Commitments

by Barbara Delinsky

  “Is this a bad time?” she asked hurriedly, worriedly. “Am I pulling you from—”

  “No.”

  “I wouldn’t want to cause—”

  “You’re not.”

  She nodded her okay. Her teeth closed on her lower lip. She folded her arms across her middle, her right hand absently kneading her left arm. Her gaze went to the barred window—which she would have given anything to open wide—then to the nearby guard who was watching, listening. She found the absence of privacy humiliating and could only begin to imagine what Derek faced each day.

  But she couldn’t imagine. Not really. The gap between them was huge.

  Wanting to narrow it, she whispered, “Will you sit down?”

  For a minute she feared he’d refuse. He looked away with eyes whose irritation was mirrored by the slight outward thrust of his jaw.

  “Would you rather I go?” she asked, again in a whisper.

  He didn’t answer, but seemed to be considering his options. Sabrina didn’t begrudge him that, even if there was an element of the power play in it. A sense of power was the least she could give him.

  At length, he hooked his jacket on the shoulder of the chair, turned the chair to an angle that suited him, lowered himself and stretched out his legs. He ended up not quite facing her, not quite abreast of her, and a safe yard away.

  Even seated, he looked large. Even lean, he looked strong. Eighteen months before, she’d thought of him purely in cerebral terms: he was a reporter who’d come in search of a story, and though he’d left empty-handed, he’d offered her a breath of support. There was nothing cerebral about him now, though. He was as blunt as the name and numbers indelibly inked on the breast pocket of his work shirt. Prison had taken away the intellectual mantle, leaving him hard and raw and physical.

  Sabrina felt suddenly tongue-tied. She’d never been in a prison. The search she’d undergone, the bars through which she’d passed, the scrutiny of the guards—all were unsettling. And Derek—she’d only met him once before. She didn’t know him. She had no idea what he was thinking or feeling, no idea how she should behave, what she should say. She wasn’t even sure why she’d come.

  But she had to say something or they’d sit there in silence. “I didn’t think they were going to let me in,” she finally managed. “They did some kind of check when they found that my name wasn’t on your list. I was surprised they gave me clearance so quickly.”

  “They only had to make one call.”

  She frowned. “To whom?”

  “Me.”

  The frown eased. “Oh.”

  “They wanted to know who you were, what our relationship was and whether I wanted to see you.”

  She considered that, then asked on impulse, “How could they know that I wasn’t an evil character trying to smuggle you something?”

  “They searched you.”

  “Ah … right,” she said, feeling a little dumb. And flushed. The room was so hot. She would have lifted her hair from her neck, except that she didn’t want to appear to be complaining. Maybe the heat didn’t bother Derek. For all she knew, his cell was like a barn, in which case the heat was a welcome change.

  She cleared her throat. “Well, anyway, thank you for saying yes.”

  “Was it that important to you?”

  She paused, nodded.

  “Why?”

  She didn’t answer at first. He was regarding her so intently that she wasn’t able to do much but think about the potential for feeling in the man and the fact that it was going to waste. Where was the warmth that she remembered? She could detect none now. Everyone knew that prison was hell but, she realized, only an inmate knew the true meaning of the word. She couldn’t comprehend the awful things that had left Derek McGill so cold and hard.

  “I don’t know,” she said finally, then shook herself a little and asked, “Does my name go on your list now?”

  “Yes.” His tone grew cynical. “Does that bother you—that there’s a record, written proof that you’ve been here?”

  It did, a little, but only because she feared Nick’s reaction if he knew where she was. Lord only knew they’d had enough to fight about lately. But she wouldn’t tell Derek that. It wasn’t why she’d come. “It doesn’t bother me,” she answered, thinking that Nick would never know. Then it occurred to her to ask, “Are you limited in the number of visits you can have?”

  “Yes.”

  Her eyes widened. “Oh dear. Am I taking someone else’s time?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I don’t get many visitors.”

