by Zoe Whittall
Elaine was the kind of mother who, if she’d had a daughter, would’ve offered her the pill as an option at fourteen after giving a speech over dinner about the struggle for women’s reproductive freedoms in the 1960s. Her own mother hadn’t spoken to Sadie about sex since she’d given her an illustrated copy of How Babies Are Made at the age of eight.
“I’m against this. You know, I want her at home. She belongs at home. I miss her.”
Sadie was stunned by her mother opening up like this, so vulnerable, so unlike herself.
“I know,” said Elaine. “But I have the feeling that if I tell her she can’t come here, that would be worse, you know? Who knows where she would go.”
“Well, you don’t know her like I do. Sadie is not stupid or impulsive,” Joan said.
“I agree. I don’t know her. I’m not trying to be her mother. I’m just trying to give her some options, in a difficult situation.”
Sadie couldn’t believe this didn’t provoke a Joan-style rant about permissive and unconventional parenting styles that are damaging, and how children need rules and respond to systems of order imposed on them so that they feel safe in a world full of chaos. “Children need boundaries!” she would normally have shouted, while demanding Sadie get into the Volvo “this instant!”
Instead, she heard her mother clear her throat. “When did it switch, you know, from when we made the decisions to when we just gave up and let them do it? When did we stop being in control?”
Sadie felt confused; she’d never heard her mother express doubt before. She always knew what to do.
“Well, parental control is always somewhat illusory, right?”
“I don’t like this, but I understand how hard it must be for Sadie to be at home. But I want her to know that she is welcome to move home at any time of the day or night, and that I will never stop being her mother.”
“Have you told her this?”
“Of course. Many times. Anyway, let her know I’m expecting her tomorrow at one, like we talked about,” she said.
Sadie felt so guilty, hearing her mother sound so unsure.
“I will.”
Friday
fifteen
the gate buzzed as Joan was packing up an orange plastic cooler for the ride to the prison. The cooler was from the 1990s, and had Woodbury scrawled in black marker on the white top from when the kids used to play team sports. Inside she’d placed ice packs, a bag of green grapes, two small yogurts, hard-boiled eggs, a bottle of water, and a tub of coleslaw left over from Clara’s last takeout order. She rolled up utensils in thick cloth napkins and had just clicked it shut when the gate’s buzzer rang.
She peered through the window and pressed the intercom. “It’s Nancy, from work,” a voice called. Joan buzzed the gate open and watched as Nancy, wearing her pink work scrubs and bright purple raincoat, pulled an oversized warming dish out of the trunk of her red compact car. She blew at the long blond strip of bangs that were falling across her eyes. Joan was both happy to see her and embarrassed to have to remember work niceties that felt so irrelevant in the face of what was happening.
“Oh, uh, hi Joan. I’m just, I was just. I was feeling badly, you know, and wanted to know you were okay, so I brought you a tuna casserole.” She held it out to her.
“Thanks. That’s very kind of you. Come on in.” Joan took the dish in her hands and took a step back so that Nancy could come inside.
Nancy smiled awkwardly, cocking her head to one side. “Oh no, I can’t. I’m on my way in, you know, I’m on tens this week, right? But I just wanted to check in. You know, a lot of us have been concerned.”
Right. There had been no phone calls to Joan, nobody checking in, beyond the card and flowers sent right after the arrest. Probably half of them were hoping to be promoted to Joan’s position if she left for good. Joan had no idea if these thoughts were incorrect or if she was experiencing a paranoid cognitive impairment of some kind, thinking everyone had terrible intentions. Normally she didn’t think ill of her co-workers. They weren’t a bad lot, for the most part.
“Thanks so much. You know, I only really have my sister, since this all … happened.”
Nancy’s face dropped into a concerned frown, and she pushed her hair behind her ears, a useless gesture, before the strand fell forward again. “You know, Joan, I lost my husband last year.”
Of course, Joan knew this already. Nancy’s husband John had hung himself in the window of the flower shop he owned on Main Street. Nobody knew why. He didn’t leave a note. Nancy used to be a laugh; now she startled easily, took more overtime than anyone else just to avoid going home and being alone. The other nurses all used to pity her and started a weekly girls’ night just to make sure she wasn’t alone every night of the week. Some of the younger ones took her out to a pub and did karaoke after work sometimes.
“My husband … had secrets too,” she said, “so I feel for you, Joan.”
Joan nodded, looked down at her feet, and noticed that teardrops were falling.
“Thanks,” Joan said, letting more tears fall onto the top of the casserole dish. When she looked up, Nancy was halfway to her little red Honda Civic already, waving. She reversed back up the driveway. Joan buzzed the gate open again and watched her disappear behind the trees.
Joan walked the casserole into the kitchen, opened the fridge, and nudged aside two heads of wilting iceberg lettuce. “My husband had secrets too.” George doesn’t have fucking secrets. He’s being set up! She wished she had yelled that. But she didn’t really know. Not knowing felt worse than knowing something for sure, even something terrible.
