Last Day

by Luanne Rice

  “Yes.”

  “Because it seems like you might not be. In fact, how could you be? It’s a big deal seeing him.”

  As she listened to Lulu’s words, Kate’s heart began to harden again. To purposely do without someone you loved was a big deal. But so was setting in motion a crime that would destroy his family.

  She took one of the last exits before the Massachusetts border. The maximum-security prison was set back from a main road, down a long driveway. Two rows of tall anchor fences topped with triple coils of razor wire surrounded the premises. The visitors’ parking lot was clearly marked. It was crowded, but Kate noticed a steady stream of people, mostly women, leaving the building, getting into their cars. Kate imagined them visiting husbands, boyfriends, sons, fathers—all incarcerated just like her father.

  “I don’t know how to do this,” Kate said, staring at the brick building. “The procedures. I should have called to see about visiting hours.”

  “I’m sure they’ll tell you when you get to the door,” Lulu said. “Are you nervous?”

  Kate nodded.

  Lulu hugged her hard. “I’ll wait in the car,” she said. “Take your time.”

  Kate walked down a sidewalk, past a sign:

  NO WEAPONS

  NO CELL PHONES

  MODEST DRESS

  Despite the number of people leaving, there was a line, again mostly women, many holding grocery bags. One by one they went through metal detectors. Correctional officers stood talking to each other while watching the visitors enter.

  “Who are you visiting?” a guard at the desk asked Kate.

  “Garth Woodward,” she said.

  “Your name?”

  “Kate Woodward,” she said, watching him scan a computer screen. “Why?”

  “You have to be on his visitors list.”

  “I’m not,” she said.

  “Then you can’t visit till you are.”

  Kate wanted to argue with him, but she knew there was no point. Frustrated, she turned to go.

  “Wait,” the guard said. “Katharine Woodward?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re on here.” He handed her a pass and directed her to Garth’s cellblock.

  She swallowed hard, walking through the metal detector. She hadn’t visited, written, or called for twenty-three years, but he’d kept her name on his list. She and the other women walked through a series of metal doors, one clanging shut behind them before the next opened. Correctional officers inspected the grocery bags, rifling through them. Kate heard potato chips crunch and break as one guard pawed through a woman’s bag roughly.

  “Hey,” the woman said. “Don’t bust them.”

  “What’s the difference? He’s going to eat them anyway.”

  The woman turned to Kate, anger in her eyes.

  “No respect here, none.”

  “No talking!” a different guard barked.

  It took thirty minutes to get from the prison’s front entrance to the last metal door.

  A massive guard stood in the middle of the corridor, making the women go around him. He had the neck of a bodybuilder and the gut of a lazy slob. His brown hair was slicked back, his complexion sallow. He watched the women pass with half-lidded eyes, like a frog waiting to lap up a fly. His left thumb was hooked into his belt, his fingers dangling down the front of his pants.

  The visiting room was full. Prisoners in bright-yellow uniforms sat facing their visitors across long tables that reminded Kate of the soup kitchen. Many of the men had tattooed arms and necks. Kate wondered what they had done to land here. She felt sick at the idea of a criminal from Ainsworth worming his way into Beth’s life.

  Guards were stationed around the room, keeping watch. The door guard had followed the women in. Kate could barely breathe. She looked at all the faces, wondering if she’d even recognize her father. She thought maybe he was still in his cell, but in the half hour since she’d signed in, she saw the guards had gotten him.

  He saw her approach and stood.

  She held back a gasp. He was old. Her tall, handsome father was stooped and gray. His skin was pale; he had a white scar on his forehead. But he was beaming, his smile at the sight of her as delighted as ever. When she got close, she had to hold herself back from crashing into him with a hug.

  “I never thought you’d come,” he said.

  “Neither did I,” she said.

