by Mary Monroe
I folded the newspaper clipping and Mama’s letter and slid both back into the envelope. The next few letters from Mama were just as depressing as the first one. I didn’t look forward to hearing from her.
CHAPTER 29
“I have some very good news to report to you.” Talking to me through the bars in my cell was one of the trustees. She was one of the few prison workers that I felt comfortable with. This one was not as husky, drab, and gruff as most of the others. She was a petite, brown-skinned woman with a cap of fuzzy black hair and large brown eyes. So far she was the only one I’d seen in the compound who wore make-up. Her lifelong dream was to one day visit the United States, so she had taken a particular interest in me from the moment I’d arrived.
I didn’t react fast enough. The trustee, whose name tag identified her as Luz Capistrano, reported the news before I could respond. “You do not have the HIV virus. Your results came back yesterday, but I didn’t get the information until this morning,” she chirped, with her arms folded across her flat chest.
I nodded and smiled through dry, cracked lips. I was glad to hear that at least I didn’t have to worry about having a fatal disease. Even though Jose had used a condom, it wouldn’t have surprised me to hear that he’d pricked a hole in it on purpose before sliding it on. But I didn’t get too excited about the news that Luz had just delivered. What I did have to worry about was still enough to keep me in the doldrums. I didn’t know what was going to happen to me during my incarceration, or what was going to happen to me when I returned to Ohio. No matter how I looked at my situation, it was about as grim as it could get.
“I will keep you in my prayers,” Luz told me, giving me one of her biggest smiles. “You don’t belong in this place. I can tell,” she added.
I smiled back. “But I’m still here,” I said, with a shrug, my voice cracking. My hands gripped the bars as I faced Luz. “Thank you for being so nice to me. I will never forget it.”
“Do you have any little ones?”
“I have a little girl named Cheryl. She’s five,” I sniffed, picturing my baby’s little, round face. I couldn’t imagine what she’d been told about my situation.
“Well, you will have her in your arms again soon. Praise God for that.” Luz’s smile faded, and I didn’t even have to ask her why. “All three of my little ones died in my arms before they lived to see one day. One thing or another. No money for medicine or good doctors.” Luz paused and let out a loud sigh. “Bad doctors live here on this island, and they did things to my body at times when I was not able to stop them. Some of the same things they do to keep the stray dogs on the street from bringing more stray dogs to our streets they done to me. I am like the stray dogs on the street now.”
“I’m sorry,” I offered, not really wanting to hear any more depressing news. It was hard enough trying to deal with my own.
Luz gave me a pitiful look. “Maybe when I make it to America, I will visit you at your home,” she mouthed, looking at me with the kind of desperation in her eyes that was common among ambitious foreigners whose goal in life was to visit or live in the United States.
“I’d like that, Luz,” I said, my eyes on the gummy floor. I was willing to say anything to maintain a positive relationship with Luz. In a place with so much despair and uncertainty, I knew I needed at least one friend. My mind flashed on the one friend that I had always been able to count on: Inez. I don’t know why, but in the back of my mind, I expected her to help pull me out of the deep hole that I’d dug for myself. I kept telling myself that had it not been for her, I wouldn’t be in the hole in the first place.
“You will love America,” I told Luz, my mind flashing on things I associated with my homeland: Big Macs, reality TV shows, Oprah, and the lovable, snaggletoothed second graders who filled my classroom every year. The thought of them beginning this school year with a substitute brought tears to my eyes. I had to turn away from Luz.
I wanted to continue the conversation. But under the circumstances, the only subject of interest to me was living through this ordeal. As nice as Luz was to me and as much as I liked her, I returned to the cot and turned my face to the wall. I kept my face in that direction until I heard Luz leave, the ring of keys she carried jingling like bells.
The prison employees were not as brutal as I had expected them to be. If anything, they seemed just plain indifferent. Luz was the most personable one I’d encountered so far.
