Out of Orange (24 page)

“Yes.” I gave him an abbreviated list of names: Hester, Phillip, Piper, Garrett, Bradley, Henry. Just the ones I knew Alajeh knew for certain, Garrett cause I wasn’t sure, and Piper because I didn’t want to be responsible for her murder. I said she had been my lover, that’s all, but like my sister, Alajeh might try to use her. Opie wrote the names down as I rattled them off. He told me not to worry, he was going to put things in motion, and we would all be okay.

About a half hour later, he came back, opened the cell door, and let me out. I followed him and the marshal out to the larger room. We sat at a big table with a big old cassette tape recorder sitting in the middle of it. Their questioning began by reading names off a list, one at a time, and asking me how the person was involved in our enterprise or with me. They had everyone’s names, even people who I hadn’t named and who didn’t belong under their microscope, like some hooker I had met once in a hotel bar in Lagos. I had given her my address in the United States and told her she should come to America. I hadn’t slept with her. She’d worked the bar at the hotel where Phillip and I had stayed. I felt betrayed by this, that Opie had already known so much. But for me to honor the proffer agreement with the AUSA and for them to know who really needed to be considered for protection, I had to answer their questions.

When we were done talking it was late, maybe ten o’clock at night. Opie asked if they could search my house. They were going to send two agents there and I could have them bring me back an outfit to wear. By agreeing to this, they would not have to get a search warrant. I would also be able to pick out the clothes I wore to court.
Going to court?
I would be going to court in California. I was still going to be extradited. I assumed I was on their hook now until they got Alajeh. I was about to agree when the other guy added that otherwise,
I would be stuck with whatever the agents brought back for me to wear and I would have to spend the night in jail. That rubbed me the wrong way for so many reasons.

I was wearing what I had slept in, my sweatshirt and cutoff sweatpants. I hadn’t planned on visiting with people that day, only two quick hops out of my car. All I had meant to do after the bank was grab a sandwich, get cat food and cigarettes, and pump gas. For these activities, my grungy getup was haute couture for Brattleboro, circa summer 1996. I was fine with what I was wearing, and they had just made it clear I wasn’t going home to stay, so insinuating that letting them search my house meant I wouldn’t be in jail was disingenuous if not outright deceitful. That is what irked me. I was entrusting these guys with my life.

Opie was quick to pick up on the damage his idiot friend might have just done to the trust he had taken all day to build with me. He recovered quickly, though, by smacking the other agent on the back of the head in a big you-dumb-ass gesture, and said, “Marshals!” as if he already knew all marshals were morons.

I agreed to the search, but only if I could be there when they did it. I feared they would leave my cats outside. I didn’t want my Edith and Dum Dum to be eaten by a coyote, a fox, or a bear. They were not country girls and didn’t have the sense to run. Edith would pick a fight and Dum Dum might want to play.

I had left the back door of my house open earlier, since I was only dashing into town. But that had been before lunch and it was dark out presently. In Newfane, nobody left their pets out overnight if they expected them to be alive in the morning. Even the feral barn cats stayed in the barn after dark. The girls weren’t going to come inside for a guest and they would definitely hide from strangers tearing their house apart. If I could go with them, I could get them in, feed them, and let my neighbors know I would be gone for a couple of weeks. “At least,” Opie added.

Opie and I drove out to my house, and the marshal and some new guy who showed up in the post office parking lot drove my car behind us. I hoped they wouldn’t run out of gas but also secretly
wished they did. They had said no to stopping at the gas station and market where I could get some cat food. I didn’t have any cat food. All I had was some sliced turkey in the fridge. I could cut that up and feed them. But the principal of their not stopping for one minute to get a can of cat food bugged me. Even Opie didn’t budge on this one thing and he clearly had a dog at home. Edith and Dum Dum weren’t part of this. They would eat the turkey, but they would know something was wrong, and then when I didn’t come home later . . .
My poor babies
.

I felt horrible when they made me wait outside my own house and come into the house only after Opie and the marshal had checked it out. It was such a silly thing to get upset about, but it was clear to me no one was in the house waiting to jump us. I guessed they wanted to make sure the cats were not armed or that I wasn’t hiding an arsenal in there or that I would not turn on them and run. Opie finally waved me and the new guy he had waiting with me inside. Dum Dum was on the couch just starting her yoga moves, so they hadn’t scared her, but she gave me a funny worried look and stopped her yoga short. I looked around for a minute and found Edith crashed on my bed. She didn’t budge, which was uncharacteristic behavior. She should have already been under the bed.

