The Captives

by Debra Jo Immergut

  Viv returned. “That guard is here now, hon. Paperwork, seems like. You’re out any minute.”

  Miranda settled down on the floor next to the toilet, leaned her head back against the cool wall. Then Carmona’s wide rosy face appeared in the window, cut off at the brows. She smiled as the triple locks turned. The door swung open. “Come home, Missy May,” she said with what sounded like true affection. “All is forgiven.”

  Miranda couldn’t tell if she knew what had happened just before the SHU guard had come for her, two astoundingly long weeks ago. Dorcas ambled by her cell, pausing in the doorway. “Cassie says keep the fucking mat. I told her it was wrong. I stole what wasn’t mine but I never said something was mine that wasn’t mine. Understand?”

  Miranda did understand, funny thing. Prison logic was beginning to make sense to her.

  SHE TOLD FRANK LUNDQUIST ALL THIS. THEN LAPSED INTO SILENCE, sipping her cooling tea. Finally he raised his eyes from his notes, gave her a small nod. A murky expression seemed to pass over his face, or was it a change in the light? She glanced up at the window behind his head. Luminous blue sky, a leggy shrub, seen from this basement vantage. It must have been wind in the branches, shifting the shadows in the room.

  “I’d like to do some diagnostics with you,” he said. “Lay a baseline.”

  “Sure,” nodded Miranda.

  “Please answer true or false to the following statements. ‘I daydream very little.’”

  “True. Are these from the MMPI? I’ve already been through a slew of tests.”

  “Humor me. I know it seems ridiculous.”

  “Sure, go ahead.” As long as I leave here with that medication remand, she thought. And she felt sure now that she would. Something too open about him, for a corrections staffer. Too human.

  “‘My mother often made me obey even when I thought it was unreasonable.’”

  “True. She was a good mom, though.”

  “I’m sure. Please just answer true or false.”

  He said this gently, not as a reprimand. Two COs passed in the hallway, voices booming, something about overtime pay.

  “‘At times my thoughts have raced ahead faster than I could speak them.’” He leaned back in his swivel chair, a clipboard resting on his knee. He looks, thought Miranda, as if he’s confused by me. And why wouldn’t he be? I am confused by me. Deeply. “True.”

  “‘I have used alcohol excessively.’”

  “False.”

  “‘Sometimes when I was young I stole things.’”

  “False.” There was that time with her mother’s rings. Did that count? she wondered.

  “‘I have no enemies who really wish to harm me.’”

  “True.”

  He jotted on the clipboard. His forehead was traced by worry lines, though they were visible only when he raised his brows, which he did each time he began to write. She found this faintly likable. She asked herself again: Did she know him? He looked to be approximately her age, or a few years older. She could have met him anywhere, wedged together in an airplane row, on a buffet line at a friend’s wedding. Miranda checked. No ring.

  He looked up at her again. “‘I have never done anything dangerous just for the thrill of it,’” he said.

  “What?” she said. “I didn’t hear.”

  “‘I’ve never done anything dangerous just for the thrill of it.’”

  Were those tears stinging her eyes? How did they come so fast? She blinked hard. She forced herself to meet his gray-blue gaze. “False,” she said.

  3

  Do Not Engage in Subterfuge or Intentional Misrepresentation

  (Principle C)

  I have to admit: I was curious.

  Curiosity is an unacceptable emotion for a mental-health professional—or any kind of health-care provider, in fact. Satisfying a curiosity is tantamount to fulfilling a desire, and a mental-health counselor has no business fulfilling his desires (or hers), even mulling over those desires, when working with a client.

  But how could I not be curious about M, this girl-turned-woman who’d float across my memories bracketed by bright sparks, who’d always seemed a key player in my story, though we’d hardly ever exchanged a word? After she left my office, I sat for a long time paging through that file folder. And it became clear that her crime was serious. This wasn’t embezzlement, it wasn’t a case of substance abuse careening out of bounds. M was in for murder.

  I passed my ten-minute note-taking break launching my small foam basketball into the hoop on the back of my office door. I sometimes offered the ball to fidgety clients who might need more than a cup of tea—for some, movement was more soothing. Lately I’d been using the ball more myself. It calmed me, too, the well-aimed bank shot. At home, for the same reason, I’d take to the playground courts in Riverside Park. I had height, and I’d occasionally sink a respectable layup. Neighborhood teens sometimes nodded approval. This could be satisfying, for someone who’d been pretty clumsy as a kid. And it passed a few hours on those warm weekends, when the city could seem lonesome.

