by Beth Harden
“Jesus, Elise. This will be rough on your mother. Have you considered that?” he asked.
“I’m smothering here,” I replied flatly.
“What about your boyfriend, Aaron, right? What does he want you to do?”
“I didn’t tell him. It’s not fair. I’ll explain it to him later when I can make better sense of things. Besides, he has a future.”
“And you don’t, is that what you’re saying?”
“Not if I stay. I’ll die here as nothing but the disabled girl everybody felt sorry for. They’ll always compare me to Lissa, the golden girl of promise. I need to go where no one expects me to reach back up,” I said.
“I’ll take you back to the farmhouse before they even miss you. If need be, I’ll explain everything to your mother.”
“Just get me back to Boston. I’ll figure it out from there,” I begged.
“Are you sure this is what you must do?” he asked.
“Yes, and I will with or without your help. I’m going,” I said. And he never asked that question again.
The Hughes home was a cramped three-bedroom bungalow in Jamaica Plains that he shared with his wife and two small kids. He shoved a cot in the corner of the sun porch and made room, thinking it was only for a night or two until I relented of this madness, saw reason and took the Trailways bus back to Portland. That never happened. I enrolled at Boston College under the Americans with Disabilities provision and began the painstaking process of completing my degree. With the help of his connections, I was hooked up as an intern to a forensic psychologist at the Boston Police Precinct. The decision to join the incoming class of recruits at the Massachusetts Department of Correction took everyone by surprise, Hughes included. In the absence of a father, he did his part, put up initial resistance and gave me a heart-to-heart on the hazards of the profession, particularly for a young female. But it was with a salute and a petition to Saint Maria Goretti that he dropped me off at the gates of the Academy as I was ushered into a sea of blue uniforms.
#
With a small fee to one of those data-collecting web sites, I am able to come up with both the phone number and address to his homestead in Waldoboro County. His adult daughter tells me that her father, now in his thirty-fifth year in law enforcement, is still working full-time in Massachusetts. Hughes is a man who will die on the job. His tenacious drive to round up the last of the worst will be the cause of death. I can visualize him clutching his heart and slumping forward with his face in a file. I dial up the direct extension she has given me.
“Detective, it’s me, Elise. The Braum’s daughter.”
“Get out! What a surprise,” he says with genuine excitement. His voice has not aged in timber or tone; though by quick calculation, he must be close to sixty now. When he knelt over my near-corpse and took stock of the grave situation, he was a clean-shaven, bright-eyed study of a young Woody Harrelson. Both intense and intuitive. Of course I didn’t register that until many weeks later and by then, the stress of my case had sprouted stubble on his chin, creased his brow and upped his habit to a pack and a half a day.
“How are you feeling, honey?” he asks genuinely.
“Very well, Detective. How’s Mrs. Hughes?” I ask.
“Healthy! At this age, that’s the first and last thing you give thanks for each day.”
“You heard about my Dad, then?”
“Yes, we received a note. What a tragedy. So unfair. Your family has already more than paid their dues. But I’m not naïve enough to expect that life is just. Seen too much over the years, you know?”
“I want to hire you to do a little side project for me,” I say, switching the subject.
“I don’t moonlight as a private investigator so tracking cheaters is out,” he teases. “What kind of work?”
“I need you to get some evidence out of the closed storage. I pray to God it’s still there.”
“I assume you’re referring to your own case?”
“Yes,” I reply. Hughes and I share one very strong characteristic - our hunches. He had always been willing to disregard logical obstacles and put aside convention to chase down that one nagging thought. I know he had put that box away in the back room with great reluctance.
“What is it you’re interested in? I’m guessing the biological material? If I recall there were multiple pieces of evidence.”
“You do hold on to that stuff, don’t you? I know it’s been a long time and space must be an issue. I want to know if it’s still accessible,” I ask.
“Let me answer you in a professional sense. It’s often an arbitrary call made by prosecutors and evidence technicians. In the case of biological evidence or DNA, there’s a standard rule. When the evidence has been fully tested and belongs to the defendant who’s been convicted, there is no need to keep it. The statute governing the holding of DNA mandates the longest holding time and for good reason. Technology, which is ever changing, allows us to re-examine and link the evidence to a suspect. That’s why this type of evidence should be maintained until all uncertainty is gone. That’s a pretty technical, long-winded answer but I want you to be clear on the laws. In layman’s terms, that kind of DNA is kept around for a long, long time if it’s proven that it does not belong to the person who was convicted. This was the situation in our case. I mean yours.”
“So, if I understand you correctly, no motion was ever made to have it destroyed?” I ask.
“Not to my knowledge,” he replies.
“But it could have been done, unbeknownst to you?” I ask.
“It’s possible, but not likely. A notice to destroy evidence has to be submitted to the defendant, his attorney and the convicting court. Any or all of these parties can object. If no one does, than the prosecutor can ask that it be destroyed. But remember, honey, no one was ever charged or convicted on the sexual assault because the material on the mattress pad and the nightgown could never be conclusively matched to the two bastards in hand.” He chooses the generic term, material, which is a kind attempt to protect my sensitivities.