I flipped on all the lights. My house had art gallery lighting, so I could make the interior as bright as a sunny day if I wanted. Opie commented on how surprised he was at how nice my house was. It looks so much smaller from the street. Dum Dum jumped onto the island in my kitchen and sat by the water faucet. I turned it on so that a small trickle of water came out and she started lapping it up. I stared at her drinking the water while Opie asked me where to look for certain things like phone bills and pictures and correspondence. I knew they were going to be disappointed by their so-called search. I had nothing in my house. I had gotten rid of every shred of my past and hadn’t broken the law, not even the speed limit, for more than two years since I’d walked away from that life.

When he wanted to see my pictures and I told him I had none, he didn’t believe it was possible. I told him about a day shortly after
Phillip’s friend was arrested in Chicago when I had lost my mind, burned my phone bills, ditched my laptop, and packed all my postcards and photographs, even those that had nothing to do with the period spanning 1993 and 1994, into my favorite bit of luggage. I took the bag to the Dumpster but decided that was too obvious; someone might look inside a piece of nice luggage in a Dumpster or at the dump—Dumpster divers would spot my luggage for sure. Instead, I drove way up into the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont to get rid of it.

Northeast Kingdom is a largely uninhabited and mountainous area of Vermont that stretches for miles and miles. I didn’t intend to take my suitcase of photos that far away; I just kept deciding I wasn’t far enough away. I finally stopped when a snowstorm mandated I come to my senses and turn around. I had pulled off to the side of a deep ravine that dropped sharply at the edge of the small road I had been on, and I’d done a twirling curl, hurling the bag as far out, over, and down the ravine and into the woods as I could make it fly. I didn’t think they would be interested in searching for the stupid bunch of pictures I had ditched. There wasn’t anything useful there to find Alajeh with anyway. I think I had been trying to throw my whole past away.

They tore my place up, emptying drawers onto the floor, pulling my dishes out; even the food in my fridge was subject to their search. One guy asked if I would log on to the computer for him. He didn’t need my help; it would just make it easier. I sat down at my desk, took one last look at the world from that seat, and logged in. The reality that I was leaving and might not be back set in when I stood up and gave him my seat. He started making copies of the files on my computer and looking through my email account at Sovernet.

He didn’t mess with any of the Twelve-Twelve files and acknowledged knowing what we did and what we had already developed. “I don’t understand why someone as smart as you got involved with drug smuggling. Was the money that good?”

He hadn’t been present for my flip-out at the post office. I think
he was a private consultant Opie had called in for this. He knew his way around my computer and some of the less user-friendly applications too. “It wasn’t the money.” I had to laugh at the irony. I would have probably been a millionaire a year later, as CTO of Twelve-Twelve. I went to my room to grab a comfortable outfit to wear on a plane and to court, and to pet Edith on the bed. She was not interested in being woken up. She almost acted like she was sick. But I knew that wasn’t it. I think she knew I was going away for another trip. I hoped it would be quick.

I was stunned when they were finished searching my house so quickly and ready to go. I was also worried. It was past midnight and I had hoped Larry and Melony would get home in time for me to let them know I would be gone for a while and to ask them to feed the cats. My heart ached when Edith wouldn’t get up to eat the turkey I had cut up for her. I grabbed her food bowl and put it on the bed with her. I picked Dum Dum up and gave her a quick hug and kiss on her cute little head, told her not to worry, I wouldn’t be gone as long as I used to be gone, then put her down. I wrote a check out to Larry for two hundred dollars to get cat food and jotted a quick note explaining I had an emergency and had to leave but would call with details the next day about when I would be back. Then I followed the guys out the door, leaving the lights on for the cats and making sure Dum Dum didn’t slip past anyone. She was a quick one.