I had not had any bad experiences with any of the other inmates yet, but I still had more than two and a half months to go. I was determined to not let my guard down. I had learned from Luz that the most dangerous inmates, like the ones who had committed murder or who had sold their own children, were kept in a separate facility. The “good” criminals, like me and the two dozen women that I interacted with, included just prostitutes and petty thieves. Just like Debra Retner had told me, some of these women seemed delighted to be incarcerated, as opposed to living on the streets. They had a place to sleep, food, medical attention, and even recreational activities. There was a small television set in a large room, with a satellite dish. There was a volleyball net in the yard. Women’s magazines were routinely passed out, and the inmates clamored for them, even though most were at least six months old.
To me, the menu left a lot to be desired. Every meal included rice, even breakfast. The bread, a flat, square-shaped biscuit, was always cold and stale. No matter what the meat was on a particular day, it always looked the same: gray and stringy. I couldn’t tell when it was pork, beef, or chicken. I skipped a lot of meals. When I did eat, I often didn’t know what I was putting in my mouth.
The next letter that I received from Mama included forty dollars, which I used to purchase a few personal items and some junk food from the commissary. I didn’t bother reading Mama’s letter right away. I was certain that it contained more words that would do me more harm than good, so I decided that I would read it at my leisure. I ended up wishing I had read Mama’s letter. If I had, I would have known what Inez was up to.
Two days after I’d received Mama’s last letter, Luz approached my cell, clapping her hands. “More good news!” she greeted. I jumped up from my cot and ran to the front of the cell, gripping the bars like I always did when someone came to see me. That Thursday morning was one of the hottest days I’d endured so far. The temperature was already over a hundred degrees, and it wasn’t even noon yet. Sweat was sliding down my face like wax.
“What is it?” I asked, coughing. I had contracted a slight cold a few days ago and was still dealing with a cough and a few other aches and pains.
Luz grinned and shook her ring of keys at me before she opened the door to my cell. “Big surprise,” she hollered. “The best surprise for you!”
“Am I going home?” I asked, gasping so hard I almost choked on my tongue. My eyes blinked hopefully.
Luz grabbed my hand and pulled me out of my cell and into the corridor. Then she proceeded to lead me down the darkened hallway, beyond the cell block. The large shoes slipping and sliding on my feet made it hard for me to keep up with her. I ignored the catcalls, grunts, and groans coming from the women in the other cells.
“You have a visitor!” Luz exclaimed, squeezing my hand.
Thursday was visiting day. Three Thursdays had already come and gone, and no one had come to visit me except Debra Retner. I had not expected any other visitors, so I assumed that it was Debra who had come to see me this time, too. Mama couldn’t afford to make the trip. And from what Mama had revealed in her letters, the rest of my relatives had said that they couldn’t visit me, because they were afraid something might happen to them if they entered a foreign country.
At this point, I was so angry with Leon that he was the last person in the world I wanted to see. It was too late for him to pay my fine and take me home, so there was no point in him coming now. The thought of him kicking back and going on about his life, with me sitting in an island jail, just made my blood boil.
Then I recalled Debra telling me on her last visit that she was going to visit her daughter in that hellish prison in Malaysia this week. I stopped in my tracks and pulled my hand away from Luz. “Who is here to see me?” I demanded. “Is it my husband?” Bile rose in my throat as I clenched my fists.
“No. A pretty woman has come to visit with you. Come about!” Luz yelled, grabbing my hand again.
The waiting room was almost as gloomy as my cell. There were a lot of dusty windows on all four walls. The windows were small and round, and looked like sad, hollow eyes. I felt like I’d just stumbled into a cheap cafeteria in a cheap hotel. It smelled like one, too: musty and stale. The glare from the sun coming in through the windows blinded me for a moment. I couldn’t see much until I reached one of several long wooden picniclike tables, where prisoners sat across from their visitors on hard wooden benches. I shaded my eyes and sucked in a mouth full of air.
