Far too early in my twenty-year sentence to apply for parole, I’d just been denied a retrial, which was, in my view, my only way out before menopause. Even though I hadn’t honestly expected the courts to take my request seriously, I was bitterly disappointed. One thing that you have plenty of time to do in prison is reflect on the past. The endless “time-out.” Just sit there, young lady, and think about what you’ve done. So I was trying to figure out where my life had so egregiously gone off the rails, when the prison counselor suggested that I start writing my life down, like a memoir. “Sometimes seeing the words written down inspires an understanding of events.” She was full of wisdom, that one. So, I did. I was so bored, mostly spending my free time lying on my bunk and picking at my cuticles until my fingers bled. Otherwise, I wandered through the days in a funk, a cloud of despair the size of an island surrounding me. The writing may have used up some time, but it did nothing to dispel that funk; on the contrary, the more I examined my life, the deeper the funk became. It was hard some days to tell if it was fear, or grief, or anger, or regret that ruled my outlook. Some blend of each, I suppose. A perfect fusion of the dark emotions. And I was one of the lucky ones. Too many of my comrades were suffering from not just the loss of their freedom, whether through drugs or crime or bad boyfriends, but the wrenching loss of their children. When I first arrived, I dwelled upon the rift that had separated me from my family; but, almost four years in, I had come to understand that the separation from one’s child was far worse. They suddenly had no control over where their kids were, or with whom. The visiting hours were fraught with tears and acting out. Or silence as a child who has never lived with his mother treats her as a stranger.
My sixth roommate, Darla, was typical of the women I knew. Convicted of a nonviolent drug crime. In her case, as she put it, convicted of stupidity. She’d opened her home up to a brother who was a drug dealer. Of course, she told me, she had no idea he was a dealer, although she did know he was a user. When the police came and raided her house, she was swept up into the bust. Her children, a baby boy and a two-year-old girl, were absorbed into the foster-care system and she had been fighting to get them back ever since. Mandatory sentencing meant that she would not have her own children back until they were in middle school, and only then if the authorities released them to her—and there were no guarantees of that.
Some of the mommies were luckier, and their mothers or their aunts had their kids. Darla had no one and so hadn’t seen her babies since the day the Child Protective Services people wrested them from her arms.
Darla’s nocturnal weeping had kept me awake all night, so I was in a particularly black humor at work in the laundry. I was in no mood to chat, to laugh at the jokes that the other inmates got from their Wednesday-afternoon visitors. To hear the gossip about the creepy guard who liked to do pat-downs, who also traded bubble gum for hand jobs during count.
“You see this?” LaShonda handed me a flyer with its photo of a happy, panting Labrador retriever and bold lettering: Be a part of a new program. Learn how to train therapy dogs while serving your time.
“No. Where’d you get it?”
“That new counselor has ’em in her office. She thought I might like to try.”
The flyer gave very few details, only that candidates must have an impeccable record for two consecutive years to be considered. Well, I had that. In spades. In the forty-two months that I had been inside, I had accrued not one demerit. Never sent to segregation. Not one hair-pulling, screaming fight. Part of that was because I kept my head down and my mouth shut. The other was that I had no ambition. I stood my ground, but I didn’t challenge anyone’s authority, guard or inmate.
“Let’s do it.” LaShonda didn’t usually express excitement; she was more of a low-key kind of person.
“Me?”
“Yeah, you.”
Except for the occasional dog sent in for drug searches, I hadn’t seen a dog in years. I certainly hadn’t touched one. Not since Tilley. And the memory of her limp crushed body in my arms sent a jolt through me. I handed the flyer back to LaShonda. “I don’t think so.”
I lived “inside,” but not in a bubble. I’d heard about this kind of program before, one with male inmates and farm animals. The idea being that animals have a salutary effect on the hardened humans. I was not thoroughly hardened, but I had lost my ability to care. I was sad. I was lonely, LaShonda notwithstanding, and we really were together only during work hours. The unspoken inmate protocol was that like gathered with like, so I wasn’t invited to sit at her table in the dining room, and I would never presume. You learn the subtle signals in prison or you don’t survive. Your kind isn’t welcome here.
“It’ll be fun, Rosie. Come on.”
“I can’t.”
“Don’t you like dogs?”
“I do.” Suddenly I felt tears forming. I sniffed them back. What had happened to my little Tilley had everything to do with why I was here at Mid-State.
My Newbury Street haircuts were now a regular appointment, and afterward Charles always pulled me into one of the high-end clothiers that lined the street, so now my workout clothes were Lululemon and my shoes came from Italy or England. Even the most fashion-forward of my college friends would have been hard put to develop a collection like the one that Charles’s munificence afforded me. It helped, he said, that I seemed to be built to wear these expensive clothes and that dressing in down-market rags was such a crime. His words. I turned in my beloved Levi’s for True Religion.