  On this afternoon, though, my aim was off.

  I had to assume she was guilty. White, well connected, well off. She didn’t fit the profile of the unjustly imprisoned. To have slid so far, spiraling down into the grim bowels of NYS DOCS, she’d taken some devastating missteps. Why? How?

  Yes, I was curious, and that was wrong. But there was much more to my decision than that—my decision to keep quiet on our shared history.

  I feared that if I did speak up, she’d bolt.

  And I just figured I should help her in any way I could.

  You didn’t need shared history, test results, or a degree—you didn’t need to know anything about her to see that her emotional state was dire. And this was my job, correct? Dispersing emotional shitstorms. Long-term therapy wasn’t in the budget at Milford Basin, nor would the taxpayers have stood for it. But crisis intervention, that was the idea.

  Here was a crisis, someone needed to intervene, and she and I, we had navigated the same school hallways, we were schoolmates, after all. So I was convinced: for intervention, she needed me—specifically me.

  I missed eighteen shots until finally I sank it.

  THE REMAINDER OF THE MORNING, I POWERED THROUGH SEVERAL admissions evaluations, then did a session with a regular, a half-blind seventy-year-old Brazilian in for smuggling coke in her cane. At lunch, I ate the chef’s salad in the staff mess down beneath the inmates’ gym, with the clamor of nonstop stomping and dribbling above. The four of us in the Counseling Center always sat together, set apart, in the corner nearest the door. The guards, looking in their cocoa-colored uniforms like a herd of broad-backed cattle, dominated the rear of the room, by the window wells that let in the only natural light and air to the stewy-smelling mess hall. They didn’t trust us. The guards felt somehow that in the Milford Basin’s endless version of summer-camp color war, we sided with the yellow—the inmates—and not with the brown. Which, in my case, was pretty unfair; though sessions with clients were often dominated by the women’s venting against the COs, I still had a whole lot of sympathy for the guard staff. Talk about your difficult jobs! No wonder they almost all had weight problems. I’d guess that compensatory eating disorders were widespread among them—in fact, one look at their lunch trays confirmed that.

  In any case, I know that Suze Feeney had a bad attitude toward the COs. She called them “swine” under her breath. “That one—Villanovo—that one is a little Hitler,” she’d hiss as a guard swaggered past carrying a phone-book-sized portion of lasagna. Suze had a white buzz cut, wore fringed shawls and swirling skirts and cowboy boots, specialized in substance abusers, and was a founding editor of The Person-Centered Review. She had a rapport with the inmates that I could never match.

  “So, Frank,” said Suze. “What did you think of the case I sent you?”

  “A complex profile,” I stammered. Next to me, Corinne Masterson, bent over a bowl of four-bean chili, giggled quietly. A
delicately composed woman, her regal head topped with an intricate map of cornrows, she was attending med school part-time and gunning for Charlie’s job. She put down her spoon. “She was assigned to me, Frank, but we thought you’d enjoy her so we sent her your way.” She cocked an eyebrow at me. “A better therapeutic match, we suspected. More like your Central Park West crowd.”

  Corinne chuckled, and Suze joined in. They exchanged a bemused glance. Those two always had some private joke going.

  Charlie Polkinghorne, our boss, Counseling’s sole M.D., looked up from his soup. “Who’s this?”

  “She was the 50 milligrams Zoloft I sent over this morning,” I said.

  “Right. Right.” Charlie nodded his head authoritatively. I knew he was allowing his admin assistant to sign his name on the med orders again. He’d never even seen the remand slip I sent. But still I regarded him with empathy. The diplomas on his office cinder blocks were the very best, I mean blue chip all the way, and if he hadn’t been a dedicated alcoholic, he probably would have been heading up a leafy inpatient clinic in the Berkshires and kayaking in rivers of cash. But mistakes had landed him here, where mistakes are paid for. He had long since settled into the life of institutional doctor, the shrink as civil servant. He lived in a ramshackle apartment in the toniest part of the county, with a balcony drifting above the shuddering tracks of the Metro North, and there he drank himself catatonic, with his alcoholic wife, Sheila, alongside.

