It was Ray and his roommate, Davis, who escaped. Ray diverted water from a plumbing main, and he and Davis dug their way down to the pipe, opened it up with a blowtorch, got inside, crawled under both perimeter fences, opened up another hole, and dug their way back out.
This may sound easy, but it was next to impossible. It involved Ray and Davis digging that first hole under a tower with a sharpshooter in it, and even more unbelievably, it involved their not being missed until standing count at 4 p.m. People were in shock over that. Not missed until standing count? How? The answer was right in the newspaper: phony work orders, clearances, passes, all made by Davis, who was a forger on top of a murderer. He’d been peaceful and crazy for years, and they’d stopped watching him. Over at the prison, heads started to roll.
The last break was seventeen years ago, when I was a senior in high school. People still talk about that one: three guys used homemade stilts to scale both fences, then hid in the home of a family that was out of town. They sewed up their gashes with sewing needles and blue thread. I always remembered that, how the thread was blue. By the time they were caught they’d taken two hostages, shot a horse, and burned a barn to the ground.
The night I heard about Ray, I moved into my girls’ room, dragging in the foldaway cot and opening it between their beds. Megan was away at a soccer game, but Gabrielle, my little one, was my accomplice. A slumber party with Mom! We were popping popcorn when Megan got home. When she heard about the plan she kicked off her soccer cleats and hurled them out the front door so they disappeared into the dark. Megan’s too neat to get mud on the floor, even in a rage. She screamed, “I have no privacy in this house! Ever. Ever. Ever. Ever. Ever.” She’s thirteen.
“I understand,” I told her, which is one of the things Dr. Riordan, the online psychologist I’ve been writing to about Megan, told me to say.
“You don’t understand,” she bellowed, “or you wouldn’t have that cot next to my bed!”
“Megan, two prisoners escaped—”
“Oh, right. Like you’re going to protect us?” She stood there with a hand on her skinny hip and it was my own face looking back at me, my young face, green-eyed and pretty. The venom and hatred I saw there was frightening, but I didn’t react. Dr. Riordan says I need to let Megan express anger and show that I can take it.
When I heard Gabby sob, I snapped. “You’ve terrified your sister, you little bitch,” I told Megan, then felt sick hearing myself.
I leaned over Gabby and put my face in her long, heavy hair, which is jet black and smells like apples. There’s a sweetness still in Gabby that Megan lost years ago. Every day I feel like I’m holding myself around that sweetness, trying to protect it.
“I thought it would be fun,” she sobbed.
“It will be fun,” I said.
Megan had stormed into their bedroom. Through the walls I heard her burrowing into her private corner, which is a folding screen she bought and curled around one window. On the outside the screen is plain white, but inside it’s a whole collage of her life: pictures of her friends, straw wrappers woven into a braid, a purple feather, a troll doll with green hair, a sparkling mask, some dried-out daisies. Gabby’s under strict orders not to go into Megan’s corner, but the person Megan really wants to keep out is me; she’s shielding her life from me because she thinks if I touch it, it will shrivel and die like mine did.
Megan was still in her corner, elbows on the windowsill, when Gabby and I got into bed. Gabby sleeps with Measles, the bear Seth gave her when she had the measles long ago. We forgot to have her vaccinated.
I lay awake a long time. Eventually Seth came home. He was working double shifts, which meant he was clean for the moment. I heard a beer pop, the TV come on. Megan crept out of the dark bedroom and went to him. I heard them talking, and the anger came up in me. Why him? What had he ever done for her? And then I thought about Dr. Riordan, whose e-mails I’ve read so many times I’ve memorized them: “Megan has many things to be angry about. It may seem unfair that she feels more intimacy with her father, but the betrayal she felt as a result of your drug use was probably much greater.” And that was true. Lying there, I told myself: What I feel is meaningless. My job, my only job, is to keep these girls safe and healthy so their lives can mean something. It helped me to think that way. I imagined myself dissolving into nothing, or not nothing but a kind of liquid sap that would fill up my girls and give them a chance and also the focus and confidence to take that chance, unlike me. If I can do that, really do that, I told myself, I can die without regrets. I’m thirty-three.
