Even So

by Lauren B. Davis

  A buzzer rang, and a door clanged somewhere and then, at the other end of the room, another door opened, and the prisoners entered. Eileen’s heartbeat increased, and her stomach gurgled.

  And then, there she was, in the prison’s orange jumpsuit. Angela was still skeletal-thin. Her hair was pulled back and she wasn’t wearing any makeup. She looked pale, and wan, and her hair was no longer the shining auburn it had once been. It was growing out and there was a duller, greyish tinge about an inch or so from her scalp. Her hands were held, fingers entwined, at her waist. She might have been walking into the choir stalls at church. Sleeplessness shadowed her red, sore-looking eyes.

  Angela spotted Eileen and smiled. Something of the dazzle and beauty Eileen associated with Angela reappeared, but only a fraction. She sat down. “It’s good to see you.”

  “How are you?”

  “’I don’t know.” Angela tried unsuccessfully to smile.

  “Do you want something from the vending machine?”

  “No, no, thank you.” Angela spoke softly, carefully, and kept blinking.

  “Well, I’d like a drink. Maybe a Coke? Come on.”

  “Sure, then. A Coke.”

  Eileen got up and fed the dollar bills visitors were permitted to bring with them for this purpose into the machine. Next to her, other people were buying crackers and cheese, chips, soft drinks. She bought crackers and cheese, too. A little girl sat on the floor with a young woman, her mother, presumably, playing with a contraption on which one slid wooden circles and squares along a winding piece of plastic wire.

  Eileen came back to the table carrying the drinks, snacks, and two paper cups. They poured out the fizzy drinks.

  “Are your eyes all right?”

  Blink. Blink. “Dumb, right? Cried myself into conjunctivitis.”

  “Did they give you anything for it?”

  “Some drops, but they didn’t do much.”

  “You need to see the doctor again.” Eileen opened both packages of crackers and cheese and slid one over to Angela.

  “Okay.” Angela kept her eyes on the Coke.

  “I sent you some cash through JPay,” Eileen said, meaning the self-contained e-messaging service inmates, as well as their friends and family, relied upon for email, money transfers, or to request appointments with any of the internal services provided by the Corrections Department. Of course, there was a cost for every message sent. At the moment the charge was forty-seven cents a page, but it went up from time to time. To send money to an incarcerated person cost somewhere around ten dollars.

  “I got it, thank you. But you don’t have to. My lawyer sends me money every month, so I’m fine.” Philip had insisted she have a lawyer, Richard McBride, and she had finally acquiesced, although he couldn’t change her mind about pleading guilty. “You use the money another way, okay? Lots of people can use that money. Actually” — Angela winced — “I wanted to give it to one of the other women who doesn’t have anyone on the outside, but we’re not allowed.”

  “No, you can’t do that. I learned that through Sister Ruth. And speaking of chaplains, have you met Sister Brigid yet?”

  “Yeah, I think. She and someone from Educational Services came into Reception and gave a little talk. I don’t remember much.”

  “I’m not surprised you don’t. This is all traumatic. Have you made an appointment to see her?”

  “What would I even say?” The note of irritation in Angela’s voice was, possibly, an improvement on the previous flatness. “Anyway, she’s booked up. And I have to figure out that JPay thingy. There’s a kiosk in the unit, but I don’t know how to use it.”

  The inmates lined up at JPay terminals and could use them for no more than fifteen minutes at a time, less, if someone else was waiting and impatient.

  “Eat something. Okay?”

  Angela nibbled at the cheese.

  Eileen said, “I’m sorry I couldn’t get here sooner. I was in Florida at a conference.” Angela had been at Edna Mahan for nearly a month. Eileen hadn’t seen her since that day in court.

  Angela shrugged. “Reception was hell. Just a big room with these bunk beds stacked up in threes. I can’t get used to it. I just can’t.” She put her hands over her eyes, as though trying to block out the visions. “Going to the bathroom in front of people. The food.” She dropped her hands into her lap. “It comes in these big plastic bags and it’s like, I don’t know. Dog food or something. I can’t eat it. The smell. And the noises. Crying. Shouting. Laughing like maniacs. It’s never quiet. I hate the noise. I feel like my skin’s coming off. I’m afraid all the time.”

