Something Like Beautiful (6 page)

Maybe he has a real plan he can only tell me in whispers, alone in a trailer on a prison compound. Maybe we are meant to be together, a couple, a family. Maybe we can overcome the deportation order. Maybe the law will change. Maybe parole will work out. Maybe everything we promised each other and believed during our long courtship and five-year marriage will come to pass. I tell him what I always wound up telling him: Yes, baby. I'll be there. I pack up food, clothes, diapers, sheets, toiletries, the baby, and me. I hire a car and head up to the prison.

How do you know, do you ever really know, that the last time with someone is really the last time? Is it ever possible to conceive such a thing when it is late and quiet and the entire of the world has briefly contracted, and now, now the world is no bigger, no more complicated than a size that you and your tiny little family can manage, and he is touching you? He has spent the day touching some part of you and Nisa, almost in disbelief that you are alive and real, not some hologram, some mirage. We could not have conceived then, neither Rashid nor I, that our first conjugal visit as a family would also be our last. I'm sure of that.

During that visit, that easy, that calm, that beautiful, that life-giving visit, Rashid watches everything Nisa and I do with the eyes of someone who has gone blind and through some sudden miracle—not a medical one so much as an otherworldly one but a miracle nonetheless—he has been regranted the gift of sight. The way I breast-feed, the way Nisa nestles in my arms, flapping her arms, studying her surroundings, relaxing when she's rocked, this is all new to him, and if I am to understand the wonder I see in his eyes, we are nearly holy. He bathes us and he washes our hair and he cooks for me and feeds me, a fork he lifts to my mouth. He changes Nisa and insists he be the one to hold her until she falls asleep, which she finally does on his chest, moving peacefully with the rhythm of his breathing.

He places her in a crib in the next room and comes back to me and this is when we make love, late, late into the visit, so unlike our other visits, our pre-Nisa life when sex was immediate and constant and wild. Now it happens on our daughter's clock, and we laugh about this and we embrace the change. But
finally when we are certain Nisa will sleep for at least a couple of hours, this is when it happens.

Somehow, then, that time, it was more intimate, our sex, more musical. It was nearly like a rescue, the way we made love, the kind of touching where you leave nothing behind. You leave everything right there in your lover's hands, his mouth. We were more generous than we'd ever been, more gracious, and when we moved together we cried, both of us did, to know how this is what we needed, how this was what we needed daily, how this was what kept us in contact with our own humanity, in contact with the best of ourselves. And yet it was exactly this thing that we could not have.

But for forty-four hours in September of 2000, we did, we had it. Deportation was set aside; parole issues and money issues, they were beyond our consciousness. We set aside everything, everything that was hard, we didn't even glance at them and we really lived, however briefly, however falsely even, but for us, we lived a lifetime in a moment, and a moment in the space we had always sought to occupy. For forty-four hours, the world was animate and it was ours and everywhere it was safe and everywhere it was shining.

In short, we sipped the wine. Perhaps we should not have. Because as the old adage warned, the sipping made it all the worse. It made it all the more shocking when we could not have it the night after that or the night after that. It was more shocking than even before, before we had a child, because now Rashid's presence was bigger than my desire for him. Now there were two of us and desire was coupled with absolute need and that need could not be fulfilled and although logically I
understand that I should not have been shocked, I was. I could not believe that I would not wake the next morning and find him there, there with us, and suddenly one night became two and two nights became years.

Years passed and that September became a memory that recessed into the shadows and I realized that yes, wow, that time back then was the last time for us and had we known, had I known, I would have surely have marked the date on the calendar, noted it as a sad anniversary each year, observed a moment of silence, told close friends and loved ones about what happened. I surely would have mourned.

But none of that happened and we spent those forty-four hours and perhaps even a short time after as though we, us, our family was going to be possible. Rashid spoke in defiant terms about beating the deportation order and was just as certain he would make parole. And after our visit, briefly I was a believer again. Encouraged by my perennially optimistic husband, I started thinking about how I could juggle work, parenting, writing, and a husband who was in prison. He wouldn't be there for very much longer, I told myself.

But it was then, in the midst of those thoughts, that the reality of our life came along and made things all so simple. Rashid was transferred to a prison nearly impossible to get to. Never in all the years that we had been together, in all of the years before he became Nisa's father, had Rashid ever been made so inaccessible.

