In the morning, I told my therapist to lean on the night staff to lock us out of the computers. I didn’t want to fall into the hole.
“This is good, I think,” she said. “Watching these videos feels like a brain trough for you. You go back, and you go back, but there’s not really anything new. At the same time, I’m observing something else here, which is that you are actively avoiding certain lines of inquiry.”
“What do you mean?”
“For example, the man who followed you. You were very moved by the fact that he knew your name. It was a kind of proof to you. But, obviously, he could have found your name via this video, correct? As you did, eventually and as this documentarian did as well? You were invested, were you not, in your sense of connection to him, so you avoided that discovery. Now, you have questions about this video. But instead of looking for answers, you just keep watching the clip. Why? Because you answer those questions, and it may prove what you seem already to know: that your feelings about this man may be projections. That his connection to you may be based in your professional, rather than in your personal life. There’s an opportunity for remapping here.”
“I won’t watch,” I said.
“Right, I agree. But why not call your boss? Ask him.”
I tried to explain about Lew and phones, the landline number in my book, but my therapist laughed at me. “So, try this other woman, the artist. Or track him down. You work in computers. It ought to be easy.”
It had not been. Lew’s number was unlisted, but I knew his address and was able to back channel to the line, but it had been disconnected. I was somewhat more successful in reaching Valerie, was able to get a message through to her current whereabouts. I didn’t know how that worked for inmates, whether she’d receive it, but when we were discussing commitments, where we should go, I cast the deciding vote for MCI Framingham.
There are ways of thinking that are habit for me, circles, back into the trough. But, there might be other ways to pursue my questions such that if I follow them, eventually, the noise in my head will stop repeating. Emily and my therapist think so. They’ve decided to approve my day pass to go home, but I’m no longer sure that I want it. Or, what I wanted was to open the pages of my paperback and find my man in there, but now it seems clear that whatever is lodged in those pages, whatever secret, it belongs to someone else. To Lew, or to the man in the SUV. I suppose that’s a piece of progress. And there are other signs. The drawings in my workbooks, my therapist pointed out, are mostly of Juni these days.
“You know what that says to me?” she asked.
“Please don’t say it. Don’t say it out loud.”
“You might end up one heck of a mother,” she said, and she was smiling all the way down to her chin wattles.
Emily is meeting us at the prison. I tried to tell her not to, but she insisted. She’s due for one of these anyway, she said. It occurs to me, something in her voice, or maybe just emerging from my own fog of self-pity, to wonder what Emily’s actual story is; what drove her to follow me, when I was a pushing a stroller around and around the block, too much of a mess to even go into a meeting, or to show up in my driveway with her teenaged son on a weeknight, what makes her travel two hours to meet me at a prison. I believe it of her—honestly, I do—but it still feels implausible that anyone could be that kind to me without some hidden motive or damage at the base of it.
At the entrance, the guards run you through the metal detector. We leave our handbags in the van, our wallets, but still, I set off the alarm. They have me walk sideways, with my hands over my metal fly. Yet again, the detector pings. Each pass through, I expect they’ll wave me on. I’m Mellie, from Wellesley or Brookline or wherever. I’ve been to college. I’m harmless. But, the guard has me take off my necklace, and then my hair clip, and then go through a fourth time. The sensor trips.
“You got underwire?” Niani asks.
I think. I furtively feel beneath my breasts. “Shit,” I say.
“I got you,” she tells me, and returns from the desk with a paper bag, nods toward a restroom. We’re not prisoners, but most of us once were, and there’s a blurry line. As far as the guards care, we’re on the wrong side of a crucial divide. I hand over my bagged bra and sidle through the detector once again. This time, I read as clean.
We wait at and then pass through four sets of steel mesh gates, the clicking and the sighing of locks, before we reach the Programs wing. Marisa is trying to explain how meetings operate on the inside, that it’s not exactly the same as what I’m used to. Recovery is popular with inmates, regardless of their relationship to sobriety, and they are ecumenical about it so whether we are peddling twelve-step or OneLife, they’re on board. There are guards just outside of the room where we’ll meet, but there’s a diminished level of supervision, the chance to communicate with inmates from other blocks, and coffee. We walk on the left side of the yellow line, and nod as we pass the guards.
“That one,” says Althea. “That one is fucking whore.”
“Be nice,” says Niani. “Make nice.”
Emily is already sitting in the front row when we enter Programs. The room serves as a remedial classroom during the day, and has optimistic exhortations stenciled onto poster board on the walls. Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day after day. Do it now. Sometimes later becomes never. The light is not good, or Emily has not been sleeping, because she wears the five years she has on me heavily today. The first group of inmates files in and take seats at the back. Marisa hugs a woman with a white raised scar running from her ear to her chin. Other Independence moms exchange news with neighborhood girls under their breath.
“Her cousin? Naw.”
“For real. And the auntie too.”
When Emily sees me, she stands, and gives me a small smile, and sits again before I’ve made it to her side.
“Everything OK?” I sit beside her. The muttering continues behind us.
