Visiting days at the Lakeville Correctional Institute were on Saturdays. Mom usually worked Saturdays, and she wasn’t going to go anyway, so I took the bus alone to go see my dad.
It was always a little surreal and sad in the waiting area. It was one of those institutional places—charcoal-gray tile, cheap metal and plastic chairs that squeaked awkwardly whenever anyone moved. Yellowish, fluorescent lighting that flickered occasionally and made most of us look like zombies. It was almost entirely women—some had brought kids. A couple of toddlers climbed up on the chairs, legs dangling, kept in check by their mothers’ phones.
Lakeville Correctional Institute was a minimum-security prison, mostly reserved for white-collar criminals or people determined not to be a flight risk. Since my father was about as dangerous as a blueberry muffin, he ended up here.
Unfortunately, he hadn’t created any animal-human hybrids. His crimes were more in the tax-evasion family of felonies, which are both the least interesting and least understood crimes. He wasn’t a mob boss, and I couldn’t use his crimes to intimidate anyone. He was a thief. Who did he steal from? Everybody, I guess. Even me.
Especially me.
I’m not sure when exactly his financial advising business had started failing. I never thought we were rich growing up—we had a house with a yard and a pool (in Minnesota the pool was available to swim in about six hours out of the year, so I guess that was an extravagance). We had the kind of life where I had the luxury of not worrying about things; everything happened by magic. It didn’t matter that my parents barely spoke to each other, or that we took vacations we couldn’t afford. I just kept going, and I had no idea that he had resorted to shady tax maneuvers to keep the thing afloat and did ill-advised things like folding our mortgage into the black hole that was his company finances.
Our life became a slow-motion plane crash. We could look out the windows and see that the wings were on fire and there were weird gremlins eating the plane as we were going down. So the only logical thing was to pretend that the ground wasn’t rushing up to meet us, keep spending money, and keep the throttle down. Maybe those gremlins would decide they were full and leave us alone.
At some point, my mom grabbed a parachute, ran for the back of the plane, and took a flying leap.
I was still falling.
I got to the visiting room first. I hated getting there first.
It was almost unbearable to be in the room. My face burned, and I felt my chest tighten and constrict, like I had swallowed a rock and it had gotten lodged in my heart. I opened and closed my hands, feeling them tingle ever so slightly, like I was having a minor heart attack.
I usually tried not to feel sorry for myself. I mean, what was the point? No one gave a shit and it didn’t help anyway. The key to surviving a disaster is keep your head down, not get too attached to anyone or anything, and gut your way through it with a sense of humor. That was the only way.
I had a flash of fear thinking about my dad—what was he going to look like this time? Had anything happened during the week?
Then I swallowed it, like I’d learned to do as a kid—you can make yourself stop crying if you get angry. And I had plenty to be angry about. Why had he done this? Why had he betrayed us?
The door opened and I heard his feet shuffle in. Slippers.
“Hey there, Squidney,” he said. Then I was hugging him, and I could feel his thin, strong body under the scratchy jumpsuit they made him wear.
His hair, which had never been long, was cropped short, a silvery speckle over his entire head. He’d started wearing glasses, round, dusty things that never got cleaned. But otherwise he was still my dad.
“Hi,” I managed, finally letting go.
He stretched out his pants and sat on the plastic chair.
“How ya doin?”
“Fine,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Started at a new school this week.”
I watched the news filter through his brain. He had probably forgotten all about it. “Ohh. Oh that’s right! Yeah, how’s that?”
Well, let’s see. I cussed out a teacher and everyone hates me and I’m not hot enough for Speech and Debate, apparently. Great first week, really.
“Um… it’s okay.”
“Good.”
“How are things with you?”
He took a moment. It was always like this now. The awkward silences that would build up and threaten to swallow any conversation or connection we might have. So many things were painful. How was it being in prison? Did I just ask that?
“Uh… I’m getting by. There’s a little library here, so I’m kind of working my way through that.”
“Reading anything good?”
He shook his head. “You know, it’s mostly self-help books and things, so—I guess maybe I could use some self-help, I don’t know.” He tried a smile.
I remembered him reading me bedtime stories as a kid, long past when I could’ve read them myself. He always had the greatest voices for the characters; sometimes he’d even make up his own stories. I don’t know if he wrote them down during the day or not, but they had seemed fascinating, tales of a gorilla and a bunny, something like that. It was hard to remember them now. It was hard to remember how we used to be.
Another silence.
“So tell me something good,” he said.
“I went to a basketball game this week.”
He perked up. “Oh?”
“One of my new friends is a jock.”
He coughed. “You could be a jock.”
“I’m not a jock.”
“You used to be really good at soccer—when you were like five.”
“Nobody’s good at soccer when they’re five. If you can stand on your own, you’re good at soccer when you’re five.”
“Well, you kept playing—not everyone keeps playing.”
“Dad, I single-handedly beat my own team freshman year.”
“That takes skill.”
“No, it takes the opposite of skill.”
“I still think you could be an athlete if you wanted to.”
“Yeah, well, your judgment is suspect.”
That stung. I didn’t even mean it to sting, but I could see him recoil. For a moment I thought about saying something else to soften it, but the words got caught in my throat.
Silence gathered between us. This always happened, like both of us were raw nerve endings and any pressure applied to the wrong spot caused excruciating pain. Say one wrong word, and the conversation died.
I looked at the floor again, then at the side of the room. Anywhere that wasn’t at him. Should I tell him about the dance tonight, or Mom and Luke, or the guy who was coaching the speech team?
No.
“Let me know if you need a shiv,” I joked.
He laughed. At least I could give him that.