by Angela Palm
“I never knew you called,” he said. “Didn’t have a phone where I was staying and I wasn’t talking to Mom. I wasted every good thing I had.” His regret was like a sleeping bear. Poking it was dangerous. He had been through this all before—what went wrong. How it all happened. Slowly and then suddenly.
“I first slept outside after you kicked me out of your house,” he confessed.
“Me? When did I do that?”
“You got mad at me about something and kicked me in the shins and told me the only reason I was even there was because your parents felt sorry for me.”
I didn’t remember it, but I didn’t doubt it was true. I hated that I’d made him feel like that when all I’d ever wanted was for him to stay. To have played any part in his unraveling was unbearable.
When we talked about the past, about the horrifying act that we were still handling with conversational care, I wondered whether his criminal activity would have pulled me into its current, as he said it would have, whether it would have buried me like Kit’s crimes buried Holly.
“We would have met in the middle,” I told Corey. “Half-bad, half-good. Half-reckless, half-restrained. Maybe we would have saved each other.”
He started to cry at that, but I watched him silently talk himself down from it. “You know, I used to watch you, too,” he told me. “From my window.”
“No way,” I said. “Really?”
“I did. Your room was always a mess. I used to watch you brushing your hair or reading your books.”
“That’s all?” I asked, remembering how I’d dressed in front of the window each night after my shower.
He laughed and blushed. “No, that’s not all. My mom caught me once.”
“So we were doing the same thing. And it wasn’t just me.”
“It was always mutual,” he said.
“You never said anything.”
“I was an idiot. And I was afraid of your dad.”
“Everyone was.”
“For good reason,” he said, laughing. “But I should have tried. I should have shown him I could have been good enough for you. Only I wasn’t. I never figured it out until it was too late. He was right to keep me away from you, and I respect him for that. To be honest, I always looked at him as a father figure.”
“What exactly did he say?”
“I was over at your house one day. Your parents were having a party. I was watching you jump on the trampoline. I was seventeen, how could I not, right?”
“I’ll give you that.”
“Your dad pulls me aside and says, ‘You’re not going to break her heart, son,’ and I said I wouldn’t. And then he said it again. Only that time in a way that meant he’d probably kill me if I did anything at all with you.”
“You broke my heart anyway.”
“I know,” he said. “And I couldn’t be more sorry. I can’t say I didn’t know what I was missing. I was painfully aware, but I didn’t think I deserved it. I was always in my own way, and not only with you. It’s a shame it took me coming to prison to figure that out.”
I couldn’t disagree with that. But he refused to consider that pursuing what we both wanted would have kept him out of trouble’s way, out of his own bad decisions. It was pointless to reconstruct the past. He wouldn’t admit it not because it wasn’t true, because we knew it was, but instead because it was too painful for him to think about, now that his future held only more of the same: passing time as best he could in a tiny room with a locked door, no matter how sincere his regret, how sincere his remorse. Remorse is a television courtroom jury buzzword, a parole panel fairy tale, and Corey’s sentence didn’t have parole. But it was real. Seeing it in someone’s face is the only way to know what it really means. We were both on the verge of sobbing, so we changed the subject before we were consumed by regret, before we were gripped by the white light of a tacked-on reel that held our own alternate ending—one past, one future. Not two.
Corey was fascinated by all the things that I shared with him, and his face lit up when he learned something new about me, or about the world on the outside. “Out there,” he called it, as if it were a mythical land that may or may not be real. He made a joke, telling me that the only knowledge he could offer me in return was how to make hooch in prison. He joked a lot. He could tell me how to traffic drugs and six ways to hustle one dollar into ten. “I’ve gotten by with the only skill I have—,” he said, “the ability to make something from nothing.”
He told me he was waiting for the next Game of Thrones book to come out, like Mike; that he would bet on the upcoming Brickyard 400 to make it more interesting; that he missed the new Deadliest Catch the night before because he was writing me a letter. He was utterly normal, yet otherworldly. His world was completely unknown to me, yet he was more than familiar. My lost family.
“How long have we known each other?” I asked.
We counted back the time. We determined it had been thirty years. I had known him longer than anyone save for my family.
When the conversation slowed, he probed me about my life, about Vermont, and what the world looked like. He loved landscapes, so I told him about some that I’d seen. The Rocky Mountains, Joshua Tree National Park, the Gulf of Mexico. He loved to hear about simple things: the color green, for example, what airplanes were like, and whether the Blue Ridge Mountains really did look blue in the distance. “Yes,” I told him. “Blue for miles.”
At thirty-six, Corey had now spent more time in jails and prison than out of them. Nearly his entire life would be spent in prison. I couldn’t fathom it, and, terrible as his crime had been, I didn’t think anyone deserved that. People were serving less time for premeditated murders. And his wasn’t that. But aside from all this, he was more focused than most people I knew. He wasn’t destroyed by fear of his future. He wasn’t distracted by a cell phone, like other people. He hadn’t another place to be. He was there, completely present, with me.
He told me about the time he held a smartphone—one smuggled into prison. Thousands of contraband phones were discovered each year in Indiana prisons—in prisons all over the United States. It was surprising to me, but commonplace to him. “It was awesome,” he said with a big grin.