  She couldn’t believe that. He’d been in the mainstream of life; more, he’d been in its limelight. She assumed that he’d always been surrounded by people, that he’d been recognized, stopped on the street, hailed in restaurants. She couldn’t believe that he didn’t have friends and colleagues who would want to visit him, to cheer him, to fill him in on the world’s doings.

  “In case you hadn’t noticed,” he stated in response to what she knew was visible skepticism, “this isn’t tea time at the Plaza. Prisons are depressing, and convicts aren’t good for much of anything.”

  “But you’re not—” she began without thinking.

  “A convict? I am.”

  “But you’re not—”

  “Like them?” he finished, hitching his head toward the other inmates in the room. “In the eyes of the law, I’m exactly like them. It doesn’t matter where I’ve been in life. The fact is, I’m serving three to seven years for murder.” His eyes held hers in a way that said he was being deliberately blunt. There was defiance in his tone and more than a little challenge.

  Sabrina rose to the challenge. “Voluntary manslaughter. The prosecutor argued for a stiffer sentence, but the judge denied it.”

  “You followed the proceedings.”

  “Yes. I’m … sorry.”

  He quirked a brow in question.

  “That you’re here,” she explained.

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “No. But it all seems unnecessary.”

  “Prison unnecessary? You should meet some of the guys here. You’d change your mind fast.”

  “I meant,” she said very quietly, “that you shouldn’t be here.”

  The sound he made was harsh and low, the bitter facsimile of a laugh. “Tell that to the judge.”

  She frowned, then swallowed and asked in bewilderment, “How did it happen?”

  “The crime?”

  “The conviction. I thought for sure that a good lawyer—”

  He cut her off. “I had a good lawyer.”

  “But there was so much room for doubt,” she argued softly. “I’m still amazed that a jury could have found you guilty.”

  “Maybe they were right,” he declared without pause.

  “No.”

  His lips twitched at the corners, as though he found amusement in her certainty. But it was wry amusement and short-lived. “Is that what you came to tell me?”

  “No. But it’s true.”

  “You’re very naive.” His mouth tightened. He turned his head and glared at nothing in particular. “You’d be amazed at what a man is capable of doing when he’s properly provoked.”

  She didn’t know what to make of that. Instinct told her that he wasn’t talking of the past but of the present, specifically of his experience in prison. Glancing at the scar by his eye, she wondered how he’d come by it.

  “I got the impression,” she began tentatively, “that the issue wasn’t whether you shot the man. The police said you did. You said you did. But the jury said that you killed him knowingly and willingly. That’s what I can’t believe.”

  Though Derek leaned forward to prop his elbows on his thighs, there was nothing relaxed about the pose. His eyes drilled hers. “The jury said there was motive. Maybe there was. The guy I killed snitched on my dad twenty-five years ago.”

  Sabrina knew about that. “You said you shot him in
self-defense.”

  “Maybe I lied.”

  “You said that you didn’t know who he was until the police identified him later.”

  “Maybe I lied about that, too.”

  She saw his hostility as a test and was determined not to fail. She kept her voice low, but made no effort to mute her confidence. “You said that he called you using a different name; that he claimed he had information crucial to a story you were doing. No reporter in his right mind would have looked a gift horse like that in the mouth.”

  “No reporter in his right mind,” Derek countered in a scathing murmur, “would have agreed to a meeting with a man he didn’t know in an isolated place that he wasn’t familiar with at an hour of the night when no other man in his right mind would be out!”

  In that instance, Sabrina knew that his anger was self-directed. She felt compelled to take issue with its cause. “You’d gotten where you were in your field by being unconventional and daring. Your meeting Joey Padilla that night was totally in character.”

  “Right. In the character to which I was born.” His dark eyes glittered dangerously. “My dad was a crook. He killed. He served time. He died in an alley, bled to death with a bullet in his gut. What is it they say about history repeating itself—about the apple not falling far from the tree, about the leopard and its spots?”

