The Captives

by Debra Jo Immergut

  Miranda didn’t blame Bloomfield, but she didn’t like him, either. Still, he represented an upgrade from Karsten Brunner. “Your father drove me to him,” Barb had told her once, when Miranda had asked what she’d seen in that unsmiling functionary of the Austrian embassy. He’d approached Barb at the Safeway’s meat department, package of beef in hand, asking her, “Please, my dear, what is ‘flank’?” Later Barb always shuddered at his memory. “His idea of a good time was to sit on the floor and listen to avant-garde jazz. No talking, just listening.” She sighed. “But your father was so unavailable. All that time on the road, the campaigns.”

  Miranda had her doubts about Alan Bloomfield, but at least her mother wasn’t bereft. Alan had driven her to the cemetery on Amy’s birthday, Barb said, dabbing at her eyes again with her tissue. “He brought a reblooming rosebush and he planted it himself.”

  A pudgy toddler in a red tracksuit flailed and bellowed in his mother’s arms at the next table. “He does not know me,” the woman was saying indignantly. “Does not know who I am.” Barb watched this for a moment, then turned back to Miranda.

  “Lynn Sherrill had a baby,” she said.

  “That’s nice.”

  “A boy. Named Justin, which is a name I have never liked.”

  Miranda gazed at the wriggling child. “I wish I could have gone with you on Amy’s birthday,” she said after a while.

  Her mother took her hand. “Me, too.”

  “Mom,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t need to say that every time I come.”

  “I’m so, so sorry.” She didn’t know what else to say.

  Barb passed her a piece of paper with a typed list scrolling down it. “I wrote up this list of what’s in the box. Make sure they give you everything this time.” Last month, COs on mail duty had pilfered her package and stolen Havarti cheese, boysenberry jam, a copy of People magazine, and a pair of knee-high socks. “I typed it up on my new computer,” Barb said. “Did I tell you Alan gave me a computer?”

  “No,” said Miranda, glumly.

  “You look pale. Are they letting you out for fresh air? You do thrive in the outdoors, Miranda. You used to like to camp out in the yard, remember?”

  Miranda checked the clock, set far off down the long row of tables with their loose clusters of weepers and squirmers, infants in car seats displayed like centerpieces, a few vague old folks wheeled up alongside. Visiting hour was drawing to a close. “Look, Mom, please don’t make me remember anything right now. I’m keeping my mind in the moment.”

  “I’m worried about you.” She blew her nose with as much politesse as possible.

  “I’m going through a rough patch. Soon everything will be fine.”

  Miranda had tried to imagine how her mother would react to the news of her death. In the short term, severe grief. There could be nothing more devastating for her. But in the long term, she’d be better off. Closure. No long years of visits to this chaotic room, where she looked like some kind of karmic joke in her tailored blazers and her gold-knot earrings. It was clearly a shock to her system to be there, and she aged more every time she came. This is exacting a more vicious toll than any death could. Miranda was convinced.

  SHE HAD BECOME FRANK LUNDQUIST’S PET PROJECT. THIS WAS CLEAR from the way he’d spring from his seat each week as she entered his office—she was a little afraid he’d barrel right into her and knock her flat. He wore an encouraging smile and a neatly pressed shirt.

  If she could have, she would have told him the truth. It’s not as if she enjoyed deceiving him. You’re way too late, she’d tell him. I’m already a goner, and you are simply speeding me on my way.

  Each week she banked another dose of Elavil, laid down another layer of chemical sediment, a powdery white stash of potential.

  But she didn’t tell him this truth. She told him about her memories, her dreams, her regrets, and he gave her the pills. It was a kind of exchange, to her way of thinking. And like all exchanges involving the unveiling of private parts, it felt a bit sordid.

  One day after a session with him, Miranda, unsettled, went to ask Lu about this. She had just finished hot-waxing her legs in the unit microwave. The thick piney scent lingered.

  “Would you sell your soul if you had to?” she asked.

  Lu ran her hands over her gleaming shins. “I have sold my body one time. To Visha. He wanted me, and I said, yes, you can have me but in return you give me Long Island house, European car, American Express charge card, and also boots and coat, my choice, from Barneys. And he said okay. And he did get me . . .” She counted with slight bobs of her head. “Four of the five things. Also, time in jail, not in the bargain but that’s life, as you say.”

