In Sickness, in Health ... and in Jail

by Mel Jacob

  ‘What’s so funny?’ Hamish asked.

  ‘He killed the last real estate agent who didn’t help me!’ I said, still laughing.

  Hamish laughed nervously until I explained that of course I was joking. He only tortured the agent, I thought of saying, but decided against it.

  ‘Nothing like that,’ I said. ‘It’s . . . it’s to do with . . .’

  ‘Paperwork?’ he asked.

  ‘Something like that,’ I replied. ‘Basically, he was . . . an idiot.’

  And Hamish laughed enthusiastically, as if recalling a very specific period of idiocy.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  ‘What are you doing tomorrow?’ a friend asked at dinner on the eve of Patrick’s first day release.

  ‘What do you think she’ll be doing,’ another friend answered on my behalf. ‘Having sex!’

  In the week leading up to his ‘big day out’, it was all my friends could talk about. Many of them had offered to take the kids for the day, or the afternoon, or an hour, until finally my sister-in-law Fiona offered to walk the kids out to the letterbox and back. ‘That’ll give you enough time, won’t it,’ she laughed as if it was the funniest thing she’d ever heard.

  With the exception of the Norwegian handyman and a few close friends, no one had asked about the conjugal visits, but it’s human nature to be curious about such things. And as the day visit drew near, I began to think about it as well. It had not only been so long since we’d been physically intimate, we weren’t emotionally intimate either. He told me that he loved me, and he wrote me letters but they were mostly anecdotal or requests for my ever-increasing to-do list.

  Because the kids became so distressed after their visits to Parklea I had stopped taking them. Naturally, Patrick missed us but he didn’t want to unnecessarily upset the kids and encouraged me to do what I thought best. So, it had been some time since I had seen him. I didn’t feel connected to him on any level anymore and the thought of him coming back to the house we had once shared filled me with apprehension.

  ‘Okay, okay, we can cry,’ Lexie said. ‘You’ve told us, like, a million times!’

  I’d read that it could be very upsetting when day-release visits ended, and I wanted the kids to be prepared. It was six-thirty on Sunday morning, and we were driving to pick up Patrick from Parklea. He had approval to come home for a period of up to twelve hours. I had applied to be his sponsor, which meant that neither of us could leave the house during the visit.

  We arrived at the prison, buzzed for the guards, and waited outside the wire fences until a CO escorted us to reception. Patrick was already waiting for us, wearing a blue T-shirt, jeans and his Winners sneakers. I was prepared for emotional turmoil at the end of the day but I hadn’t prepared for the sight of him in his pre-prison clothes. It’d been so long since I’d seen him in regular clothes and it made me think about the past, and the usual agonising question of why all this had had to happen, but I was also relieved that he was coming home and that this chapter of our lives was finally coming to an end.

  There in Area 4 reception I burst into tears, and now that I’d started crying there was no stopping me.

  ‘Mum, Mum, why are you crying, Mum? He’s coming home,’ Nick said, confused.

  ‘Sometimes . . . when you’re happy,’ I said, speaking through the sobs, ‘you cry. It’s . . . called . . . tears of joy.’

  Nick looked unconvinced but the CO, who was polite and respectful and no doubt used to this sort of thing, nodded to indicate that I was telling the truth. I calmed down and signed the day visit forms, agreeing to the following conditions: we were to remain in our home at all times and switch off the internet, and Patrick was not permitted to make any phone calls, commit any crimes, handle money, take drugs, drink alcohol or drive a car, and had to remain connected to the black monitoring box that was to be plugged into the home phone line.

  As soon as we walked in the door, the kids were all over Patrick, wanting him to play and share their lives with him. ‘Do you want to jump on the trampoline? Can we wrestle? Do you like my drawings? Want to play Minecraft? Can I show you my lip balms?’ ‘Just hang on,’ I said. ‘We need to plug the monitoring box in and Dad wants to have breakfast.’

  The kids groaned.