Speaking of religion, that was another quirk of mine that Charles preferred I let go. He grew demonstrably uncomfortable whenever I mentioned that I’d gone to Mass with my mother. He texted me during Christmas Eve service, although he knew that I would be in church at that time. A sexy text. Like the rest of my generation, I couldn’t not look at it, even as the priest glanced my way. The Fosters and their forebears were nominally Protestant, and paid a little lip service to the notion. They could recite the Lord’s Prayer, knew a few hymns, and could follow the Book of Common Prayer through important funerals without getting lost. I thought that as long as they lived by the idea of doing right, being kind, that was okay. It wasn’t as important to go to church as to live the ideals. Which, of course, they didn’t.
The point is, I was getting a taste of the good life. And I liked it. But that taste came with a price. One that my mother noted.
“That another new coat?” My mother was peeling potatoes over the kitchen sink. She wore her usual at-home uniform, a pair of Wrangler jeans saggy in the bottom, and a short-sleeved cotton shirt that had seen better days. If she left the house, she’d swap out this outfit for a venerable pair of black pull-on pants and a blue blouse complete with a bow. And, always, on her feet a pair of black Naturalizers. She was a fashion plate, that’s for sure. Teddy was there, working slowly on a jigsaw puzzle that I believed had been on the edge of the kitchen table for two years. It took him as much effort to place a piece in that puzzle as it might have taken someone else to sink a basket from mid-court.
“Yes, it is. Do you like it?” Charles had given me a trench-style coat, perfect for mid-spring in New England. The material, a heavy silk cotton, felt lovely between the fingers. The color was khaki, a nod to the military antecedents of the style. I spun like some girlie-girl to show how the skirt of the coat flared.
“Don’t care much for the color, but it suits you.” She set the peeler down and wiped her hands on a paper towel. “Do you know anything about this?” She handed me an envelope, the top of it destroyed by someone’s careless opening of it.
I looked at it, noted the letterhead with an impulsive smile, and pulled the letter out, completely bewildered at why my boyfriend’s firm would be writing to my mother and father. I won’t lie; it crossed my mind in that split second before unfolding the letter that Charles was asking for my hand in a most formal manner, a very Jane Austen moment quickly blasted by the real purpose of the letter. An offer on their house. A lowball offer. It seemed as though Wright, Melrose & Foster, Charles’s firm, had designs on this down-at-the-heels section of Bunker Hill, this last bastion of the struggling classes.
My parents’ house wasn’t one of those granite and brick antique town houses that appear to have grown out of the ancient pavement rather than having been built. There was no charm to it, a simple two-story frame house fighting for balance at the midpoint of the hill on which it stood, flanked on either side by a house just like it. Brown-with-tan trim. Flaking paint. Semidetached gutters. The three houses faced their future across the narrow street. On the other side of the street, where three houses built in the same era and the same style as my parents’ house had been, now stood an architect-designed apartment building with a façade that mimicked the granite and style of the antique and well-preserved town houses. This building towered over the cowering houses across from them, their penthouse dwellers forced to suffer the view. I was at college when those houses were bought and cleared away. Over the course of the four years I was in school, the six-story building grew up, casting its shadow into my childhood bedroom.
My mother had served corned beef and cabbage for Charles’s first, and only, meal chez Collins. It was so trite. If I had been home when she began to cook, I would have convinced her to make something less stereotypical. Plus, it made the house smell like a nineteenth-century tenement. It did occur to me that she was doing up the Irish for Charles’s benefit. Not to impress, but to remind him of my origins. In her own way, my mother could be as much of a snob as Cecily Foster.
We pulled up in an Uber. Parking on our street being as difficult as it was, Charles could hardly be expected to shim his mint 1968 Chevy Camaro into a tight space. To say nothing—and, to his credit, he didn’t—about the vulnerability of a vintage car. Just the curiosity factor alone would have been a problem.
Charles was still dressed in his workaday clothes, which is to say, a fashionably tailored charcoal gray suit, a crisp white shirt that looked like he’d just put it on, and a tasteful tie. The only suggestion that he wasn’t going into a board meeting was that he’d loosened the tie. I was, on the other hand, just off shift, still in my black jeans and white work blouse, still smelling of expensive coffee. I scampered up the steps to the front door and waited as Charles remained on the sidewalk. He was looking at the house, and I had that elevator-drop feeling. Maybe he was going to cut and run. He didn’t. He came up the steps, keeping his hands at his sides, not touching the flaking wrought-iron railing.