  “Of what?” Eileen took Angela’s hand, lying on the table like a dead thing, cold and damp.

  “Myself. Mostly myself. That I’ll freak out and hit someone, or start screaming and never stop. I can’t sleep. I just can’t sleep. I wish I could talk to Connor. Every time I close my eyes, I see his face.”

  “You haven’t heard from him, then?”

  “No. I tried calling. He won’t pick up. I write letters. Maybe he’s just throwing them in the trash.”

  “But maybe not. He might be reading them. Give him time. He’s in my prayers, as you are. Do you want me to call him?”

  Angela looked up. “No. Yes. No.” Tears fell again. “I don’t know.”

  “Tell you what? Give me his number and you think about it. Let me know.”

  “Okay,” she said, and Eileen repeated it three times so as to commit the number to memory.

  Angela shook her head as though to shake out the thoughts. “I’m in a unit now. They moved me three days ago. Bravo Unit. They call everything by military names. It’s so strange.”

  “That has to be better than Reception.”

  She shrugged again. “It is. There’s a common space with a microwave, cups and things. A washing machine and dryer. Metal furniture all bolted down. This guard, or officer, as I’m supposed to call her, sits at a desk and reads mostly.”

  “What about the women?”

  “A couple are okay. I have a roommate. A ‘bunky,’ if you can believe it.” She didn’t quite sneer, but Eileen thought she might have, had she not been so exhausted. “Diane. She’s tried to help me.”

  There was something bitter in that last phrase, and Eileen suspected Angela was not faring at all well with women she would consider, in her old life, somewhat beneath her in education, class, experience. Hard lessons here.

  “She’s all right. A little younger than I am, but she’s been here for nine years. She was in maximum, but they transferred her to minimum a few months ago. I don’t know what she did. I understand it’s best not to ask.”

  “Probably wise. She’d tell you if she wanted you to know.”

  “Nobody asks what I did.” For a moment they were quiet and then Angela made a sound that might be interpreted as a laugh. “You know, I thought there’d be something noble in ’fessing up to what I did, to making sure you weren’t in trouble, to trying to help that man.” Her eyes were very wide now, the swollen lids puffy and flaking. “I set up a trust for him with the lawyer. From the divorce settlement. It’s a whack of money. It’ll last a long time. What a fool, right? Thinking I could buy my way out?”

  “The trust is a good thing. A wonderful thing. It’s going to make an enormous difference in their lives.”

  “Well, good for me. Noble me. But there’s nothing noble about being here. It’s a coffin. It’s nothing. And okay, it’s just what I deserve, I get that, I do, but what’s the point? What good does it do anyone to have me here? Diane has a tattoo on her face! Her face. She has anarchy tattooed on her face.” She leaned in and half-whispered, “What do I have in common with someone like that?”

  “Angela, she’s just a woman, and someone trying to be kind to you —”

  “I know, I know. I’m trying, okay, but it’s not easy. I don’t know, it’s not what I expected. I thought I’d be better. I imagined I’d be the one helping. I’d be doing, I don’t know, leading y
oga classes or some crap like that. I spend my time scrubbing toilets and mopping the floor.” She crushed the package of crackers. “I wish I’d kept on driving or thrown myself into the fucking sea.”

  “Well, I’m glad you didn’t. You’ll get through this, Angela. And I know it feels as though you’re all alone. But you’re not. And it’s not forever. Five years.”

  “Five and a half.”

  “You won’t serve it all. Eighty-five percent max.”

  “I don’t think I’m ever going to get out of here.”

  “Give it time. Reach out to Sister Brigid. Promise me.”

  Angela pushed back. “Sure. Why not?”