  They stood facing each other for a minute, till a guard approached them and gestured to keep a distance apart, sit down on opposite sides of the table. Kate tried to keep her face from crumpling, but it was a losing battle. She felt like a little kid whose heart had been broken. She stared into her father’s hazel eyes, saw all the love and pride he’d always felt for her, thought of all the years he’d stolen from them.

  “My name was on your list,” she said.

  “I know, Katy. I never gave up hoping.”

  “You probably should have,” she said.

  “But I didn’t.”

  She looked at his hands. Gnarled and veined, they were flat on the table, as if he wanted to reach across and take hers, reassure her like he used to when she was a little girl, let her know that everything would be all right. He’d been the best father ever, until he wasn’t.

  “What happened to your forehead?” she asked.

  “A fight,” he said. “Years ago, when I first arrived.”

  “You fight in here?” she asked harshly.

  “No,” he said. “I got beaten for what I did to you and Beth. People here don’t like fathers hurting their children.”

  She braced herself, her whole body shaking, remembering the ropes around her wrists, the weight of her mother’s body.

  “Do you know about Beth?” she asked.

  “Yes, Kate,” he said, the smile completely gone. The moment rocked her. The horror of Beth’s death hit her again, seeing the grief in her father’s eyes.

  “Murdered,” she said. “Just like Mom.”

  “Who did it?” her father asked. “Her husband? I want to kill him, Kate. If he gets caught and winds up here, I will.”

  “Your mind goes straight to that?” she asked. “That’s not how most people think.”

  “It’s how fathers think,” he said.

  She took that in and imagined how he must feel, trapped in here, unable to be with the family, to have protected any of them—to have put them in such danger. She had loved him so much. She wondered how he had lived through the last twenty-three years, knowing what he’d done to his daughters, to his wife.

  “Tell me—do they think it’s Pete?” he asked.

  “No one has been arrested.”

  “I know, but you two were so close, and you have the best instincts. I don’t believe you don’t know—whether it’s been proven or not, you know in your gut. No one knew Beth better than you.”

  “Actually, I think you knew her better.”

  Her father sat back. She’d shocked him. “That’s not true,” he said.

  “We weren’t close anymore. We haven’t been since the day Mom died.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “It changed everything between us. We were never the same after that,” Kate said. She delivered the words like blows. She saw the pain in his face and didn’t care that she was being cruel.

  “She talked about you every time she came here,” he said. “She told me about your job, all the famous people you flew, the places you visited. You always brought her presents. She told me about dinners you two had and what a great aunt you are to Samantha. How you and Lulu are still best friends. No, Katy, you’re wrong in what you’re telling me. She adored you as much as ever.”

  Kate looked down. She hadn’t said that she and Beth didn’t love each other deeply. In fact, she thought they’d loved each other even more as time went on. But they’d been blocked by the trauma, a force field created by the violence of that day, impermeable to words. Each of them occupied her own dark solitude; feelings could b
reak through, but language couldn’t.

  “I don’t know if it was Pete,” Kate said, thinking of what Lulu had said.

  “Then who?”

  “Who is Jed Hilliard?”

  “Jed?” her father asked, looking confused. “The kid who was here?”

  “Kid?” Kate asked.

  “Well, to me. Thirty, thirty-one, something like that last time I saw him. The artist.”

  “Yes, an artist.”

  “Why? What does he have to do with Beth?”

  “She met him here.”

  “Yes, but they barely knew each other. He’s a good artist; he has a fine eye. I told him if I still had the gallery, I’d give him a show.”

  “Is that why you introduced them? So she could exhibit his work?”

  Her father paused. His gaze sharpened, a terrifying look entered his eyes, and for the first time she saw the deep change in him—not just age, but the darkness of life in prison.

  “No. Definitely not. But I was proud of her,” he said. “I was being a big shot, letting him know I used to be someone, that my daughter was a star in the art world. Are you saying he killed her?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t even know his name until this week. Where is he?”