“But we’re light-years down the road now in terms of DNA testing. Can this material be re-tested and matched against current DNA samples?” I persist.
“For what purpose?” he asks.
“To identify the invisible man. Our third guy,” I state.
“I don’t want to know what you’ve got in mind. Let me answer your question by saying yes, there are new techniques that use evaporation to lift prints off materials. And these results are virtually indisputable. That all did not exist when we were looking at your case.”
“And can’t we link into the national database and fingerprint files and stuff like that?” I ask.
“There’s definitely more information available to us now,” he admits.
“So, if I send you a new sample, can you have it tested and compared to the material in the evidence file? Please, there must be a way. Someone you can ask. I just need to know.”
“You know I would do anything to cremate the bastards that did this to you, but ethically, I have to do what’s within my scope. You know, you’re in criminal justice too. We can’t risk our careers doing anything illegal but….”
“But what? Are you saying you won’t do it?” I ask point-blank. Another thing that Hughes and I have in common is that new addition to our vocabulary, a small but useful conjunction that we’ve learned to kick into a jam: but: ‘an introduction to something contrasting with what has already been mentioned. Despite that; in spite of; nonetheless.’ Hughes coughs, and fumbles with the phone.
“You’ll do it, then?” I ask. There’s another prolonged pause while he wrestles with his conscience, trying to justify the small breaches in protocol he’ll have to take to accommodate me.
I hold my breath.
“Shit. Okay!” he says finally. “You know I can’t turn you down, Elise. Never was good at saying no to a pretty girl. Send me what you have. I’ll give you my home address. Make sure the sample is properly h
andled. It can’t be compromised or contaminated. Bag it up, seal it and send it overnight express. Give me a couple weeks to see what I can find out. And make sure you say a big hello to your mother for me.”
“Bless you, Detective!” I gush. He likes it when I address him by his title. It makes a man feel powerful and protective. He knows I need him and I know he needs me too. What he’d never admit to is the inexplicable feeling that I was his soul mate, that person in his life to whom a connection was grafted before the beginning of time and the Big Bang migration of continental plates. It was that deep. We had never been lovers in the typical sense. It had been years since we had seen one another; but the tragic force that drew us together bonded us in some intense and unbreakable way. We were life partners in our mutual quest to right this wrongful world. Cop and co-ed joined in a consensual cause. Women are wildly intuitive and I believe that the moment he laid eyes on my battered bare body, he hoped that someday he would see it again healed and radiant and offered up to him in act of pure sacrifice. Circumstances seem to disprove this theory since his amicable marriage to a loving woman whose simple pleasure is using her silver coins for a Buy-Two-Get-Three-Free deal at Big Y is still solid and going strong. But underneath his apparent satisfaction, I wonder if he yearns to be harnessed up with another restless soul. I’d bet my Christmas bonus on this - that after I’d left that musty daybed on his sun-drenched porch where I’d camped for months, and before the bed linens were stripped and laundered, that he lifted the sheets to his face to inhale my fragrance, looked up at the dim city stars and made a wish. A wish he never said out loud.
#
The video we are watching today is a grainy copy of a pirated documentary burned in someone’s basement during a desperate budget crisis. The audio stutters; the picture is blurred and jumpy. It shows a woman who after being raped repeatedly had her arms severed completely and was tossed in the desert to die. She wills herself to walk with bloody stumps held heavenward; knowing that succumbing to the pull of gravity on her exhausted shoulder muscles will kill her. The men are sickened by what they see. Some drop their heads; others wince and cover their eyes.
“What the fuck?” murmurs Willis. He looks away.
The next segment features an interview with a former USFL football player, a stand-up guy until he stabbed and killed his wife over a text message. He is speaking from inside prison and telling his audience, ‘You don’t know what you are capable of doing and will do under the right set of circumstances.’ The men are drawn in by his gutsy testimony. ‘A wise man learns from his mistakes. I say a wiser man learns from the mistakes of others. I already made that mistake. It’s done. You don’t need to repeat it,’ says our reformed athlete. ‘By the grace of God, I only got twenty-three years. You do what I do now and you’re finished. Finished!’ he emphasizes.
“Twenty-three years? Shit, that might as well be life,” Gemini whines while preening the tendrils of frayed threads on his worn shirt.
The video switches to a woman, bird-like in appearance with a tight twisted beak of a face, eyes pulled to slits, her neck taut with bands of shiny, convoluted scar tissue. She lifts her arms to show the third-degree burns that etched away over eighty-percent of her flesh after she was bludgeoned with a hammer and set on fire by her husband. I swear Serge is crying. He stares in open-faced horror at the screen shaking his large cranium back and forth in disbelief. Rev keeps glancing away and looking back, both horrified and captivated at what he is seeing. Bowman raises his hand and asks if he can be excused to go to the bathroom in the hall.
“Everyone stays until the end,” I state firmly. When the film clip is over, there is utter silence in the room. Zimmer forgets his whole cripple act, gets out of the wheelchair and walks up to the front to turn off the DVD player.
