Love in Florida

The letter said only: Come see me.

She didn’t have to sign it. I would have known Betty Sue’s handwriting anywhere. Sitting in my living room, floating on the humid tide of summer air, sweat in my beard, sweat sticking my clothes to the chair, I turned the envelope over in my hands. I ran my fingers over the crinkled line of her cursive, then sniffed the paper. A faint antiseptic tang.

Betty Sue had mailed it to me from the Homestead Correctional Institution, a women’s prison at the southernmost tip of Florida. I knew she had been incarcerated there for a few years now. I hadn’t talked to her in a decade, but I kept up with the local gossip back home. The fact of Betty Sue’s imprisonment had taken our small town by storm. Everyone was shocked; nobody was surprised. Hadn’t she always been a brat? Remember the plate-smashing tantrum she threw as a five-year-old in Millie’s Diner? Remember her penchant for shoplifting in middle school?

I could not picture Betty Sue as a full-grown woman, let alone an inmate, behind bars. I had not seen her since the age of thirteen. That was when I loved her.

○

Picture this:

Two scrawny kids fighting on the lawn. Betty Sue and I grew up in the muddiest, ripest corner of the armpit state of Florida. In my memory, I wear denim overalls with a rip in the knee. My hair is a mess, dirt on my neck; I probably haven’t showered in a week and a half. I remember Betty Sue’s pigtails, as skinny as garter snakes, lashing around her shoulders. Her cheeks are flushed. She scoops up a handful of mud and flings it into my face. Direct hit. Two figures catapult sideways, into the bushes.

If you look past this image, you will see the house where I was raised. A mildewed porch. A blue-painted door. The walls hold one another up like a group of drunks heading home from the bar. The roof is beaten in. A tree branch fell years ago, and the breach has been patched inexpertly. It drips in the rain. My family is used to navigating around the rotten, mossy floorboards and stagnant pools of water.

No one is home. My older sister clerks at the drugstore during the day and waitresses at night. I scarcely ever see her—a thin figure slipping past my room before dawn, hair drawn back in a severe ponytail. She’s working her way out of here. My mother cleans houses for rich people. My father is a track laborer on the railways, making it home for one week out of every five or six. And I—Silas Warner, off school for the summer—tackle Betty Sue Sullivan, the only child my age within a three-mile radius, into the dirt and pin her down with both hands.

“Say uncle.”

She narrows her eyes. “Screw you.”

Her breath is short. I’m sitting on her solar plexus. A crimson blush spreads up her freckled throat like the stain of sunset. I can feel her heart whanging against the cage of my thighs. Suddenly concerned—she could die there, her eyes fluttering, her lips going blue—I slither off her torso. Betty Sue rolls away, holding her gut and coughing.

“I won,” she gasps. “I won.”

Even now, all these years later, the smell of a coming storm still does it to me. The heaviness in the air before it rains. The rank musk of adolescent sweat. Pearly skin spattered with freckles. Green eyes wide beneath the thunder.

○

After a week of thinking, I wrote her back. I told her no.

I had my reasons. Work obligations. A brand-new baby. The pregnancy had been hard on Jasmine. She had always been an elegant woman, pale and self-possessed, like a lily rising from still water. She wanted children—we both did—but she was not prepared for what would be required of her to gestate and birth one. She would have preferred to do it like Zeus, knocking a hole in her skull to bring forth a fully formed, adult offspring.

Instead, she vomited into the toilet every morning for the full nine months. Her feet and ankles swelled. Her belly became a glistening globe, striped with stretch marks. I still found her beautiful, but when she looked in the mirror, she seemed to see something less than human, a fecund, slobby animal. Giving birth—the pain, the blood, the indignity of her own nudity, the touch of strangers’ hands on her skin—left her raw and bewildered. Even breastfeeding went against her nature. These days, she tended to trail around the house in a shapeless robe, the baby on her hip, her face blank. She still used animal terms to refer to herself. Fat as a whale. Milked like a cow.

And so I replied to Betty Sue with a no. A gentle no. Not just now, maybe one day, if only. At the mailbox, I dusted off my hands.