  Looking back, I think Charlie only vaguely sensed that he’d entered his sunset era at the Department of Corrections. I had a soft spot for him; he had hired me when no one else would. But Corinne didn’t have a soft spot for Charlie. Neither did Suze. And with reason. He had never aspired to work in women’s corrections. Suze and Corrine had. Charlie settled. So, undeniably, had I, the newest member of the team. But while I aimed for an air of humility around these colleagues—and I sometimes sensed that they appreciated my efforts—Charlie was perilously clueless.

  “What the hell’s her charge again?” Charlie asked.

  “Second-degree murder. Stiff sentence, too,” I said. “Fifty-two years. No parole.”

  “That’s a white girl with a bad lawyer,” said Suze.

  “Or a judge up for reelection,” said Corinne.

  “That’s a shame.” Charlie fished for the final pea in his minestrone.

  “And her father was a U.S. congressman, stranger yet,” said Corinne.

  “Only one term,” I said. “Never won another election.” Maybe I said this with a bit too much familiarity. Suze looked up at me quickly. “That’s what I gather,” I added with a shrug.

  They didn’t know about the connection M and I had, of course. They didn’t know where I went to high school or even where I grew up. They didn’t know much of anything about me, in fact, except that I’d been in a cushy practice in Manhattan and was tossed out amid some kind of litigation mess. Mistakes were made, and now I was here, where mistakes are paid for. In the half year I’d been working at Milford Basin, I didn’t talk about myself very often. Which is typical, I suppose. I’m not in the habit of talking about myself much. I’m more of a listener. It’s my job.

  THAT EVENING, I ARRIVED HOME TO TRUFFLE THE CAT—HE HAD BELONGED to my ex-wife, Winnie; I’d somehow inherited him, and we lived together as incompatible roommates—and a ringing telephone. My baby brother, Clyde. He explained that someone named Grigori had promised to maim him if he didn’t come up with three hundred dollars by midnight. “I’m out here right now doing business, Frank. Just give me two, I’ll make the rest.”

  I sighed and I rooted around the living room for my car keys. At the tawdry corner of Amsterdam and 108th Street, I idled with a chunk of twenties fresh from the money machine clutched in my shift hand. Posted at an overturned Whirlpool dryer box topped with a turquoise plastic tarp, my brother smiled at passersby and lovingly indicated his wares, like the proud fromager I’d once seen selling disks of goat cheese at a street market in Paris. Urbanites, with faces mostly weary or worried, rushed around in the evening haze. Watching them pass Clyde and his offerings without a glance, well, it rubbed my heart the wrong way.

  My brother peddled tube socks on consignment. He worked for a man I will call Jimmy, who marshaled armies of sellers of tube socks, windup plush toys, hats and hair ornaments, and balloons. They ceded him 85 percent of the proceeds in return for a cot in one of several rodent-riddled row houses Jimmy owned in Sunset Park, transportation to and from Manhattan, and a half a gram of heroin a day.

  “It’s a version of life,” Clyde used to say.

  That night he was far from his best self: his brown hair hung in lank strands around his face, cold sores flowered violently on his lower lip. Clyde had been a junkie for going on a year now, and so calamitous and steep had been his decline, I worried that someday soon I’d never remember him any other way. He was just nineteen, my junior by many years. He’d shrugged off higher education; unlike me—always the uneasy underachiever, neglecting homework then asking for extra credit assignments—he’d been a placid D student in school. He dreamed of being a pastry chef in a swank New York eatery, but obviously, other things happened instead.

  He spotted my car and sidled to the curb, slightly bent, an unsettling combo of anorexic teen and decrepit old man. But his eyes were achingly clear and he greeted me so thankfully, throwing his arms open to hug me as I climbed from the car. Sporting a grubby Princeton sweatshirt, he looked like a demented frat boy who’d been starved and beaten for a week.

  “You could use a shower, pal,” I said, hugging him gingerly.

  “You’re telling me, my friend. But thank you God, at least I’ve haven’t got the louses.” He was starting to talk like Jimmy, who was Macedonian. He eased the cash from my hand and stuffed it into the pocket of his pants, which were filthy green, embroidered with minuscule mallards, someone’s old golfing trousers.