She tried to pull herself together, placing the cooler by the front door, catching her reflection in the mirror. What does one wear to a prison? Suddenly Joan’s plan to look clean and presentable seemed ridiculous. It’s not like she was going to park the car and waltz into a prison like she was ducking into a Best Buy. She didn’t even really know what a prison looked like. She had printed out directions from Google, highlighted all the major interstate exits. She drew a pink square around the building.
She eventually dressed in the outfit she normally reserved for student–teacher nights, a sort of plain caramel pantsuit with a scarf, a getup that comfortably blended her age and status in life. Sadie called it her ugly old lady suit. In the mirror the outfit made her almost disappear, except for the red streaks across her face from crying, the deep circles under each eye. She looked old.
She was about to get in the car to go pick up Sadie when her daughter appeared at the door, wearing the same sweatshirt she’d been in for days.
“Give me a minute, I need to change,” she said, briefly stopping to squeeze her mom’s arm.
“Okay. Bennie told us that you’re only allowed to bring your id and nothing else. Also, you have to wear baggy clothing, and no reds or yellows, and no jewellery.”
“Why?”
“I have no idea.”
“I don’t think I really own any baggy clothing except sweatpants.”
“Those will do.”
Joan paced the first-floor hall for a few minutes before announcing that she would be waiting in the car. She found it covered in eggs, and went around to the side of the house to open the hose and spray it down, which was her new morning ritual. She didn’t bother with soap, just adjusted the nozzle to the hardest pressure, not wanting Sadie to see the viscous evidence of their new status in life. She gathered the eggshells in her hands and threw them in the outdoor garbage by the side of the house. Inside the trash bin was Sadie’s red canvas school bag, which she extracted angrily. It was a good-quality bag, with leather straps and detailing, and had been purchased only recently. Then she saw the scrawled black letters across it. whore. Joan pushed it back into the trash, punching it down, and covered it with the eggshells as a sharp, hot feeling rose in the back of her throat.
When Sadi
e came out, she was carrying one of Andrew’s old backpacks, which she tossed into the car.
“The nineties are back again,” she said, shrugging.
Joan wanted to say something but couldn’t, so she switched on the radio and reversed a little too frantically, toppling the trash bin.
sixteen
sadie was not prepared for the dire greyness of the institution that now housed her father. Any prior knowledge of prison architecture had been gleaned entirely from television, but in real life the prison looked even more frightening than she’d imagined. They pulled into a parking lot where a Greyhound bus was unloading visitors, who all joined a line by the front door.
“There’s a down-on-their-luck bunch if I’ve ever seen one,” Joan said, making Sadie shudder a bit.
When Joan turned the car off, she unclipped her seat belt and turned to Sadie. “This is going to be very weird,” she said.
“Duh.”
“Some things might shock you,” Joan said, “but I’m here for you, and soon your father won’t be here anymore and we’ll be back to normal.”
Sadie nodded, wishing she could be as hopeful as her mother, and opened the passenger-side door. They headed towards the lineup, which had only grown longer since they’d arrived. They took their spot and Sadie stared at the patterns on the cement, the lace-up sneakers and shiny high heels in bright blue and soft pink, and one particularly vibrant pair of red knee-high boots. They stood quietly in the line for close to an hour, Joan rocking back and forth from foot to foot. They didn’t even try to make small talk with each other, just withstood the discomfort in silence. Children ran around, their mothers periodically scolding them, but they were doing what everyone wished they could do, running off the energy and nerves that raged inside them. Sadie curled her toes and then uncurled them, over and over, until she could barely feel them.
Eventually the line moved. One male guard who looked as though he was cast from a 1980s prison exploitation film waved them through to a stern, blasé female guard with a red mullet and raccoon eyeliner. She gave both women a pat-down. Sadie tried to open her eyes naively, betray a hapless uncertainty. The guard looked right through her, touched her roughly, and exhaled a sour smell through her mouth as though she had a cold. Sadie grimaced, feeling so anonymous but guilty at the same time, with every prod and pat of the woman’s hands, as though they would find something that could keep her out or, worse, force her inside.
After the security and id check, they walked through two sets of electrified gates made of razored wire, past the gun tower, and across a courtyard. Their ultimate destination looked a lot like a grammar school cafeteria. They sat in rows and waited on hard-backed chairs.
It was announced outwardly — by their clothing, their straight white teeth — and inwardly in an uncomfortable, involuntary monologue — I do not belong here — that Joan and Sadie Woodbury were outsiders in the penitentiary waiting room. Sadie, as she realized this, felt ashamed of her feelings of superiority.
“Thirty-five percent of people of colour are imprisoned in America for bogus reasons. We have more people in prison here than any other industrialized nation,” she whispered to her mother.
Joan looked at her when she spoke but did not respond. Eventually she said, “You might want to keep your voice down,” and looked around anxiously, as if talking about race in this context was implicitly racist and they were, as they both wanted to scream, good, civil people, and not racists. Their discomfort said otherwise.
All of the other visitors seemed to know how to be in this environment. Their postures betrayed the kind of relaxed waiting stance one adopts at the dentist’s office. Joan picked at her nails, her clothes, and could simply not be still.