  There was silence between them for a moment. The conversations went on around the room, with some voices pleading, some women crying, others laughing, children occasionally shrieking the way nervous children do. They drank their Cokes. The sweetness, with no ice and rapidly warming in the too-close room, set Eileen’s teeth on edge.

  Finally, Angela said, “Can I ask you something?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “You’re angry with me, aren’t you?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Don’t lie, Sister Eileen. You’re a nun. Not supposed to, right? I mean, not supposed to be angry. However … nevertheless … you’re furious and disappointed with me. I know. I could tell right off, as soon as I called you from that hotel. It’s okay. I don’t blame you.”

  “Angela —”

  “No, seriously, I’m furious with myself. And horrified and, to be honest …” Angela looked out the wall of windows and chewed her lower lip for a moment. “I mean, it all seems like madness now. Such a crazy dream. If it wasn’t for me being in here, I’d wonder if any of it ever happened at all.”

  Eileen felt a red worm of judgment rise up in her. After all these years, all this prayer, all this incense and flame … Oh, settle, settle, oh, breathe, breathe. She thought it wasn’t that easy for other people — the man who’d lost his leg, Philip, Connor — to relegate Angela’s appalling behaviour into some convenient back room of the mind. “That’s one way of looking at it,” she said.

  Angela kept her eyes on the milky light coming through the window. “You know, you once told me you believe we’re all intertwined, like a spiderweb, each thread attached to the other. Not a new image, of course, but the way you talked about it …”

  She turned back to Eileen, eyes full, nose running. Tears for herself, for her son, for the people she’d harmed?

  Angela continued, “It’s a question of letting God take the messes we’ve made, all those tangled bits of thread, and believing they can be sorted, spun, woven into something useful, a pattern, maybe one that’s even there by design.”

  “I don’t believe the accident was destined, Angela.”

  “Yeah, I know.

  Eileen said, “There’s nothing, however bad, that God can’t transform into something good, though, if you let God. Look, Angela, you didn’t run. You stood up and held yourself accountable. That counts for something. I know that right now, in this place, awful as it is, it can appear as though only more awful stuff is in your future, but we don’t know what the future will bring, only that whatever God has in mind for you is more wonderful than you could imagine.”

  Angela looked hard into Eileen’s face. “I’ll have to take your word for that,” she said, and then looked away. “There was this one woman in Reception, right? She left her seven-year-old daughter, who had Down’s syndrome and cerebral palsy and was on a feeding tube, alone in the apartment while she went out to some bar. When she got back, the police were in the apartment, waiting for her. I don’t know exactly what went wrong, but the child was dead. How do you live with that guilt? She wouldn’t stop screaming, yelling about what she’d done. They took her away. What’s God going to do with that?”

  “I don’t know. I only know the story’s not over.”

  “Isn’t it? Well, at least I still have a chance with Connor.”

  A harsh buzz came over the P.A. system. The guard pushed forward from the wall against which he’d been leaning. Their time was up. Eileen’s eyes stung. “I’ll come back.”

  “If you want. I don’t mean to sound, oh, I don’t know what I mean. You take care.”

  Eileen hugged Angela, as she was allowed to do, once upon seeing her, and once upon leaving her. “Time, Angela. Time and trust. Bless you.”

  At the door, Angela passed through the metal detector and kept on walking without turning back.

  Not good, thought Eileen, not good at all.

  EILEEN COLLECTED HER JACKET, car keys, phone, and wallet from the locker in which she’d left them before entering the visiting room. She quickly jotted down Connor’s number on the back of a grocery receipt. She waited as some of the other visitors cleared the metal detector and stepped out into the bright, chill September Saturday.

  She called Brigid.

  “Brigid Kenney here.”

  “Hey, Brigid, it’s Eileen.”

  “How did it go?”

  Eileen pictured Brigid, short shock of white hair, gold-framed glasses, probably wearing one of the bright-coloured sweaters she favoured. She’d be at home in the red-brick house next to Our Lady of Mount Virgin Church she shared with five other sisters in Middlesex, maybe looking out her bedroom window at the front of the house onto the statue of Mary surrounded by a circle of flowers in the front garden.