I eyed the guards, and they eyed us. Corey ignored them and kept his sights set on me, though he was aware of them watching. “You’re so beautiful,” he said, over and over, making me blush. I wondered what the guards were thinking about our conversation. “You’re the woman I always thought you would be and then some,” he said. He lived his life being watched closely, he said. “But I never get used to it.”
I couldn’t get used to it either. I noticed everything—the ten cameras above us, the smattering of fake plants throughout the room, the metal and Plexiglas that comprised nearly every surface, the plastic children’s kitchen, and the limp, naked baby dolls in the play area.
Six hours of hand-holding could not make up for sixteen years of wonder and unanswered questions, yet we persisted in believing that they could. They must. We kept trying.
Rule 2. On a contact visit in prison, you may bring up to twenty dollars in quarters in a clear plastic bag. The inmate may not touch the quarters.
I didn’t realize until three hours into the visit that Corey was too polite to ask me for anything to drink or eat. I jumped up. “You must be thirsty, hungry?” One of the guards stood and took a step toward me. I sat back down quickly and then rose again, more slowly.
“A Sprite. And you pick the food. I don’t care.” He looked both relieved and embarrassed. “Thank you,” he added.
“You must care. What do you like? Is there anything out here that you can’t get in there?”
“I don’t care. You pick.”
We went back and forth like this, in a stalemate of manners. As it was still technically morning, I ended up choosing an egg, cheese, and sausage breakfast burrito for him and a pizza for me. I read the instructions on the burrito package, trying to determine whether to remove the
wrapper or cook it with it on. A woman in a long white denim skirt and oversized red T-shirt made small talk with me. “Food’s a little better up at Michigan City,” she said as she ripped the ends off a small packet of pepper and sprinkled it onto a sandwich of unidentifiable meat. I looked at the vending machine and cringed. The packaging it came in read “pork-shaped sandwich.”
“Keep the wrapper on and set the timer for one minute, love,” she said, and I was grateful for the insider tip. I pictured myself in five years, still coming to visit Corey there. Passing down tips on using the microwave to other women, telling them which vending machines will eat their change and which are likely to jam.
I brought the food back and set it on the table. I could tell that Corey was uncomfortable when I did anything for him. He tensed and trained his gaze on the table. “Would you mind bringing me a napkin, please?” he asked without looking up, his voice so timid and soft, you’d think he was asking to borrow five thousand dollars.
I wanted to shake him and make him stop the nonsense of not asking for what he needed—not even allowing himself to believe that he was worthy of small acts of care from someone who did in fact care very much for him. I cut him where it would most hurt on purpose. I had always been a bit mean like that and would still flip if I was provoked or wounded. “You should have asked for my help a long time ago. Come back to my house instead of sleeping in the fucking cornfield and doing drugs when things got bad.” I spat the words out at him, filled with another surge of frustration. “Maybe you wouldn’t be here.”
“I deserve that and more,” he said, offering himself up as my punching bag. “Get it all out of your system, honey, because I’m not going anywhere. Can’t and won’t.”
He also couldn’t stand up until it was time for him to return to his cell. That was another rule of the visiting room. But he turned in his chair to watch me walk to get the napkin and back.
When I got back, he was grinning. “I’m watching you because I want to savor this day. I hope you don’t mind. It’s been too long.”
I smiled at him, warmed by his sweetness. But again, I was troubled by the vision that punctuated my thoughts. Corey with a knife. Our neighbors, stabbed. Blood everywhere. Over and over I’ve pictured it, unable to sequence the chain of actions that could have led to that outcome.
In one scene in Badlands, Holly observes Kit watching a huge, helium-filled red balloon float away against a Montana sky, knowing nothing will ever be the same. Not for him, and not for her. “My destiny now lay with Kit, for better or for worse,” she says as the balloon disappears into the clouds. “Where would I be this very moment if Kit had never met me? Or killed anyone?” As she tries to imagine a different present for herself, tension fills her voice, its innocence stripped back to reveal a fragile future.
I looked up at Corey, the scene shaken away from my mind, and I opened my mouth to ask the question, the what the fuck question that needed to be asked, but as I did, he turned the burrito over and we saw that the tortilla was covered in a grayish film.
I pulled the plate away from him. “Let me get you something else.”
Before I could stand up he pulled the burrito back, picked it up with two fingers, and gingerly took a bite. “It’s fine,” he said with his mouth full.
We both knew it was rotten, but he ate it anyway. It took him ten minutes to finish it. I worried that he ate it only because I gave it to him.
Rule 3. On a contact visit in prison, you may not wear any jewelry.
