The Fifth Circle

by Tricia Drammeh

  Then it hit me—she took her finals after the last day of school. On the day of my first court appearance, she was sitting in school. On a day when just seeing her face would have made all the difference in the world, she was answering a bunch of stupid questions on a bunch of stupid tests so she could pass a bunch of meaningless classes she’d never even need because she was never going to do anything with her education. Only, she was going to do something with her high school diploma. Or, at least she was going to try.

  “So, after everything I did for you, you’re going to leave me here while you go off to college? While I’m wasting my life away, you’ll be dumping our kid with a babysitter so you can go out partying with all your stupid college friends?” The volume of my tirade rose until the CO came to stand behind me. I stopped talking and tried to calm my roiling emotions.

  Alex sighed and began speaking. “Sean, I’m not leaving you. I’m trying to carve out some kind of life for me and our daughter. Don’t you want us to have something better than what we had growing up?”

  “Yeah, but I want to be a part of it.”

  “I don’t mean to be cruel, but she’s going to grow up without you whether I’m sitting in Saint Edmunds or whether I’m in Columbia getting a degree. In a couple of months, you’ll be transferred, so it doesn’t matter if I move. I’ll still have to drive somewhere far away to see you.”

  “It does matter, because while I’m sitting in jail doing nothing, you’ll be doing everything I can’t do—going to school, meeting other people…”

  “So, what do you want me to do? Sit in my mom’s house for seven years and never leave except to go to the grocery store or the welfare office? Teach our daughter that it’s okay to do nothing while we wait for our EBT card to be reloaded?”

  “Ma’am?” A corrections officer came to stand behind her. “Can I get you to lower your voice please?”

  “Sorry,” she said, blushing and looking down. For a moment, she looked like the old Alex, the Alex I’d always loved. But, only for a moment. When she turned her head back to look at me through the plexi-glass, she looked like this new Alex I was beginning to loathe with every ounce of my being.

  “I want to go to law school,” she said, her eyes blazing and intense.

  “Why? What good is that going to do? By the time you’re finished, I’ll already be out of prison.”

  “I want to go to law school for me. And, for my daughter. I want to be independent and able to give us a good life. I want to help other women and girls who’ve been abused.”

  Me. My. I.

  It was all about Alex. She didn’t think about me at all. I’d killed her father so she could be free, and now all she wanted to do was take her freedom and leave me behind.

  “Great, Alex. That’s wonderful. Do whatever you think is right. Abandon our kid so you can be the campus whore. I don’t care,” I hissed into the receiver, careful to keep my voice down in case the CO decided to end our conversation. “Just remember this: when I get out, I’m gonna hire a private investigator to find out all the shit you did while I was locked up and I’ll take you to court to get custody of our kid.”

  “You think the courts will take a child away from a lawyer and give her to a felon?”

  “You’ll never be a lawyer. You’ll never be anything more than what you are right now—the stupid, selfish daughter of a child molester. You’ll probably open your legs to the first college guy who winks at you and be knocked up again by the time the semester is over.”

  “You don’t know anything,” she whispered.

  “I know you, Alex. I know you better than you know yourself. I know you can’t say no to anyone or anything. If you could, you would have said no to your father a long time ago.”

  “I can say no, Sean. Starting now.” A harsh clattering reverberated in my ears as she hung up the receiver and rose to her feet. She turned and walked away.

  “Alex!” I screamed. The CO was on me in an instant.

  Fighting back tears of regret and shame, I allowed myself to be led away. Alex was gone. My life was truly over.

  Chapter 33- Alex

  As now a little glimmer made its way

  Into the dolorous prison…

  (Canto XXXIII, lines 55 & 56)

  I made my way out to the waiting room. I began to cry the moment Susan stood up to greet me. She pulled me into her arms.

  “Oh, sweetie, I was afraid this would happen,” she said, hugging me as tightly as she could. My huge belly got in the way. I pulled away from her, wiping at my damp cheeks with my bare hands.

