Vicki tells me everything in a rush, her thoughts tangled, words tripping over each other. And I think to myself, She’s on meth again. This is meth talking. She says her son got into a car accident on the freeway, got a ticket for reckless driving, had his car impounded, owes hundreds of dollars in fees that he can’t afford, and if he doesn’t have a car, he can’t get to work or go to school. And this is the kid who was doing well. Her daughter is using, she says, either again or still, it’s not clear. She was in rehab and now isn’t. She is living who knows where. She might be with this guy she was arrested with awhile back, the arrest that landed her in the same prison as her mother. Or maybe she’s with someone else now. She is not answering Vicki’s texts.
I want to ask about Steve, who seems to be the constant in her chaotic life, but Vicki is already on to something else. She lost her job, she says in a rush. This isn’t the job she had when she first got out, a part-time gig organizing racks of vintage costumes in a warehouse. And it isn’t the one she had after that, a few shifts a week at a twenty-four-hour convenience store. This is—or was—a job at a bakery that sold gluten-free pies to local grocery stores. She told me about this job before, how she loved the work but hated the “drama:” the run-ins with fellow workers, personality issues, sniping, backstabbing, problems with the boss who she thought didn’t know how to run a business. And was a sexist. She had ideas to improve the product, but no one listened. Vicki says she was fired not long ago when business slowed down. But really, she says, she was fired because “I’m not a yes-girl. And I’ll never be a yes-girl.” This is pre-COVID-19. No one has even heard of COVID-19, although a few months from now it will be the only thing anyone talks about. But at the moment, unemployment rates are at an all-time low. Jobs are plentiful. Or rather, jobs are plentiful elsewhere, but not in the working-class, rural community she lives in—a community that has barely clawed its way out of the 2008 recession. And jobs are never plentiful for an ex-felon. Getting that full-time bakery gig, which actually used a skill she had learned in prison, had been a big win. She was proud of that job.
The story continues. She goes into the local unemployment office to sign up for benefits, and her claim is denied. She hadn’t worked at the job long enough. They told her she needed to have worked there a year to get benefits. “But I was in prison,” she says, her voice cracking. “How was I supposed to have been working at an outside job when I was in prison?” Now she is out of work, out of money. Her kids are messing up. Her life looks on the brink—and not of something good.
When we talk again a few days later, she tells me she now has a new job, something having to do with the census. I ask her if she’ll be going door-to-door. She says no, that this job involves traveling. Where, I ask? She doesn’t answer right away, which is odd because she rarely entertains silence in a conversation. Finally she says all she knows is that she’ll be “on the road.” To do what? I ask. She doesn’t seem to know. She says she’ll tell me more about it later. She’ll get me her schedule in a few days. Maybe she will be traveling up to where I live, and we can get together.
Several weeks go by without a word from Vicki. She’s busy with this new job, I think. Good for her. Then another week passes. I text a few times and get no response. Another week passes. And then I forget all about Vicki. There’s news of a soon-to-be-named new virus, with people reported sick and dying in China, France, Italy, Iran, Brazil, and then the United States. There’s an outbreak, the first of what will be countless others, in Seattle, where I was scheduled to teach. I cancel the trip. The virus spreads. Life changes, at first slowly, then with dizzying speed. People are hoarding toilet paper and baking sourdough bread.
Two months after Vicki told me about her new job with the census, I get an email from the head of the mentorship program at the reentry nonprofit that connected me and Vicki, who writes that Vicki wanted me to know that she has a new phone number. I feel an odd chill. People don’t change their phone numbers for no reason. And why wouldn’t she just reach out to me directly?
I immediately text the new number: “Is everything okay?”
“Can I call you?” she texts back. I’m in the middle of something. I ask if I can call her in an hour.
“Yes, call me.”
