by Cathy Lamb
Two cars pulled over. Three islanders crossed the street to see what was going on.
The chief finally gave me a Breathalyzer test. He tried to stand close to me, but I said, “I am not comfortable with you standing so close. I can smell the onions on your breath and your body odor.”
“Step back,” Marco said, glaring at Chief Ass Burn.
The three people, all longtime friends, crowded around Chief Ass Burn, Marco, and me.
I blew into the Breathalyzer. The chief was clearly disappointed.
“What did I blow?”
“I’m not required to tell you.”
“Actually,” Elizabeth Bellagiio said, who was a judge, “you are. What did she blow?”
“The test shows no alcohol,” Chief Ass Burn muttered reluc-tantly, with disappointment and embarrassment.
“Then she’s not drunk and she’s allowed to leave,” Marco said. He turned me toward my truck.
“That’s correct,” the judge said. “Unless there is another problem, Chief?”
“Yes. She was swaying in her lane, so I’m issuing her a ticket.”
“I was not swaying in my lane.” I had been upset, that was true. But my eyes had never left the road.
Marco said, “I’m reporting you again for false charges and for stalking Evie.”
It was Marco and me and the judge and the two other friends, all in line facing the chief, glaring.
“Go ahead, Marco. Be my guest.” He smirked at me. “If you want your ticket reduced, come and see me, Evie. You might get lucky.”
I grabbed Marco’s arm as he lost it with the chief, as did Mel
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Stanton, a brawny fisherman who got in Marco’s face and said,
“Man, calm down. Don’t do it.” The judge, standing right in front of him, said, “Back off, Marco. You won’t win with your fists here.”
“Stop stalking me,” I said to the chief. Marco’s jaw was so tight I thought he might break his teeth.
“I’m not stalking you. I’m enforcing the law, Evie,” the chief said, smirking again. “And you will follow it. See you soon.”
We watched the chief drive away. I was so mad I wanted to spit nails. I glanced at the amount of the ticket. It was another fortune. If you received a certain amount of tickets in one year, couldn’t they take your license? Couldn’t they cancel your insurance? I would not be able to drive my truck.
“Give that to me,” Marco said, and took it, seething.
“I like that pink halter shirt, Evie,” the judge said. “Is that a new style?”
“It’s such a soft material,” Maci LaFolette said. “Plus, the white mice are cute.”
“Thank you.” I felt the anger drain out of me. I didn’t look at Marco. If I did, I would have laughed. Probably half hysterically, but I would have laughed.
After everyone left, Marco said, “I thought you might need this.”
He handed me my red lacy bra and red ruffled shirt.
“I’ll follow you home, Evie,” he said, so gentle.
I nodded my head, then turned around and gave him a hug, because the truth was that the chief was creeping me out and Marco was my hero.
He followed me home down Robbins Drive and turned off at my driveway.
The cats missed him immediately.
Late that night I sat outside on my front porch and watched my mother and aunts’ flowers swaying in a slight wind, the darkness casting shadows. I tried to calm my anger. Sundance sat right beside me on the step, and Mars lay sleeping in my lap.
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I had a vase of Judi Dench apricot roses nearby, and their scent was sweet and pure.
Flowers are so delicate, intricate. They are natural wonders and miracles. How come daffodils look like the sun? Why are irises so elegant, a blend of colors that seem magically hand-painted? And peonies. Are they three flowers squished into one?
So full, so perfumy.
I wiped away a few tears. Sundance edged closer to me.
“Oh no!” Mr. Bob and Trixie Goat ran over to me, their bells clanging in the night. I swear they were smiling. I laughed. “How did you escape again?”
That’s why I keep animals. I love them and they make me laugh, even when I’m crying.
Later, Marco sent me a copy of my ticket. He had paid it. But he attached a letter that he had sent to Chief Ass Burn’s superior, detailing the traffic stop and the exorbitant cost of the ticket and what Chief Ass Burn had said to me.
