She had ironically taken this assignment on long before my sister and I had ever become entangled with the justice system. It was kind of a blessing for her. It had helped her deal with much of what had already occurred to us. But her experiences had the opposite effect in regard to our sentencing. Only cold-blooded murderers got this kind of time; rapists didn’t get half of what we had tried to convince her that we were going to be given. She always believed this was just prosecutors trying to be scary.
It was hard for them to understand, when viewed through parent goggles, that their two daughters—who were so smart, so beautiful, so innocent, with such promise—could be facing this court as the outlaws we were admitting to being. I heard a throaty noise from behind me. It had come from my dad. I knew he was upset; this was the throat-clearing noise he made when emotional. I had only heard it a couple of times in my life, but it was unmistakable.
I was first up. I was dressed well, in a tailored tan pantsuit and a black turtleneck, with my long hair pulled back in a bun. Up until this moment, I did not look or feel like a criminal. But when I stepped up to the bar with my lawyer, that is what I became. I wanted to turn around and tell Dad that I was all right, I wasn’t afraid. But the judge had come into the courtroom and I was frozen—breathing and alive, but I couldn’t turn around. I realized I was shaking. Well, trembling; shaking seems more deliberate. I wanted to have my sister right by my side, where I could see her, maybe hold her hand, or comfort her. But she was behind me with her lawyer, watching what was about to happen to her happen to me.
The judge started speaking to me about letters he had received on my behalf alleging what a great person I was. His words turned into white noise. I thought I could hear Mom and Dad’s heartbeats more audibly than what the judge was saying, but I think it was my own heart doing double time. I knew my sister was afraid for me and it bugged me that she had to be there right then. I was more afraid for my sister than I was for myself. I felt sorrier for my parents than I did anyone. My poor brother must have been completely freaked out. I said a prayer in my mind that he wouldn’t have a seizure. My brother is epileptic and stress is a trigger. I realized we had to be setting a record for twisted emotions and family drama. I thought it couldn’t get worse.
The judge looked over my shoulder and to the people behind me, acknowledging someone who wanted his attention. I heard his words perfectly then and was stunned. “Yes, sir. Would you like to address the court?”
“Your Honor. Yes, I would like to say some things on behalf of my daughters . . .” Dad paused. Dad was comfortable on stage, but not this one. He still looked like a star though, and while I was embarrassed, he was actually responding to the judge’s request to the peanut gallery for input. I was proud he stepped up and identified himself as our father. “I am sorry. My wife and I were parents of the seventies—good parenting was to be permissive, let them make their mistakes and learn.” He paused again and looked flustered. “I don’t understand this.”
The judge was patient. Eugene Wolters was not before him for sentencing; he was not a criminal. He was a father. The judge was a father too. I knew the judge would know, without a doubt, this was a good father, this was a good family, and now he had to see me and Hester, not just the data in our presentence reports. Dad turned to my mom and held her hand more tightly. “This sentence extends to all of us here today.” Dad made a sweeping gesture toward our cheerleading section from Cincinnati. “Your Honor, as I said, my daughters have never been in trouble with the law.” He stood silent for a long moment before he could continue. “I hope that this court shows us mercy.”
Hearing this from my father took my breath away. In all of this, I had never been able to quantify or genuinely acknowledge the pain and suffering this predicament had caused him and Mom. But there it was, their pain flooding my ears and my heart like molten lava. I felt like my heart had stopped pumping blood out but kept pumping it in, and it would explode.
The judge spoke about how horrible my crimes were and how, in spite of his compassion for the family, the crimes demanded harsh sentencing. Besides, it wasn’t in his hands anyway . . . “mandatory minimums” . . . blah, blah, blah. I heard the judgment: “Ninety-four months to be followed by five years supervised release.” He asked me something, but I have no idea what. Alan, my lawyer, responded for me, and it was done. Alan and I were excused from the court and walked out. I felt like I had left my sister to be torn apart by wild dogs. My father gave me a sad smile as I walked by.
The weirdest thing imaginable happened when we left the courtroom. I felt great, fucking fantastic. I felt like a ten-thousand-pound weight had just been lifted off me. It wasn’t until that moment that I understood how heavy it had been, the not knowing, the waiting, the hoping, for over six fucking long years I had been dead. But I felt alive again, like someone had just zapped me with those electric paddles and my happy heart was beating again. I could now see an end to this. It might be years away, but it existed. My whole family would celebrate when that happened. I could see it: Mom and Dad, probably at the Bankers Club, popping corks and cheering.
My sister came out of the courtroom a few minutes later and my elation vanished. She looked pale as a ghost and pissed off. Her lawyer had prepared her for forty-eight months; she got seventy-two. My brother came out next and looked lost. Then Hester’s husband of six months—a Tom Cruise look-alike named Matt—Mom, and Dad came out with my sister’s lawyer and formed a huddle, probably about the surprise addition of two years to Hester’s sentence. Hester walked toward me and Alan while digging in her bag. She pulled out her pack of cigarettes.