As always, I receive the news like this: I get a phone call from one of Rashid's friends, who says, “He's in the box.” He offers no real explanations, makes nothing clear.

As of that call, I had known Rashid for more than ten years, been his wife for more than five. We'd run up thousands and thousands of dollars in phone bills, spent countless hours in conversation with one another, speaking, sharing. But in all that time, across all those years, never had I heard those words, the ones that I'd always feared, the ones that meant that Rashid would be locked in special unit, alone, for twenty-three hours a day. The other hour was allowed for exercise in an outdoor cage. Alone.

Phone calls were banned. Our only communication was letter writing, which was much harder for me now with a job and a daughter. The fissure that grew between us was nearly one you could see. Without visits or real-time communication, Rashid's life in a prison no longer was something I could understand or make sense of. And my life doing a slow redaction into working, parenting, cleaning, bill paying, sleeping, working, cleaning some more, was not one he could understand.

Our worlds, and so the two of us, became unknown, unknowable to one another. And Nisa and Rashid became distanced as well. Important milestones—her first steps—could not even be shared over the phone. Fatherhood via fiber optics and weekend visits was not even possible. Months would pass before we were able to get there, up to the new facility, so that Nisa could visit her father, my husband, this stranger.

Eventually letters from Rashid came that told a bizarre story about how he was accused of being the mastermind behind a stabbing incident in the prison. Rashid and five others were convened before a prison panel and found guilty of stabbing another member of their Muslim community. Never mind
that the only evidence against Rashid and the others was secret and—to this day—uncorroborated testimony. Never mind that the minor wound on the victim hardly corresponded with his story of being attacked by several men. Never mind that it was public knowledge that the so-called victim disliked Rashid intensely because Rashid was considered a leader in the community. And never mind that in the end, the court system, months after Rashid finished his time in the box, every day of it, found him innocent of all charges.

But that's getting ahead.

In the days following the false incident, prison officials sentenced Rashid to 120 days in isolation and before you could say,
Whoa, Nellie, where's the goddamn evidence?
he was shipped an unimaginable nine hours away to a new facility in a part of the state neither of us had ever heard of before. This is what happened in the time following the time we were on the trailer in September. This is what happened that took our hope apart. That took us apart.

“It's a total lockdown joint,” Rashid writes me, in a letter from his new address. “Everybody here is in the box. That's how they're building prisons now,” he writes. “We're locked in cells that are the same size as single cells everywhere else, but here it's all double-bunked. Can you imagine being locked up in a room the size of your bathroom, with a stranger? For months? For something you didn't do?”

I am at work as I read this. I am trying to live this new life as a mother, as a magazine editor. And I am trying to do it with a measure of competency and cool, but here is my reality. I am sitting in a cubicle waiting for Denzel Washington to call back on
a story I am writing, but no matter how hard I am pushing for this new life, looking dignified and hip at the same time sitting in a cubicle, I am snatched back into the old one. And as much as I love Rashid, I don't want to be. I don't want to spend my days and nights worried about the world of prisons and guards but I can't imagine leaving this man alone, this man I made a child with. I want to curl up in a corner, sob, scream. I want to call a friend, tell her what's happening. But I am at work. I am a mother. I cannot lose it. At work there is professional decorum. At home there is my baby, and my loss of calm destroys hers. Of course out in the street if you lose it and you're Black, you're doing time. I tell no one what's happening, not for some time, not until I trust I can say the words, but devoid of emotion.

The transformation into that person, the one without feelings, begins on the subway ride home as I finish reading the rest of the letter. On that 3 train speeding toward Brooklyn, it may look like me, but it isn't me. It is someone else, an impostor, a pod person. She can walk through the world without reaction, and certainly without tears. I let her take in the information, consider it, but not process it. I let her go home, breast-feed my child, go to sleep in my bed. Me, the real asha, has already ferreted out a hiding place and stored myself there, while a Step-ford mother, worker, woman, wife, moves about in my stead. She deals with everything, including the words contained in Rashid's letter:

“If you want to come see me, just so you know, visits here are at night from 6 to 9
PM
.” After that he adds, “You cannot come see me the first 30 days though. The first 30 days here, all visits are behind the glass. And I'd have to be shackled. Leg irons and
cuffs. You and my daughter can't see me like that. But after 30 days—now only 22!—I can be at a table with you. That's if you want to come.”