  ‘We’ve got plenty of time. We’ve got all day,’ I said.

  I called the monitoring company, advising them that we’d arrived home and reported the box number. Patrick read the instructions on the sheet, unplugged the internet cable and plugged the monitoring box into the phone line, so the company could download the software that connected to his ankle bracelet. The woman on the other end of the line explained that the phone would ring, and she instructed me not to answer it because this was the software downloading.

  ‘Do you mind if I have something to eat?’ Patrick asked tentatively, looking at the breakfast food I had laid out on the table. It was as though he were a guest, a stranger in his own house. All through breakfast, while he was devouring smoked salmon and cheese and fresh figs and juice, the shrill sound of the phone continued.

  The monitoring company called my mobile to explain they could not get a reading. I rang our telephone provider to turn off call waiting and double-checked that the modem was switched off. For two and a half hours, the home phone continued to ring as they tried unsuccessfully to download the software. By a process of elimination, we realised they couldn’t get a signal because of our back-to-base hard-wired alarm. Corrective Services was notified and Patrick was allowed to stay as long as the monitoring company could continue to reach us on the landline.

  After breakfast, Patrick played with the kids for several hours. They jumped on the trampoline, played cards and Jenga, and he finally got to see Lexie’s extensive lip balm collection as well as the vast array of craft she’d made during his absence. While Patrick played with the kids he was happy and buoyant, but after two solid hours of it he retreated into himself like a turtle into its shell. He became quiet and completely uncommunicative, an outline of his former self.

  He wandered around the house, taking it in. I thought about the way everything in your home looks after being away on holidays and wondered what this must feel like for him. He stopped in front of photos and opened drawers to see what was inside. I had lived with him in that house for five years before he had gone away, and yet it felt like he had never been there before.

  As Patrick wandered down the hallway, one of the doors slammed shut from the wind and he jumped. And later when I touched him on the elbow from behind, he flinched and said, ‘Don’t do that.’

  We sat down for lunch and Patrick listened to the kids telling him the stories they’d wanted to share with him for so long. He listened but didn’t speak.

  The home phone rang. It was the monitoring service again. They spoke to me, checked my ID and then spoke with Patrick to check that he was still on the premises. We joined the kids in the living room to watch The Simpsons. After a couple of episodes, he led me to the bedroom. He stood just inside the door for a moment, looking at all the changes—the paint, the furniture, the wallpaper and the linen.

  ‘It’s nice,’ he said.

  I felt nervous and vulnerable, like it was our first time. Like he was visiting my bedroom, not the room we’d once shared.

  He moved a stray piece of hair out of my eyes and, with the back of his fingers, caressed the side of my face. He moved towards me and kissed me, tenderly, passionately. Our tongues collided as his hands moved down my arms to my fingertips. He kissed me again and lay me down on the bed, propping himself on one elbow beside me. In between kisses, he slowly and expertly began to undo the buttons on the front of my dress, revealing my expensive new lingerie. He unclasped my bra, moving his hands over my body, and resting on the curve of my stomach. His fingers were electric; every part of me felt alive, reminding me what I had missed. Of what it is to touch and to be touched. Soon we were moving and caressing in a way that only lovers who truly know each other can.

  A
nd then phone rang.

  ‘Leave it,’ Patrick said. In addition to Corrective Services and the monitoring company, friends and family had called to see how he was.

  ‘But what if—’ I said and Patrick put his finger to my lips. The phone abruptly stopped ringing.

  ‘Mum, Dad, it’s the people from the jail. They said you have to come to the phone right now!’ Nick shouted.

  We spoke to Corrective Services, answered their questions and tried to resume what we had started. Then, not even five minutes later, the phone rang again. It was Corrective Services, who explained that sometimes people try to pop out immediately following a phone call from the department.