Our baby, Corey, was red and very small, about the size of a hand. He looked scalded. You could see he shouldn’t be out in the world. Can’t we put him back? I asked that question several times. Isn’t there a way to put him back? No one even answered me.
He had a tight little face, a shrunken face like a mummy dug up after centuries. The pain of thousands of years was in it.
I would sit there, watching him through the glass. He moved like a boiled hand, opening and closing weakly. “We need to turn him,” the nurses would tell me, and I’d move away.
I only took a bump when I couldn’t move or care for the other two without it. I’d think, Just a little one, just enough to get them to school, and I’d take the bump and feel the baby clench up in me.
After Corey died, I was in a psychiatric hospital for months. I just want to die, I’d say, and they’d tell me, You have two girls who need you. And you’re clean, you’ve kicked your habit and your whole life is still ahead of you.
I told my mother, “The doctors say I have to forgive myself or I can’t go on. So I’m trying to do that.” And my mother said, “Forgiving yourself is one thing. Getting God to forgive you is something else.”
The prison-teaching gig came to me through the college. It was a huge opportunity because I’d only just started my master’s and I wasn’t qualified to teach yet, but they fudged that to give me the chance, because they needed someone. The money was great—hazard pay, they called it. And I thought, If I can teach someone else how to write, maybe that will mean I can do it myself.
When I got my list of students I showed it to my cousin Calgary, who’s been a CO at the prison for years. He started to tell me about them. Melvin Williams: “Big, stupid guy,” he said. “Found religion and all that.” Thomas Harrington: “Smart. Works with reptiles. A meth freak like you.” Hamad Samid: “Keep an eye on that one. He’s a Muslim.” Samuel Lawd: “They turned him gay. The big black guys pass him around.” Allan Beard: “Oh yeah, the professor. They caught him with an airplane hangar full of pot.” But I stopped him there. I didn’t want to know their crimes. It would prejudice me against them.
When he got to Raymond Michael Dobbs, Cal said, “He’s nothing. Trash.”
“What do you mean, trash?”
“He’s just—trash. That’s all he is.”
This pissed me off, I don’t know why. “Trash is something sitting in a trash can,” I said.
“That’s where you’re gonna be teaching, darling, in a great big trash can.” And maybe Cal was thinking it or maybe it was just me: Then I’ll fit right in.
I got to my class the first night and there they were: the trash. Looking huge at their desks. Most of them seemed edgy, curious, but not Ray Dobbs. He was lean, with thick dark hair. Handsome. But his blue eyes were dead.
I gave him an assignment: Write a story three pages long. And he came back the next week and read out the vilest shit about fucking his teacher. All of them were howling and I was really scared, knowing if I lost control of the class there’d be no getting it back. And that gave me an adrenaline surge that was the tiniest bit like getting high.
So I started to talk. And as Ray Dobbs listened to me I saw something open up behind his eyes like a camera shutter when the picture shoots. It made goose bumps rise up all over me because I’d done that; I’d made that happen just by talking. It felt intimate, like something physical between us.
> After that I could feel Ray watching me. It made me alert, like someone had scrubbed mint all over my skin. I’d walk into that stinking, miserable prison and for the next three hours, a wise and beautiful woman would float out of the wreckage of my life, and her words and thoughts and tiniest movements were precious.
I tried not to look at him. I was afraid he’d see I wasn’t a teacher or a writer; I had no credentials to be standing there. And I didn’t want him to know. It would ruin everything.
I bought new clothes. People noticed at work. Before I started at the prison, Calgary had told me clearly: “Piece of advice: don’t go in there looking like anything. It isn’t even the prisoners, they know better, but if you get all dolled up the staff will hate you.” So I never wore any of it to class. But I was doing it for him.