She musters a better face. “Same old crap. My motherfucker ex sent his sister around to my house, when I was out. She was going on to Leo about how he wants back with me, how it’s me won’t talk to him.”
“Shit,” I say.
“Yeah, right? And I have to decide about the hearing. I don’t want to testify, but I don’t want him out, either. Change addresses, get a new phone number? It’s all too close to the bone, waking up in a bed that doesn’t feel like yours. I’ve been through that too many times.”
“Maybe he’ll mess it up on his own. Someone told me they never give you parole on your first try.”
“This is his third.”
“See?” I say. “Shows he’s no good at it.”
She shakes her head. “How are you? No. Let me look.” She gives me the once over, nods. “You still could use a haircut, but you look a little more human.”
“Stop it,” I tell her. “You’ll give me a big head.”
“How’d it go with—whatever that guy’s name was? The audio guy.”
“I don’t think he’s really making a documentary.”
“He want to sign you up for the first level of enlightenment?”
“Not exactly; not just.” I tell her, about the interview, the documentarian’s idea about my stalker and the thief, how he thinks meeting me was a result of his enversion session at OneLife, the Kif-Vesely’e connection.
“So you were there two years ago?”
“I was a mess, Emily, when I came back from LA. I’ve got bits and pieces. So, maybe. But, this guy’s story, it’s from when we were kids. It’s his deal, not mine. I don’t want to get sucked in.”
“Thing happened to me once,” says Emily. “Guy got fixated, became convinced I was his long-lost sister or something. He’s researching me, tailing me. He amasses like evidence. Junior high shit, we worked at the same donut shop, our middle names both start with a V. But at a certain point, I start to get convinced. Like, wait. Maybe. Then my mom sets me right: I know how many times I fucking gave birth. Squeezing a kid
out of you is not a thing that slips your mind. Your guy, the documentary guy, sounds like it’s the same deal as my long-lost brother.”
“Yeah, that’s kind of where I ended up. The guy from my driveway is fixated on the video. If there are connections, that’s how they link.”
“What we should talk about is how you broke your word. How you were not supposed to be organizing encounters with this individual.”
“I didn’t organize—”
“Just so you know. I didn’t fail to notice.” She shakes her head. “In my experience when people start to mass, start to act all the same and head in the same direction, there’s either money or revenge behind it.”
“The Green Line, on game day.”
“Money and revenge. I’m saying, I don’t think this camp thing is anything—some kind of nonsense bouncing between them. This video of your boss’s, though, that’s a money angle. You know, I went back, watched it again a couple of times?”
“Shouldn’t you be talking to your sponsor about this?”
“I’m not watching it like you watch porn, not like to get off. It’s just—like why I did again is because I don’t actually know what the fuck it is. Like the minute I figure it out, it’s something else. So, for example, there’s this actual celebrity sex tape, from a few years back.”
“How many times have you watched it?”
Emily looks—for someone else you’d say sheepish, but for Emily, you’d have to say, she looks like how apologetic would look on a person who’s decided they don’t apologize. “Ten. I’d say ten times. To figure it out, though. Anyway, one thing is the bathroom lady video is the same, like identical, to the first thirty seconds of the sex tape. What does that mean? Is that art? I saw where someone said it was art.”
I shrug. “Look, it’s weird for me,” I say. “Knowing what I can pursue, what I’m supposed to leave on the table. You know, I’ve basically stopped taking notes, and it feels like I let a bad dog out of its cage, and it’s just wandering around sniffing things for now.”
“You know who that bad dog is, don’t you?” A real smile breaks on her face, and it feels good to make her look like that.
“I get all the therapy I need at the House. Don’t shrink me. And also, stop watching sex tapes.”
Emily releases a short bark, then looks around at the filling room. “Your friend in here, is she coming?”
I shrug. “Wait and see.”
“I’ll get us some coffee in the meantime.” Emily goes over to the table with the sludge coffee. She knows a few of the inmates from her work in the courts and others who’d done stints outside before relapse and reoffense. I watch my shoes, think about the various scuffs on the leather and the fraying of the laces. A voice breaks over the loudspeaker, and inmates from the last block file in. I try to watch, and also not to look like I’m watching as they make their way to the rows behind us. There is a different way of walking in here, low slung hips and loose knees. There are fist bumps and occasional laughter, but as they pass the guards, their baseball-bat length wooden batons, their heads drop and I can’t tell one from the other. Still, I remain aware of the bodies behind me, the shuffling and the nose-blowing and the muted chatter. Emily takes her seat at my side as the meeting begins.
“She here yet?”
“I still don’t see her.”
“Maybe you should talk today, make this trip count.”
“And say what? My sobriety is really straining my budget? I’m worried my toddler might not get into an Ivy?”
“How about Monday, then? They’ll shed tears for that shit in Brookline.”
“I know,” I say. “I know. Same rules for me as for everyone else.”
“I can’t let you keep sliding on it.”
There is a rustling and a scraping of chairs, and a bone-thin woman in long, delicate dreadlocks stands up. “Good evening. This is the regular meeting of the Framingham MCI sober club. I’m Serenna and I’m a drug addict and I’ll be the secretary.”