Wow. The man could write.
I thanked him by giving him five books I knew he’d love. I brought them to his clinic.
“Thank you, Marco.” I had given him a check for the ticket.
He had ripped it up.
“My pleasure, but you didn’t need to give me these books. It was the least I could do. I’m sorry it happened.”
“I’ll be glad when Chief Allroy is back.”
“Me too.”
I wanted to hug him, but I didn’t. I smiled, turned away. I knew he was watching me get into my truck and drive away from his idyllic home on the island with, undoubtedly, a bouncy and comfy bed where I would not get to bounce or be comfy.
“You’re not selling pot out of Flowers, Lotions, and Potions, are you?” I set my fork down on my table. I had invited my mother and aunts for dinner at my place. I had candles down the center of the table, interspersed with Mister Lincoln red roses in three glass vases.
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I’d made chicken parmigiana and lemon pie. No. That’s a lie.
I bought chicken parmigiana from the new Italian restaurant and a lemon pie from Bettina. I had a small piece of lemon pie before dinner to cleanse my palate.
“No, heavens no!” My mother’s tone was outraged, as if I had asked her if she stole horses from neighboring farms.
“Goodness gracious golly! How could you think that?” Aunt Camellia said, all high-and-mighty. “Marijuana? In Flowers, Lotions, and Potions? Never.” She shook her finger at me.
“Don’t even suggest it, young woman.”
“We are businesswomen,” Aunt Iris said, her brow furrowed at me. “We make decisions that positively affect our profit line and elevate the level of the company. We do not sell products that do not enhance this goal.”
“We can’t have people coming to the counter and saying,
‘One tulip bouquet, one joint,’ ” my mother said. “Or ‘Roses and mowie wowie, please!’ ”
“Oh, my gosh,” I moaned, knowing my question was perfectly legitimate. “I’m not intimidated.”
I had seen a number of people following my mother and aunts to the greenhouse. Chatting, laughing, gossiping. They would come out with a small bag of marijuana, wrapped in a pink ribbon. Yes, pink. And the pink ribbon always held a flower, a black-eyed Susan, white daisy, lupine, dahlia, or snapdragons, depending on what they had in the greenhouse and outside. They were selling pretty pot.
“Nothing wrong with making pot lovely,” my mother said when I talked to her and my aunts about it.
“Flowers add love to life,” Aunt Camellia said, clasping her hands together in joy. “Romance. A taste of floral heaven.”
“Packaging is important from a practical, marketing perspective,” Aunt Iris said. “We are a business.”
“I’m so excited about our Antarctica trip!” my mother said, clapping her hands after one more reprimanding glance in my direction.
“You’re not going to follow my advice, are you?” I said.
Dang it. I had neatly piled up about twenty-five books against
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the light blue armoire into which my grandma Lucy used to climb and sing songs, and Venus jumped up on it and knocked it over.
“More lemon pie, honey?” my mother said, holding her hand out for my plate.
“Advice can be given but not acted upon if the receiver does not intellectually or spiritually agree,” Aunt Camellia said.
“If we want your a
dvice on our Antarctica business, we’ll ask for it, young lady,” Aunt Iris said. Then she squeezed my hand to take the sting out of her words.
I stared at them with some suspicion as they dug into their lemon pie with an overload of enthusiasm.
They had the munchies, didn’t they?
C h a p t e r 2 6
Betsy Baturra
Women’s Correctional Prison
Salem, Oregon
1978
After performing dish-cleaning duty in the kitchen one night, Duke lay in wait for Betsy. Duke had been able to switch shifts without much notice. There was a new guy handling the schedules and he didn’t know all the dynamics yet. He didn’t know that Duke had many enemies and he was not supposed to be near Betsy. He didn’t know that Coralee was doing her best to keep Duke away from her.
Duke excused one of the guards and said he would take Betsy back to her cell. The guard was new and young, and he knew Duke was the warden’s nephew.