“Hello, Renee.” It was Inez, the one woman that I never expected to talk to again.
Luz patted my shoulder and left immediately. I just stood there staring at Inez, with my hand still shading my eyes, which had tears forming in them.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I croaked, wobbling on legs that felt like they were going to collapse at any moment.
“I would have come back down here sooner. But I didn’t go straight home when I left here. I made a detour to Aruba. I didn’t know you were still down here until last week!” Inez rose and put her hand on my shoulder, guiding me into the seat across from her.
She looked uncomfortable and frightened as she glanced around the room, and I could see why. There were almost as many armed guards in the room as there were prisoners. An escape was not even a remote possibility. And from what I’d heard about the immediate area outside the compound, it was safer to be inside. Other criminals, wild dogs, and snakes patrolled the area. A week ago a woman who had worked in the laundry room wandered too far away from the prison grounds one evening. They found a few bits and pieces of her body on the ground next to a coconut tree two days later. She’d been raped and beaten and left for the wild dogs to finish off.
“I guess you know how I ended up in here,” I said, sounding sarcastic when I didn’t mean to. I couldn’t control much of anything I said or did anymore.
Inez glanced to the side, speaking with her lips barely moving. “I’ve talked to your mother and your sister. And ten different other people saved that newspaper clipping about you for me.” Inez tapped my hand. “I told your mother to tell you in her letter that I was on my way. I booked a flight as soon as I heard, so I didn’t have time to write you a letter first. Besides, I didn’t know if you’d accept a letter from me, anyway. I figured I had a better chance of communicating with you if I showed up in person.” Inez shifted in her seat and gave me a hard look. It was hard for me not to look away. “Renee, I came back to the hotel the next day after that, uh, that little confrontation we had. They told me you’d just left in a cab. I waited in the lobby all night for you to return. When morning came and you hadn’t come back, I went back to my hotel. I hadn’t slept all night, so I was out like a light for the next eight hours. If I had known anything about what had happened to you, I would have been there to bail you out, no questions asked. Despite our little spat, I would not have let you go to jail,” Inez said, with conviction. And I believed every word she said.
I felt disembodied. My head seemed to be floating above my body. I was stronger than I’d given myself credit for, because I was still able to express myself. I tilted my head and gave Inez a wan smile. “They would have let me go if I’d been able to pay the ten-thousand-dollar fine in time. Leon could have brought it, or he could have wired it down here.” At this point, I had to stop talking to catch my breath and compose myself. I felt a panic attack coming on, but a few deep breaths held it off. “Leon hung up on me when I called him. And you know how broke everybody else in my family is,” I said tiredly. “Did you know that Jose was the one who set me up?”
“Who the fuck is Jose?” Inez asked, with a grimace. “Did I meet him?”
I nodded. “He was the one who was tickling my feet that day we stopped for drinks after shopping,” I said, my angry words burning my lips. Just thinking about Jose made me sick. Talking about that beast was almost impossible. But since Inez gave me such a puzzled look, I kept talking about him. “You had already met him earlier. When you came back with our drinks, he forgot about me and was suddenly all over you like a cheap wig.”
“Jose? The older dude with the reddish hair?”
I nodded. “He works for the cops. Men like him help the cops trap…uh…prostitutes.” My eyes wandered off to the side for a moment. “Jose didn’t pay for my dinner or flirt with me because he liked me. He was only doing his job,” I said through clenched teeth.
“Fuck…it could have been me.”
“If you had fucked him and accepted money from him, yes. But it wasn’t you,” I said in a firm voice.
Inez sighed and tilted her head. I could see large tears in her eyes, even though she blinked a lot, trying to hold them back.
“Renee, I am sorry about what happened between us. And I don’t blame you if you don’t want anything else to do with me when you get home. But I want you to know that I didn’t sleep with Leon after he got with you. I know people think I’m a whore, and I don’t give a shit. And maybe I am, but I am as good a friend to you as a woman like me can be.”
