The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (72 page)

Mo said she’d heard of it but didn’t know much about it.

“Patel says that’s what my mother might have been suffering from. She took out this reference book, the DSM-something or other, and read me the symptoms: reckless, self-sabotaging, paranoid about abandonment. It’s plausible, isn’t it? The way she sabotaged her career as a model? The way, whenever my father got himself free of her, she’d sink her hook into him and reel him back in? There’s this
other borderline symptom called ‘identity disturbance.’ That fits, too. She leaves the small town for the big city, becomes Jinx Dixon.”

“The same as Lydia’s father,” Mo said.

“Hmm?”

“Willie Popper. He went to New York and became Fennimore Forrest.”

I nodded. “Hadn’t thought about that. ‘Identity disturbance’ on both sides of my family. Lucky me, huh? Maybe I’ll go out of town for a while and come back as, oh, I don’t know … Derek Jeter.”

“Isn’t he a Yankee?” Mo said.

“Oh god, you’re right. What was I thinking? Lolly’s probably rolling over in her grave. She hated the Evil Empire almost as much as the Lady Vols.”

It felt good to exchange smiles. “Hey, speaking of Lolly,” Mo said.

She told me she’d run into Lena LoVecchio the day before—that Lena had come to the compound to see a client, and she and Mo had chatted for a few minutes. “I mentioned that I was reading Lizzy’s life story, and I said how we wouldn’t have known any of these things if you hadn’t rented out the upstairs to someone whose field was Women’s Studies. And Lena said that Janis wouldn’t have found any of that stuff if Lolly hadn’t hijacked it.”

“Hijacked?” I said. “What did she mean by that?”

“That’s what
I
asked her. Do you remember when they started harassing Lolly? Bullying her so that she’d resign?”

“How could I forget?” I said. “She gave me the blow-by-blows every single Sunday night.”

“Well, according to Lena, Lolly saw the writing on the wall. She knew they were gunning for her. For some reason, all of her grandmother’s old records and diaries and letters were still here at the prison. Stuffed in a storage closet someplace. But when Lolly said she wanted it all back, they said no. That it was state property, even Lizzy’s correspondence. And, come on. Lizzy had written and
received those letters before this place even existed. And it wasn’t because DOC was actually interested in Lydia’s archives. They just were saying no to spite her.”

“Sounds about par for the course,” I said.

“So, according to Lena, Lolly said screw it, and she took it all home anyway. Carried everything out of here piecemeal, a box at a time.”

“No shit,” I said. “I knew she’d defied them about taking Lydia’s wooden sign, but I didn’t know she’d boosted all the other stuff, too. God, there’s a
ton
of it up there—filing cabinets full. Must have taken her weeks. How the hell did she get away with it?”

“I asked Lena that. She said Lolly told her that was one of the benefits of working second shift. When you left the place at eleven o’clock at night, you could walk out of there with the warden’s desk strapped to your back and nobody’d bat an eye.”

I laughed, shook my head. “She was a gutsy one, wasn’t she?”

“She was more than that, Cae. Janis may have put all the pieces together, but Lolly’s the one who carried those pieces out of here. She rescued your family history for you…. Oh, I’m sorry, Cae. I didn’t mean to make you cry.”

“No, it’s just that …” I wiped away my tears with the back of my hand. “I loved her so much, you know? I just can’t remember ever telling her I did.”

“Well, whether you did or not, she knew, Cae. I know she knew.”

I nodded. Sniffled a little more. “God, lately? I’m like a human fountain or something. I cry so much, they ought to put me on
Dr. Phil.”

“I think some of those tears have been waiting a long time to come out,” Mo said. “And it’s good that they are, Cae. It’s healthy.”

“Yeah, okay. So anyway, that’s enough about me and my screwed-up family. How
you
doing? Everything okay here at Camp Quirk?”

More or less, she said. She’d written to the deputy warden about the women’s harassment of Crystal. And miracle of miracles, he’d taken it seriously, she said. Had the ringleader transferred to a different tier,
warned the others that he wanted it stopped, and told his COs to be on the lookout and let him know if it didn’t. “So far, so good,” Mo said. “Oh, and Crystal’s going to start hospice training. Her approval just came through today. I think it’ll be good for her, Cae. Whatever did or didn’t happen that day her baby died, the guilt she feels has paralyzed her. Comforting the dying will allow her to do something merciful. And maybe that will help her to …”

“Forgive herself?”