○

That same night, the baby woke me with his gut-wrenching screams. I kicked out and muttered, “Betty Sue.” The image was hot and blurred: a yellow bathing suit, wet pigtails, the splash of a river. I had not dreamed about her in years.

Then came the incident at Danny’s Rental. My job required me to be personable, curious, and unflappable. Your child peed in the back seat? No problem, we have a protocol for that. Your dog jumped up on the side door and left scratches in the paint? No problem, I’ll refer you to my manager. The engine won’t start? The oil light’s on? No problem, no problem at all.

Beneath the buzz of fluorescent lights, I stood sweating through my shirt, the phone cupped against my ear.

“Yes,” I was saying. “Thursday. A minivan.” I looked down, and there, in my notepad, I had printed in emphatic letters: Betty Sue. Betty Sue. Betty Sue.

She haunted me. Later that week I sat alone at the kitchen table, a beer at my elbow. It was a Saturday night, and the house was blessedly silent for once. Jasmine had taken herself and the baby off to her mother’s for the evening.

Then I heard a light footfall on the stairs. I got up to check, but I was alone in the house, only my own shadow moving. As soon as I sat back down at the table, though, I heard it again. Trip-trip-swish. No one walked that way but Betty Sue in a mood.

She haunted me in the garden when I dug up weeds to suit my wife’s taste. During her pregnancy, Jasmine had become enamored with tomatoes, and our backyard was a minefield of swollen orbs. I crouched in the dirt, my body gritty and fly-bitten, broiling red in the Florida sun. Jasmine knelt beside me, worrying away with her spade. The baby lay in his basinet. His eyes were open, staring up at the toss of tree branches. I sat back, removed my hat, and felt a wind touch my nape. A teasing breath. Betty Sue blowing sharp between her teeth.

She haunted me in the slow drift toward sleep. She haunted me when I leaned my forehead against the window of a pickup in the parking lot of Danny’s Rental. She haunted me at the seashore, where Jasmine stood on the sand, laughing and clapping, as I, waist-deep, spun my bubble-bright, hilarious son in a circle above my head. Wallace had only recently begun to laugh. His mouth was as wide as it could go.

Betty Sue haunted me when my wife brushed her sugar-soft hands over my back. She haunted me as I met Jasmine’s eyes in the dark bedroom. She haunted me as I made love to my wife for the first time in months, as I entered her dry and delicate body and felt her arch underneath me, a cry caught in her throat.

○

In childhood, Betty Sue and I lived at the edge of a swamp, not far from the Everglades. Her house and mine were separated by vines, creepers, and mud. There were tree trunks slimy with moss, quicksand pools, and turtles the size of your stomach. There were bobcats in the underbrush—noiseless, watchful creatures that melted away between the leaves but left their fish-smell on the wind.

My house was situated in an uncertain clearing that my father always intended to mow when he was home but rarely did. Betty Sue’s house, half a mile away as the crow flies, could have been on the far side of the moon. There was no safe passage through the marsh. You had to walk the long way: three miles across the parched curves of the country road.

And we did, Betty Sue and me. During the sweltering summer days, she would wander into my yard with her hands in her pockets, feigning casualness, as though she had stumbled upon the place by accident. I never knew when she would appear, so I kept one eye on the road, pretending even to myself that I did not care if she came. Eventually, if she did not turn up, I would walk the miles to her house instead, grumbling all the way.

Things were never amicable between us. We argued about everything from her overuse of the word like to my obsession with baseball stats to her father’s drinking to the future of the great state of Florida when the oceans inevitably rose. We dared each other to dangerous feats, walking the eaves of the roof or teasing the alligators. Often we came to blows. Even when we were really too old to be rolling in the mud, we needed to make contact and it was the only way we knew. We snapped and sparred until we grew tired. Then she would leave, or I would, striding away as though this time were the last time, never acknowledging that we would meet again the next day, and the day after that, seeking each other out unerringly and unwillingly, driven by loneliness and yearning and the strange, prickly electricity of our bond.

Alone in my bedroom at night, I would hear her. As I lay on the bare mattress on the floor, I gazed at my treasures: a jar of sea glass, a four-foot snakeskin, an alligator tooth, and the dirty magazines I’d stolen from my father. All of these things—and me—were transformed by the moon, made fantastic, blue-tinged, deeply shadowed. I listened to the snores of my mother in her room next door. I listened to the restless shuffle of my sister on the other side as she doffed one work uniform and donned another. I listened to the patter of mice inside the wall.

