The Captives

by Debra Jo Immergut

  Clearly, she was no criminal genius. This much, if nothing else, was certain. Anyhow, she’d gotten what she’d wanted, the pills, and used them, and she was glad her plan hadn’t panned out. She had only decided to see him one last time, simply to apologize. To come clean with him, as part of her new leaf.

  And now his preposterous proposal.

  If, by some miraculous turn, he did actually succeed in realizing this bizarre idea of a prison break, what then?

  Preposterous. This is the word that came to mind.

  He was, apparently, a good person. Apparently, he had some concern for her well-being. And yes, she had taken note of his forearms and his large, long-tendoned hands as he turned a silly little foam basketball while they talked. Yes, she considered his face to have a certain appeal, humble and ruddy. The ruffled blond locks often gone a bit too shaggy.

  She kicked at her blanket, kicked it off her bed.

  She just wished she could sleep.

  BACK ON C UNIT, SHE DEVISED A PERSONAL PROJECT. GATHER TOGETHER the ingredients to make risotto for April. It had been her best dish when she used to cook for Duncan McCray. Now she wanted to make it for her best friend ever. Her small savior, their bond so very deep, so foundational to this life. But lately April was off. Miranda had found her sobbing in her room twice in the past week. Maybe the new arrival, Nessa, had hurt her in some way? Miranda found the girl dull and cranky, but April had seemed charmed, beguiled; she’d been all smiles around her, and mascara-widened eyes. Now something had changed, but she wouldn’t say what. All she did was curl herself up tightly on her bed, bury her head in her hands, and say, “I’m scared shitless, Mimi. If I die in here, my folks won’t be coming to get me. They’ll bury me with the homeless. I am so scared.” She wouldn’t say more. She lay in her bed and wouldn’t get up.

  Carmona came by, saying, “You ladies better get in line, you wanna get your outside time.”

  “I’ve got cramps,” sniffed April.

  “All right, then. Missy May, what’s your story?”

  “I’m coming.” Miranda reluctantly left the cell. As she joined the other ladies lined up at the unit exit, she wondered what had shaken April.

  “Mimi!” Lu appeared on line beside her. “Walk with me, I’m very happy.”

  A triangle of white cotton knotted over her yellow hair, Lu looked like a comely factory girl from a Stalinist mural. Her swooped cheekbones and vivid turquoise eyes.

  The doors to the unit swung open and the column of women, jostling and nattering, moved down the hallway. “Yes, I am happy happy today,” said Lu. “Visha and little Visha are coming for a trailer visit.”

  “My mother’s coming. Not for a trailer.”

  “Your mother is a beautiful lady,” said Lu. “Her earrings were very pretty the time I saw her.”

  A cluster of COs watched them fan into the yard. The September sky, smooth and bright as blue-tinted glass, the trees surrendering a leaf here and there to yellow.

  Miranda turned to her. “April is so down. I don’t know why.”

  “We all get sad here, Mimi.” Lu leaned toward her as if confiding a secret. “It is not a fabulous place.” She hugged herself, rubbing her hands over her bare arms. “Getting cool. Winter will be soon. I think maybe the weather makes April sad.”

  “She did grow up in the Sunshine State.”

  “Not like me. I am from the snow.” Lu frowned and surveyed the yard. The usual clusters gathered by the usual picnic tables, others on the blacktop. “Visha did a hit last week, Mimi. They cut off the guy’s tongue and also balls.”

  “Jesus,” said Miranda.

  “They killed him after, of course. He was talking, they think.” She shook her head and clucked in dismay. “So bad to rat. He will go to hell.”

  They reached the fence line path. Miranda clutched the chain link with one hand, felt dizzy, as she often did when Lu talked about her husband’s exploits. This was information she did not want to know. Lu trusted her with it completely. She seemed to think that Miranda had also been a gang moll of some kind, though Miranda had tried to explain that this was not the case.

  “I am going to bathe myself in Chanel number 19 gelee de bain before my trailer, Mimi. For Visha. A hot bath.”

  “How are you going to manage that one?” asked Miranda. There was only one bathtub in their building, in the fourth-floor health-care station’s bathroom.