Betsy began to shake as Duke took her elbow. “No, Duke, Carson is supposed to take me back. Carson, you take me back.”
“I-I . . .” Carson stuttered. “I’ll do it, Mr. Duke. I’m supposed to do it. I’ve . . . I’ve been assigned.”
Duke told Carson to stop “being a pussy. Shove off, Carson, or I’ll report you.”
Carson said, “It’s my job,” and Duke slammed him into a wall. Carson sunk to the ground.
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“See?” Duke laughed, bending down and putting his face smack up to Carson’s. “You are a pussy.”
When they rounded that one blind corner, right by the supply closet, where Duke knew the cameras didn’t reach, he quickly opened the door. Betsy’s hands had not yet been cuffed by Carson, and Duke hadn’t noticed in his hurry to steal her away. He shoved her up against the metal shelves, her face crashing into an edge, then pulled on her orange pants, yanking them to her knees, as she fought through the dizziness.
Duke kept one sweaty hand pressed into her back, her face and chest smashed into the shelves. Through the ringing in her ears she heard him unzipping his zipper, undoing his belt, and pulling his pants down. He was panting. He was groaning. He said, his breath hot and putrid on her neck, “And now you’re going to get what you’ve been wanting, Betsy. Begging for.” He put his hand around her neck. “If you make a sound, I will snap your neck.”
For a second, she didn’t move, couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, her head splitting, but then he moved his hand to take down her underwear, and suddenly she could breathe again.
She was disgusted. She was sick with fear. She was about to be raped by a repulsive, gross, violent man. All of her fury over losing Rose and Johnny, being constantly watched and harassed by Duke, being locked up, it all roared out. It roared out through the fog of depression that she lived in behind the cold, scary bars. It rose from the deepest part of her soul, this animal-istic, teeth-baring, rollicking rage.
Betsy, her orange prison pants down around her ankles, a raw scream emanating from her throat, picked up a container of cleaning powder and swung it at Duke’s head with both hands, as hard as she could. The container bashed his cheek, and cleaning powder sprayed his face, burning his eyes. He let out a guttural yell of outrage and swore from the pain, temporarily blinded.
She then picked up a broom and rammed the handle right into his naked groin. He yelled and bent over, breathless. She
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yanked up her pants and kicked him as hard as she could in the head with another scream of fury, and he went down, stumbling to the floor, his eyes squeezed shut against the stinging powder, one hand on his balls. For good measure, she kicked him in his huge gut, which blew his air straight out, his face red and strained.
She bent over his writhing form and told him about the premonition she’d had. “You’re going to hit a deer, Duke. It’s going to come straight through the window of your truck. Your truck will hit a tree. You will never walk again.”
Duke felt a cold rush of fear flood his insides. He wanted to kick her, shut her up, hold her down and finish the plan, but he couldn’t move. She kicked him in the head again and screamed as she opened the door to the supply closet.
Guards rushed in, hearing the screams.
“She attacked me,” Duke said, rolling on the floor, swearing, his face covered in cleaning powder. “Betsy attacked me.” He struggled to get up, still holding his balls, no one helping him.
“That woman is a psych patient. She shouldn’t even be here.
She’s a danger.” He tried to roll over, to stand up, but he forgot his pants and underwear were around his ankles. He tripped and fell, straight down, naked butt up.
No one helped him up. He swore again, rolled over, then bent to pull up his pants over his rapidly swelling groin, hardly able to see because of the cleaning powder in his eyes. “I need water for my eyes! Water! Water!” He stumbled out. “Get me water!”
“I didn’t attack him,” Betsy said, scared now, defeated, because she knew she would be in isolation by that night, probably for months. She wrapped her arms around her skinny waist and stared at all the guards, begging Coralee with her eyes to believe her.
“Duke made Carson leave so he could take me to my cell. He shoved Carson, and Carson hit the floor. Go talk to Carson.