  Sabrina had read about Derek’s father. She hadn’t read anything of a like-father-like-son nature in print, but she had no doubt that it had been snickered about in more than one smoky corner of more than one after-hours bar. It was clearly a sore point where Derek was concerned.

  “Self-fulfilling prophecy?” she asked slowly. “I don’t believe it for a minute.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I knew you before.”

  “Once, Sabrina,” he reminded her in a low, dark voice. “We met once. We spent all of fifteen minutes together.”

  She couldn’t argue with the time, just the effect. “Put it down to instinct, then. You’re not a killer. You were approached in the dark of night by a man with a gun. He showed every sign of wanting you dead. You defended yourself in the only way you could.” She caught in a breath. “Lord, Derek, it was his gun! You went into that meeting totally unarmed!”

  He stared at her for a long time, torn, Sabrina thought, between belief and disbelief. The radiator hissed, low voices droned on, distant banging echoed through the walls. At length, he thrust a handful of fingers through his hair and looked off in disgust. “It doesn’t matter,” he muttered. “None of it matters.”

  “But it does.”

  “No. It’s done. I’m here.”

  “What about appeals?”

  “Appeals?” The word came off his tongue sounding like a concept that was truly absurd. His lowered voice only added intensity as he continued, “When a case is rigged from the start—when bail is denied so you have to rot in a holding bin for two months awaiting trial, when pretrial motions fall like flies and evidence self-destructs and eyewitnesses lie and the judge’s charge is legally faultless but royally biased—you don’t put much faith in appeals.”

  Sabrina hurt for him. His words had spilled with low, seething force, and she suspected that they held merit. He had the air of a wounded animal. His faith in justice had been shattered. He was bruised and aching.

  “You were railroaded.”

  His eyes said yes. His mouth remained shut.

  “Do you know by whom?” she asked very, very quietly.

  “You shouldn’t have come, Sabrina.”

  “Is there anything you can prove?”

  Straightening in his seat, he ran a hand around the back of his neck. “Christ, it’s hot in here.”

  “Derek…”

  “Why did you come?” he asked. His eyes, his nose, the faint curl of his lips, the rigidity of his jaw—all radiated anger.

  Her gaze held his for a moment before sliding toward the nearest guard, who was looking directly at them and making no bones about eavesdropping. Sabrina knew there was little they could do to change that, but it put her on the hot seat in yet another respect.

  “Why did you come?” he repeated tightly. “If it was to argue my case, you’re wasting your time. My lawyer has developed an ulcer doing just that.”

  She pressed damp palms to her skirt. “I’m not a lawyer. I wouldn’t know what to do.”

  “Then why are you here? Is it curiosity?”

  “No.”

  “Pity?”

  “No!”

  Sarcasm gave his voice a brittle edge. “I can’t believe things are so slow in New York that you’ve come here for a little innocent socializing.”

  Her hand returned to her arm and began to knead that same spot just above the elbow. “Please, Derek…”

  “Then it must be the old do-gooder instinct.”

  “No.” Why am I here? Because you understood … “I was in the neighborhood—”

  The punishing glance he shot her was an effective cutoff. “Not an original line,” he snapped. “I’ve heard it before from my glib ex-colleagues who’ve traipsed out here looking for a scoop, and it doesn’t hold water. Parkersville is in the middle of nowhere—par for the course for prisons.”

  “And homes for the severely retarded,” Sabrina added with her chin tipped a fraction higher. Forthrightness seemed her only weapon against the bitterness she heard. “I’ve been in Vermont visiting a residential center that may be suitable for my son. Parkersville was along the way. It seemed a waste to be so close and not stop.”

  Derek’s mask slipped, and she knew that in some fashion or other she’d reached him. She didn’t know whether he would question her about the child, didn’t know whether he’d give half a damn, what with the horror of his own life. He had every right to tell her to take herself and her problems through the nearest set of bars and leave him alone.

