Count eight and lights out at ten. I can’t sleep. I wait for the next sound. The longest stretch of quiet I ever counted was 269 seconds. When I sleep I sleep fitfully. The cell stays a sweatbox. They leave on enough light so that they can always see me. And in the near-dark I get to thinking that a man only gets so many hours of light (even the weak Stemble kind). It’s a sin to blink in the daytime. I told you from the first that I’m afraid. It’s not this life that scares me now, it’s the mechanics of leaving it. Sometimes they can’t find veins. They have to break out a scalpel and cut to tap them. I do exercises. I clench and unclench my fists three hundred times at every count and another five hundred before I sleep. It makes my veins puffy and very blue. If I’m going to go, I’m not going out a split job.
I’d rather be like I was coming here in ’82, scared of everything instead of scared of that one big thing. And I do mean everything. After the trial my lawyer says, don’t put a toe out of line, Mr. Lusk. (I don’t think anymore that he’ll be able to pull off a reprieve but he still calls me mister and that’s worth all the money Mom coughed up and more.) He says it’ll help for my appeals if he can sell me as a model prisoner. Keep thinking Clemency Board, Mr. Lusk, he says. Worst thing you can do is act out.
So I’m locked up in Stemble. Scared to death of breaking some rule. And I’m scared of the men here because they’ve killed people (even if I’ve done the same). More scared of them than the guards, even though with a policeman dead officers’ve got to be looking for my least little slip up. It’s 1982. I’m still thinking in terms of months. I tell myself just don’t screw up, just don’t screw up.
Now there’s a man in the cell to my left, Nuz, who wiped out a whole family because one of the sons slashed his tires. I see him only when he’s taken out to the pens. Guy looks like a turtle. He starts to talk to me. Calls me Doc (he knows I worked in a hospital before here, knows I’ve had seven semesters of college). And even though I’m scared (eight victims, grandparents and everyone), I start to think some part of this world is like my old one and maybe a nickname means we’re good. Nuz tells me who to watch for. Warns about this guard, Wethtin, who gets crazy if you don’t call him “sir” and “Officer Wethtin.”
Guy on the other side, Enright, just laughs and laughs. He garroted a woman my mother’s age. I pretend he’s not there, one wall away.
Thirty-eight days pass and I don’t crack. I’m an idiot. I actually think I’m going to make it. My lawyer’s going to pull something off. Day thirty-nine Wethtin shows up for contraband check. He cuffs me. He goes through my stuff. He sees a picture of my little girl and puts a check mark in his log. “You got a daughter?” he says, real cold.
I go, “Yes sir, Mr. Wethtin.”
And he says, colder still, “Repeat that, inmate?”
I don’t get why he’s mad. My hands are cuffed, remember. I repeat what I said, louder, because I thought maybe he hadn’t heard. Nuz gets really quiet next door. Wethtin swings his fist right into my gut. Nuz only starts making noise again once it’s over. On the other side Enright’s laughing like crazy. The guy’s a panzer but he’s got this tinkerbell laugh. “Guard’s name is Westin,” he goes, “w e s T i n. Guard’s name is Westin and heth got thith lithp.” Even pulling the trigger I never hated anyone like I hated Nuz and Enright and Westin then. I never hated anyone like I hated that little ball of myself in the corner because I got then that this was it. The rest of my life.
Crazy thing is, when they took Nuz, I cried. Cried like they were taking me.
They have a new guy in Nuz’s cell. Young kid, about your age, Maisie. Duane Pelly, who likes that weather girl. He showboats. None of this has hit him yet. He’s from a huge family and has one joke that he tells over and over to the guards, Enright, me, whoever. He probably told the jury. You’ve got four brothers. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Duane. Guess which one ends up in Stemble. Everything about the kid’s thin as gauze. The longer he goes not thinking, the harder it’s going to hit him. So he’s here a week and I start to talk to him. Watch out for Wethtin, I say. Enright laughs. I don’t think I deserve to die, and people outside will say I’ve done a whole lot worse, but setting Pelly up like that’s the closest I’ve ever come to feeling maybe the state’s right.