When I make the call, the connection is so bad that I can’t hear what she is saying. Her voice cuts in and out. But I can hear the tone of her voice. She is scared. She is just holding it together. But I don’t know what “it” is. In between the static, I hear her say that she is “in the middle of nowhere.” Then we lose the connection. I call again. This time, right before the line goes dead again, I hear her say that she’ll be somewhere with a better connection, a truck stop, in a half hour or so and will call me back.
I am sitting in my car in the rain when the call comes. “I did something very stupid,” she says. No preamble. “I did something very, very stupid.” There is a catch in her voice. “I made a very bad mistake,” she says. I want to know, but I don’t want to know. When you reclaim your life after twenty years in and out of prison, when you get clean after a lifetime of drug abuse, it is a fragile life you are living. But Vicki seemed to be doing pretty well. She had a home and a man who stuck by her. She was in the health-care system, getting the right meds for her ADHD and to ease the heroin withdrawal. She had a new job, a government job. It was temporary, like all the new hires for the census, but it was not some minimum-wage sinkhole like her other employment.
“I threw it all away,” she says, sobbing. Vicki has told me many things, many sad and bad things, but she has never before sobbed. I’ve seen her cry. I’ve seen the tears. I have never heard her cry. She cries for a while.
Then she starts to tell me what happened. She was at a friend’s house a few weeks ago, and there was, she says, a “quantity of drugs” there. The friend, or maybe it was a friend of that friend—when Vicki tells a story, she goes off on tangents that are hard to follow—says that they needed someone they could trust to sell the drugs. And Vicki says she will.
Just like that.
As far as I know, Vicki had never sold drugs before. She used drugs, but her crimes, at least the ones I know she served time for, were identity theft and forgery, stealing credit cards, paper crimes. But she had just been fired from the bakery job. Her application for unemployment benefits had been denied. Still, she had a home, and her boyfriend, now fiancé, was employed. So she couldn’t have been desperate for money. She answers my unasked question. “I don’t know why I said yes.” Now she is sobbing again, unable to continue. I listen to her weep. After a while she says, “It’s like, in a second, I reverted to my criminal way of thinking…without thinking.”
***
Vicki may not know why she said yes in that moment, but the literature of criminology provides clues. What she thought of as a thoughtless split-second decision might well have been the cumulative effect of being triggered. All around her, for months and months, were reminders of her previous life. From the rooms in her house to the streets of her town, the riverbank she walked collecting rocks, the convenience store she stopped in to pick up a cup of coffee—they were all “prompts,” conscious or unconscious, to remember and reexperience the past. Each was a temptation, an invitation. Researchers have identified these as environmental stimuli that trigger what they call a “cue-reactivity process.” How many times can you be cued before you respond? She could resist, be strong willed, for only so long. And then there were her old friends, her street family, the ones who had long been part of her criminal life. She saw them. They hung out where they always hung out. She didn’t really know anyone else, and making new friends, as an ex-felon, was an uncomfortable prospect. She had talked to me about the difficulty of navigating relationships. When do you tell someone who doesn’t know you about your past? And how do you tell them? And what do you risk by telling them? Or by not telling them? “I’m not ashamed of where I’ve come from,” she said to me once. “But that doesn’t mean I want everyone to know.” So those casual get-to-know-you conversations that people have when they are reaching out to others were not so casual for Vicki. It was easier to stick with the people who knew her.
And then there is what prolific researcher and criminologist Shadd Maruna called the “doomed to deviance” narrative. It is the story some ex-offenders tell themselves. In his work tracing the lives of those who had successfully reentered and those who had not, he found that repeat offenders were “not so much committed to a criminal lifestyle as they were resigned to it.” Ironically, he found that those who committed new crimes had a realistic view of their prospects and the challenges they faced. He concluded that, in reoffending, they found a kind of psychological shelter. “Intentionally failing may be less stressful on a person’s ego than trying to succeed and failing anyway.” Did Vicki think she was doomed to deviance?
Her drug addiction had been treated, maybe even successfully. But what caused it had not been. That kind of counseling was unavailable to her, and it took a lifetime. As one of the On the Outside researchers who tracked those reentering noted about a subject who seemed to be doing well and then faltered, “under the surface, things were beginning to unravel.” For Vicki, the surface was not that smooth anyway. The job loss was a blow. Her children were not doing well.