As we talked, we inventoried the scars on our bodies, which marked the passing of time, the way we were already wearing out, even in our thirties. Corey described the ones I couldn’t see that he had acquired over the years and were hidden beneath his clothes. There was one between his ribs, from when he was shanked a few years back. Six more all over his torso, from the same stabbing. “Ice pick,” he said, nonchalantly. Scars populated his arm, hand, and both wrists, where he’d had surgery to repair several breaks acquired in a fall in the prison’s laundry room. Another break, knuckles that now looked flattened, from when he attacked an officer. He had had a problem with anger, he said, problems with authority, but he worked on it daily. “Every day, I can choose to deal with my life, or not deal with it.” Rain was a reminder. “Arthritis already,” he said. He showed me three dark specks on his fingers where he had tested potential tattooing ink. “Never get a tattoo you can’t cover with a shirt,” he advised, again showing his Gemini nature—being two things at once. When he was clothed, the enormous tattoos on his shoulders, back, and chest didn’t show.
“Please tell me they aren’t swastikas.”
“They aren’t. They have to do with Norse mythology.” Another interest of his, about which he had read extensively. I thought it curious how, even during the years that had separated us, we had both clung to stories to make sense of our lives. We had taken an interest in the same topics—science, space, history, literature. It was uncanny the way we knew the same things, but had acquired our education so very differently. Sharing these unexpected intellectual spaces with him was, to me, extraordinary. He was thoughtful and poetic in the way he approached his limited access to the world and it endeared him to me all the more. He clung to his knowledge, and I could see that it was saving him the way it had saved me.
In turn, I showed him the age spots that were accumulating across my knuckles. I described the C-section I’d had four years earlier, the scars on my neck and back where I’d had lymph tissue biopsied. I described the cysts all over my ovaries. He flinched as he rubbed his thumb across the seemingly permanent indentation on my ring finger, where I normally wore a wedding band. He drew his mouth into a line, breathed in sharply, shook his head real slowly. The bear stirred in his sleep.
In between these inspections, we processed who we used to be (girl next door, boy next door) and who we had become (woman in the world with a husband and children, man in prison who has never used the Internet on a standard computer and refers to computers as “the machines”). We attempted to reconcile the truths against the untruths. Was it my father who kept him away from me, or was it also his mother? Was the separation carried out in concert? Was it I who said let’s slow down, or Corey? I called, he called, neither of us ever got the messages. He thought I had flat-out rejected him, while I wondered why he didn’t try again. We felt robbed. We cobbled together memories, rounding out our recollections into a fuller story of us: it was I who stripped in my bedroom window for him, he who turned his light off to watch. It was I who called him over one night and said now or never, he who hesitated out of respect for my age and a promise he’d made to my father. “I thought we had plenty of time,” Corey said, “that we could have all that later.”
I squeezed his hands in anger.
“Crush them,” he told me. “Dig your nails in, let it out.”
I squeezed harder and then released his hands. It felt a little better. “I’m still mad at you for leaving me there.” Riverside, drowning. Broken anyway.
“I know you are,” he said. “Do you think I haven’t wished a thousand times I’d stayed? Done what I wanted to do with you and waited for you to graduate, then figured out a life together? Yes, I know you would have made the difference in me. You’re back in my life two months now and you already have. I’m a better man with you in my life. Everyone here can see it. I walk differently, I talk differently. I don’t tell them why, but that’s because of you. But let me tell you from experience. You go down the what-if road, you’ll drive yourself crazy.” He caressed my fingers to impress his point. “We both have to live in the present.”
“You and my dad had no right to negotiate around me like that. Nobody asked me what I wanted.” How could I still be angry about something that had happened so long ago? When would I ever be free from what men decided for me?
“You’re right, and I’m sorry about that. But what would have happened if I had? You would have started sneaking out to see me, come with me to places that woul
d have gotten you into as much trouble as they did me. Then what? No,” he said, “it’s better this way.”
Corey’s voice was soft and tender the whole time we talked. I still couldn’t imagine him hurting anyone. He was not like Kit. And I was not like Holly. This was another kind of tragedy, a loss that has never stopped taking from us, or from others. A debt that would never be paid off, though he would keep paying. It occurred to me then that Corey had come to terms as much as he could with his crime, with life in prison, with the fact that he still didn’t know how he could have done what he did or how he could have gotten so lost that he lost his own head, with never having children or a woman to love and give himself to in bed. It was me who hadn’t gotten over it.
“Is it?” I asked. “Is this better?” I waited a minute, then went for it. Time was running out. “Tell me what happened that night. I need to know.”
He lowered his head, as if he couldn’t bear going back to it. “You don’t have to,” I said.
But he started in. He told me most of what went on leading up to it—that he had been coming off drugs, was still rocketed by the withdrawal, needed money. He intended to rob them. He’d only brought the knife to open the door and didn’t think they were home. In and out. Easy. But that wasn’t what happened. He was confronted, and he panicked. He started with a few words that would have described the altercation, but I stopped him. He couldn’t bear saying it, reliving it, and I couldn’t bear hearing it. “I didn’t want to go back to jail,” he said, exasperated. His explaining cut off then. There weren’t any words that could describe further what had happened or his split-second, fear-based, drug-fallout reasoning. It still didn’t make sense to him; he had thought through it many times, unable to understand his own actions. He could say nothing to me that would justify why he didn’t just turn and run.
“Are you telling me there is no good reason that this happened to those people?” I asked. “Are you telling me you had the opportunity to run and didn’t? And that I’ve carried this loss with me, all this time, for it to come to this?”