From across the forest, between the dark tufts of reeds, beneath the creak of branches and the gusting of the wind, I listened to Betty Sue. Her sniffle and sigh. Her fingers tangling in the blanket. The blink of her eyes. Her cough. The expansion and contraction of her rib cage. The flutter of her dreaming brain.

○

After sending my letter, I intended to return to the state of poignant nostalgia that had characterized my relationship with Betty Sue for so many years. My childhood crush. My first love. A fond memory.

But I couldn’t help myself. Every day, as soon as I returned from Danny’s Rental, I would shuffle the mail like a deck of cards. Jasmine, shambling by in her dressing gown, tugging a used Kleenex from her sleeve to blow her nose, did not notice my agitation. Each day that passed without a letter from Betty Sue wound my nerves a little tighter. I had told her not to write back, but surely she wouldn’t take me at my word. She never had before.

Two years earlier, I had heard about her incarceration during one of my visits home. My mother was the one to tell me, dropping this bit of news as a casual aside in the middle of dinner. I sat stunned, feeling the blood in my ears, not hearing a word of the rest of the conversation.

Jasmine was with me. Before Wallace was born, we traveled to my hometown every few months, driving four hours across Florida, north to south. My wife always handled these trips well. She was skilled at adjusting her conversation to meet people at their own level. She would sit beside my father in his recliner, ignoring the miasma of cigar smoke, listening as he rambled on about the technical elements of a piston engine. She would watch soap operas with my mother, exhibiting every sign of enjoyment. She would gaze at pictures of my sister, now a flight attendant, groomed and immaculate in her blue uniform, the family’s success story. Jasmine would comment on her poise, one hand fumbling for mine to give me a reassuring squeeze.

But that visit was different. I spent most of it in a state of shock. Whenever Jasmine was out of earshot, I would draw my mother aside and try to extract more information. What else had she heard about Betty Sue? What exactly was the word on the street? Could she repeat the whole thing from the beginning?

My mother was frustratingly short on specifics. In her customary manner, hesitant and uncertain, she nattered and apologized. She had heard something about it from a neighbor, who had heard something from the postman, who knew Betty Sue’s mother’s cousin. Actual details were few and far between.

During the remainder of my visit home, I tried to ask around. The gas station attendant said grand theft auto. The clerk at the grocery store informed me it was possession with intent to sell. The librarian murmured it was murder, cold-blooded murder. Nobody knew for sure. The consensus around town seemed to be that Betty Sue was a bad seed, and it had just been a matter of time until she found her way to a sorry end.

But I knew better. That was the distortion of hindsight—people shaping events in retrospect to fit a particular narrative. Hadn’t we both been feral children, dirt-poor, raising ourselves at the edge of a swamp? I could easily have been the one who went astray, and everyone would have said the same about me, as though they’d known all along that I was no good.

In retrospect, I could have done more to find out what crime Betty Sue actually committed. The full story was doubtless a matter of public record. I suppose that when push came to shove, I didn’t really want to know.

○

Two weeks after I mailed my letter, the phone rang in the middle of a Saturday afternoon. Jasmine and I were drowsing in bed, taking the advice of every parenting book and sleeping when the baby slept.

“You get it,” my wife snorted into her pillow. It was the landline, which we kept only for emergencies; Jasmine’s parents, in particular, had trouble with the whole concept of cellular technology. The night table was on her side. I lunged across her body, took up the phone, and fell back against my pillow.

Someone was already speaking, an electronic voice: “—a collect call from the Homestead Correctional Institution. Will you accept—”

“Yes, yes,” I said.

The air changed, charged with tension. Sunlight played through the curtains, casting shifting patterns of glow and shadow on the wall.

“Silas,” a voice whispered.

Jasmine seemed to have gone back to sleep, snoring beneath her cloud of dark hair. Perhaps she had never really woken up.

“Betty Sue,” I said.

She laughed. “You recognized my voice!”