Duke knows there’s a blind corner here that the cameras don’t reach. He pulled me in and shoved me against the shelf.” Betsy didn’t know it, but her eye was black and swelling rapidly. She
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also had a swelling cut across her cheek that was bleeding down her neck. She was pale.
“I defended myself because he was going to rape me. That’s why his pants were down around his ankles.”
“I believe you, Betsy,” Coralee said gently. She’d seen it all in the few years she’d been here. She couldn’t wait to get out and go to law school. She’d seen sick, dangerous inmates, and she’d seen sick, dangerous guards. “This will never happen to you again. I’m sorry.”
Betsy bent her head, leaned against the shelves, and passed out, her head a mass of pain. Coralee and two other guards caught her and brought her to the infirmary, where for once she had a kind nurse and a kind doctor. They let her stay two extra days to rest.
She was not sent to isolation.
Duke was fired from the jail by his uncle. Duke about lost his mind, he was so mad. He shoved everything off of his uncle’s desk before he left. He would immediately tell his mother and she would give his uncle a piece of her mind! Wouldn’t she?
Life was so stupid unfair. Betsy caused him to get fired. She teased him. Flirted with him. She wanted him, and he fell for it.
He hated Coralee, too. He would get back at her. He knew where Coralee lived. Coralee thought she was better than him.
She was a woman. They could never be better than him. He would pay her a visit. He had paid many women “visits” over the years, starting in high school, when they rejected him.
He went to the doctor because of his still-swollen groin. The doctor said there might be “permanent damage.” The doctor, a woman, did not seem to believe Duke’s story about how a woman inmate “went wild” on him. His eyes burned for two days, turned red, and his vision blurred. His head pounded where Betsy had kicked him, and his gut was all bruised up. It even hurt to drink beer.
He would get his revenge on Betsy if she ever got out of jail, he thought, getting super drunk that night, then passing out on the patio of his apartment.
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Three days later, after hitting the deer, crushed against his steering wheel and unable to move or feel his legs, he remembered what Betsy had said.
Duke never walked again. He never attacked anyone again.
He was alone and bitter the rest of his life.
C h a p t e r 2 7
Tilly Kandinsky
Portland, Oregon
1975–1985
Tilly, Johnny’s younger sister, stopped speak
ing on the night her father was killed. She had been a frightened, quiet child ever since her mother left, cowering from her raging father, but that night she completely shut down.
Tilly hid behind the couch during Johnny’s argument with her father, but she saw everything, she heard everything. She saw the knife, she saw the blood, she saw her father collapse.
When the police tried to talk to her, she moaned and rocked back and forth and cried. She could not explain what happened, her eyes staring into the air at a faraway place.
She buried the trauma, the murder, the screaming, the gush of blood.
Tilly was sent into the foster care system, where she was almost catatonic for the first year. Eventually, lost in the system, she had the usual and expected horrific things happen to her: Abuse. Neglect. No love or care. Shipped from one house to another, one school to another, where she disappeared to other people and to herself. A few of her teachers tried to help, tried to get her to talk, but she wouldn’t. Mostly, though, she was ignored. Dismissed. Case workers were in and out who barely re-
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membered her name. In fact, at one stretch she didn’t see a case worker for almost two years.
She was put into a mental health institution because she was fourteen and still hardly talking, so she must be crazy. The mental health institution did more to harm her than help. Tilly roomed with psychotic teens. Dangerous teens. Suicidal or homicidal teens.
And some who were like her: traumatized. Many were from foster care. Some were poor. Others were middle class or from prominent and wealthy families.
Tilly rarely saw a psychiatrist, and when she did, all he did was stare at her chest. Another one hardly looked at her and spent ten minutes with her filling out paperwork and calling her mother about a bad date she’d had the night before. The man was such a jerk, the psychiatrist whined to mommy. Didn’t even pay for dinner!
Finally, at sixteen, she was moved to a new foster care home.
She was the only child. The couple was in their sixties, patient, and wanted to help kids. It was the first time she felt love since her mother and Johnny.