Maureen shook her head. “You never really forgive yourself. At least
I
haven’t been able to. But if you can find ways to be useful to others, you can begin to figure out how to live inside your own skin, no matter what you did. The girls who commit suicide here? They’re the ones who
can’t
figure out how to do that. Their guilt just becomes too hard for them to bear. A girl over in Travers Hall killed herself day before yesterday. Hung herself with a plastic garbage bag. She just couldn’t take it anymore.” Maureen asked me if I remembered a cellmate she’d had a while back. “Irina? The Russian woman?”

I nodded. “Irina the Terrible. The one who was always coughing. Was
she
the suicide?”

Mo shook her head. “She’s in hospice now. I’ve been taking care of her. It probably won’t be more than a couple of days.”

“What’s she dying from?”

Multiple problems, Mo said. Because of confidentiality, she couldn’t really go into the specifics.

AIDS? Hepatitis? Hadn’t I read something a while back about an outbreak of TB in Russia? “Tell me she’s not infectious,” I said.

Instead, Mo assured me that she was careful—that, as a nurse, she knew how to take precautions and make sure the other volunteers took them, too. “But you know something, Cae? Now that Irina’s close to the end, that hostility has left her. And god, she’s so appreciative of small efforts: if I feed her ice chips when her mouth gets dry, or comb her hair. Sometimes at night when she gets scared, she asks
for me. And the third-shift COs are pretty good about waking me up and letting me go to her…. She likes me to listen to her stories about when she was a little girl, or sometimes she just wants me to hold her hand. I never would have predicted it when we were stuck in that cell together, but Irina and I have become friends.”

“She’s lucky she’s got you,” I said.

“But I’m lucky, too, Cae. That’s what’s so cool about working with hospice patients. It’s reciprocal.”

Kareem Kendricks came suddenly to mind—his recitation of the seven acts of mercy:
minister to the prisoner, bury the dead.
…

“You know something?” I said. “You’re a damn good nurse.”

She broke into a beautiful smile. “I am, aren’t I? Thank you, Caelum.”

The CO at the desk announced that we should begin our goodbyes. Visits were over in five more minutes.

“Hey, before I forget,” I said. “Dr. Patel said to say hi. Velvet, too.”

“Oh, speaking of Velvet, that reminds me,” Mo said. “Father Ralph’s gotten the warden’s okay for a special family mass. We can each invite two people on our visitors’ list. It’s two Sundays from now, January twentieth. I thought maybe you and Velvet?”

“Could be dangerous for you,” I said. “If she and I show up in a house of worship, that God you believe in will probably start hurling thunderbolts.”

“But seriously, Cae. Will you come? And ask Velvet?”

I told her she could count me in, but that Princess Voodoo might be a tougher sell to get to a Catholic mass.

“Father Ralph’s even gotten the warden to spring for a light lunch after the service. So we’ll be able to share a meal and hang out together for a while, without these stupid tables between us. Which is
huge,
huh? Father Ralph is awesome.”

I said I expected nothing less from one of my fellow Four Horsemen.

“Four Horsemen?” she said. “Oh, okay. Your relay team. Right?”

“State record holders for umpteen years.”

“And wasn’t Captain Martineau on that team?” she said.

I nodded. “Who’d have thunk, back when we were those four skinny high school seniors passing off the baton to one another, that we would have turned into a cop, a priest, a casino big shot, and yours truly…. A lunch, huh? Guess I’ll finally get to taste some of that five-star jailhouse cuisine you’re always raving about.”

“Cuisine?” Mo said. She got a kick out of that one.

It had been a good visit—one of the best we’d had since she’d gone in. Thinking about it as I walked back up Bride Lake Road, I caught myself smiling. And as that smile faded, I subtracted in my head the number of months she’d now served from her sixty-month sentence. Twenty-nine down, thirty-one more to go. The day of that family mass, she’d be right about at the halfway mark.

“A girlfriend, Al?” I said. “And we’re talking about a
real
woman here, not the vinyl blow-up kind that arrives in a UPS truck?”

