Out of Orange (27 page)

“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 not 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, Natalie, 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.

“Well, kiddo, this is it. I have to leave you now for a little while. Please stay out of traffic and stay healthy. It’s going to be a long time until we can play again. Until then, be a good girl for Julie.”

“You love that cat more than you ever loved me.” Julie laughed. “You don’t hold a candle to Miss Kitty either.” Then she smugly tossed her bag over her shoulder. I was lucky to have found a friend like her. I hoped she was going to be okay. Somehow, though, I knew she and Miss Kitty would bounce back. She had promised to wait for me, and I wanted to believe it was possible. But I knew I was probably seeing her for the last time. I knew the same was true for Miss Kitty, even though it broke my heart to admit it.

When we arrived in Dublin, it was a little disorienting. I pictured FCI Dublin being out in a vast area of mountain-size rolling hills of gold, covered with windmills and with weird little trees dotting the hillsides. As we finally approached the area where the facility was, I could see the windmills in the distance and I realized it wasn’t the first time I had seen the place. When the marshals had dropped me at Santa Rita Jail seven years before, we had come from the opposite direction. We arrived at the entrance to a military base, where we had to show our IDs to a man in a booth before being allowed to pass.

We drove by a long fence that surrounded a big open field. The buildings there were like the military barracks or housing I had
seen in the Presidio, but more dilapidated, and an area full of rusty old gym equipment sat out in the middle of the field. I spotted a couple of women in tan-colored jackets and blue uniforms, wearing work boots, and figured they were personnel or something. At the end of the fence, the road we were on intersected with where we had to turn to get to the facility.