In the inimitable Collins family way, every single one of my brothers had shown up to meet “the new guy.” I was screwed. There was the array, all five of them managing to be in the living room at the same time, looking like the Patriots had fielded half the offensive line. To cap it off, the patriarch himself, Bert Collins.
If Charles felt like he’d walked into a scrum, he didn’t show it. There is something to be said for good manners, and my boyfriend quickly put out a hand to my father and gave him a good manly shake. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Collins.” Charles was a veteran of high-powered meetings and he didn’t underestimate this one. He looked my dad in the eye.
“Call me Bert.”
For one exceedingly brief moment, I thought we’d be okay.
Any other boy I’d brought home was treated as if already part of the family. Teased and fed. Invited to sit on the couch and watch the game. Threatened with gelding if he should go too far with me. Charles was so very different from my other boyfriends. The boys from my teenage crushes were just like my family; they came from people like us. And they were exactly that, boys.
Within fifteen minutes, the common language of men petered out. Charles’s interest in sports was limited to lacrosse and sailing. He was not conversant with mechanics. He knew the stats on his car, but not the workings. Politics, well, we just skipped that topic altogether.
However, as Mom served up the corned beef—Charles declined the cabbage—the talk turned to real estate. Paulie was finally at the point where he was hoping to buy a house and bemoaning the lack of affordable housing stock.
“Hey, Charles, you’re in real estate. Got any advice?”
“I’m not in sales. I’m in property development.”
“So, you build?”
Charles took a small bite of meat. “Our firm handles large-scale corporate projects.”
“So, no dumpy little houses?” This from Paulie.
“No. Sorry.” Charles neatly laid his knife and fork across his half-full plate. A man with no appetite, another black mark. “We deal in the millions.”
“So, who’s for dessert?” I stood to clear the plates. “Mom’s made her famous Jell-O cake.”
As soon as I helped Mom clear up, moving as fast as I could so as not to leave Charles alone with the brothers too long, we got ready to leave. Dad was in the bathroom, I remember, and we could hear him coughing. He’d been doing this for so long that it had become part of the sound track of our lives, but I could see Charles wince at the gross noise. It was pretty ugly, and just how ugly, we would find out soon enough.
Charles did not put out his hand to say good-bye to my father. I noticed that Dad didn’t put out his, either.
“Thank you for a lovely meal, Mrs. Collins.”
“Wish you’d enjoyed it more.” Mom didn’t mince words.
Dad opened the door. Stood there like a sentry, waiting to see the back of this high-flown suitor. I could hear the television in the background, the brothers hunkered down to watch a game.
“It was lovely. I’m a man of small appetite.”
Mom harrumphed and left us at the door. To leave food on one’s plate in our household was an insult. I knew that Charles was going to be a hard sell from now on.
“Oh, Mr. Collins?”
“Yeah?”
“Just curious. How much did you pay for this house?”
Dad shut the door behind us.
Charles took my hand as we waited outside for the Uber. “I want to show you something.” He walked me across the steep, narrow street. “See that?” He pointed to a plaque, fixed by brass bolts into the granite beside the Federal-style front doors of the new apartment building. WRIGHT, MELROSE & FOSTER DEVELOPMENT COMPANY. “That’s ours.” He sounded so proud, as if he were showing me something very personal, an accomplishment.
“No. I’m sure it’s nothing he knows about.” How easily I could fool myself. The trench coat was so very warm in this steamy kitchen, and I took it off, revealing my workaday barista uniform. “I mean, sure, he has to know about the idea, but not that they’ve sent this letter. I’ll bet he’ll be mad.” I grasped for reason, for sense. If Charles and/or his company were scouting our area for such a project, wouldn’t he have at least mentioned it to me? It would seem not. So I decided that this was just some upstart in his company firing off letters without his knowledge. But even as I thought that, I knew that there was nothing that Charles didn’t know about in his real estate world. He fielded phone calls at all hours and no matter what we were doing. Terse with underlings, fearless with senior partners.
“Call him, Rosie. Ask him what’s going on.” Teddy pushed away from the table. “I don’t want to move.”
“Nobody’s moving, Teddy. I promise.” The first of oh so many unkeepable promises. “This is just somebody’s fishing expedition. Besides, there’s no law against saying thanks but no thanks.” Was there? Who says no to progress? To Charles?
My phone was in the pocket of my nice new trench coat from Donna Karan.
Charles almost never answered during the day, but this time he did. Almost as if he knew I’d be calling once I got home. “Hey, babe.” His voice did not sound like that of a man determined to make his girlfriend’s parents homeless.
“My mom got a letter from Wright, Melrose & Foster.”
“Really?”
“Something about buying up all the houses on this street. Their house.”
“We want to complete our multiphase project.”
“So you do know something about this letter? Did you send it?”
“No.”
“Is this cast in stone, this project?”