Opie took the check and the note over to Larry and Melony’s front door and slid it under. I sat in his SUV and stared at my own doorway. Dum Dum always jumped up to cling to the bottom edge of the window in my front door whenever I left the house. She could pull herself up and peek over the edge. She would be there when I came home too, peeking out the door, hanging on to the lip of the glass frame. It was cute as hell: a cat’s version of the dance dogs do when their owners come home. I loved seeing her little head pop up every time I started the car to leave or pulled into the driveway. Not this time. I watched her pop up in the window. She held on until I couldn’t see her little head silhouetted in the doorframe anymore.
Goodbye, baby. I’ll hurry
.

T
HIS CALL IS FROM THE
Chittenden County Jail from . . .” There was a slight pause in the computer-generated message, and then the recording I’d made earlier of me saying my name was played, like it had always been part of the sentence and I wasn’t a transient interloper in the prison’s phone system. “Cleary.” I heard my own recorded voice saying my name and it sounded weird, not like myself. “This call will be monitored and recorded. To accept this call, press one. To refuse this call, press two. If you . . .” I could hear my father fumbling with the phone. God, please don’t let him hit the wrong number.

Of course, he did not hit the wrong number. Dad was someone you wanted to have at your side during a serious crisis. Movies like
The Russia House
and
The Hunt for Red October
made me homesick. My father acted and looked so much like Sean Connery. My mom was the complete opposite; she was the screaming girl who always broke a heel at the wrong moment or had to be slapped out of hysterics if, for example, she was late for an appointment.

“Hello . . . Cleary . . . What’s going on?” I had needed to psych
myself up in order to make this phone call. I had never been in trouble with the law before, much less called home from a jail. I didn’t think my parents had ever received a call like this from anyone before in their lives. What I hadn’t prepared for was the phone system just coming right out and telling my father that I was in jail. He sounded calm, not angry, when he answered. But my father never sounded angry; if he was actually mad, he still sounded calm. But this wasn’t that kind of calm. It was the concerned kind. I was ready for his angry calm, the look-what-you-have-done or you-made-your-own-bed-young-lady calm, but not this weary concern.

“Dad.” My fucking voice was cracking already. I couldn’t even say that much.

“Honey. Tell me what’s wrong. Why are you in jail? Start from the beginning.” His voice was so soothing. Maybe every father’s voice is like medicine to every daughter in the world facing a personal crisis of this magnitude. But my father was the only person on Earth who could say two words and make any problem, even one as big as I had just dropped in his lap, feel survivable.

I heard my mother screech “What?” in the background. My father must have covered the phone with his hand. There was a brief muffled conversation, and then I could clearly make out him saying “Be still.” There it was. That was his angry calm voice, stern and commanding. But it was directed at Mom, who was probably acting like our nervous Chihuahua, Lizzy, did right before she peed on the floor. Mom was not the calm type, not even for small things, and her daughter calling from jail was hardly a small event.

“Cleary, your mother is here with me. Tell us what is going on before she has a nervous breakdown.” There was Dad’s dry wit. I couldn’t help it. I tried to control my emotions, but like bats in a cave set to escape, one got out, and I laughed out loud inappropriately. I loved my dad so much. Mom too, but only Dad could do this trick, make me laugh when it hurt to breathe.

“I’m okay, Dad. But I’m in really big trouble.” I had to stop for a second and take a deep breath. It turned into a sob, and the rest of
my sentence probably sounded like “Mwabla blubber blubber, and then Mwaaaa blubber blubber.”

“Honey, did you murder someone?” I could hear Mom’s audible gasp when he said this.

“No, Dad. I didn’t murder anyone. But blubber, and then Mwaaaa blubber blubber.”

He interrupted my unintelligible gibberish. “All right, honey. Whatever it is, it’s not the end of the world. We’ll get through this. Take a deep breath, Cleary. We’re here. We’re not going anywhere.” Then he was quiet with me. He was a thousand miles away, but we were
being still
, as if he were right there beside me, and then I was breathing again. I was also sniffing and hiccupping and about to throw up, but I could take a deep, soothing breath again. If I were at home, he would sit quietly with me like this, being still, and with something this bad, he would put his arm around me until I stopped sobbing, at least stopped long enough so that I could breathe right and speak coherently. I could hear Mom asking to talk to me, then he covered the phone again for a second. “Okay. Let’s start from the beginning. What happened?”

“I’m being extradited to California for smuggling drugs.” I got that out. Now all I had to do was ask if he had heard from my sister, his little baby girl, and I had to make sure I didn’t run out of time on the phone. There was a fifteen-minute limit on phone calls; after that I would be cut off, and it was a long wait for the phone if I didn’t finish my conversation in one shot. “I’m so sorry.”