“Oh, honey,” I said. “Oh, kid. You calling me from prison?”

“That I am.”

I laid a hand on the plane of Jasmine’s shoulder blades to steady myself.

“How’d you end up there?” I said. “I never heard.”

“It’s none of your beeswax.”

“Did you steal something? Remember that time in the Five and Dime, with the lipstick? I always told you—”

“I don’t want to talk about it. We don’t talk about it here.”

I bit my lip, deciding not to push. Betty Sue inhaled, a familiar sound, quick and impatient.

“Is your wife there?” she said. “Right there?”

“She’s napping.”

“Married man,” she said.

“And a kid. Wallace. My baby boy.”

“Oh, hush.”

A silence fell between us. I could feel her—lithe limbs, hard knees, clambering into my lap.

“I’m in this ugly room,” she said. “The wall is an awful color. Beige. Not really a color at all. There’s another inmate with me. She’s waiting to use the phone. She’s got her eyes on me but she isn’t really listening.” Betty Sue’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Nobody’s really listening, Silas.”

“I’m listening. I wish I could take you away from there.”

She laughed. “Oh no. They ain’t never gonna let me out.”

There was a moment of stillness. When her voice returned, it was so low and urgent that I flinched. Her breath touched my ear.

“You’ve got to visit me,” she said.

“What?”

“You get yourself here. You have to—”

I lost her again. The line clattered with static.

“What’s happening?” I said desperately, forgetting to keep my voice low. Jasmine jerked in bed, kicking a foot clear of the sheets.

“—got to go,” Betty Sue said. “They’re making me—”

“What?” I gripped the phone in both hands. “Are you there?”

She was gone. I could tell by the quality of the silence, but still, I waited for a good long stretch with the phone to my ear, listening to nothing.

○

The drive seemed endless. Wallace, colicky, squirmed in his car seat. His face was red, mouth distended, hands working like sea anemones. I watched him in the rearview mirror.

Jasmine sat beside me, radiating a kind of martyred grace. The night before, I had told her about Betty Sue. I told her everything, and Jasmine listened with her head cocked to the side. In a strange way, her reaction reassured me. Yes, she was angry about my deception, suspicious of my motives. But she told me she would come along, and I said thank you, yes, I needed her there.

The drive took nearly six hours. We lived near the Georgia border, as far from the Homestead Correctional Institution as you could get without leaving the state. The highway shimmered with mirages, the broiling asphalt casting up warped reflections of the cloudless sky. The car’s air conditioner whined and sputtered in a feeble protest. Beneath my wife’s honey scent and the diaper-and-flour odor of the baby, I caught the sting of cigarettes, fused deep into the seat fabric, from the days before I’d quit. Jasmine had done that, weaning me off the smokes with her patented brand of reasoned argument. It was one of many painful gifts she had given me.

Florida rolled out before us, hot and forsaken. Roadkill lay crushed on the melting tar. Clumps of identical houses were clustered like patches of mushrooms. Children with dirty legs played by the side of the highway. As the merciless sun climbed the sky, the moon followed us, refusing to set on schedule. A ghostly silhouette against the blue, it hung in my window like a stopwatch, counting how many years, days, and hours it would take me to finally quit betraying Betty Sue.

○

We made love only once, Betty Sue and me, at the tender age of thirteen. We were both too young for it, but when we learned that she would be moving away—when her father took a new job in Grand Landing—we met in the forest one last time. We were both angry at the situation, scuffing our feet, hands jammed into our pockets. We did not know how to end our difficult relationship. There wasn’t a word for what we were to each other.

I kissed her first. It was a strange little bump, our mouths colliding. She stepped back and stared at me, astonished. I waited for a slap, for her to turn to the side and spit on the ground.

Instead she flew into my arms, weightless and glimmering. It didn’t last long. We peeled off half our clothes and lay down among the weeds, my hands shaking as she buried her cry of pain in my shoulder.

Even now, I remember every moment of it, every shift, every inhalation. The line of her jaw. The way her fingers dug into my forearm, marking five perfectly round bruises that lingered for days. When it was over, we rolled apart, wide-eyed and scared. Betty Sue had leaves in her hair. There was a streak of blood on her inner thigh. I could not move. I lay in the grass, feeling as though God himself had reached down and pinned me to the earth, like a butterfly stuck to a corkboard backing.