I knew I would make the trip and Rashid did too. Despite my decision to retreat from half of my life being spent behind prison walls, my need to keep prisons from institutionalizing my child, I could not let Rashid sit in a cell for four months with no outside contact, no outside confirmation that he was still alive and that he mattered and that he would always matter. To me, certainly, but most of all to our daughter.

W
e leave the house, Nisa and D and I, like fugitives under the dark weight of night, quietly slipping out of my apartment building sometime before four in the morning. Rashid's father and best friend had offered to split the nine-hour drive upstate so that Nisa could see her dad. So that he could see her. The night before we were to leave, Rashid's dad backed out, but D did not, and together we began the nine-hour journey to a place none of us would ever, in a world we made, a world we had control over, choose as a destination. It was March 3, 2001, and the weatherman was predicting a horrible snowstorm that weekend, but I didn't learn this until after.

Later, when my parents asked me what happened, how did things go wrong on that trip to see Rashid, I said to them that all I remembered was telling D I was getting tired, that I didn't think I could stay awake with him any longer. I suggested to him that we pull over; we had already been driving about seven and a half hours and we had plenty of time to rest by the side of the road for a little while and still arrive at our hotel, put our things away, freshen up, eat, and head over to the facility on time. He said, no, no. Just like that. “No, no. I got this. Go to
sleep, baby girl.” After that, I said to my mother, all I remember is screaming, begging him to get control of the vehicle; he was not able to do it.

We hydroplaned, flipped, went over a thirty-foot ravine, cut down four or five trees, and the car broke into three parts before finally stopping. And then suddenly there was a man standing over us, a stranger who had seen the accident. “I don't think there are any survivors here,” he said. “No,” I mumbled at him, I think, anyway, that the word came out. I struggled to get myself loose, screamed for them to help my baby, who was strapped tight in her car seat in the back.

The stranger helped me out of the car and I ran, stumbled, ran some more, stumbled some more, over to the other side of the car to get to my baby, to pull her out of the wreckage and then back up the hill where paramedics were already arriving. D followed behind us a few minutes later. I kept thinking that the car was going to blow up just like in the movies. It's real, you know, the thing that takes over you, the superhuman strength thing, when you think your child's life is on the line. I'm sure I've never moved so fast in my life, certain as I was that there was going to be an explosion.

When we reach the top of the ravine, the paramedics strap me onto a board and they separate Nisa from me. I don't know where she is. The paramedic brings her over but I cannot touch her. I am strapped down. There is a fear that something is broken and they want to keep me immobilized. I don't remember how D was taken out of the car, or how he gets to the hospital, and I don't remember if Nisa and I ride in the same ambulance. I don't remember seeing my baby again until we are in the hospi
tal. They bring her to me finally and place her on my chest and it's only then that her screams stop. We are, all of us, x-rayed and examined and determined to be fine, considering.

D has a bruised rib cage, I have a concussion, but Nisa is completely without physical injury. It is four-thirty in the afternoon. A police officer is there and I ask him to call the prison, to tell my husband what's happened. I give him the phone number, Rashid's information. “Please tell him that we're fine,” I nearly plead, “but we will not be able to see him.” All I can think of is that I want to be home. I want to be safe, alone and safe with my daughter. When the cop saunters back toward us about fifteen minutes later, I ask if he's called the facility. “Yup,” he responds. I ask if he said that we were fine despite the accident. Calmly, he looks at me and says, “I just told him that there was an accident and y'all wouldn't be coming.”

Of course we have to go now. Now there is no choice, no way we can rest. If Rashid does not see us, if he does not hear anything more—and there will be no way for him to know more before we are back home—he will cave in to worry. Something bad happening to a family member is a major fear for men in prison I have known. Rashid and I will never forget the day a man's wife, in a freak accident, fell out of a moving van on the highway on the way to see her husband. She did not survive. I could not let Rashid have any of those fears, especially about his baby, a baby under a year old. Where does additional anxiety take a man, I wonder, who is already in hell?

From the hospital I call a taxi service and a guy who could have been a body double for one of the mountain men from the film
Deliverance
shows up in a car I thought he would have to
turn a crank on to get running. But he seems nice enough and besides, we are desperate. “You know how to get to the prison?” I asked him. “Sure do,” he responds, not cheerfully, but neither does he sound judgmental. He gets us to the facility safe and sound, and exactly on time, just as a van of other wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters are unloading packages and getting themselves signed in and processed through metal detectors.

