain was so busy with the things I wanted to say to my mother that I didn’t even care when a rattlesnake slithered across the path.
Don’t bite. Don’t bite.
I ran past the snake, past a curious steer, then past something small and brown and furry that scampered into the weeds at my approach.
Just passing through.
I ran away from my thoughts and toward whatever.
I ran.
I ran.
When I reached Pumpkin Rock, I wasn’t the slightest bit tired.
It was easy to see why Sophia had sent me here, but I remained too jumpy to appreciate her attempt at humor. The giant boulder was about three times the average person’s height and almost perfectly spherical. Local wags had painted it bright orange and drawn on a jack-o-lantern’s face. Mr. Pumpkin leered at me as, without pausing for breath, I whirled around and began running back down the trail.
Sixteen hours and thirty-seven minutes to go.
After returning to my car, I checked the other map Sophia had drawn me and headed for L.A. Fitness just off I-15, where the toned ash blonde at the counter issued me a guest pass. This enabled me to spend two hours on the Nautilus machines.
Fourteen hours and six minutes.
Muscles aching, I stopped by for a carnivore-N-carb reload at In-N-Out Burger, then made my way back to my motel room.
Thirteen hours, fifty-two minutes.
There wasn’t much on TV, just so-called reality shows, an NCIS rerun, and a piece of HBO fluff about a book club where none of the Hollywood-looking women ever seemed to read. They all had great hair, though, and I received a few makeup tips to make myself look younger, not that I wanted to. In my business, experience trumps looks.
When the last woman in the book club had found cheap and easy everlasting love, I turned off the TV. What to do now? Unable to come up with anything more reasonable at the moment, I decided to rearrange the furniture. My motel room was ugly, but I’d chosen it for its nearness to the prison, not its charm. Everything was either solid brown or solid orange except for the carpet, with its pattern of orange flowers on a deep brown background. Oh, and the coverlet, which featured broad brown stripes on an orange background.
Ugh.
I eased the visual monotony by dragging the brown tweed chair away from the orange-curtaine
d window and placing it against the brown opposite wall. Then I moved the faux wooden desk to the window. The desk lamp had an orange shade, which blended well with the orange drapes. Now I had my choice of looking at solid brown or solid orange, as long as I didn’t look at the carpet or the bed.
Still feeling antsy, I did some pushups. Despite my weak left arm, I managed thirty. Then I showered again.
Nine hours, fifteen minutes.
After toweling dry, I slid naked underneath the cool sheets—white, thank God—and turned off the light. I lay there in the dark for what seemed like an eternity, then turned the light back on and looked at the clock.
Eight hours, six minutes.
There would be no sleep for me tonight. On my way back from L.A. Fitness, I’d passed an all-night Walgreens, so I threw on a clean tee-shirt and jeans, drove as slowly as I could to the drug store, and limped in. I browsed the magazine and book section, grabbed a Sue Grafton—sainted be her name—a Lee Child, and a Stephen King horror-a-thon, along with a copy of the latest issue of Guns & Ammo. Thus fortified, I took them to the cashier.
“Doing a little light reading?” the cashier cracked. Well past retirement age, he sported a hairdo so thick and black I suspected it was either dyed or a wig.
“It’s for my mother.”
His silver eyebrows almost touched his low hairline. “She must be some woman.”
“Buddy, you have no idea.”
Seven hours, forty-six minutes.
Almost two hours later, having speed-read my way through the Jack Reacher shoot-em-up—six hours and eleven minutes—I developed a desire to talk to someone who didn’t kill for a living. Jimmy was the logical person to call, but it was only eight minutes after four a.m., and he needed to be alert when he opened Desert Investigations tomorrow morning—make that this morning—in case some dumb judge had let Mother Eve out again. My left arm still throbbed from the pushups.
Sylvie? Like me, she suffered from insomnia, but if she’d finally been able to drift off, it wouldn’t be friend-like to wake her again.