No man believes in his heart that he’s going to meet the needle. But in my head I know that things are winding down for me. And maybe that’s why I’m taking the time (and just about crippling my hand) to tell you these things. A man at the end of his life needs the love of his friends. And I know through bad experience there’s no love without honesty. So I’m telling you the truth about me, Maisie. I realize that you’re not going to like this letter, and so I’ll say this. It will always be your choice whether or not to write back, but not everything’s your choice. Now that I’ve told all this truth, seeing me as something less than a feeling human is no longer an option available to you.
16.
Your letter arrived with the season’s first snowstorm. Early that year. It was only November. Mid-afternoon but the world felt twilit. Outside the post office, headlights were milky with flakes. I had thought to have a ritual, that I would read all your letters at the café where I’d made all that trouble with the plate. But it was a vicious storm and Stemble issued such cheap paper. A flake or so and your words would bleed. And so I read it there, in the post office, at the vestibule counter where customers sort junk mail from things that matter. I did not remove my gloves, Clarence. It was slow going and clumsy, of course, but you can’t imagine that was my primary concern.
I read. I secured the letter in my purse. I removed my hat, which was wine-colored and, according to Kath Claverie, framed my face becomingly. I removed the tartan scarf that was still in good shape after a decade. The belt and buttons of my good wool coat gave me some trouble and for the first time I regretted not buying the one with toggle closures. The gloves I tucked away in my purse. I left the rest of it behind me. I opened the door. It’s beautiful—you wouldn’t have seen it in ages—the air that fills an empty threshold. Snowflakes cut the space like television static.
“Lady,” someone said behind me. “In or out. There’s a storm on.”
Out. In Stemble you were always much too hot.
I started walking. I liked my neighborhood plenty but it was not without its troubles. Someone who had real need would come along to claim my warm winter things. Light poured from the windows I passed, buttering the flurries. You had no windows. I clutched my purse across my chest. Your letter in it, folded and dry.
My daughter says it’s been cold in St. Louis.
My own girl’s got her head on right, so it’s rare I get the chance.
My own daughter says I make up for every grade school penpal she had who never wrote back.
My daughter’s your age and her letters are never so mean.
The wind yowled. I still had my shirt and slacks, my solid boots, but in this weather I might just as well be naked. Yet there was heat, too. The sense I’d swallowed live coals. Pamela, Pammie, Pam. Three times a year we let you write her. On her birthday, because it had to kill you knowing she’d grown. At the turn of the year, so you’d mark another of yours gone. And at the peak of summer when she only wanted to play outdoors. You always ended with jokes she grew much too old for: what did the zero say to the eight?
Nice belt.
They were right to keep you warm in Stemble. Cold air could scour anything clean.
And Pammie was a good girl. “I’ve passed notes in Geometry that matter more than this,” she’d griped at sixteen, waving that thin, cheap Stemble paper.
I had hid my glee. “You shouldn’t be passing notes,” was all I said.
Pamela left home five years ago.
Your letters should have gone the way of curfew.
Only, the wardens couldn’t stop you now. Not like they used to. Inmates can’t write minors without their guardians’ consent.
Pam hadn’t been a minor in years. Simple arithmetic. She’
d been living without me almost as long as she’d lived in your care.
I never lied to her about Arizona. Frank and I agreed that was the right approach. Four bullets made splinters of Barbra’s sternum. Pamela had to know it. For Barbra’s sake and her own. Three letters a year. You were meant to be a gadfly. She was meant to swat you away.
What did the history book say to the math book?
You’ve got problems.