One day, I invented a reason to meet Calgary at the end of his shift and take him to Home Depot to help me look for shelves. It was crazy—I actually took a half day off work to do this, knowing my chance of seeing Ray was infinitesimal and that even if I did somehow glimpse him, we couldn’t speak.
And when the day came there was Ray, right by the entrance. Months of planning couldn’t have made it turn out any better. And even though I never looked at him directly, just walked through the sun into the prison to meet Calgary, that encounter was the equivalent, in the real world, of going to a movie, holding hands through dinner, coming home, making love, waking up, and doing it all over again. I’d forgotten what that kind of love felt like. Right then was when I knew how deep this thing with Ray had gone, how there was no getting out.
Gabby and I are eating supper and she’s telling me about the pregnant guinea pig in her science class when I look out the window and see the state police car come up the road. Gabby hears it and jumps onto her feet and runs to the screen door, and then the joy just falls right out of her. “Mommy,” she says.
Pete gets to the door first. “We didn’t want to bother you at work again,” he says. He’s acting formal in a way that tells me something is about to happen that I’m not going to like. Gabby stands so close to me I can hear her breathing. Thank God, Megan’s at soccer practice.
They come in, squeaking in their uniforms or boots or whatever it is about cops that always squeaks. “Sergeant Rufus has some information we wanted to run by you,” Pete says.
“Okay.” The coffeemaker grumbles and spits behind me. I feel Gabby’s cheek on my arm and my heart speeds up, but what am I scared of? I don’t even know.
Rufus starts in, standing right in the middle of the room. “The visitor’s log shows you made a visit to the prison on a day when you weren’t teaching, a day when visiting isn’t even allowed.”
“It wasn’t a visit. I was picking up my cousin Calgary. He’s a CO there.”
“He has a vehicle of his own, doesn’t he?” Rufus says.
“So?”
“So why pick him up?”
“Because that’s the plan we made, okay? Is that against the law?”
Pete’s pink skin is wincing up around his eyes. Gabby holds my arm.
“Did you see inmate Dobbs at any time during your visit?”
I hesitate. And once I’ve done that I know I have to answer yes. “He was working outside with some other prisoners when I came in.”
I think Rufus is disappointed I’ve answered honestly, and that calms me down. Keep it together. They don’t know anything—there’s nothing to know! I keep wanting to glance out the window at the place where Ray’s manuscript is buried, but I stop myself. It’s not what they’re looking for, but they’d take it.
“Did you greet the prisoner?” Rufus asks.
“No.”
“Did you acknowledge at any later point that you’d seen him?”
“Yes. I told him I’d seen him.”
“He tell you what kind of work he was doing out there?”
“No.”
“Well, I’ll tell you right now: he was working on the exact pipe he and Davis would later escape through,” Rufus says. “That’s what he was doing.” He drains the coffee I’ve poured him and sets down the cup.
“I didn’t know that.”
“Of all days you choose to come to the prison outside of work,” Rufus says, “it happens to be that day, when he’s paving the way for his escape. And you come to the prison for a reason that doesn’t sound like much of a reason to me.”
“I told you why.” My mouth is dry. I look at Pete. “Please tell me what you want.”
“We’d like to look around the house,” Pete says. “With your permission. We don’t have a search warrant—”
“But we can get one.” Rufus jumps in. “We have probable cause.”
“We may be able to get it. And you know, Holly, those types of searches aren’t too respectful of personal property.”
Oh yes, I know. As in: breaking, smashing, slitting open pillows and mattresses. As in, your home will never be the same.
“Okay,” I say. “But please, be careful in the girls’ room.”
Rufus is already making a beeline down the hall to our bedroom, where the door is closed. That’s when I realize they think that Ray is actually in my house. Which makes it seem possible for a second, and just thinking of that fills me with longing. I hug Gabby to me.
When they get to the girls’ room, I dash in after them. “That little screen over by the window,” I say, “be careful over there, okay?” I look at my watch. Megan will be back in forty-five minutes.
In the front room, Gabby’s kneeling on the couch, looking out the window. I sit down next to her and say, “Hey.”