“Dear God.” It sounded like I had just knocked the wind out of him when he said this. I had never heard this helplessly wounded calm before. I stood up straight, sucked my sadness, fear, and angst up in one big deep breath, and stuffed it down as far as I could push it, as far as I needed it to be to convince my father I was all right. We would be cut off in moments and I couldn’t let this connection die, not until I knew he could handle my being locked up, my being so far beyond his reach and his ability to fix this for me. It would make him crazy. I would rather he be mad at me, furious even, than have to think of him worrying about me.

He could help me, though, by helping my sister. I needed him to write me off as a lost cause, but in good hands, and focus on saving her. “Dad, I love you so much. But this call will get cut off soon. I have a lawyer. I’m going to be all right. I will give you his number and he can tell you everything that is going on. But right now I need you to do something.” I got this all out as fast as I could.

“Anything, honey. Tell me.” I could tell that he had just put me on speakerphone and it worried me. I didn’t know if being on a speakerphone was allowed. There were so many rules for phone calls in the Chittenden County Jail. Not all of them would be obvious, like someone picking up a second phone in the house could be considered a three-way call. I didn’t know. But the call would get cut off, and I would have my phone privileges suspended until I could see a counselor. So I hurried through the rest of the information. I had to make sure he got it before something stupid like that happened.

“Call Hester and tell her to come home. Don’t take no for an answer. She is in trouble too. She needs to know that the people who arrested me will help her, but she has to trust me and be honest with them, completely honest. Tell her not to be afraid.” I listened to the dead air between us, praying he didn’t drop dead from a heart attack while he absorbed the impact of everything I had just said to him. Mom was silent, so she had either passed out or Dad was sitting on her.

“We will get her on the next plane home.” His voice was calm again, a flat calm. “Your brother is here now.” I could hear the subtle change in his voice that told me he was going to be all right. My father was as smart as a whip, and he knew what was going on. I didn’t need to fill in too many blanks. After I had written my first novel, and before I burned it in my backyard, I had asked him to read it. Dad was an editor, after all. He had asked me how I had come up with such a great plot. I confessed that I had actually lived parts of the fiction. This, of course, was the reason I later burned the novel in my backyard.

“I’m going to give you my lawyer’s phone number. He will update you.” I hoped they had a pen nearby. The phone had just beeped
three times. That was the three-minute warning we were about to be cut off.

“I’m ready. Go ahead.” It was Mom. She sounded so business-like, not hysterical at all. I gave her my lawyer’s phone number. She read it back, then asked me, “Is there a number where we can reach you?”

“No, Mom. It’s for outgoing calls only.” I was referring to the phone I had called them from.

“Do you know your counselor’s name yet?” I was stunned by this question. How did she know about stuff like that? I had only just found this out myself, that a counselor was assigned to me and that I would be meeting with him the following morning. “You mean my lawyer?”

“No, honey, your counselor. You will get one even if you are only there long enough for that. When you find out, call us back and tell me.” I remembered my mom was teaching adult basic education in the Hamilton County jail in Cincinnati. I told her the man’s name and added that I didn’t know how long I would be there. “I love you.” She said this and I believed it, but it was almost disorienting having my mother be so matter-of-fact about the conversation we were having, when she should be in hysterics.

“I love you too, Mom. I’m so sorry.” I made the short, sharp gasp of a fresh surge of sobs about to escape. Mom could tell or she was psychic.

“Don’t let the women see you cry like this, honey.” When she said this, I could almost hear Rod Serling welcoming me to the Twilight Zone. My mother coolly telling me not to cry was a sure sign we had entered a parallel universe. Mom was the crybaby, not me.

“Okay.” I took a deep breath and held it, waiting out the passing wave of tears and snot.

“Cleary!” I heard my father interject this and knew it meant to quit it, that I should breathe. But I would sob if I let myself exhale.

“Gene! Cleary isn’t in the right place to have a breakdown. Honey, you listen to me. Pull yourself together until you can find yourself a private little corner. Go there and have a good cry, sweetie. Go to the chapel. That is a safe place. You can cry there.” I heard muffled
conversation again. We were definitely in the Twilight Zone now, no doubt. This was probably Mom covering the phone to tell Dad to calm down.