I have almost no memory of that place, what it looked like, how we were treated by the guards, if we ate from the vending machine, if Rashid was waiting for us when we walked in, if we had to wait for a long time for him to come to the visiting room. That whole visit, nearly the whole of it, happened someplace outside of me, someplace that does not normally store memory. There are just small snatches of images: Rashid holding me, holding us, Nisa and me. He told me that when the facility informed him of the accident, he thought things had been much worse, that he hadn't been given much information.

After I tell him the details of the accident, Rashid shakes his head, holds us tighter, tells me he cannot believe we are there, with him. D is sitting at the table with us. I'm sure they talked. I don't know what about. And then Rashid says, I suppose for emphasis, “I just can't believe after everything that's happened, you're here. You're here and you're looking at me like you used to look at me.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“I mean you're looking at me like you need me.”

I don't respond. Maybe I do need him. Maybe I do not. I have no idea at that moment, nor did I the day before that or the day before that, what I need.

When the visit comes to an end, Deliverance is waiting, as promised, right outside the prison door. The snow, already swirling above and around us, seems now poised to rage. The airports have been closed, as has the bus station. There is no train service in this part of New York State. Deliverance is our only hope for getting home in the next twenty-four hours. I can't believe I'm willing to get in a car for hours and hours again, that I'm willing to ride those roads, but I need my home, my own warm place with its multicolored walls, its mud-cloth prints, the pillows and the candles and the peace lily and the ivy; and my home with the all its books, the Dexter Gordon CDs, the yellow-and-purple sheets Nisa and I curl up in, the notebooks I write in. I needed to be near it all. I needed to feel safe, and I could not feel safe in this place, this place of prisons and crashes.

We negotiate with Deliverance's taxi company. Nine hundred dollars and the deal is done. We have a ride home, which we are ready for first thing the next morning. Deliverance shows up with a friend, also someone who would qualify for mountain man body-double status. This doesn't feel like the smartest decision I have ever made, but what choice do we have?

D and I look at the two young tattooed men, and we all shake hands and get in the car, which, you can't make this up, they called their company's luxury vehicle—a gray and rust-stained Caddy, circa 1972. I look at the vehicle. Unlike the other, I don't think it needs a crank, but I wonder how much gas the boat-sized thing takes. D, Nisa, and I ride in the back. I place Nisa gently in her car seat, which had been one of the few things—besides us—left relatively intact after the crash.
Still, I say a prayer, whisper it into Nisa's ear. The boys turn on the radio. Black Sabbath is playing. I don't know what I was hoping for—maybe a little Donnie McClurkin? I buckle up. Double-check Nisa's straps.

We're about fifteen minutes into the trip back to New York City when Deliverance's dispatcher two-way-radios him and says the price of the ride is double and if we can't pay, no trip. Deliverance, and his friend—who also works for the service—argue vehemently with their boss. “A deal is a deal,” one of them says. Their boss tells them if we don't pay now—and if they don't drop that money off at the base before heading south to the city—they would both be fired.

More words are exchanged, and then suddenly—it was Deliverance who said it, tossing his long, blond hair around defiantly—“Fuck it, man. We're going to New York.” With that, he turns off the two-way, turns up Black Sabbath, and together the two of them navigate us safely back to our home.

What those two days will teach me, beyond reminding me not to judge people right off the bat—and that was a big one—what I will carry for the next three years, is some sort of scattered lesson, one with no real beginning, no real end, only a whirling dervish of fear, hazy but repeating, and brutal images of the entire end of the world I know, the streets and the people and parks and waters and the loves and my baby, my baby, snatched up by giant enemy arms, snatched up and thrown, crashed to the ground, and all of them, all of us splitting apart, breaking, broken. No survivors. The lesson that sat in me, in my bones, in my blood, waiting there like a slow-moving poison, was one of danger lurking everywhere, but nowhere more so than with Rashid.

The lesson I should have taken, but the one that will not occur to me until I sit down to write this story, is that I can make my way home, I have always made my way home, no matter what the challenge, no matter how icy the road. And I can do it not only because I am invested in doing it, invested even when I am not conscious of it, but also because there are others, there are people, human beings, who, despite a million real or meaningless differences that may exist between us, those people, those humans, agree—and sometimes it is for just one brief moment, and sometimes it is as a life's commitment—that yes, we do, each one of us, deserve the chance to get back home.