  But he didn’t. His tone mellowed. It didn’t exactly warm, but it lost its caustic edge.

  “How is he?”

  She swallowed. “Nicky? Fine. Uh, okay.”

  “You look exhausted,” he said even more quietly. “Is that what ‘okay’ is doing to you?”

  “He’s more than a full-time job.” She studied her thumb as it tugged at her palm. Head bowed, she allowed for the flicker of a frown. “Your story was good, Derek. I watched that first airing. I wanted to tell you, but somehow…” She gave a vague shrug. “Time passed. I had other worries. You had other worries.” Frowning more deeply, she turned her head and whispered, “Lord, that smells awful.”

  Derek followed her line of sight along an acrid trail to the nearby duo who were smoking up a storm. “The rest of the world is giving it up. Not here. It’s something to do, something to look forward to. No one cares if we kill ourselves.”

  Sabrina’s head came around sharply. We. It didn’t seem right that he should be one of them. She didn’t see him as a criminal. But he did identify with the prison population. She was trying to figure out how closely when his scar caught her eye. Like Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter or the mark of Cain, Derek had his scar. Its jagged edge disrupted the line of his face. Its color was that of subdued anger. It was the intrusion of violence into civility. It was symbolic of a nadir in his life.

  It upset her. She felt an urgent need to touch it, to soften it, to wipe it clean. Riding on that impulse, she raised a hand—but seconds shy of the contact, she stopped. Derek’s eyes had darkened to broadcast a warning. Danger. Do not touch. Curling her fingers into a fist, she dropped the fist to her lap.

  Why am I here? Because you understood, and I wanted to talk.…

  “Is the rest of the prison as hot as this?” she blurted out.

  “Mostly.”

  She looked around at the others in the room. “I’m surprised.”

  “You expected to find prisoners freezing in their cells?” he asked, then took his time answering. “It doesn’t work that way. Segregation units are cold, but that’s to make it worse when they strip you down and
toss you in. The rest of the time they figure that if they make you sweat, it’ll zap your strength.” He eyed her levelly. “They want docility.”

  She supposed she could understand that—the docility part. Trying to think positively, she asked, “Do you get outside much?”

  “I get yard time.”

  She glanced at the window. “It’s been a horrid winter.”

  “Have your husband send you south. He can afford it.”

  She smiled sadly, rubbed her arm, shook her head.

  “He can’t afford it?” Derek asked.

  “Oh, he can, but I can’t go.”

  “Because of Nicky.”

  She paused, then made a tiny gesture with her head that passed for a yes.

  “How old is he now?”

  “Thirty-four months.”

  “That’s nearly three.”

  The smile that had been sad turned contrite. “Thirty-four months sounds better. More babylike. He’s still pretty much a baby.”

  “No progress?”

  “Progress is relative, I suppose. He doesn’t choke so much when he eats.”

  “What do the doctors say?”

  Lifting one shoulder a fraction, she spoke in a troubled tone. “The same thing as always—that his development is delayed and that they don’t know why.”

  “Do they hold out any hope for improvement?”

  “Not much.”

  Derek grew quiet. He leaned back in his chair, compressed his lips, stared out the window.

  “Your story was accurate, Derek. It clearly depicted the problems.”

  “I tried to go beyond that.”

  “How could you? There are so few answers.”

  “I came up with one.” He slowly turned his head and looked her in the eye. “Will you institutionalize Nicky?”

  She began to deny it automatically. She gave a quick head shake—then cut it short when it occurred to her that she wasn’t talking with her husband, or with their friends or relatives. She was talking with Derek. She’d taped the story he did and had watched it half a dozen times. He took great care with his words, but their gist was clear. He believed that in some cases institutionalization was the best course. He understood.

  “Uh, I don’t know. Yes, maybe.”