  We did eventually make love but, after all the interruptions we weren’t able to recapture the level of intimacy we’d had before. Afterwards, Patrick went into a deep sleep and sometime later in the afternoon I had to shake him awake to speak to the monitoring service again. I thought that having rested, he would have been more relaxed; instead, he woke up a completely different person.

  I was in the kitchen washing up. Patrick came in and started to stack the dishwasher.

  ‘It’s not working,’ I said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know. The technician came and said he couldn’t find anything wrong with it.’

  ‘It’s the filter. You’ve got to clean the filter regularly,’ he snapped and forcibly pulled out the bottom rack to access the filter.

  ‘It’s not that.’

  He turned around to get some paper towels from the pantry. ‘It’s a mess, everything could fall out!’ he said, angry about the state of the cupboard.

  Over afternoon tea he became very agitated. ‘The house has gone to rack and ruin,’ he announced.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You should have been on top of things.’

  ‘I have been,’ I said, wounded.

  ‘The dishwasher’s not working, the side gate is broken and the chook cage hasn’t been cleaned out since I left.’

  ‘You’ve been gone for almost two years. It’s been cleaned out many times. And the side gate has been fixed twice already,’ I said defensively. ‘I think the whole thing needs replacing.’

  ‘Well, you need to get on it,’ he said coldly.

  ‘I’m aware of that, but during the week when I’d planned to see to it, I was at the hospital with Lexie, and when I wasn’t working and looking after the kids, I focused on getting the pool sorted out, because you asked me to make sure it was a priority.’ The pool company had finally advised me that the pump was broken, which had, in turn, blown up the solar heating, so I had to manually clean the pool.

  ‘I just expected that things would be in better condition,’ he said without apology.

  I walked down to the bathroom, closed the door and cried. I had been looking forward to him coming home but he wasn’t home. I didn’t know who he was anymore. He certainly wasn’t himself. It was so out of character for him to get angry. I felt like going for a walk but the terms of his release prevented me from leaving my own house. Patrick’s mother had applied to be a sponsor but had not yet been approved.

  I splashed water on my face and told myself that maybe it was all due to the anxiety and expectation of the day. It must be worrying knowing that at any time, for any reason, he could be sent back to prison.

  Patrick played Lego with the kids, pausing momentarily to snap at me about the pantry again. I bathed the kids and made their dinner for them to have in the car, and at five-thirty, I called the monitoring service, as per procedure, to let them know we would be leaving home in half an hour.

  Upon arriving at the prison, I signed the relevant paperwork, and after Patrick had been breathalysed and searched, the kids and I were escorted back outside. As I turned the key in the ignition, I noticed that the car parked next to ours had a sleeping toddler in the back. I’ve sometimes left my kids in the car when I’ve run into the petrol station, or when parked outside the bakery at the local shops, but I’d probably draw the line at leaving them in the prison car park, at night.

  Patrick continued to come home for his monthly day release visits. Each time, he grew more and more angry. He went from silent to disturbed, and flew into a rage over the smallest things. Finally things deteriorated so much, I couldn’t see a future for us.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  I was slumped on the couch in Steph’s small office, feeling more disappointed and lost than I’d ever been in my life. It was only two months shy of Patrick’s release date, and all the effort and the heartache that had been expended seemed to count for nothing.

  I’d spent the first part of the session tearfully recalling some of the day visits. This was the first time I had seriously entertained a real kind of split—separate houses, custody arrangements, alternate Christmases with the kids.

  ‘Do you love him?’ Steph asked gently.

  Days before, my sister, Amy, had asked if I was still in love with him, wanting to know if my heart skipped a beat when I saw him. In the very beginning, I’d been in love. I’d spent countless hours day-dreaming about him and practising my new signature.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, tearing small strips from the tissue.

  So many different things ran through my mind. We’d been married for sixteen years and we’d been in love, once, but that butterflies-in-your-stomach feeling had gone. Once I’d believed that was because our relationship had deepened into something far richer and more complex. We got married, built a life together, had children, and a house and a mortgage, and while that might not be the stuff of an onscreen love story, it was real life. And much of our life with the children involved tedious and mundane things. Stacking the dishwasher, doing the laundry, picking the kids up, taking them to sport and music. As David Sedaris once wrote about the dearth of films about long-term couples: ‘Look, they’re opening their electric bill.’