  “He’s not from Connecticut. He got arrested here, a pot conviction; that’s why they sent him to Ainsworth. When he was released, the plan was for him to go back to Warwick, Rhode Island. That’s where he lived before, where his family lives. He had to return there; that would have been his parole arrangement.”

  “Warwick’s not far from New London. Where did he get caught?”

  “The shoreline somewhere.” Her father nodded slowly. “Maybe New London, I’m thinking. Maybe it was. But still, Beth lived in Black Hall—that’s a world away from drugs and the back streets.”

  “She volunteered in New London; didn’t she tell you?”

  “She sure did. I was proud of her.”

  “And Jed wound up at her soup kitchen. They became friends,” Kate said, watching for his reaction.

  “She appreciated talent, and he was a master of the line,” he said, frowning slightly. “He had a touch of Matisse in him.”

  “I’ve seen his work,” she said.

  “You did? What did you think?”

  “I think he caused her problems,” Kate said.

  “What problems? What did he do?”

  “Worked at getting close to her. Complicated her life,” Kate said.

  “He wasn’t a user, Kate. I know a little about people in here, after all that time, and I didn’t get that from him at all. Beth had good sense, and if she liked him, it was because he is a decent person. And I’m sure she saw his talent. Like I did. In fact . . .” He stopped himself.

  “In fact what?” she asked.

  “Well, he missed nature in here. It ripped him apart. He was always sketching rivers, hills, trees. When he was getting out, I told him he should draw the gardens at the Ledges.”

  The Ledges was an abandoned estate a few miles north of Mathilda’s house, also on the Connecticut River. Years ago, a nonprofit group had restored and operated it as a state park. There was a sunken garden full of lavender and old roses. Concerts and plays had been held in an amphitheater beside the rock ledge sloping into Long Island Sound. Many Sunday nights, her family had gone there to picnic and fly kites and listen to Mozart or bluegrass, see performances of Gilbert and Sullivan and once a production of Henry V. But there were financial misdeeds on the part of the nonprofit’s board, and the Ledges went untended. Kate didn’t tell her father that the mansion had fallen into ruin, the gardens now overtaken by weeds and tall grass.

  “Jed was never violent,” her father said, a ravaged tone in his voice. “He was peaceful. I worried about him in here. He wasn’t tough enough. I can’t believe he would have . . . that he could have attacked anyone. He was always one of the ones who needed to go home, who didn’t belong in this place. But I swear to God, if he fucking hurt her . . .”

  “How did you find out she died?” Kate asked.

  “Scotty Breen told me,” he said, using Scotty’s maiden name. “She called. It was the worst day of my life. The second worst.”

  “Those two days are connected,” she said.

  “I don’t dare ask you to forgive me,” he said. “I don’t even want you to. I don’t deserve it.”

  Kate knew she should get the words out. This was her chance. Everyone always said forgiveness is not forgetting, that the act is as full of grace for the forgiver as the forgiven. This would not hurt her. She gazed at the old man across from her. She knew that she would never see him again, and she also knew she could never absolve him.

  “It’s okay,” he said, as if he knew her struggle.

  Kate pushed her chair back, ready to go, the words caught in her throat.

  “Kate,” he said. “Thank you for coming.”

  She nodded.

  “You haven’t called me Dad,” he said.

  She knew she hadn’t. She had told herself, long ago, that she no longer had a father. Gazing into his hazel eyes now, she went back a thousand years, was jumping up and down, wanting him to put her on his shoulders so they could be a two-headed giant.

  What are we? he used to ask.

  Sweethearts and partners, she would reply.

  She turned to leave. Some of the women she’d come in with were still at the tables; others were on their way to the door. She glanced over her shoulder. Her father hadn’t taken his eyes off her. A guard approached him, ready to escort him back to his cell.

  “Dad,” she called.

  “Katy,” he said.

  “What are we?” she asked.

  He beamed, exactly the way he had when she’d first walked in, the way he had when she was a child. She walked fast, past the frog-eyed door guard, leaving the visiting room before she could hear her father answer.