  “My Mr. Liverwell. He will take me upstairs during count.” She grinned and winked at Miranda. “I maybe give him a peek.”

  Miranda shook her head in wonder. Nobody worked the angles better than Lu.

  “Now I will shoot basketball with the B-Unit ladies,” said Lu. “Bye bye, sweet little crow.” She gave Miranda a peck on either cheek and strode away across the grass, swinging her long, elegant arms.

  SHE DISCOVERED SHE COULD GET BUTTER, ONIONS, AND GARLIC from one of her literacy tutees, who worked in the Zoo pantry and would steal them in return for Miranda writing out her pleas to the parole board—ordinarily, Miranda would have done this gladly without any bartered payment, but Cristal was happier not having to feel indebted; she was in for credit fraud.

  Mami, queen of the unit kitchen, promised her a few bouillon cubes.

  “Arborio rice and—what does this say—saffron threads?” Barb Greene stared, mystified, at the scrap of paper Miranda had given her at their next visit. Barb had never been much of a cook. “Can I buy these things at the Safeway?”

  “It’ll be an adventure for you.” Behind them, a family of Nigerians—an inmate and her four sisters—were singing hymns in low tones. Everyone in the visiting room, even the COs, even the children, seemed soothed by the sound.

  Barb tucked the note into the pocket of her blazer. “Risotto in prison. I never would’ve dreamed.”

  Something about her face. Something about her mother’s face. “I don’t believe it. You had your eyes done.”

  Her mother pursed her lips. “I changed my hair.”

  “Who decided you needed plastic surgery? Alan Bloomfield?”

  “Not surgery,” her mother scolded. “A tiny incision. Two. Local anesthesia, in the doctor’s office. It was my idea. And Alan was nothing but supportive.”

  “I don’t think you needed it. But if it makes you feel good.” She did deserve it, of course. The ordeal Miranda had inflicted upon her.

  Her mother smiled. “Do I look thirty-five?”

  “Mother, I’m almost thirty-five.”

  “Good grief.” Barb sighed and took Miranda’s hand in her own, held it there, studied it. Blessed assurance Jesus is mine, sang the women, oh what a foretaste of glory divine. “I was thinking, the other day. In January it’ll be twenty years since the accident. I can’t fathom that. Can you?”

  “Not really. No.” She put her free hand over her mother’s. “Time passes so slowly in here. But it seems like Amy . . . like she was alive ten minutes ago. And I was sitting in her room watching her get ready for some dance. Homecoming maybe. That blue dress with the long sleeves.”

  A slight smile. “You wore it to your senior prom. In her honor.”

  “I did?” Miranda didn’t remember, she hadn’t remembered that.

  Yet some memories were so precisely focused, so Technicolor, she could remember them in sense-soaked detail. The rustling as her sister and mother unfolded magenta pleated-paper flowers to hang before a birthday party. The burnt-gravy smell of TV dinners in the oven, Salisbury steak and green beans. Jingles and theme songs, naturally. Velvety tickle on fingertips brushed over flocked wallpaper. A pencil cup, painted macaroni pasted to a frozen orange juice can, sitting on her father’s Rayburn Office Building desk. The names of lifeguards Amy flirted with at the beach, her bathing suit printed in shooting stars.

  But the post-Amy years, the few years after: those memories were sparse. Miranda had transferred to public school, instead of continuing at Potomac Day, where she would always be known as the little sister of the dead girl. She didn’t
want to be singled out that way. So, though her parents had misgivings—a small school is so supportive, they said, at a big school you’ll just get lost—she started at sprawling Lincoln High. She could just about remember the day, a few weeks in, when it looked like she might be cut from the track team. Her mother called the coach and he singled her out during gym class and said she could join the JV squad if she still wanted to. Barb swore she hadn’t told the man about Amy’s death, but Miranda knew she was lying. She could see sympathy in his eyes every time he looked her way.

  And beyond that? After Frank Lundquist’s confession and his preposterous proposal, she had passed hours and days trying to reconstruct those high school years, those lost post-Amy years. The whole period of her father’s ill-starred second campaign, his so-called comeback: this happened when she was a freshman at Lincoln, but she couldn’t recall anything. Except that she’d refused to campaign. And so had her mother.