  “But you love Visha.”

  “Yes. I wouldn’t sell my body to a man I did not love, Mimi. Or my soul. That I would not do.”

  Miranda felt deflated.

  But still, sequestered with Frank Lundquist, lulled by infusions of hot tea and his sympathetic gaze, she found herself compelled to lay a few things bare. She was using him pretty ruthlessly, it seemed to her, and she didn’t feel right about it. In fact, she felt fairly terrible about it, and that led her to reveal more in their sessions than she generally planned to. Which is how she found herself telling him about the blue car.

  It was a 1969 Pontiac LeMans, and it had a snout, a long insinuating snout that ended in two nostril-like headlights. The windshield raked backward, like a greased pompadour, and the convertible top opened at the push of a button, making a celebratory wail as it reared up slowly and then folded itself into a slot tucked behind the back seats. The paint was ice-blue. The seats were cream-colored vinyl.

  Miranda first saw this car when Neil Potocki, her father’s biggest financial backer, parked in front of their house in Pittsburgh in the weeks just after Edward Greene won his congressional seat, when the moving boxes started filling up the hallways and corners. The men would powwow around the kitchen table and her mother would shoo Miranda and Amy out. And there was this convertible in the driveway. Miranda pretended to steer, Amy preened in the mirror on the flip side of the visor. Miranda was nine, Amy twelve.

  Neil Potocki was softer around the middle then. He owned the television station in Pittsburgh that showed blurry broadcasts of city council meetings and the Channel 23 kiddie club. Brown suits, brown ties, brown mustache, small brown eyes, smoking skinny brown cigarettes. And the blue car.

  He must have really adored that car. Years went by, and in 1981, when Miranda was thirteen, Neil Potocki turned up again, this time in Washington, on Super Bowl Sunday. The convertible was the only thing about him that hadn’t changed. He lived in northern Virginia now, on a hilly estate way out in what her parents, with a hushed thrill in their voices, called “hunt country.” At the top of a rise, overlooking a neighboring farm where blanket-wrapped steeplechase horses grazed from carts of hay, the house was sprawled. “It’s not a house, it’s a mansion,” her mother had said, as they steered up through the snowy slopes along a serpent-curved driveway. It looked old, all white wood and brick and stone railings, but it smelled new. Neil Potocki no longer was dressed primarily in brown. Instead, a deep red sweater and khaki pants, his hair salt-and-pepper gray, mustache gone. He looked thinner and smoked menthol cigarettes and sometimes a pipe. The blue car was parked out front, next to a clean white Mercedes-Benz. Miranda’s mother told her he had sold the Pittsburgh station, made a killing, invested in cable television, made another killing, and bought a great deal of real estate all over the East Coast.

  “Is he a millionaire?” she asked her mother.

  “Oh, yes,” she said.

  “And he gave Dad money?”

  “He gave the campaign money, sweetie, not Daddy. Both campaigns.”

  “So was he mad when Dad lost?”

  “I don’t know,” said her mother. “And whatever you do, don’t ask him.”

  The Super Bowl played on the biggest TV any of them had ever seen�
��so big it had its own projector that sat across the room and beamed the picture onto the enormous curved screen. On low couches, men in boating shoes and women in wool pants and gold jewelry drank Bloody Marys and ate little crackers smeared with salmon spread. The drinks must have been strong, because they were all talking very loudly and most paid no attention to the game or to the gaggle of younger children who were slapping each other and arguing over Parcheesi in the next room. Miranda sat on the arm of a sofa next to her dad, listening to him talk about a big lobbying deal for a lumber company. She thought she might pass out from sheer boredom. Her skirt, a plaid kilt kind of thing, itched. Scratching under the waistband, she watched the man who sat next to her father, his thin sandy hair and big bland eyes. He nodded at everything her father said, but he kept sneaking these glimpses toward the game on the TV. She watched his eyes shifting back and forth. Adults are so endlessly fake, she thought. She vowed to herself she wouldn’t wear this awful skirt again.