  After the stress of the court case and the long hard slog of Patrick in prison, for him to come out and direct all of his anger and blame at me was more than I could bear. It wasn’t because I didn’t love him anymore; I just didn’t think I could do it anymore.

  ‘I think . . .’ I started, red-faced and bleary-eyed from all the crying, ‘we should get a divorce.’

  Steph waited while I blew my nose and started making my way through the box of the tissues.

  ‘It’s perfectly understandable for you to feel like that,’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t think him coming back . . . would be so hard,’ I said, looking up again at the drawings.

  ‘You are under an enormous amount of pressure. And the adjustment of someone returning home can be more difficult than the initial period of them going away.’ I looked out the window at the date palm tree shading Steph’s car. The branches sprang out from the top like leaves from a pineapple. The trunk even had a yellowish tinge and a criss-cross pattern. There was so much shade from such a small thing, I recall thinking.

  ‘I can’t give a proper diagnosis without seeing him but from what you’re describing . . . it’s textbook PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder. Reacting to loud noises, polarised behaviour, flashbacks. I’ve worked with a lot of clients suffering from PTSD. I’ve worked closely with police officers and the transition back into regular life can be very difficult for them. And Patrick’s coming from an intense and aggressive environment into a space that hasn’t been his home for almost two years and then, unlike other PTSD sufferers, he has to keep returning to the stressful environment, to prison. That can’t be easy.’

  I thought about what Steph said. It was hard to imagine what Paddy must have been through. In his letters and conversations, he’d always made things sound so funny and light-hearted. He recorded any conversations or characters we knew the writer in me would find interesting. And yet, when he came home, he wasn’t the Patrick from the past, or the Patrick in the letters, or the upbeat person from the visits. I didn’t know what had happened to him on the inside or who he was anymore.

  ‘Yo
u know I’ve never told you what to do, that’s not part of the work we do together. These things are your decisions to make, but I will say this: you are both under a great deal of stress right now, and when things are like that, it’s not easy for anyone to make a rational decision,’ Steph said. ‘It’s going to take time for things to settle down, so that you can both make a decision about the future.’

  I couldn’t see a future. With Patrick or with anyone else. While Patrick had been away, I’d received two propositions. One from a sixty-year-old banker with a toupee. The other from an unemployed man who lived in his parents’ garage. It was depressing to know that, as a yellow-eyed, yellow-toothed, wobbly woman, these were now my options. But I didn’t care if I lived alone with a hundred cats, I just wanted this to end.

  It would have been nice to believe that our love was strong enough to endure anything. But how long did I have to wait? We had already endured so much. The court case, and then the crucible of prison. I’d lost my faith that we could move past this.

  ‘In my experience from counselling many other couples, marriages can endure the worst of storms. I’ve seen couples overcome affairs and gambling . . . all sorts of issues where trust has been broken.’

  I blew my nose again, noisily.

  ‘It takes time for something as complex and intricate as a marriage to be rebuilt.’

  I’d never heard the word ‘intricate’ used to describe marriage before. I recalled an art lesson where the teacher used it to describe the ornate details in period architecture. The kind you see on cathedrals. We had been married for sixteen years. And I know that in itself is not a reason to stay with someone, and nor is having kids together. But they have to count for something.

  I thought about how much effort I had spent on renovations or writing stories in order to make them work. And then about how little actual time I had spent on my marriage. I mean, I had stayed, but I’m talking about actual work. Often, it seems marriages are like old buildings left to crumble and corrode until there is no other choice than for them to be condemned. If a marriage is as precious and magnificent as an ornate ancient building, it would take gloved hands, careful strokes and a lot of time to restore it to its former glory.