  31

  Kate’s hands felt light on the wheel, as if she were made of air. Driving south, past all the landmarks that had reminded her of her father, felt different now. He wasn’t just a specter from the past. He existed. The memories changed character as she sped through Hartford. They weren’t as poignant, she thought. But that was wrong—seeing him in prison, in his jumpsuit, with the scar on his forehead, made them more so.

  “He’s never getting out,” Kate said out loud. They were miles from the prison, but she hadn’t spoken till now.

  “What was it like?” Lulu asked.

  “Like walking through the steel-doored gates and ten circles of hell. These poor women bringing bags of snacks to locked-up men—in line, no talking, marching through the doors, guards watching everything. The guards,” she said, remembering the look on that one’s face. “They wanted something; I don’t know. For a prisoner to act up, to catch a visitor with contraband.”

  “You were in there a long time.”

  “It took forever to get to the visiting area.”

  “And you saw him.”

  “Yeah,” Kate said.

  “Is he . . . how is he?”

  “He’s old. He’s sorry about everything.”

  “What did he say?”

  Kate shook her head. She didn’t want to talk about her father anymore. Every detail of the visit reverberated. The stoop of his shoulders, his old familiar smile, the sound of his voice. She wanted to hold on to the moments, keep them to herself. If she spoke about them, they would become conversation and dissipate. They wouldn’t belong to her anymore.

  Lulu sensed it and looked out the side window. They sped out of the cities, south toward the shore. Once past Middletown, the landscape became wooded. The day had been long, and shadows from trees and rock cliffs lengthened across the pavement. Although the day was hot, summer was drawing to an end. The sun had noticeably shifted its place in the sky, the angle of the light lower, moving toward the equinox.

  “You know what we should do?” Lulu asked just before they hit the Baldwin Bridge over the Connecticut River
. “We should swim.”

  Kate had imagined dropping Lulu off at her car in New London, heading to the Ledges to sit in the tangled garden and wait for Jed Hilliard to show up. Or maybe he would be there already, sketching weeds and wildflowers, waiting for the moon to rise. More likely, it was only a place her father had mentioned to him in passing, no meaning at all. Maybe Jed had never even been there.

  “You’re right,” she said to Lulu. “A swim. But what about bathing suits?”

  “What about them?” Lulu asked.

  They laughed, and Kate drove them down to Hubbard’s Point. They told the summer cop by the train trestle they were visiting Scotty Waterston. The tide was high, the sandy parking lot damp. It had been built on a wetland, cleared of spartina and its thickly woven root system. The salt water followed its eternal path and still rose through the sand beneath a thin layer of gravel and broken shells.

  Bypassing the main beach, scattered with late-day beachgoers, they walked to the western end and climbed the steep hill to take the path to the deserted haven known as Little Beach. The crescent strand was backed by a coastal forest of pines, white oaks, and black walnut trees. Beyond the woods was the Great Marsh, fed by Seven Mile River.

  The sun had just dipped behind the trees, and the beach was shadowed. There wasn’t a person in sight. Kate and Lulu dropped their clothes and walked into the water. The Sound was cool, but Kate didn’t hesitate. It had always been a point of pride that while others stood at the edge, getting used to the temperature, she dove right in and accepted the shock.

  She swam straight out, underwater, eyes wide open. At high tide the rocks were far below, and she saw tendrils of sargassum weed drifting upward in the current. When her lungs were bursting, she crashed up through the surface and took deep breaths. Lulu was swimming toward the breakwater. Kate stayed where she was, treading water, facing shore.

  Blinking, her eyes cleared, she caught sight of the graffiti Lulu had mentioned—sayings, initials, and patterns. She felt disgusted by the desecration and turned around to look out to sea.

  Across the Sound, two ferries heading in opposite directions passed each other. Sunset gave the white boats a pink cast, turned the water’s surface lavender. Skinny-dipping at Little Beach was one of summer’s great pleasures and always had been.