“Did Leon try to sleep with you after he married me?”
Inez dropped her head and nodded. “All the time. And the more I rejected him, the more he hated me; at least that’s what he tried to make you think. But I do believe that he did develop very strong feelings for you once he realized what a wonderful woman he’d picked. He married you. You had his baby. That’s got to mean something to him.” Inez sounded sincere, but that didn’t make me feel any better.
“Have you seen or talked to him?” I asked.
“As soon as I found out what had happened to you, I went to see him. I told him that I’d told you everything. He was righteously pissed. But I didn’t give a flying fuck. Now I know he won’t be trying to make moves on me anymore.”
“Why did you come back down here?” I asked. “There’s really nothing you can do for me now.”
“Because I knew you needed a friend to help you get through this mess. Who else was going to do it? As far as I am concerned, you are still my best friend. When you get home, I will do everything I can to help you get back into the swing of things. That’s the least I can do.”
“I don’t want you to pity me, Inez. I’ll be fine,” I said.
Inez shook her head. “I don’t pity you. You are the best friend I’ve ever had, and I want to be there for you again.”
I don’t know what made me say what I said next. I didn’t even believe the words as they rolled out of my mouth. “I wish I was more like you. I would not have been so quick to settle for Leon. I should have dated every man in sight.”
Inez gave me a long thoughtful look. “Why would you want to be like me?”
I shrugged. “At least I’d be happy.”
“You think I’m happy?” Inez guffawed. “You think fooling around with a lot of men makes me happy? Did you ever think that maybe the reason I do what I do is because I am unhappy, and I’m trying to hide it? You want to know what one of the few things in my life is that makes me happy?”
I blinked and shook my head.
“You,” Inez declared. “I never had any close female friends in my life until I met you. That’s why I tried so hard to warn you about Leon. I guess I didn’t try hard enough.”
“Yes, you did,” I rasped. “You did all you could do for me.”
I lost it first. I started crying, squawking like a crow. Inez was even worse. She burst into tears and cried so hard, I ended up consoling her.
CHAPTER 30
Inez stayed until visiting hours were over. I returned to my cell, feeling like a new woman
, and in a way I was. I knew that I could never go back to being the same meek little housewife I’d been. I didn’t know yet what I was going to do about my marriage.
Mama included some vague hints in her next two letters that Leon was thinking about getting a divorce, so there was a possibility that the outcome of my marriage was not going to be up to me, anyway. One thing that Mama had revealed in her letters was that Leon had agreed to let Cheryl stay with her until I returned. That didn’t surprise me. I did believe that the man loved our daughter as much as he loved his other daughter, but he didn’t have the patience to take care of two young girls on his own. He used to get nervous when both of the girls were in his presence. And that was even with me there taking care of most of their needs.
Another month dragged by, bringing me closer to my release date. But I was more depressed than ever. One of the inmates died in her cell while giving birth two and a half months early. When the guards and trustees found her the next morning, she was hanging sideways across her bed, with the dead baby dangling from between her thighs.
They were still cleaning up the mess when Luz strutted down the hall to my cell, with a familiar grin on her face.
“You have a visitor from America! Come about!” she hollered, clapping her hands like a trained seal.
I had received a letter from Inez telling me that she’d had some unexpected expenses, and because of that, she didn’t know when she’d be able to visit me again. But I still assumed it was her.
“He’s a nice-looking man,” Luz continued. “Nice blue suit.”
I stopped dead in my tracks. I didn’t think that any of my male relatives had scraped up the money for a ticket and a hotel, and gotten over their fear of something happening to them in the islands. There could be only one other man in a nice blue suit sitting in that visitors’ room, waiting to see me: Leon. The way I felt about Leon now, I would have preferred a visit from Jose, or even Osama bin Laden.