  “Maybe you should go in there and talk to him. Tell him I’m sorry. Tell him I’ll come visit him in prison. Tell him…” I trailed off when Susan raised her hand to stop me.

  “I’m not going to speak for you. I’m tired of trying to make everything better for him. Maybe if I would have let him fight his own battles a long time ago, things would have turned out differently.”

  “But, I’m afraid he’ll do something…”

  “He killed your father,” she said. Her eyes were empty, almost cold. “What else could he possibly do to make things worse?”

  I opened my mouth and closed it again. What could he do to make things worse? He could get in a fight. Start a riot. Get thrown in solitary confinement. But, that could happen regardless of whether or not he was upset with me. Even if I was able to go back in time and undo our whole conversation, he might still end up losing his temper over something else. It was likely he would do something impulsive eventually because Sean had no self-control.

  “If something happens because of what I said…”

  “It won’t be your fault. Don’t you dare change your course for the future,” she said. “Are you ready?”

  I took a deep breath and expelled it in a rush. “I’m ready.”

  ***

  The sun was beginning to set when we pulled into her driveway. Susan hugged me again before I set out across our front lawns—my final trek from Sean’s house to mine. Not mine. That house would never be mine again. It was a house of misery, of despair, of shame.

  My mother was waiting for me when I let myself inside. She didn’t ask about Sean.

  “Come watch TV with me,” she offered.

  “I need to finish packing.”

  “Are you sure you want to go through with this?” she asked. “I talked to Becky and she said…”

  “I’m sure. Claire’s coming early tomorrow morning. I should go to bed.” I turned away from her and started up the stairs.

  “Why are you doing this?” she asked, causing me to pause. “You’ve shut me out, Alex, and I don’t understand. Did I do something? Say something? Why are you so angry?”

  “You did nothing. That’s the problem,” I said, turning to face her.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I know.”

  “I never did anything to hurt you. If I’d known your father…”

  “You did know. You just didn’t want to. Do you want me to tell you everything that happened?” I glared at her, daring her to say yes. If she really wanted to know, now was her chance. We could sit up all night and discuss all my traumatic childhood moments—every time I cried out and was ignored; the time she asked me if I’d hurt myself when she found my ripped, bloody panties under my bed; the time she grounded Claire for telling lies to Aunt Carrie; the time I told her Daddy had been hurting me and she told me she’d talk to him when things settled down. Did she really want to know why I was angry? I doubted it.

  “I…it won’t help to relive everything. Wouldn’t you rather put this behind us?” she asked, tears rolling down her face.

  “I am.” Without another word, I climbed the stairs to my room and shut the door. As a final tribute to my father, I locked the door.

  My bags were packed—a few outfits I’d bought from a thrift shop and some toiletries. I didn’t want any of my furniture, or anything else my parents had given me. I left my jewelry box behind with Sean’s ring i
nside it. A gift from my father’s killer incased in a gift from the man who killed my innocence. Somehow, it seemed fitting to leave both symbols of my oppression behind in my childhood home.

  The few meager items I’d bought for my baby were stacked by my dresser: a diaper bag full of clothes, a car seat, a bassinet, a package of newborn diapers. Suddenly, my small collection of baby supplies seemed so inadequate. I was ill-prepared to bring new life into the world, but a gentle nudge from my daughter’s foot to the inside of my abdomen reminded me new life had already begun.

  With new life brought new beginnings—and endings. My last night in this house felt bittersweet. Would I miss anything at all? I tugged the string on the mini blinds and stared out the window. If I pressed my right cheek against the glass, I could see Sean’s house. That’s the one thing I would miss—my old friendship with Sean. A friendship ruined by a romance neither one of us could handle because we were both too damaged to cope.

  Though Sean and I had been apart these past few months since his arrest, we were still together in a prison of our own making. Sean was Wrath. I was Apathy. Together we lived in the Fifth Circle of Hell. I’d lived there all my life, but I was moving on. I could change—I was changing. With every heartbeat I shed a little more of my former self.