“Anything jump out at you?” I ask.
“That’s so fucked-up,” says Noble.
“How could anyone do shit like that to another person?” asks Dent incredulously.
“Believe it or not, that’s what you guys are capable of,” I say in a neutral voice.
“How can you say us guys, Miss Abrams? Those are extreme cases,” says Rev defensively.
“Listen. Here’s the deal. No more second person, she. It’s I or me from now on. Understand?” The men are taken aback by my uncharacteristic abruptness. I can guess what they’re thinking. Counselor Abrams is bi-polar or else it’s that time of the month. Or maybe she’s in a fight with her husband and brought that shit to work. They feel defensive, even a bit antagonized by this hormonal shift, but isn’t that just like a female to change colors? The blame game has started.
“I already know. It’s the probations officer’s fault because she had it out for you from the get-go. And the cops who need to make so many arrests per month to meet their quota. It’s a business, this prison thing, and we keep our jobs if you keep coming in. Of course the state makes all kinds of money off your sorry asses. And, oh yeah, your woman cried wolf and turned you in so she can cheat on you. And wait a minute, it’s bigger than all that. It’s a friggin hate crime too because you are black or Hispanic or just goddamn poor. Am I right? Did I cover them all?”
‘Jesus, Mizz A. We thought you was on our side,” Ortega mumbles, clearly hurt.
‘I am. That’s the whole point. The sooner you guys starting owning your shit, the quicker I can help you become the men you were meant to be.”
They need time to mull this one over. It’s the same with every class. I turn my back on them and pop the video out of the player, collect up the dry markers and the eraser. A quiet conversation starts up in one corner of the room. I ignore them and get busy rustling homework papers into my briefcase. In the reflection of the corner mirror, I can see several huddling together in earnest discussion. A few others are leaning in over the table top, gesturing with their hands and getting heated. Only two appear to be totally disengaged. Crespo is watching an earwig beetle creep slowly up the pull cord to the blinds and Bowman is doodling anime figures on the cover of a Daily Bread devotional he picked up off the floor. The volume of voices gets louder; more opinions are being thrown into the debate and are being hashed around. A small grass-roots revolt is brewing, one that will froth and foment and eventually be quelled by a lone voice of reason from the one guy who is brave enough to use it. I still don’t turn around or acknowledge them.
“Let’s face it. We must love this place an awful lot,” says Dent finally. “Hell, we have to cuz we keep coming back over and over. It’s like my grandma said, ‘What’s wrong with you? You got a prison wife or something? Why else do you keep going back to live with men?’
“Yeah, we're good at telling what our shorty’s done wrong. But we must have done something first to push ‘er to that point,’ Ortega says with conviction. They have entered a new phase of this purifying process when as peers, they begin flushing out the fakes.
“Let’s knock off the bullshit. I could’ve killed my ex. I almost did,” admits Serge. “Four minutes of rage is all it took to ruin a life.”
I notice that Willis has his big body half-turned and is looking out the window towards the small driveway where transport vans race by shuttling inmates to and from court at unsafe speeds. The passengers in leg irons and jumpsuits are not in any danger of ejection, they are bolted tight in place.
“What did you think, Mr. Willis?” I ask.
“I really can’t say,” he answers. He seems unusually distracted and reserved.
“Did what you watched bother you?” I press for some type of reaction. He’s pulling back, detaching himself from whatever gut reaction prompts this sudden aloofness. Willis shrugs but doesn’t respond. I decide to take a different tact.
“Most of you guys are addicts, right? And I’m assuming that the majority of you have been through the 12-step program at some point. Does anyone recall the fourth step?” I ask. The attention swings back to the front as the topic changes.
“Take a fearless moral inventory,” says Re
v.
“You’re right. This is one of my favorite challenges because it asks each of us to stare into the mirror of self-reflection and be honest about what we see. It’s such a vital step in recovery. So tell me, guys, if you take a good hard look inside, what do you see?” The question goes to the group as a whole and is meant to hit each man where he sits squirming in his own discomfort or denial.
“I feel nothing but disgust,” admits Willis suddenly.
“That’s wonderful,” I say. I don’t mean it to be sarcastic. The brooding man snaps out of his slouch and gives me the full force of his intimidating stare.
“Hold up! Hear me out. That feeling of self-disgust is your heart sending a signal. It means that it knows you can do better and that you are capable of different choices and better outcomes. Self-disgust is one of the best motivators if you are ready to make a change. If all you see is self-pity, than you’re helpless and stuck in your own misery.”
This is the point where the tide turns like the salty inlet that whittles its way inland from Frenchman’s Bay. The high water surges forward and spills headlong into the fresh flow of the Jordan River heading back out to sea. For brief moments, there is the optical magic of reversing currents as the force of colliding elements turns tail and retreats. Some of these men will continue to pound stubbornly upstream; others will meet resistance and fall back. But chances are a few will allow themselves to be diverted like a brackish mix of rain and brine and will settle into transparent pools of true reflection.