“Not stone, exactly. There are any number of players in the mix. Any number of variables. First steps.”
“Okay. So, what should they do with this letter?”
A pause while I could hear Charles speak to someone in the office. “Just have them toss it.”
“Thanks.”
“For now.”
It happened during count, when every inmate must go to her “room” and wait to be enumerated by one of the cadre of guards who perform this task. It could be a dangerous time for us, depending on the guard, depending on his mood. I was alone in my room, Darla having been sent to the infirmary with a bad cold. He stood there, staring in at me framed by the open cell door. A big guy. Officer Tierney. Either he was lazy or he thought a scruff was attractive. He stared at me and smiled. “What if I leave this door unlocked and you come on down to the closet?” The closet was a utility closet, where I knew that certain assignations took place. I shook my head no. “I got something you might want, you know, in exchange for a little favor.” He pulled a tampon out of his pants pocket. “Whole box where this came from.” He put the tampon back in his pocket, then slowly unzipped his fly. “Ten minutes in the closet with your mouth and I’ll give you two. Ten minutes with your pants down and you’ll get the whole box.”
None of my choices were good. If I rejected him, he could send me down to seg on some trumped-up charge; if I accepted, he’d expect more favors. Either way, I had to live with myself. I looked like everyone else in the place—that is, faded, sloppy, and desperate—and I don’t know why he thought I was a good target that day, except that Darla wasn’t there. Maybe he thought I was lonely; after all, I never had visitors. Maybe it was the Irish thing, him a boyo and me a lass. The idea of this great ugly man touching me made my skin crawl, and I declined as casually as I could. “Thanks, but I’m going to have to say ‘No thank you.’” I waited. I pulled a People magazine off Darla’s shelf. I began to flip pages, as if he weren’t standing there, my door unlocked, the rest of the guards busy with count.
“I’m gonna leave the door as is. Think about it.” He moved away, but his eyes were still on me.
Our guards, not all, but enough of them, were effectively predators in a buffet of small mammals—small, deprived, and extremely vulnerable mammals. As I sat there, shaking, I saw the long corridor of my bleak future, fending off this kind of threat. Maybe not being able to fend it off with a guard a little more determined. I was lucky, I suppose, that this was the first time I’d been propositioned, and I knew that that mercy had more to do with my race than with my lack of allure. Most of the guards were white and they mostly preyed on the black girls.
I lay awake that night, not just because Darla was back from the infirmary and still coughing her lungs out. Every sound from the corridor twanged against my nerves. How was I ever going to get through sixteen more years of this? The sameness, the fear, the boredom, the hopelessness. The physical deterioration and intellectual stunting. What evil would Tierney visit upon me for my rejection of him?
When I did finally fall asleep, I dreamed of a dog. A large shape, shaggy fur, kind eyes. In my dream, the dog stood over me as I lay on a wide, soft bed. In my dream, I felt safe.
I walked over to the table where LaShonda and her girls were having breakfast. “Let’s go talk to the warden.”
Warden Don Hinckley always reminded me of Tom Hanks’s soccer ball companion, “Wilson,” in that movie about being stranded on a desert island. Like the ball, Warden Hinckley was a little deflated, smooth-cheeked, and always had the same expression on his face—something between meditative and explosive. When he pulled his heavy black-framed glasses off his face, he wanted you to know that he was paying attention to you, sometimes not in a good way. This time, he snapped them off and nodded. “Okay, I’ll put your names in for the program.”
“And then what happens?” LaShonda stood like a good soldier standing at ease, hands behind her back, chin up.
Hinckley slid his glasses back on. “I guess they’ll interview you. If you appeal to them, you’ll get dogs. Puppies. I really don’t know that much about it; not really sure I’m okay with it, but, hey, if it rehabilitates inmates, I’m not going to stand in your way. As long as they don’t crap all over the place.” He waved us off, smoothing his ubiquitous red tie. When I first arrived at Mid-State, I thought he was making a political statement; later, I realized that the warden was as color-deprived as the rest of us.
We walked out of his office, suppressing girlish giggles. “You ready for some rehabilitation?” I shouldered LaShonda; she bumped me back.
“You ready to be pickin’ up dog crap?”
In college, the first three years flew by and I was suddenly a senior. In prison, not so much. There aren’t any benchmarks. No freshman, sophomore, junior designations that mark off the years toward the accomplishment of graduation. You don’t graduate from prison. If you’re lucky, you get paroled. The seasons lumber by, marked only by the heat or the cold, the sad, limited decorations for the holidays; the arrival of new fresh-faced guards and the departure of the hardened, cynical old-timers taking early retirement.
So now, at the end of my fourth year of incarceration, I might finally have something to look forward to every day. A real purpose to fill my endless empty days.