Riverine (28 page)

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 would 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?”

We sat there with wet eyes and stunned expressions, holding each other’s gazes. I hadn’t expected there to be no good reason. Not that any reason was
good
. But I thought for certain there would be an explanation for what he’d done. There wasn’t. Drugs themselves had not triggered his actions. There was no mental illness. There was nothing. It didn’t align with my memory of him or with the narrative I’d constructed over the years.

Corey wasn’t off, at least I don’t think so. The psychiatrists assigned to screen him before the trial that never happened didn’t think so. In my view, this was a good thing. It meant that the crime was an isolated incident, unfortunate and horrid, yes, but he wasn’t a sick
person
. In some ways, he was made by where we were from and who he was from, from circumstances and repeated slips through cracks with no one to pick him back up. He was from the wrong part of town in a town where status mattered and where people of authority had little else to occupy their time. He’d been exposed to criminal life very early, and it had pulled him into its current. But he had also made bad choices. And by his word, he’d never valued his own future enough to make better ones.

“We’re not much different,” I said, after thinking this through a bit. “None of us. People are mostly water and thoughts.”

People, especially young ones, are malleable. Like wet sediment. Guided by whatever kind of banks have lined their river, by what has held them. By what has let the liquid drain out. They try to dredge the bottom, straighten the path, widen the mouth. But the water must go somewhere.

“Thank you for sending me that picture of us,” he said, changing the subject to something lighter. In it, we were laughing, sitting in the grass, the river a few hundred yards behind us. “I’d forgotten there were good parts to my childhood.”

I’d gone back to see our houses before the visit. To check on our windows. It was something I did from time to time, a ritual to remember him by. I didn’t want to tell him how small the place was that had warped us somehow, sending us in opposite directions, away from each other when we had always wanted to be together. I didn’t want to tell him how escapable it was. How leaving didn’t require extremes.

Rule 4. On a six-hour contact visit in prison, you may use the bathroom once. If the offender uses the bathroom, the visit is terminated.

Corey told me he had had nothing to drink since dinner the day before. “Dehydrating. Don’t want to lose time with you.”

After the burrito incident, we allowed ourselves one sip of pop each. We wiped our fingers clean as well as we could. I was happy to see him, despite the more challenging parts of our conversation, and it showed—I couldn’t stop smiling. He was a lost puzzle piece finally found, the picture complete, though distorted. We posed for a photograph and smiled. I tried to make every minute count, not knowing how long it would be until I saw him again. I tried to put us both back together again, as least for the present moment.

Corey turned my right hand over—flat, open, and palm up—examining the way I was made as if he were a scientist and my skin might consist of a newly discovered element. “Can I read your palm?” This was one of the many things he had studied during his time in prison. Sixteen years down. Forever to go.

In recent conversations, via letters in the mail, we’d been considering dust and origins, the vastness of the universe compared with our tiny stakes in it. We’d been considering the stars we used to be. One thing we’d always shared: the sky. At least there was that. He wrote to me to make sure I knew when to see the super moon, the blood moon, when Saturn would be visible. There was a slim chance that we could share the sky again; the earth, too. Life sentences sometimes got overturned, but Indiana was notoriously “tough on crime,” and his crime was one of the worst. The public would always consider him to be a threat. He had changed, but he would always be fragile. He had endured too much, including his own rock bottom, but I knew the world would still be better with him in it. My world was better with him in it. I had seen inside him. I knew him better than anyone else. Save for a blighted past, he was nearly whole now, as whole or good in the present as any of us could say we were. He deserved another chance, I thought. I promised to pick him up at the gates if he ever got out. I’d buy him a telescope and we’d stay worlds away from the past. We’d never drive by the river. Not even to look at our windows.

He was stoic, contemplative, as he prepared his assessment of my heart line. My fingers rested gently against his wrist in a tragic repose, an inert
come hither
. I wondered if he heard my blood rushing, or if he noticed that I was nearly breathless, but he leaned in closer, his hulking hands and shoulders striking soft poses that suggested a gentle giant of a man. A man who had learned to show great control over his capable body and his undernurtured emotions. A man who had both softened and hardened under the effects of time and punishment, who could not bring himself to kill even a fly or an ant now. A man, somehow, full of love.

My heart line resembled an aerial cartography of the river where we grew up, whooshing in one direction with various inlets and outjuttings. Corey began near the left side of my palm, running one thick finger along its rugged yet determined trajectory. “One love begins here, young and stupid but real enough,” he said expertly, the corners of his mouth upturned. His finger reached a tangled breakage. “Here, midway, there’s a branch that flows into the main line, only it’s weaker and fades.”

I nodded my encouragement at him. There was no need to name names. Instead, this was the way we would talk about deprivation and absence and regret. About entire years of nothingness. About other people we had known. This scar, a woman who wasn’t me. This pale remembering, a boy who wasn’t him. Here, a crescent-shaped shadow, the nick of a knife, that marked the night that we couldn’t quite broach head-on in conversation.