  “Not great. She’s not doing well.”

  “No surprise there.”

  “She’s got some awful eye infection, and I suspect she needs antidepressants.”

  “Has she asked for medical services?”

  A number of people were walking down to the bus stop. Others getting into cars. Everyone was quiet, sombre. The post-visit letdown. Several children were crying. And Angela would be back in her unit. Doing what? Eileen couldn’t imagine her chatting with the other women, couldn’t imagine her doing much other than curling up in her bed and crying. “Not yet.”

  “There’s not a great deal I can do unless she requests a visit.”

  Eileen told Brigid that Angela had a roommate recently transferred from maximum, someone with an anarchy tattoo on her face.

  “Oh, I know her. Diane. She’ll be good for Angela. Knows her way around. Has the respect of the other women. Good heart.”

  “I’m not sure Angela sees it quite that way. Not yet, anyway.”

  “I told you it would be a shock for someone like Angela. For some of these women, the structure and discipline are the making of them. They need it and thrive, believe it or not, but for someone like your friend, with her background, being used to doing pretty much what she wants when she wants, wow. She’s got quite a road. You emailing her?”

  Eileen said she was, a couple of times a week at least.

  “Good. Keep trying to get her to ask for me. I’ll come running. And, speaking of running, I’ve got to. A pile of things to get done before the ‘Journey Through Grief’ session in about half an hour. Let’s keep in touch on this, though, okay? And we’ll keep praying. Blessings.”

  And praying was precisely what Eileen did on the forty-five-minute drive back to Trenton. Angela, Eileen noted, had not asked about Carsten, and so she had not told her that Carsten had come to see her, to apologize, and to say he did not think, for a while at least, that it would be good for him to help out at the Pantry. She had told him he would always be welcome to come back, but perhaps it would be good to take a little break and reflect. She prayed for him as well.

  Angela

  Prison was a horrible mixture of boredom and revulsion and fear and exhaustion.

  First there was the boredom, exacerbated by the fact nearly everything was not only metaphorically drab, but literally. The doors, the cement-block walls, the concrete floors. The metal beds. The black plastic mattresses, no more comfortable than sleeping on a napkin over stone. The white(ish) pillowcases and sheets and brown blankets. The white socks and T-shirts and ru
nning shoes. The plastic tub at the end of the cot for personal possessions. The high-school-esque grey locker (the actual lock was an additional fee). The food was brown with bits of less brown. The bread was white. The plastic trays were grey. The toilets stainless steel. The common area in Bravo was at least a very faint yellow, one might even say urine yellow. Certainly not daffodil. There were, however, those orange jumpsuits, unless you were in maximum, and then they were khaki.

  The cell Angela shared with Diane was the same as every other cell. It had a small window. She had to stand to see out, and mostly all she saw was the wall of the other wing of Bravo Unit, but if she looked a little to the left, she could see a tree, a large oak. She was allowed in the yard three times a week for an hour and had seen the trees there and the grass, remnants from when the land had been a farm. So, if she stared at that tree, she could imagine a rolling farm just out of sight and hills and more trees and no people, just earth and sky and the sea somewhere beyond.

  6:00 a.m.: Wake up.

  7:00 a.m.: Breakfast.

  8:00 a.m.–10:00 a.m.: Work or education. Medical.

  10:00 a.m.: Return to housing unit for count.

  11:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m.: Lunch.

  12:00 p.m.–3:00 p.m.: Work. Visitors on Saturday:

  1:00 p.m.–3:30 p.m.

  3:00 p.m.: Back to housing unit for count.

  4:00 p.m.: Off duty/time in yard. Chaplin. Medical.

  5:00 p.m.: Dinner.

  6:00 p.m.–7:00 p.m.: Religious and specialized programing. NA. AA. Anger Management. Visitors on Tuesday and Thursday: 6:30 p.m.–7:30 p.m.

  8:00 p.m.: Return to housing unit for count.

  11:00 p.m.: Lights out.