When Sadie had watched her mother work in the hospital — something that had happened only a few times, when she was a child — she admired the assured way she could command a chaotic situation. Amanda’s mom was always deferring to other adults, especially Amanda’s father. It never seemed as though she knew how to make a decision for herself. She was afraid of what Joan might do if she knew they’d watched a scary movie or eaten some ice cream. “Does your mother allow sugar?” she’d ask before scooping into a brick of Heavenly Hash. And Sadie would nod, even though desserts were a rarity. Watching her mother now, after the humiliation of their entrance, and now having to meet her husband in this environment, was almost as destabilizing as the whole ordeal itself.
When they called Joan’s name, she and Sadie were led into an adjacent room and given some rules. They were told that they were allowed one hug when they met and one at the end of the half-hour, but no contact in between. They had to keep their hands on the table and in sight at all times.
Sadie didn’t have her lucky eraser to squeeze, because she wasn’t allowed to have anything. She’d left it sitting on the front seat of the car, where she hoped its proximity would still help her through this. If she got up and ran out, as she was beginning to feel that she wanted to do, she was sure she would be breaking some jail regulation and be arrested. She felt the need to get close to the floor, as they tell you to do if a building is on fire.
George walked into the room in handcuffs, in the same orange jumpsuit he’d worn at the hearing. He looked like an actor playing a criminal. Some white-collar crime.
Joan hugged him and then stifled several sobs.
Sadie gave him a hug, as though he were a stranger at first, patting his shoulder, until the comfortable memory of thousands of hugs brought her closer, feeling safe, and then she remembered where they were. When she pulled back, at the urging “Okay, enough” from a prison guard, her body was an earthquake. She could not look at him and feel anger. When he spoke, her facade broke.
“This is just a mistake,” he said. “Someone is out to get me and I know that sounds crazy, but that is what has happened.”
“Okay,” Sadie whispered to him, sitting down again. In that moment, no matter what had happened, she wanted him to be okay. She wanted him not to be beaten in prison by the people inside who truly were evil. She wanted him not to be despondent. She wanted him to get out of there. The flood of empathy she felt for him was unstoppable.
“You can feel more than one thing,” Clara had said the night before over the phone. “This is a complex situation, and you can have an open heart.”
Sadie watched and listened as her mother and father talked non-stop about the hearing, about his health and safety, and about Bennie said this, Bennie advised that, Andrew said this. There was no talk of media reports, or the things girls whispered to each other at school, or the death threats on the voice mail. It was all about how they were going to get him out. Pragmatic and pointed, fake calm. This was all Joan. She was deeply practical and results-oriented. George didn’t break until the end, when a single tear formed in his eye. “I miss my girls,” he said.
Later, Sadie wouldn’t remember leaving; all of a sudden they were in the parking lot again, gulping for air.
Joan sat in the driver’s seat and sobbed so hard that the car shook. Sadie placed her hand on her arm, squeezed it, and then gently prodded her to change places so that she could drive them home.
“You’re in no condition,” she offered.
“Neither are you, Sadie. Just let me get some air and I’ll be fine.”
“A hundred thousand crashes per year in America are a result of driver fatigue,” Sadie said as Joan clicked open the driver’s-side door and began to pace the parking lot, clutching her arms around herself. Sadie got out and circled the car, hoping her mother’s pacing wouldn’t concern the men in the high tower with the sniper rifles.
She got into the passenger seat without protestations, and Sadie drove all the way home. Having something to do and things she had to pay attention to allowed the trauma of what had just happened to recede into what was, at that point, a bubbling and full reserve of pain she would rather avoid thinking
about.
I can keep it together. I can just be stoic. Just like Grandma used to say before she went senile. “Don’t let anyone see you break,” she’d said when Sadie was upset over a girl who’d stolen her favourite pony toy and then smashed it to pieces. “You are better than her, and it’s just a stupid toy. Just pretend it doesn’t bother you, and eventually it won’t. You’ll see.”
And even though Joan had the child and her mother over and they sat in the living room talking about their feelings, and the child feebly apologized and they all had a good laugh about children and the crazy things they do, Sadie kept her grandma’s words in mind.
When they stopped at the roadside for gas, Sadie checked her phone. There were five texts from Jimmy, all asking if she was okay. Do you have reception? Are you ok?
Just say it is and it will eventually be so, she thought.
She slipped her mother’s credit card into the slot to pay for the gas, and then washed the front window. Her mother slept in the front seat unaware.
“It will be almost a year before the trial,” her father had said, resigned. “And that’s being optimistic. So, hold tight. I’m going to try to finish that old thesis of mine, so maybe there’s a bright side.”
“But that’s doubtful,” Joan had replied. “I mean, doubtful that that is really a bright side, right?”
“Yes, yes, it is doubtful. I’m trying … to create something of worth out of this whole … mess.”
Sadie got back in the car and turned on the radio again. Joan stirred, adjusted her head to lean against her rolled-up sweater. Sadie texted Jimmy back. I’m totally fine. It was weird. I want to watch movies and forget about it. Go steal some pot from Kevin so we can just relax.