○

Picture this:

I am standing in a room that is not exactly a color. Tables dot the space, the air charred fluorescent. There are women in orange clothing strewn in plastic chairs, conversing in low voices with friends and family.

Jasmine stands outside the door, the baby on her hip. In the lobby. In safety. Through the square, scratched window in the door, her gaze is fixed on me like a laser, her expression unforgiving. The glass frames her and Wallace like a portrait in a museum: Madonna and Child, Plagued by Lunatic Husband.

Trip-trip-swish. A woman in orange dashes toward me. She still wears pigtails, now threaded with gray. I stumble at the sight of her. She sprints to the nearest table and stops on the other side, panting. We are not allowed to touch. Her grin is as bright as ever, though one tooth has yellowed, beginning to rot. She is giggling and crying at the same time, no tears, only breath too big for her little torso, rocking in her chest like wings.

Overlaid with this, I can still see the child I knew. Same height, same build. Same face, though the skin is weathered now. Same glittering eyes.

I sit down, keeping to my side of the table. I do not allow my fingers to wander. Betty Sue mirrors me. I send a reassuring glance to Jasmine, noting that her shoulders have relaxed. I understand: it is a relief for her to see the reality of things, a human being, flesh and blood, no siren with magical powers, no seductive minx, no rival. Jasmine bounces the baby, who has begun to fuss, and turns away.

Betty Sue begins to talk a mile a minute, just as she always did. She tells me about her father, who recently passed from cirrhosis. She tells me about learning to play basketball in the prison yard. I tell her about my mother’s increasing addiction to soap operas. I tell her about my father’s promotion on the railways. Betty Sue knots her hands together. Her fingers are chapped, her nails bitten down to the quick. This is small talk, breezy conversation, yet somehow it makes my head swim. Her brother. My sister. Her memories of our old neighborhood. I tell her how the place has changed. We can’t shut up long enough to draw breath. She waits until the guard is looking away, then strikes my shoulder to make a point. I’m gesturing with both hands, trying to shape my life in front of her. Here, the house. Here, the big tree in the yard. Here, my family. Her whole face follows every movement, drinking me in with affection and hunger, a lover who has missed me with every breath, a bird eyeing a worm.

Underneath all these things, another conversation takes place in silence. I tell her I always loved her. I tell her good-bye. With her eyes, she says the same back to me. We never got to say these things when we were kids. We didn’t know how.

○

That was the last time I saw her. We did sustain a written correspondence for a while; we gave it our best shot. Every few weeks, an envelope would turn up in the mailbox. By that time, Jasmine found the whole thing amusing. “Another letter from your girlfriend in prison!” she would cry. A page or two of misspellings and cross-outs. Nothing intimate or revelatory. The epistolary equivalent of chitchat. It would take me a few weeks to accumulate enough words for a reply. The span of time between call and response got longer and longer on both sides.

I had other things on my mind. Jasmine was herself again. She read late into the evening, cooked her special pasta, and listened to jazz. She gazed at the baby with a satisfied glow in her cheeks. I had missed her. I took her out to fancy dinners so she could dress up. I fixed the crooked kitchen cabinet. I brought home a stuffed bunny for Wallace, one that squeaked when you squeezed it.

In the end, Betty Sue and I stopped trying. I stored her letters in a shoebox at the back of the closet, gathering dust. I sweated her out of my system like the last remnants of a bad flu. Perhaps she had been in my bloodstream since childhood.

On that fateful day—when I took her virginity, or she took mine, or we both gave them away, or maybe that’s the wrong way to think about it altogether, because really what we did was cross a threshold, both of us, staring into each other’s eyes—Betty Sue climbed to her feet right away and tugged on her jeans. I remember her standing over me. A chortle rose out of her throat. I smiled up at her, at the sunlight crowning her brow. She laughed until she had to clutch at her stomach.

“I got you,” she told me, in between shuddering bursts. “I got you good. Nobody else can ever be your first. It’s always going to be me.”

I opened my mouth to answer, but she turned on her heel and ran away. I watched her flash between the trees and disappear.