I reached my townhouse. My clothing made a second, icy skin. I was glad my neighbors worked. One peek out the window and they’d be on the phone to Senior Services. I was fine though, cold but fine. I didn’t fumble with my keys. My fingertips were bloodless white and the meat of my hands very red. I thought of Ma, that chestnut of hers about labor and virtue. Red hands like a washerwoman’s, true heart like a saint’s. I went immediately to the kitchen and ran the tap. Cold water is best for cold hands; the shock of hot is all too much. We taught Pamela these things, Frank and I. “He isn’t a factor in my life,” I said to the empty kitchen, echoing Pam’s stock reply whenever asked about you. I said it loud over the tap, its pressure Niagara to your drool. I couldn’t remember the last time I had heard her say it.
She said other things, Clarence. My shakes weren’t cold now but panic; there was a chance that these were things you already knew: Pamela never swore. That was Frank in her. Bull sweat. Mother of pearl. I remembered her grade school cadence going over spelling lists. A fragment of the poem she’d had to memorize for that battle-axe who taught eighth-grade French. And of course that high school solace: I’ve passed notes in Geometry that matter more. We raised her polite. Maybe she just kept up the three letter habit. Maybe when you wrote back she felt obliged to reply. Only duty. She’d sent wedding thank-yous within a month of the ceremony, such a responsible girl. Never anything less than a high B+. She’d got the top grade in Geometry. What notes she passed must have mattered very little. They must have been rare, those notes.
I lifted the kitchen phone. Buttons cheeped. I wasn’t going to confront her. I only wanted to hear her voice. 2:46 p.m. She’d be off at work but it was her voice on the answering machine. She was far more tech-adept than Blue.
But Pamela answered, breathy, on the first ring. “’lo, it’s Pam.” Not the way I taught her. Good afternoon, Stearl residence. Claverie now.
“Aren’t you at work?”
“Lida?”
“It’s the middle of the afternoon,” I reminded her.
“I know. I’ve—”
“Are you sick?” She had always been susceptible to colds. Even in the Arizona dry. Barbra told me. Good thing she had, or that first winter I’d have been sure we’d fed her something wrong. “I have good oranges,” I told her. “Remember? I told you at lunch? They’re organic and I’ll never finish them on my own.”
“I’m not sick, Lida. I’m doing some paperwork from home. What’s that noise?”
“I didn’t know they had you on paperwork. I thought—”
“I’m serious. Don’t you hear that hiss?”
I shut off the faucet. “I thought they always had you out with the dogs.”
“In this weather?”
“It snows on the blind same as everyone.”
“Well aren’t you profound.”
“I’m glad you’re not out driving in this mess. I like that the center gave you the day.”
“Flextime’s genius. I blow off every Thursday to meet my dealer.”
“Very funny, Miss.” If it weren’t for Barbra, who’d also blown off work at midday, Pam might have gone for the more obvious joke and said lover.
“That’s him knocking now. Just a minute, Hector!”
“Pamela.” A miserable fizz in my brain. Every Thursday, Pam said, quippy and unpremeditated, like it was true. Today was Thursday. The day she had blown off work and met me for lunch had been a Thursday too.
“Oh relax, Lida. It’s just the soft stuff. You know I can’t stand needles.”
“Did Blue take the day too?”
“Nah. He’s got this monster deposition. I’ll see him maybe in May.”
“You sound lonely. I can—”
“I’m fine, Li, but I need to go. Got to keep the line free for the center.”
“Say hi to Hector for me.” I wanted to see if the name gave her pause. It was an unusual one to come up with off the cuff. No one thinks Hector, voilà, unless a Hector’s on her mind.
“I’ll say hi to Hector and Blue both.”
I made sure to hang up first. I was no longer cold. I felt it in my cheeks. I’ve always blushed easily; I got that from Ma. Pamela didn’t. She was old enough now to have secrets. You were writing to her. She was writing back. Please let that writing be the only mess she’d got herself into.
Barbra didn’t blush much either.
Barbra who played hooky from work in the bed of Lawrence Ring.
The apple never falls far from the tree. “Stupidest thing I ever heard,” Ma used to say. “I’ve run an orchard. Any fruit worth keeping gets picked long before it falls.”