“Hello!” I couldn’t let the time run out on our phone call while they bickered, although that was more normal behavior.

“You are going to be fine. You know what, honey? Saint Anthony tried to jump today!” Mom came back and was all excited and happy when she told me this, like everything was clear to her now and all was well. I knew exactly what she was talking about. I was so happy she was her Looney Tunes self again.

A whole team of those crazy bats escaped from my chest and I burst out laughing instead of crying. We had a statue of Saint Anthony in our library at home who occasionally wanted to end it all by jumping to his death from the bookshelf he lived on. The statue didn’t actually jump, but no matter what we did to correct the vibration causing its slow move to the edge of the shelf, every once in a while we would find him facedown in the carpet.

Mother, due to her slightly superstitious and deeply Southern Catholic genetics, accredited our Saint Anthony statue’s suicidal tendencies to messages from God. Of course, his messages were usually a bit more trivial than what she suggested now. Saint Anthony was invoked in our household with prayers for lost keys or earrings; his leaps were to announce it was time to look again. Mom recommended I go to the chapel and find a copy of Saint Anthony’s prayer to recite until I could get my head on straight. I supposed a lost mind could be considered worthy of a jump from Saint Anthony.

“Your brother Gene wants to say something before we go. We’re going to call your sister Hester when we hang up the phone.” She gave the floor to my brother. I could hear her heels on the ceramic tiles in our kitchen as she walked away from the phone. I could picture the three of them huddled around the phone there. Mom always did that, say “your brother Gene” or “your father Gene.” This introduction added clarity when having a phone conversation, such as we were, since they had the same name. But she also did this
for Hester, which struck me as funny. She was my only sister and the only Hester we knew; the distinction was unnecessary. Mom also signed all her letters to me as Catherine C. Wolters, aka Mom. Maybe she did that in letters to my sister and brother, but again, the distinction in my case was superfluous. I would know I hadn’t written myself.

“I love you, Cleary.” I could tell my brother was crying by the way he pronounced his words so deliberately. I didn’t get to respond.

The phone call was cut off and I turned away from the wall to find a rather large and angry woman staring me down as if I was on her phone, in her house, on her time. I was, but I didn’t know that yet. She picked the receiver up before I had even gotten clear of the stool in front of the phone, then slammed it against the plastic box on the wall. “No, you didn’t!” She held the receiver out to show me.

There was evidence on the phone handle of the sweat I had broken out in while on the phone revealing the news to my parents that I was in jail. I had thoughtlessly failed to clean it off before this woman had picked it up. It was bad etiquette, and gross, like failing to wipe down a stationary bike in the gym. The angry woman starting going off, very loudly, about how nasty I was. I was a white trash bitch and a number of other not-so-niceties. I tried to wipe the receiver down with my shirt, but before I could make that mistake, a lady jumped from the line and handed me a wad of tissue.

“She’s federal.” The tissue lady said this to the angry woman, who now had her arms crossed against her chest and was towering over me like a giant. She uncrossed her arms, stepped back, and apologized. It was the weirdest thing. The nice lady who had saved me with the tissues told me she would come by my bunk when she got off the phone and give me the lowdown on “this fucking romp-a-room.” She was referring to my temporary new home. “Don’t talk to these imbecile bitches.” She pointed her chin in the general direction of the TV room, a space shared by the inhabitants of a handful of rooms in our wing of the Chittenden County Jail where everyone sat, glued to an episode of
Jerry Springer
.

There was a desk against the wall near the phone bank, home
to an overly made-up woman in a uniform. She had a long chain attached to her belt that had so many keys on it, it passed for a gaudy accessory, rather than a functional collection of keys. From what I could tell, her job was the sitter at the desk and the keeper of fire. I had literally jumped for joy that morning when I’d arrived there after my brief engagement in the courthouse, feeling suicidal, homicidal, and overdressed and overheated in my multilayered travel outfit. When I first saw her go to a doorway separating the sitting room from a very small grassy triangle outside, where she lit the cigarette of either an astonishingly young girl or a dwarf, I had nearly cried I was so happy to get to smoke. I had learned that smoking cigarettes was permitted when that door was open. Lighters and matches, however, were forbidden. In order to smoke the permitted cigarettes, the guard had to light them for us.