  Otherwise, those months and days were missing pages. Swept away in the wake of her sister, flying.

  She did remember graduation. Wobbling onstage in too-high heels, extending a hand toward her diploma, her eyes falling on a lone figure in a dark suit, standing at the rear of the crowded auditorium, an uninvited guest. Her father. And he saw her see him, and he waved at her. A tense little gesture, a slightly tentative smile. And the burning tears that sprang to her eyes at that moment, and the tremor she felt sweep up the back of her body, into her belly, her heart. She thought she might topple, but she didn’t. By the time she marched out of the room—or stumbled, in those awful heels—with the rest of the grads, he had vanished.

  That image had stuck. If ever a bar or two of “Pomp and Circumstance” played somewhere, that tremor swept back into her.

  HE WAYLAID HER IN A HALLWAY OUTSIDE THE EDUCATION ROOM A few weeks later, as she rushed to her tutoring job. He’d been hoping to run into her, this she could see. His white button-down snowy, one side untucked.

  “Miranda,” he said.

  “I don’t think we should talk anymore,” she said.

  “Wait—”

  “Please leave me alone,” she urged. “I’m blooming where I’m planted.” She turned and continued down the deserted hall.

  She heard him call her name again but she didn’t turn around.

  11

  Paramount Consideration Should Be Given to the Client When Interrupting Therapy

  (Standard 10.09)

  As a teenager, I devoured stories about men driven by a ruling passion, a quest that dictated the hero’s every move. A Patton, a Jack London, a Joe Montana. Men of action, of motivation. Men who would’ve shared my notch high on the Lundquist curve. Tucked in bed at night, staring past the curtains into a night sky blanched of stars by the neighborhood streetlights, I prayed that my secret mission might be revealed to me. I tried to summon laserlike direction. But instead, morning would arrive with Top 40 on the clock radio, and the days would roll out, aimlessly pinballing from one thing to the next, chemistry quizzes and driver’s ed movies and people who didn’t really activate the imagination. Was this life, then?

  One day in seventh grade my mother dragged me to buy a pair of dress shoes for my granddad’s funeral. He had been an optometrist. “So he fitted people for glasses,” I said as we sat waiting for the salesman to bring me a brown brogan. “That was his purpose in life.”

  “Well, yes.” She adjusted the blankets over baby Clyde, sleeping in his carrier on the seat beside her. “And he married your grandmother and raised Aunt Laurie and Aunt Betsy and me.”

  I sighed and rested my chin in my hand and watched the traffic out the wide front window, tan, blue, red, brown, blue, silver, blue. Colors repeating, a mysterious code transmitting only to me, here in this shoe store on Rockville Pike. I didn’t get the point.

  “Are you upset about something, Frank? Is there a girl?”

  I turned back to her. “Just admit it. Nothing means anything. That’s the big secret everyone’s trying to hide so their kids will keep doing their homework.”

  She shook her head at me with a smile. “You are a darling,” she said. “Do you know how much your mother loves you?”

  “Come on. I’m serious.”

  “Look, why not suspend judgment on this one,” she said. “By the time it’s all over, you’ll have it figured out. Or you’ll forget you ever asked.”

  I rolled my eyes. The salesman knelt at my feet with his shoehorn. As he winched my feet into stiff, shiny lace-ups, my mother reached over and brushed my hair back from my forehead. “You are a person of immense character,” she said. “It may not seem like it now, but you’re going to surprise a lot of people. Just like Granddad Dan.”

  I have never understood what she meant by that. Who did Granddad Dan ever surprise? He lived his entire life in Baltimore, sold eyewear. As far as I could tell, the only things he ever pursued with passion were gin rummy and crabbing the inlets with a chicken neck tied to a string. But I suppose she knew things about him that I never will.

  And as for me being a person of immense character? Perhaps, depending on the variety of character one has in mind.

  THE DAY AFTER I PROPOSED ESCAPE TO M, WINNIE CALLED MY OFFICE from an airplane over the Gulf of Mexico. She said we needed to talk, asked me to meet at a bar on Columbus that she’d always liked. I considered the pours stingy and overpriced. But fine, I said. At least we were on speaking terms again. I’d felt sorry about the way we’d parted.