She doesn’t answer. There’s a blankness to her face that reminds me of Megan.
Rufus sticks his head out of the girls’ room. “What’s this bed between the other beds?”
“That’s where I sleep,” I say. I almost add, Since the breakout, but I stop myself, thank God.
They come back out and start looking around where Gabby and I are sitting. We move to stools by the countertop where we eat. Our dinner plates are still there, the food half eaten. I wonder if giving Pete and Rufus the manuscript I’ve buried will stop all this, but I don’t think so. I think it’ll make things worse.
Gabby leans forward and rests her head on the counter between the two plates. I rub her back. Rufus is going through Seth’s tool kit, which he keeps on a shelf above the TV. He pulls something out and says, “Pete.” Just the tone of his voice makes me turn and look. And even when I see what Rufus found—a bag of crystal—even when I feel the sick horror of what’s about to happen because Seth broke our ironclad rule: never in the house, keep it on your body but never in the house, or we’ll all be liable (but what do rules mean to junkies?), even with all that going on in my head, I keep rubbing Gabby’s back because she’s peaceful, and the longer that peace lasts for her the better. Even if all I can buy her is one more minute.
I look at Pete, my barometer of how things are going. He looks like he’s about to puke. Rufus comes over to me, holding the bag. “Do you know what this is?” he booms out, and Gabby jerks upright, terrified.
“It looks like a bag of crystal,” I say.
“Looks like? You’re saying this isn’t yours?”
“It’s my husband’s, I think. He still has a habit.”
“We’re going to have to take you in.”
“Whoa, whoa,” Pete says. “There’s no reason to take her in.”
Rufus looks at Pete in disbelief. “We just found a bag of crystal on the premises and you don’t want to make an arrest?”
“It’s not hers,” Pete says. “It’s Seth’s. I know these people.”
“Yeah, I know you do. You’ve been bending the rules from minute one trying to protect this lady. But we’re officers of the law, Pete. You don’t look the other way when you find a bag of crystal just because you’re pals with the lady who lives there, unless you’re looking to get into trouble. Which I’m not.”
“Please,” I say. “Please.”
<
br /> Pete looks like he wants to die on the spot. And then I know it’s going to happen, because Pete has four kids and he can’t afford trouble of any kind.
Gabby’s clinging to me, begging, “Don’t go, Mommy, please don’t go,” but something has gone dead inside me. “It’ll be fine, sweetheart,” I say, and I pry her arms off me. “I have to call Grandma.”
I pick up the phone and dial my mother’s number, praying she’ll be home. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to make a call like this.
The phone rings. Gabby starts to cry. Pete looks at Rufus and says, “You find this kind of thing fun?”
Rufus looks down at his shoes. He doesn’t look like he’s having any fun at all.
My mother answers.
As we’re winding down the drive, I see Megan coming up from where the soccer bus lets her off. She looks thin and narrow in her red uniform. The headlights hit her and she covers her eyes and steps to the side of the road, and I watch it all move over her face: curiosity about this car driving away from our house, anxiety when she sees it’s a police car. Pete rolls the window down.
“Hey, Meggie,” he says.
“Hi, Mr. Konig.”
“How’d you and Amy do out there tonight?”
“I’m not on Amy’s team. She’s varsity.”
“Listen, your mom’s coming in to help us with something. Shouldn’t take but an hour or two.”
“What about Gabby?”
“Here, talk to your mom.” He rolls my window down and Megan comes over and leans in. I hide the cuffs between my legs.
“Honey, it’s nothing,” I say. “I just have to go in and talk to them.” It feels strange not to reach up to her, but I can’t let her see those cuffs.
“Okay.” When she isn’t being sarcastic, Megan sounds very young.
“Grandma’s up there. Can you go up and meet her?”
“Okay.” She turns and keeps walking.
Pete and Rufus take me to the county jail and hand me over to corrections. At that point I’m officially out of their hands. It’s evening, and no judge is on duty, so I’ll have to spend the night in jail and go to court in the morning. I’ll be late to work, if I get there at all.
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