“Geeze, Quirky, that was so funny, I forgot to laugh.” We were having coffee in the booth by the front window. Seeing him again, I realized how much I’d missed him.

“So who
is
this lucky lady?”

The woman who’d sold him his car, he said.

“The Mustang widow? Really?”

She had telephoned him a few weeks after he bought it, he said. “Her stepson was cleaning out her garage for her and he found the ‘Stang’s mud flaps. Her husband had had them custom-made at some specialty shop. I think the guy might have been more of a Mustang lunatic than I am.”

“Yeah, but I’m sure you’d take him in the general lunatic cate
^gory.
”

“Shut up, asshole. Anyways, I drove over to Easterly to pick ‘em up, and she goes, ‘Do you want to stay for dinner? ’ I got there maybe four, four thirty in the afternoon and I didn’t leave until after eleven. She’s easy to talk to, you know? When you’re with her, you don’t even notice the time. Plus, she’s funny. Sarcastic, kind of. I don’t know, we just hit it off.”

“So Big Al’s romantically involved,” I said. “Thanks to mud flaps.”

“Hey, flap
this”
he said. “And it didn’t start out as a boyfriend-girlfriend thing either. It was more like, we were just two people talking, telling each other about our lives. Except now it’s kinda turned into something else.”

He said that after his father’s most recent mishap—it was the third time in six months that Al had had to rush down to Florida—he’d had some tough decisions to make. Had had to lay it on the line to his folks. He couldn’t keep trying to be in two places at once; he had the business to run. “And at night? After Ma and me would get back from the hospital and she’d go to bed? I’d call Dee on my cell. Just to talk to a friend, you know? And after I hung up, I’d feel better about things. Calmer, like. And this one night I called her, she was like, ‘Okay, I’ve done some research for you.’”

“Research about what?”

“Old people stuff: home health care, nursing homes, Medicare. She’s the one who found St. Joe’s for us, and believe me, Quirky, that place has saved my ass. Whether or not I’m gonna be able to save
this
place is another story. I can’t keep operating in the red every month. Hey, if I thought it would beef up business, I’d put my counter girls in thongs, you know? Hell,
I’d
wear one.”

“Them, maybe,” I said. “You? Nope.
Bad
move…. So your parents are okay with going into a nursing home?”

“They balked at first—my mother, especially. Didn’t want to go someplace where she’d have to live with a bunch of ‘old people.’ And the food thing: nobody can cook the way she can. But she’s getting used to it. And Pop, well, he just kinda goes with the flow. Doesn’t hurt that they got a chapel there, so Ma can walk down the hall to Mass every morning. And the priest they got there’s Italian. I
really
lucked out there.”

“And what’s Mama’s take on the girlfriend?”

“Likes her okay, I think. First time I brought Dee over there, Ma was giving her the evil eye. You know that Sicilian thing: anyone who’s not
famiglia’s
a little suspect. But Dee’s Catholic, so that helps. Picked up some points when she told Ma she went to parochial school. Her husband who died? That was her second marriage. I haven’t exactly mentioned to Ma that she and her first husband got divorced. Or that she’s a
lapsed
Catholic.”

“Well, what the old
signora
doesn’t know won’t hurt her,” I said. “But cut to the chase, will you? Have you and the widow, uh …?”

“Have we what?”

“Done the deed yet?”

“You writing a book, Quirky? Make that chapter a mystery.”

“Gee, lover boy’s blushing a little,” I observed. “I’d say that solves
that
particular mystery. So when do I get to meet your little honey?”

“Stick around,” he said. “She’s driving over later on. We’re gonna do Chinese, maybe see a movie. You wanna come with us?”

I declined the offer. Told him I’d swing by St. Joe’s in the next few days to see his folks. Al said if I wanted to see his mother, I could save my gas money. She was in the back. “Got her apron on and her pizelle iron fired up. It’s like she never left the place.”

And as if on cue, Mrs. Buzzi, all four-foot-ten of her, emerged, lugging the once-famous statue of the Blessed Virgin whose eyes, back in the seventies, had bled a map of Vietnam. “Alfonso!” she said. “What the hell you got this stuck in the back for? Put her in the front window where she belongs.”