  Winding down the Saw Mill River Parkway on my evening commute, I soaked myself in sounds from the seventies. Little Willie, Willie won’t go home, but you can’t push Willie ’round, Willie won’t go. Anything to occupy my brain. Anything to distract me from my realization that a drainhole had opened in the bottom of my existence and that my heart was being tugged by suctioning, centrifugal, inexorable forces down into it and away. I had plunged into something with M. I had cast my line into dark water, and there was no spooling it back in. And I didn’t know where it would end, where the string would run out, on what claw-scuttled, bone-littered floor this venture would come to rest.

  This escape. And M. Maybe she, at last, was the ruling passion I’d been longing for, that directedness.

  But then, more likely: M was just one more avatar of randomness. Another lurching twist of fate. A minor player from my distant past, thrown again into my life by the dumb wheel of fortune, come back to spin me dizzy then push me forward into an unknown, unwise, and probably unpleasant future.

  I couldn’t decide.

  I didn’t dare ask myself: Did I love M. Was I in love with her. Did I even really understand the concept of love, for all my counseling, my training and certifications, my attempts to heal my clients’ exhaustively broken hearts.

  After all, I’d gotten a late start. I’d hardly even spoken to a girl until I was about fifteen—before that, the comics rack at the drugstore held much more appeal. Then came the unrequited crush on M. And that pretty much set the template for college—I dashed myself to bits on the berms of diffidence thrown up by various unattainable fellow students. By the time I was twenty-three and living in New York, wrestling with grad work at NYU, I had given up on beauties. Instead, I allied with a series of sensible women: professional, health-conscious, with wash-and-wear haircuts and reliable birth control.

  And so there was Vie, the grimly driven science reporter for the New York Times. She phoned after meeting me at a conference, asked me out for sushi, ordered for us in Japanese, quizzed me on my father’s work, gave me a pretty decent blow job, and moved me into her apartment the following week. At night, in bed, while I massaged her tense buttocks, she would spin office-politics strategies aloud, baroque and ruthless scenarios worthy of a coup plot at Wehrmacht headquarters. About once a week, a superior at the paper would sneer at her in a way that would make her sob all night long. She wore huge, pearly-framed spectacles perched high on her thin nose, which gave her eyes intense, insectoid magnetism, had a ringing, sweet laugh that I heard a
ll too rarely. She was always trying to get me to cut down on saturated fats. But what can I say—I wasn’t about to give up potato chips. When we had been together nearly two years and I still was reluctant to talk marriage, Vie kicked me out.

  Then came Shelby, squat and jolly, an analyst for Goldman Sachs. We met at a wine tasting in December of 1991. With an expansive circle of friends, a love of adventure, and a truly generous spirit, Shelby kept me busy. We bicycled in France, walked shelter dogs, took culinary tours of Flushing. I cheered her on through hard-fought round-robin tournaments at her racquet club in Midtown. She never made an issue of the difference in our tax brackets; she never insisted on paying for me, she let me keep my pride. Shelby had bought a cottage in Quogue with her fat bonus money, sea breezes and shingles and squeaky floorboards, where we summered together for three fairly happy seasons. Fairly happy, I say. Days at the shore with Shelby meant having her trounce me at beach volleyball and badminton, her little legs churning up the sand, her eyes narrowed with competitive zeal. I wouldn’t call it fun.

  I loved Shelby as a friend, but I had never felt more, and finally I had to tell her. It hurt but didn’t devastate her, I think. We parted ways for a while, and then became pals again. The last time I saw her, the market was soaring and she had become the single mother of twins.

  I strolled over to Columbus on the early side, posted myself at the bar, and waited for Winnie. Winnie was my last sensible woman. Capable, genuine, no stars left in her eyes after nearly a decade of New York dating—and undeniably attractive, in her way, willowy, with a pile of corkscrew curls. She happened to be a few years older than me, but we were both a bit overripe, I guess; either we would fall off the tree and rot unattended, or be picked. We picked each other—if, for no other reason, I guess, than to prevent our own wastage.

  Winnie strode through the door wheeling a roller bag behind her, wearing a bread-colored pantsuit. We had a quick embrace. An awkward moment. She seemed distracted and tired.

  “You look wonderful,” I said.