But: all those work-free Thursdays of Pam’s. Her throaty, casual hello. Hector. She’d been so young when she met Blue. She hardly dated before him. And it had to be tough going sometimes, all the extra that she did for him. If she strayed with some seeing man, at least she could believe him when he called her pretty.
And of course she was her mother’s daughter. Barbra, who never shared much with me. Never shared anything. I could count on my fingers what little I knew about her lover.
He responded only to Lawrence, never Larry.
He had worked at Folsom High for nine years.
He stood five foot eight, only three inches above Barbra, and was nowhere near as handsome as you. So Barbra must have seen something there; she must have learned to look deeper. Before your bullets tore her, my sister had begun to grow up.
He was tri-county amateur table tennis champ. I pictured Barbra, paddle in hand, laughing. Her hair falls in her face and she brushes it back. The paddle, still in her grip, grazes her forehead. “Careful there,” says Lawrence Ring. It helped to pretend his voice was like my Frank’s. It made it easier to pretend the rest, that she loved him enough to turn what followed to a little bit more than a waste.
You wounded him first but he died after Barbra. He bled and lived to see her bleed. My younger sister passed from this world in the company of a man whose name she never saw fit to speak aloud to me.
Outside my townhouse, the wind continued its shrill. Winter had always been my most difficult season. In the summer it was simpler keeping track of Pam. I put her in flip-flops. Each step she took, a sandal thwacked against her heel. Pamela walked in such small steps through the house, across the patio, pad, pad, pad. Listen, Lida, I’m right here. Listen, you can hear where it is I’m going.
17.
Saturday came, and with it another of Kath’s linners. The Claveries lived in Ladue, where the brickwork houses strove so aggressively for grand that even the snowdrifts couldn’t make them homey. From the driveway, it seemed as though Kath had subscribed to that Realtor’s adage about buying the worst house on the best block. A single story, imagine, for a family of six and in such a choice neighborhood. But that was just a trick of landscape. The house burrowed into the back of a hill, descending for two stories that were invisible from the street. Kath liked it that way. The modest roofline made her trees look taller than her neighbors’.
She was the one who answered my knock. Narrow trousers, dark blue but never denim, and a wheat-colored, scoop-necked sweater that, judging by the drape and the absence of sheen, was clearly real cashmere. The Claveries’ was a shoe-free household, and I exchanged my boots for the wooly moccasins Kath kept in an entryway basket. Kath was in gym socks, bleached bright and not remotely grubby, but nevertheless not quite the thing. Little chinks like that were what made it possible to truly like her. “We’re all downstairs,” she said, fingering the ever-present necklace of grandkids’ birthstones. A
silent moment swelled in which neither of us brought up Marjorie, followed by a squawk from the basement. One of the grandchildren, summoning Kath. She left me to hang my own coat. I was family now. I knew the way.
From the looks of the closet, I was last to arrive. Jackets pressed close together, sleeves bulging. All the Claveries hung their coats that way, sleeves stuffed with whatever outerwear was meant to pair with them. A coping system for Blue, I guessed, so he’d never have to fumble about. I hung my own and went toward the stairs. I passed through Kath’s kitchen, which was one of those extraordinary rooms that always felt yellow, buttery and sunlit, though the backsplash was done up in slate and the walls were the green-white of asparagus ends. I could hardly see Kath’s refrigerator for the stick figures; the Claverie grandchildren were burgeoning artists. An inlaid bowl stood on the central island, a lovely piece that anyone else would fill with glass baubles or fresh fruit. Assorted nothings cluttered it. A rock with googly eyes and pipe cleaner antennas. A book of stamps. Three wrapped lollipops. A watch. A pair of sunglasses. Kath’s keys with a tennis ball keychain. Four pencils. A pen lid. Kath’s driver’s license.
Her hair was brown, as mine was, though in both our cases some credit was due Patrice at Salon Carondolet, a small world coincidence we had discovered in the lead-up to Pam and Blue’s wedding. I picked up the license, what luck. It said she was five ten. I was barely five four.
They probably wouldn’t look that close at Riverview.
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