  Finally, she wandered off to search for Amy, passing through a number of rooms, each with a slightly different arrangement of perfectly puffed-up sofas and chairs and polished wood tables. On a bookcase, there was a framed picture of Mr. Potocki shaking hands with the president. The president grinned; Mr. Potocki was caught talking, his mouth open. He looked like a toad trying to trap a fly.

  She found Amy in the vast kitchen, speaking Spanish with the hired bartender. Amy was in third-year Spanish and was trying to talk her parents into letting her spend next summer in South America. She sat on the butcher-block counter, her long legs in white wool tights and loafers dangling.

  “Miranda, this is Joaquin.” Amy gestured toward a short stocky man in a burgundy vest and bow tie, who was busily slicing lemons and limes. “Joaquin, mi hermana,” she said to the man.

  “Yes, pardon,” said Joaquin with a little bow. “Now I must find Mr. P. I need more tonic.” He looked relieved to have found an excuse to leave the room.

  “You want to drive me home?” Miranda asked when he was gone. “I’m bored out of my mind.”

  Amy slid off the counter and absentmindedly began practicing some steps from a pom-pom routine. “I don’t know—you think Dad would let me?” She had gotten her license three weeks before, on the second try (“I really don’t get why blinkers are that important,” she’d said with a shrug).

  Miranda flopped down in a chair by the oversize kitchen table, which was covered with trays of food waiting to be served, rare roast beef slices rolling in pink waves, the potato salad piled into chunky yellow hills. Amy, still moving her feet to an unheard beat, plucked a pickle from a bowl.

  The swinging door flew open and in walked Mr. Potocki.

  “Goddamn it, Rosie, we need tonic and—”

  He stopped short when he saw Miranda and Amy. “I’m looking for my housekeeper.”

  “Rosie has dolor de cabeza,” said Amy. “She had to go lie down for a minute.”

  “Shit.” He frowned and stared at the floor. Then he looked up, as if remembering they were there. “You didn’t hear that, ladies.” He winked. He still had a little potbelly and his neck was thick, but otherwise he might be considered debonair, as Miranda’s mom would have said.

  Turning to Amy, Mr. Potocki said, “Can you drive, sweetheart?”

  “Sure.” Amy smiled.

  “She only just got her license,” said Miranda.

  “So you’re completely legal then,” said Mr. Potocki. “You’d probably benefit from a little more practice.” He tugged a heavy key chain from his pants pocket, a dozen keys clustered with a thick letter P sculpted in brassy metal. “I can’t leave my guests. Why don’t you take the Mercedes, go get me a case of tonic? There’s a C-Mart just down the road a ways.”

  “I don’t know,” said Amy, as if seeing the big key chain had given her second thoughts.

  “Tell you what.” He put the big clump of keys back in his pocket and, from a narrow drawer beneath the telephone, pulled out a ring with a single key dangling from it. “How’d you like to drive a vintage convertible? It’s a very sporty car.”

  “The blue one?” said Miranda.

  “That’s right.”

  Amy reached for the key. “Okay.”

  He regarded her appraisingly. “Willing to make a deal. Your dad’s girl.” He winked. “You could even put the top down, cupcake, it still works.”

  Amy nodded, looking a little dazed.

  “It’s freezing out!” said Miranda.

  Mr. Potocki scoffed. “The sun is shining. Convertible weather.”

  “Should I go tell my dad?” Amy said.

  “I’ll tell him,” he said, picking at the roast beef platter.

  “I don’t think she should drive,” said Miranda.

  “Shut up!” snapped Amy.

  “Little ladies,” said Potocki. “Play nice.” He folded a slice of beef into his mouth, then reached into his back pocket, pulled out a black leather wallet, and plucked out a fifty. He handed the bill to Amy, giving her hand a little squeeze. “Thanks. And get diet tonic, please. A half dozen diet.”

  “Wait till I’m gone before you tell them,” whispered Amy to Miranda.

  Miranda agreed. In the end, she almost always did whatever Amy said.

  She watched from a big bay window in the breakfast nook. It took Amy a while to get the car started and the top down. She wore the gloves Grandma Rosalie had bought at Garfinckel’s. Cashmere, cream colored. She gripped the wheel tightly as she backed out of the parking area. Then the car slipped out the twisting driveway and disappeared amid the violet snowy hills. Above the hills, the winter sun dangled, a worn silver locket against the pale skin of the sky.