  A woman towing a sobbing toddler paused to look over Clyde’s showroom. “These are dynamite socks,” Clyde said to her. She started off down the sidewalk again, dragging the child behind her.

  The smelly smoke of frying fat from a churros stand on the opposite corner wafted around us, a greasy fog. “I’m dog-tired from work and I don’t understand who Grigori is,” I said.

  “Short version,” said Clyde. “Last week some kids stole my socks. I had to borrow money to repay Jimmy for the lost inventory. Grigori is Russian, the Russians are the bank, and you don’t stiff the bank.”

  “Stole your socks?”

  He looked down. “Sleeping on the job.”

  Sleeping, I understood, meant nodding, meant he was high, propped against some piss-covered wall, slumped in some doorway. That queasy despair again, the guilt, rising again, upending my gut. How could I let this happen to this boy. My blood, my sole sibling, my dead mother’s late-to-the-party joy.

  “Grigori has one of those crooked Russian crosses tattooed on his shaved head.” He grimaced. “Even Jimmy seems a little spooked by those Sheepshead Bay guys.”

  “What about readmission to Llewellyn? I’ve been asking around, I think I can get you a spot—”

  “When I’m ready, Frank. Just not ready yet.” He slipped the money from his pocket again. Rubbed the corner of each bill between thumb and forefinger, as if ensuring the ink was smudge proof, or testing the paper’s weft. “I promise.”

  I had given him five hundred. “Buy yourself some food,” I pleaded. “You’re so goddamn thin.”

  “And yet the girls are all over me.”

  Heat of tears building behind my eyeballs, I returned to my car. I powered down the passenger-side window. “When will you be ready, if you please?”

  “I’ll be ready when I’m ready.” He was counting the bills again.

  I rounded the block and headed for home, the sun lowering now, spilling gold all over the river as it fell. The timing of Clyde’s arrival in the city a year earlier couldn’t have been worse. My career had cracked up a few months before, an
d, when he turned up at our apartment, establishing residence on our sofa, Winnie and I were already crouched in a kind of ongoing sniper exchange, striking each other with startling frequency and precision. After a few days in the free-fire zone, Clyde decided to evacuate. He fell in with a girl he’d met in Washington Square. Flor was her name. She was a junkie. As I skittered into a tailspin, out of a job and out of my marriage, he was sucked into something much more dire.

  A year later, I found myself still reeling through the days. Shell-shocked by his implosion. And mine.

  And yet Clyde claimed to enjoy his unfettered new life. “It’s like I’m dangling on the very edge of everything and it’s actually not a bad place to be.”

  Bumping down into the garage beneath my building, a neogothic hulk on Riverside Drive, I wondered why so many people were tossed by fate to the outer edges.

  Take M. Here was a person teetering on a precipice.

  Climbing the echoing stairwell from the garage, I realized that, maybe, I was very slightly dismayed that she didn’t remember me. Because we surely had talked a few times—trig handout, fire drill. As far as I could remember. And I think I did remember every word I shared with her during those school years. She laughed, once or twice.

  Back in my apartment, I paused at the long mirror Winnie had fixed by the bedroom closet. In many respects, I felt profoundly unchanged from that wobbly ninth-grader, easily flustered, needled by self-doubt, and not able, in any consistent manner, to abide by the standards for morality and honesty by which I judged those around me. A difficult truth, for a licensed professional who is tasked with helping others evolve. But, at that moment, in that dingy airshaft-view room, with the cat blinking atop my ex-wife’s pillow, it seemed clear to me: if I were slightly more string-bean shaped, and still driving my grandmother’s boatlike Buick Ventura, I would have been the same guy. The same boy who been fired from Burger Palace for deep-frying his buddy’s hat, who had called girls’ houses—including M’s, a few times—only to slam the receiver down when someone said, “Hello.” The same eager-to-please cutup, the same chronic striver, never quite attaining the pinnacles that had been predicted for him by certain achievement tests. Tests administered by one Erskine Lundquist. Yes, that Erskine Lundquist, of the Lundquist Curve. That’s my father. Clyde’s father, too. Clyde hadn’t tested as well as I had. Dad was left badly shaken by his scores.