  Could Sean change? It was up to him. I couldn’t fix him or heal him or make his life better. Only he could do that. There was still a chance for him to free himself from the hell he’d created for himself. Jail was just a place. The real prison was the one that held his soul. I’d miss Sean. I loved him. Even after everything that had happened I loved him still, but not enough to stay. In order to save myself, I was prepared to leave Sean behind to make his own way.

  The single most significant moment of my life was the day I said goodbye to my best friend…

  Wait! I’d never really had a chance to say goodbye to Sean. After he lashed out at me, I fled without saying another word. Should I write him a letter? Delay my departure so I could say my goodbyes to him when he made his next phone call to his mother? Pain washed over me and I let it immerse me in its cold and familiar comfort. I let myself feel it, own it. Pain was good. It was sharp and real and chipped at the dull, rounded edges of indifference.

  As I closed the mini blinds and turned away from the window, I realized a final goodbye wasn’t necessary. I was already gone.

  Chapter 34- Sean

  Thence we came forth to behold the stars.

  (Canto XXXIV, line 139)

  Nine years later, I stood before the Parole Board. Nine years behind bars. Nine years of pure hell. The Institutional Parole Officer thought I had a pretty good chance of getting out. The prisons were overcrowded, I’d been well-behaved over the last seven or so years, and I’d even taken some online college courses within the hallowed walls of the state pen.

  “Do you regret what you did?”

  It was a question I was prepared for, a question the Board always asked, or so I’d been told. Did I regret what I did? There was no easy answer.

  I could see it in their eyes. They were waiting for that one word—the word that would make or break my prison career. The word that would grant me my freedom. Yes.

  I thought about Alex. She wrote to me a couple of times a year and sent pictures of our daughter. Alex was doing well. She’d just finished law school and started an advocacy group for abused women. She and our daughter, Amber, lived in a rental house in Columbia. It didn’t sound like there was a man in the picture, but Alex would hardly want to rub it in my face if there was.

  Did I regret what I did?

  I killed the man responsible for stealing Alex’s innocence, the man who tormented and terrorized her. I gave Alex her freedom—freedom from her unbearable situation, freedom from her father, freedom from me.

  She’d sought her own freedom—freedom from the Fifth Circle of Hell. I knew about Dante, now. I’d read The Divine Comedy and I knew why he decided to assign punishments the way he did.

  “Mr. Droste?” They were becoming impatient.

  I allowed my mind to drift away, to embrace the fantasy that could have been if I answered the question correctly. I could see Alex and our daughter—prove to her I’d changed, beg her to give me a second chance. I’d work hard, maybe even finish college. I’d be a good husband and father…for a while. Then, gradually the moods would overtake me. I’d sleep too much, or stay awake too long. I’d become angry, bitter, erratic. Then Alex, her previous sense of freedom and independence stripped away, would be forced to make a choice.

  “Do you regret what you did?”

  “No.”

  From the corner of my eye, I couldn’t see the expression on the Parole Officer’s face, but I knew he was incredulous. The window of opportunity had closed, and it was another few years of prison for me. I’d given up my freedom—for now. Traded my freedom for hers. I wouldn’t barge in on the life Alex had created for herself. I wouldn’t force her to make a choice between letting me into her life, or turning me away.

  Once, she’d asked if I wanted her to bring Amber to visit, but I told her not to. Prison is no place for a baby. She never asked again. I longed to see Alex and our child with a yearning intensity that took my breath away, but I said no.

  No.

  The word had become my prison—and my redemption. Did I regret giving Alex the freedom to fly?

  No.

  Tricia Drammeh is a wife, mother of four, book lover, coffee drinker, and author of paranormal romance and mainstream fiction. She makes her home in St Charles, Missouri.

  Tricia can be contacted at the following places:

  Email: Tricia@triciadrammeh.com

  Website: http://www.triciadrammeh.com

  Twitter: @triciadrammeh

  Other published works include:

  The Claiming Words: Book One in a paranormal series for young adults.