Riverine (27 page)

Now, he tried to preserve the health and good looks he had left through yoga and exercise, healthy food choices, and adequate sleep. We were not all that different. We watched the same TV shows, read the same articles, and shared some of the same interests. “Did you read the one about the French catacombs?” I asked. “I think it was two issues ago.” And he told me he had. We talked about our favorite parts of the article, and I wished we were in my living room instead of the prison’s visiting room. I wished they would let me buy him out. “Couldn’t you get put on house arrest for the rest of your life and live in the country somewhere? You’re not dangerous. You’re regular. I’d take care of you. Give the taxpayers their money back.” To me, dangerous was an unmedicated uncle who had made dead-sober death threats or a three-peat violent sex offender who had a staring problem. Those men had made me feel unsafe. Corey didn’t.

“Honey, I wish it were that easy” he said. “To fall asleep at night, I imagine myself in a little house or in a garage somewhere, a place away from everything where I won’t bother anybody. I imagine the different things I would build, see the pieces in my mind, the way they fit together and how it would look when it’s done.”

“That’s sweet,” I said. “And a good idea, I think. To think yourself away from it all.”

In Norway, the maximum prison sentence, even for murder and rape, is twenty-one years, the last five of which are spent at a special facility whose focus is relearning how to behave respectfully in the world, how to work productively, and how to live without chemical dependence. The concept is twofold: two decades without freedom gives victims a sense of justice, while the focus on rehabilitation gives society justice. Barring both the death penalty and life sentences, the approach aims to respect life on both sides of crime. Prisons in that part of the world have remarkably low recidivism rates compared with other nations. Meanwhile, the United States has 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of its prisoners. What would happen if we treated each “criminal” as we would want our own children treated if they committed a crime? What would happen if, as in ant colonies, each member of our communities, regardless of station and role in life, was considered indispensable?

“I think all this time I’ve been building it all for you.”

I laughed. “So you’ve built me a barnful of imaginary furniture? Seventeen years’ worth of chairs and hutches?”

“Something like that.”

Corey had retained the best parts I remembered of him—his humor, his sincerity. He had discarded the ones I’d never seen up close—the drugs, the poor choices, the disregard for consequences. I don’t know what I thought he’d be like instead. In poor health? Incapable of communication? Closed off from me?

He revealed to me that he had used heroin, among other drugs, for quite a while leading up to the events that would end two lives and change the course of his own. And though it sickened me to hear how he was living—sleeping anywhere, sometimes even at his sister’s grave—I kept listening. “I was coming off of it when it happened. Needed money, was getting sick.”

“Sick from the drugs?” I asked.

“Yeah. If you can believe it, I was a hundred and fifty pounds when I was arrested.”

That was seventy-five pounds less than was he was now, and he looked strong, trim, and healthy. No, I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t imagine him like that. It made my skin crawl. In my head, I kept filling in the gaps, reinserting myself into his life in all the places where I should have been there, pulling him in another direction. So much of the human body rebuilds itself in a short span of time. The cells of the liver, the brain, the skeleton, the blood. We are built for survival, to begin again on the heels of physical failure. If only the social structures that govern us would give us second chances the way our DNA does. Our bodies are leaner than our laws.

“I never let you see that part of me,” he told me. “You were too good for all that, and I wanted to protect you from it, from me.”

“I wish you’d have come back to see me one last time. I waited for you. I called and left messages with your mom. Everything could have gone differently.” If we had had cell phones—that technology was a few years beyond our time—we would have been talking. I still would have been in his life. No question.

“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.