“Tell them we’re outside smoking. We’ll be there waiting for them.” She’d said this to my lawyer, Alan, assuming he knew whom he was to deliver the message to and that he would hang around waiting to do so. She grabbed my hand and yanked me in the direction she had told Alan we were heading, gripping my hand and towing me toward the elevator. I passively followed her to the elevator and I saw a smile form on her lips while we were waiting. I think in spite of the nasty turn of events, she was having her strange minute of joy too. We were given three months to turn ourselves in, so I hoped she wasn’t planning on making a run for it, not right then anyway. We were stopping for a cigarette outside though, so I knew I would have the length of a cigarette or two to talk her out of jumping if that is what the happy smile on her face meant.
“Are you all right?” I asked her while she pulled a cigarette from her pack and lit it.
“I’m fine. I’m relieved.” She leaned against the exterior glass wall of the Dirksen Federal Building in Chicago and took a long draw off her cigarette. I lit my own, and we said nothing for a few moments. “What about Matt?” I could see her chin trembling. “Six years.”
“Hester, think about how long we have waited for this, how long he has waited to know the ending. He has a date now. There is an end to this.” I started to paint the same picture I had been creating in my head when she came out of the courtroom. The celebration, the end of our long journey. It was in sight and we would all make it there.
We wouldn’t know for sure where to turn ourselves in, not until we were given a destination by the Bureau of Prisons. Hester got her letter first. She was going to a place in Lexington, Kentucky. It was the facility closest to our family and her husband. She had been so relieved. He could visit her there. So could Mom, Dad, and Gene. She had made Cincinnati her home again, so all of her friends were there, and they would all support her and Matt while she served her time. I was happy for her but not so much for myself.
I had assumed I would get designated to the same facility. I wanted that, I could see my family, but I was also sorry I wouldn’t get to see any of the friends I had made in San Francisco. I started cutting my emotional ties with all but a few of them.
My letter didn’t arrive until December. I wasn’t designated to Lexington, Kentucky, as I had expected. I was designated to Dublin, California. I was secretly relieved that I did n
ot have to go to the same place my sister was going. I’d had time to consider it and I was very worried about being in the same place as she would be. I knew she would be better off that way; so would I. In my brief encounter with the world we were heading into, seven years earlier, I had seen how dangerous it was to love anyone in there with you. People used that vulnerability like a weapon. I had met so many nice people who didn’t belong in the circumstances they were in, but I couldn’t easily pick out the monsters among them. But they were there, just waiting to pounce on naïve little fools like me and my sister.
“You sure you should do that?” Julie stopped me from grabbing the pill bottle on the bureau. The poor thing hadn’t signed up to babysit a morose drug addict on her way to jail or to adopt Miss Kitty. But that described our brief, tumultuous relationship in a nutshell. She wasn’t in love with me anymore, I was long gone, but she loved the little black kitty I had chased up De Haro Street. She was just babysitting me, and they both deserved much better. Before that could happen, I had to vanish.
“I’m fine. I just finished the site. There’s nothing else I can do.” This was an odd reply to her quandary about my taking too many Vicodin.
“Have you called your mom and dad?”
“That’s the last item on my list. It’s three hours earlier there.”
“It’s three hours later.” I thought for a moment and panicked. She was right. It would be midnight soon. So I sat down, took the pill she thought I shouldn’t, and called them.
“Hello, Cleary.” I laughed at Dad. He knew I was the only person who would call him at midnight on a work night. “Your mother and I have been waiting for your call. We thought you meant nine o’clock Eastern Standard Time.” I could hear him muffle the phone and wake her. They were probably in bed. Mom had probably dozed off and Dad was probably sitting up doing the New York Times puzzles. I had told them I would call at nine; that would have been at six o’clock my time.
“Have you talked to Hester?” Miss Kitty jumped from the desk and walked over to me, jumped into my lap, and started kneading my leg with her sharp claws.
“We have. She’s ready for her big day. They came over last night for a last supper and she had a good cry. But she will be all right. We will make sure of that.”
“Are you taking her?”
“No. Matthew is delivering her. We will be going down Saturday to see how she is doing. Are you ready for your big day?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be.”
“I’m so proud of you.” I laughed when he said this.
“Yes, I bet you are.” He laughed back. Laughing is the best medicine in the world, second only to talking to parents who love you and could actually say they were proud of you for going to prison.
“Seriously. We are so proud of you girls for doing what you have done.” I knew he didn’t mean the drug-smuggling part and I felt like maybe I better not make any more jokes. My dad was not the most emotional kind of fellow, not outwardly. When he said things like this it wasn’t easy for him to keep his cool lid battened down. “You are so brave to go through this all alone.”
“Dad, I’m never alone.” I lit a cigarette, took a drag, and tried to think of a witty punch line for that one but came up blank. “You and Mom are always only ten numbers away.” I thought of something funny. “And now I can interrupt West Wing and The Sopranos without fail. I promise to call you every night at ten o’clock.”
“We’ll leave a daily update for you then, on our answering machine. But do give us a call sometime when you want to talk.” He was kidding. If I called in the middle of him having a heart attack, he would pick up the phone, and he knew that I knew it.
“Drats! Okay. I won’t call during prime time.”