  The car hadn’t been driven for a year, and its brake lines had begun to rot. And then a patch of black ice, or maybe a deer, though no animal tracks were ever found. Instead, just the swerving path of tires, the car with steaming blue snout buried in snow, and a girl of sixteen, far away in the drifts.

  THE PETITE WIRY WOMAN WHO LIVED IN THE CELL FACING MIRANDA’S had worked the streets of Syracuse’s Tenderloin District for more than twenty years. Gossip in the unit had it that she slashed the throat of a john who tried to skip without paying and had only missed the electric chair because the man had been an escaped con and African American on top of that. Her name was Weavy Moore. All day every day she sat at the little desk she’d fashioned for herself from a sheet of thick cardboard and stacks of boxes, scrawling a missive to the world across the smooth flip sides of sandpaper squares, swiped from her job in the chair caning shop.

  On this morning, Weavy looked up as Miranda left her room, heading for the kitchen. “You talk all night,” she said.

  Miranda stopped. This sinuous deep voice. Weavy had never spoken to her before. She hesitated by the cell’s open door. Beside Weavy’s desk rose a knee-high stack of sandpaper. The walls were bare but for a torn magazine page taped above the desk, a photo of a young, handsome Jesse Jackson.

  Weavy didn’t lift her eyes from her writing. She sat very straight in her chair, clenching her fat marker. A black-and-white scarf covered her head, wrapping around it neatly and tightly, as if her mind were a wound that needed dressing.

  “You talk in your sleep. You say nonsense things.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “It disturbs me.”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t know what I can do about it. I didn’t even know I was doing that.”

  “Well, it disturbs me. You disturb me.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Miranda. “I’ll be gone very soon.”

  Weavy looked up then, turning her broad wrinkled face slowly toward the door, and regarded her with a profound indifference, a void Miranda felt she might fall into forever.

  “Gone. Yes,” Weavy said. “You will be gone directly to hell.”

  Miranda backed away. Backed all the way into her room. Without volition, a toy figure reeled backward by a string. Shut the door, leaned into its steeliness, her forehead pressed against t
he chill.

  Forehead pressed against the chill.

  She saw a girl in flight. A new driver.

  Now the girl was flying over snow, straight across the center of sight, just behind her shut-tight eyes.

  And behind the girl in flight, another tableaux: a moving picture, aglow in red and blue. She pressed her forehead against the chill, thirteen years old, accepting the cold of the glass window, as she watched the dots race around in the night, red and blue, red and blue, in the darkness just outside the breakfast nook of the new-smelling, old-looking hunt-country mansion. Small blurry dots of red and blue skimming speedily over the dark driveway. Circles of light, rafts of radiant beings, chasing one another in the night. Her forehead against the chill.

  Behind her, in the room, a tangle of sounds. Gasping, gulping, strangled cries from her mother, as if someone were dunking her over and over into deep water. “She was a new driver,” she yelped. Male voices, her father’s mixed in. Muttered talk. Then the jangling of bracelets, loud, coming close to Miranda’s ear. Strange hands landing on her shoulders, perfume smell falling over her in a choking mist, the bump of a kiss on the top of her head. “Poor dear.” A voice she doesn’t even know. “Poor little dear.”

  Far behind, the burble of the football game, still playing, somewhere people on TV cheering, somewhere music trilling. “She flew thirty yards from the road,” a voice said.

  She considered this. She tumbled this idea in her mind. It tumbled there still.

  What must it feel like to soar over snow?

  She leaned her forehead into the steel of the cell door, a coolant to the skin outside her brain.

  So fast you’d sail, so light. So free.

  7

  Take Steps to Minimize Harm When It Is Foreseeable

  (Standard 3.04.a)

  Elavil—its generic name is amitriptyline hydrochloride—is a tricyclic antidepressant. And not a particularly heavy-duty one. Some doctors use Elavil to treat bulimia, to ease chronic pain, to prevent migraine, or to tamp down a pathological weeping and laughing syndrome associated with multiple sclerosis. The standard dosage of Elavil is 75 milligrams per day. It is not considered a dangerous drug, but an overdose of Elavil can be fatal.