She took the drugs from her friend and peddled them for a week and a half. Then the cops showed up at her door. She doesn’t say that they had a warrant. She says that they “came and kicked in the door.” They found “a lot” of drugs in the house. I don’t ask what kind. It doesn’t matter. This next part of the story, told rapid-fire with Vicki’s signature combination of sidetracking and dead-ending, doesn’t quite make sense. She says the cops did not arrest her. They did not take her down to the police station and charge her with possession or intent to sell. She thinks it was because she told them she would give up her supplier. But even as she promised, she knew she wouldn’t.
“I could never do that,” she tells me. For a minute I think it is the “honor among thieves” thing, but then she says, “If I told, these people would go after my family. They would hurt my family.” After the cops leave, she begins making plans. All the thinking she should have done before saying yes to selling drugs she does now. She finds out, anonymously, from a local criminal defense attorney’s office, how much time she would be facing if convicted. With the quantity and type of drugs found at her house, with her history of criminal convictions and—to top it off—with the proximity of her house to a school, she is told that she would face a mandatory minimum of ten years. “I can’t do ten years,” she tells me. “I know what I can do, and I cannot do ten years.”
I shouldn’t say it, but it comes out before I can stop: “And you didn’t think about this before you said yes?”
“I know, I know. I blew it. I completely blew it. I ruined my whole life in a split second, that second I said yes. Everything I worked for. It’s gone.”
I have heard this awful lament before. One of the men in the prison writing group I facilitated lashed out in anger, fueled by alcohol and jealousy, his reptilian brain temporarily in command, and committed a terrible crime more than thirty years ago. In that second, he ended two lives, one of them being his own. Belinda, with no premeditation, had grabbed a knife and stabbed her pimp, changing the trajectory of her life for the next twenty-two years.
Vicki’s plan was to skip town. She had not been officially charged, and she wasn’t going to wait to see what happened. She had not yet been contacted to give up the name of her supplier, and she wasn’t going to wait for that either. She says there’s a statute of limitations on a warrant, should one be issued, of two years. If she can just “disappear” for two years, she will be able to come back home and be clear. She seems certain about this. She tells me that she spent the week after the cops broke in staying out of sight and making plans. As part of those plans, she concocts this fiction about getting a job, one that involves travel.
“What I told you about that census job?” she says. “That was all a lie.” There is no job. There never was a job. She made it up to explain, at least temporarily, to friends and family, why she would be taking off. And then she left. She is on the road. She is calling me from some truck stop somewhere. “My family doesn’t know. No one knows,” she says.
But now I know. And I do not want to know anything more. If I know, I can be asked. If I am asked, I will need to tell.
“You need to go back and turn yourself in,” I say, knowing that she won’t, but knowing this is what I should say. “If you tell them that you can’t make good on your promise to give up the distributor because you are afraid for your safety or your family’s safety…they’ve got to understand that, right? They’ll do something.” I don’t know what I’m talking about, of course. What I know about things like this comes from watching cop shows on television.
“No,” she says. “I can’t go back. I won’t go back. I just have to manage to keep out of sight for two years.” I try to dissuade her again, telling her how increasingly difficult it will be to move around now that state after state is instituting stay-at-home edicts, telling people they should leave their homes only for essential purposes, maybe even enforcing restricted movement by patrolling. We are in the first awful rush of the pandemic. But she thinks the pandemic will help her. “I’m not gonna be a priority for anyone,” she says. “No one’s gonna come looking for me. There’s too much else going on.” She is probably right.
I can’t know where she is or where she is going. But I want to know that she is safe. “You have someplace to be, right?” I ask. “You’re not just wandering?”
“Yes, I have someplace.”
I tell her to be safe. Then I delete all our text messages from my phone and block her new number. If I am asked, I don’t want to have anything to tell.