“I don’t know what we can do to help. But if you have problems, anything, please don’t keep it to yourself. We will do everything we can.” He was quiet for a minute. But quiet on the phone with Dad wasn’t an awkward silence or dead air where someone might think the call had dropped. Oddly, it was the part of every phone call where I felt he was closest to me. “Are you scared?” I don’t think he really wanted to ask the question.
“Yes, but it’s the same scared as when I went to school in Fulton,” I lied. “I know what to expect, ’cause I had to do that whole extradition thing, remember. I met some of the women I will be living with now, or women like them, and they told me all about the place I am going now,” I lied some more. “You would have thought they were on their way to camp.” That was true. “I hear there is even a pool there.” I knew this wasn’t true. “They call it Club Fed.” That was true about a decade earlier. “Best of all, I can go back to school and not have any distractions.” The last item I could neither confirm nor debunk in the little bit of digging I had done online about my new home. But the idea had been appealing and in California the governor offered educational grants. If you were in the pokey and wanted to go to school, it was free.
“My goodness, you’re making me want to rob a bank.” His voice sounded crisp and clear, not perilously close to a meltdown. There was one thing in this world I knew I could not take: hearing my father cry. “I don’t want you to be disappointed.” I relaxed, content with the fact that we had gone from him being worried and scared about me going off to jail all by myself to him being concerned I might be overoptimistic about my upcoming vacation. I didn’t want him to think I was crazy.
“Dad, I know it’s going to be hard at first. But I’ll be fine. We humans are such adaptable creatures. We can get used to just about anything.”
“Truer words have never been spoken. Your mother is going to explode if I don’t give her the phone.” I laughed and agreed to call the first chance I got, once I had moved into my new place in Dublin.
“Honey. Are you all right?” Mom sounded frantic. “Tell me everything you just told your father.” I knew if I didn’t, she would drive my dad insane, if he dared to try to paraphrase. So I tried to recall every single thing I had said and did a pretty good job of it. I could hear my dad snoring in the background when I finished. “Don’t worry about tuition, just find a school that will let you take correspondence classes. Look for reputable universities too, not some fly-by-night operation, or your degree won’t be worth the paper it’s printed on.” She took a quick, deep breath. “I will help you research this, but I think this is a wonderful way to turn your scar into a star.”
Mom went through a list of dos and don’ts that she knew of in regard to the pokey. She had been teaching in the Hamilton County jail for years by now and had gotten a very good sense of some of the unwritten rules her students lived by, with me and Hester in mind. Never borrow anything from anyone, especially money; never owe anyone anything, especially money; don’t get involved with anyone, especially staff; don’t trust anyone, including staff; stay away from drugs and troublemakers; exercise regularly; do not eat too many carbohydrates; don’t nap; eat all your vegetables whenever you get them; make sure the staff know you come from a good family, but don’t let other inmates know this; and stay out of everyone’s business. As it turned out, that was astonishingly good advice.
I made the same promise to call home as soon as I could. She told me not to panic if it took a little while before I could make any phone calls. She told me that if that happened, to know that my mother and father were praying for me every night. “As a matter of fact, let’s pray together every night. We go to bed at eleven o’clock. Let’s all say a Hail Mary together then.”
“Okay. I like that idea. You guys can tuck me in every night.” I laughed at the idea of my mother coming to prison to tuck in her forty-year-old daughter, the drug smuggler. She asked me how I was getting there, who was taking me, was there gas in the car, and what I was bringing with me, and finally, we were done. When the call was over, I really did feel ready.
I called all my friends one last time, telling them Julie would give them my address and information about visiting me as soon as we had it. I called my best friend, Natal
ie, and made arrangements for her to pick us up the following morning. Julie didn’t have her driver’s license and originally Natalie was going to drive us in my car and park it at her house in Oakland until my friend Steve could come get it. He was going to sell it for me and put the money on my account at Dublin. The account is what I would use to buy things like hygiene products, snacks, notepaper, and pens.
Miss Kitty and I finally went for our last late-night walk, but I took a little more time than usual. It was warm for January and it had rained a little. Everything looked new and shiny, and the streets were quiet. I sat down on the stairs in front of the main entrance to Grace Cathedral and prayed I would one day return there with Miss Kitty. Worst-case scenario, I would be back in November of 2010. Best-case scenario, my sentence would be overturned and I would come home sooner. I had no idea how that might happen, but I prayed for it anyway.
I looked out over the twinkling city and tried to imagine the day I would come back to San Francisco. It would be such a celebration. I looked forward to returning to the halfway house on Turk and Taylor Streets, but this time on my way out, not at the beginning of this long journey. I could see myself coming back, getting back to work in software. I might be close to forty-seven by then, but I would still have some good years left in me. My whole life wasn’t wasted. Maybe I could even write a book about the whole ordeal and save someone foolish from making my mistakes.
By 9:30 in the morning Julie was up and showered, and though we did not need to and had not planned on leaving the house for another hour, I decided I wanted to get it over with and go, so I called Natalie to pull the hearse up. I threw my jacket on, grabbed my bag, and went to the window seat where Miss Kitty was napping in the morning sun.
Out of Orange: A Memoir Page 25