“You hear from the doctor?” someone whispers. I look up, but the question isn’t for me.
“Yeah,” says someone else. “But there’s nothing he can do about it.”
Emily joins in the recitation of the serenity prayer, and I mumble along after, dropping the G-d when I need to. I’m trying. I hope she can see that. I look along my row now, at Marisa, and Emily and the other women from Independence house; I take a sideview of the inmates behind me for whom the place I live would be a haven, and I know I can try more, work harder.
Obviously, this doesn’t feel like my scene, but that’s exceptional thinking again, that’s my giving myself superpowers. I used an illegal substance. I took messed up risks. My half a college degree never really protected me from ending up here. It’s luck, probably, and—a point Marisa’s made—skin color that has protected me, and neither is anything to congratulate yourself about. It’s nothing to act superior on.
Still, I’m keeping my eyes on my lap. I’m thinking it’s an easy place to get accidentally in a fight for looking at someone the wrong way.
“Hi,” I say. “My name is Mellie and I’m a drug addict.” I take a breath. I raise my eyes from the floor to the level of laps. I see Marisa’s broad tight waistband, the aqua butterfly ink visible at her hip. I go on. “I started using drugs when I was sixteen years old, and I’ve been sober for fifty-five days. I have every reason to stay this way, but it means I don’t get to leave my life, and that’s tricky to get used to.”
I’m still not looking up much beyond the circle my shadow casts in the incandescent light, but I can feel Emily breathing beside me. She’s surprised. I’m not spilling my guts, obviously, but even this small speech is more than she’s used to hearing from me. I guess I’m getting practice in my daily sessions of art therapy, group therapy and normal therapy. Maybe even I can give some credit to the workbooks and guided meditation.
I am better.
A little bit.
Emily leans her shoulder momentarily into my shoulder. I take another breath, a deep one down into my lungs, and let it release slowly. And then we’ve reached the second row.
The women on either side of me turn, and I do as well. There’s Niani, and Althea, Marisa, and the woman with the long scar. Around me, the women rustle and mutter small phrases of understanding, One day at a time. Keep coming back. It works if you work it. They speak and they sweat and they wipe their noses and they ignore me.
Except for one. A skinny woman in a red bandana is watching me. She’s bald beneath the head wrap, and which is why I had failed to recognize the woman who is not really my friend. It’s Westie. She smiles at me, delighted. The forgery charge had been in LA. She and Lew shared a studio space, though there was more to it than that, and she’d been snared up in his legal troubles. I knew this because I’d been approached as a character witness, an opportunity I’d declined. Ultimately, her Massachusetts relatives had pulled some lawyer trick to have her serve in her home state. If I’d pictured her, in the intervening months, it had been in more of a country club facility, making crab apple jam with Martha Stewart and the other insider traders. If I’d pictured her, it had been as less broken by time.
When we have folded up the chairs and are circulating with our Styrofoam cups of coffee, Westie comes over to me.
“You got my message,” I say. “You came.”
“I’m not here to have Jesus get me clean.”
Looking at her now, I can see that she still has the hair on her head, but it’s cut short, and going gray. For so long, Westie looked half her age, and now suddenly she looks twice it. “How is it in here? Can you work at all?”
“Ink and paper. I draw people’s kids on their arms so the tattoo artist can use them as a guide. But, you know, supply and demand. This is a place short on amusements. So, I appreciate your coming. Now, let me see if I can guess what brings you here.”
“You made a video,” I say.
“That is a very funny way of putting it. I mad
e a few videos, but I imagine we’re not discussing my entire artistic oeuvre. You seem a bit vague, Mellie. What’s up?”
There’s a buzzy feeling. “I am sorry,” I say. “I feel like there’s something you’re expecting me to say. Is this about your lawyer, because, I should explain, when he contacted me, I wasn’t in a position—”
She waves her hand as if clearing smoke. “I was who they had. I was the conviction they could get. It didn’t come down to character.” She glances at me again. “Listen, can you hustle up a cigarette for me? From one of your sober compadres over there? I don’t want to shock you with how craven I’ve become, but the aunts cut me off. Delilah has Alzheimer’s, so Beatrice keeps having to break it to her again what shame I’ve brought on the family. Can you imagine? I don’t have enough in commissary for a fucking Jolly Rancher. I would kill for a smoke.”
“Let me see what I can do.”
I tap Emily on the shoulder and she gives me a look, like you good over there? I see how rough Westie seems, but I give Emily what I hope is a reassuring nod and bring Westie two cigarettes. She sniffs one, like it’s a cigar, her nose all along the paper, then lights it. The tip brightens, deep orange on the inhalation, and then Westie lets out a stream of smoke. The whole process is completed in moments, the lighting itself done in a cupped hand, the matches or whatever invisible.
“Fuuuuuck. It’s been like three weeks since I’ve had any tobacco. There’s a ban on smoking going into effect like imminently. I’m going to be a husk, like human jerky, some freeze-dried piece of meat.”
The Likely World Page 23