Eileen (13 page)

“I'm fine,” said the little arsonist, wiping his face with the hem of his smock. His mother whimpered. I remember she wore a white scarf, and when the scarf fell away I saw that the skin on her neck was raised and welted in pink and yellow scars
from burns. The visitation was over when the clock showed that seven minutes had passed—visits were seven minutes long and I suppose that had some religious significance—at which point I waved to James, who delivered the arsonist back to the rec room or wherever and brought in the next boy. Randy stood around in the doorway while I collected a final signature from the weepy mother on her way out. Her vitriol came through in her penmanship. While the earlier signature was clean, careful, the outgoing signature was violent, jagged, and rushed. It was always like that. Everybody was broken. Everybody suffered. Each of those sad mothers wore some kind of scar—a badge of hurt to attest to the heartbreak that her child, her own flesh and blood, was growing up in prison. I tried my best to ignore all that. I had to if I was going to act normal, maintain my flat composure. When I was very upset, hot and shaking, I had a particular way of controlling myself. I found an empty room and grit my teeth and pinched my nipples while kicking the air like a cancan dancer until I felt foolish and ashamed. That always did the trick.

Something struck me as I watched Randy scratch his elbow, then lean against the door frame of the visitation room: I was no longer in love with him. Looking at him with eyes now glazed over in my new affection for Rebecca, he seemed like a nobody, a face in a crowd, gray and meaningless like an old newspaper clipping of a story I'd read so many times, it no longer impressed me. Love can be like that. It can vanish in an instant. It's happened since, too. A lover has left the warm rapture of my bed to get a glass of water and returned only to find me cold,
uninterested, empty, a stranger. Love can reappear, too, but never again unscathed. The second round is inevitably accompanied by doubt, intention, self-disgust. But that is neither here nor there.

When James returned, the boy he was guiding up the hall was, to my great surprise, Leonard Polk. Leonard walked casually, almost jauntily with his hands cuffed behind his back. He was taller than I expected, and loose limbed with that awkward softness young men have before their bodies harden. There was a strange bounce in his step. His face was bright and relaxed, awake and serene in a way no other boy's face had ever seemed, a loose reservedness which I found myself admiring. He looked pleased, impenetrable, and cold as though nothing could ever disturb him, and yet still as innocent as the silent creature I'd seen earlier touching himself absentmindedly on his cot in the cave. I searched for something in his face, anything his mask of contentment might betray, but there was nothing. He was a genius in that sense—a master. His was the best mask I'd ever seen.

James ushered him by the glass wall of the waiting area. When they passed Mrs. Polk on the other side, Leonard smiled. I imagined this boy in his parents' darkened bedroom, standing over his sleeping father with a kitchen knife, moonlight flickering on the blade like lightning as he brought it down hard and fast, tearing across the man's throat. Could this strange, supple creature have done such a thing? Randy took him into the visitation room, set him in the chair, undid his cuffs, and stood in the doorway.

“Mrs. Polk?” I called out.

The woman rose from her seat in the waiting area and came toward me. I remember this first vision of her with excellent clarity, though she was utterly unremarkable. She wore sharply creased black trousers, tight around her swollen thighs. Her sweater looked like an afghan blanket, the different colored squares lined up over her chest and large gut. She was repugnant, I thought, in her fat and dishevelment. She was not an obese woman, but she had quite a paunch and seemed bloated and tired and nervous. She walked stiffly, shifting from side to side with each step as some fat people do, and carried a brown coat over her arm, no purse. As she entered the room I noticed some white pieces of fluff stuck in the back of her frizzy hair, which was pulled tight into a bun. Her lipstick was a cheap and insincere fuchsia. I stared steadily at her face, trying to determine what sort of intelligence was there. Since she was overweight, I assumed she was an idiot—I still tend to judge those types as gluttons, fools—but her eyes were clear blue, sharp, with the same strange twist as her son's. I saw the resemblance in the eyes, the freckles, the pouty lips. She looked nervous handing her coat to Randy as I patted her down. My palm landed with a thud on the small of her back, which was soft and wide. I stifled an odd impulse I had to embrace her, to try to comfort her a little. She seemed so dowdy, so pitiful, like a sow awaiting slaughter.

“All set,” I told her. She took her coat back from Randy and sat across the table from Leonard, or Lee, as he was called. Mrs. Polk was shifty-eyed. The boy just smiled. I looked from mother
to son. If Rebecca's theory of Oedipus was correct, perhaps I had grossly misjudged what kind of women young men found attractive those days, because Mrs. Polk was nobody I could imagine anyone would kill for. Then again, maybe Lee Polk was out of his mind. It was impossible to tell what he might be thinking. His mask didn't waver. It was not my stony, flat mask of death, nor was it the stiff, cheerful posturing popular among housewives and other sad and deranged women. It was not the cutthroat bad boy mask set to ward off potential threats with the promise of violence and hot rage. Neither was it the lily-sweet bashfulness of men who pretend they're so weak, so sensitive, they would crumble if anyone ever challenged them even a little. Lee's look of calm contentment was an odd mask, peculiar in its falseness as it hardly looked fake at all.

In an effort to keep from crying, it seemed, Mrs. Polk pinched her eyes shut and exhaled. After a moment she folded her hands and placed them on the table, opened her mouth to speak. But then, from down the hall, loud clicking footsteps made us all stop and turn. It was Rebecca. Here she came strutting toward us. She carried her notebook in one hand, a cigarette in the other. Mrs. Polk, Randy and I all froze as she approached, a wobbly silhouette at first, and then a vision in lavender, loose russet hair bouncing around her shoulders. When she got closer, she was serious, quiet, and I saw that her fingers clutched her notebook like the legs of a lizard grappling a rock. There was something tense about her. She tried to smile, her eyes nervous and glittering. She was human and neurotic underneath that beauty, after all. That was comforting. The coincidence of
her timing struck me. Had she invited Mrs. Polk? What had Rebecca done with Leonard's file? She nodded to me and Randy and stood between us in the open doorway, holding the notebook close to her body. As she watched mother and son sitting there, she wrote continuously without looking down at the paper, ashing her cigarette absentmindedly at the floor as it burned down to her fingers.

Mrs. Polk kept her nose in the air as she spoke. I don't remember what she said to him, but it wasn't much. Such and such about his cousins, maybe something about money. Nothing important. Her son remained silent. At some point Mrs. Polk sighed, frustrated, and stared off at the wall in exasperation. When I tried to peek under Rebecca's hand to read what she'd been writing, it looked like chicken scratch. Since I'd never seen shorthand before, I assumed it was simply nonsense, lines on a paper she'd made so as to appear that she was taking notes. I didn't understand it. Dr. Frye, when he'd come to observe the family visits, had never taken notes. I wondered, of course, why Rebecca was there at all. Dr. Bradley never made a single appearance.

After a minute of silence, the boy staring at his mother's hands on the table between them, Mrs. Polk lifted her face, looked Lee straight in the eyes. Her wrinkles were long and saggy, as though her face had once been bigger, fuller, but had been deflated, leaving deep folds dug like trenches. She began to cry. If I heard what she said, I don't remember it precisely, but I assumed the gist of it was, “How could you do this to me?” her voice plaintive and soft. Then she cleared her throat
and grunted aloud. Her hands were small and red and cracked, I saw as she pulled out a tissue. She blew her nose into it, then balled it up like an angry child and stuffed it violently back in her pocket. In that moment, she reminded me of my mother and her quick switches, how one minute she'd be sunshine and singsong and the next she'd be cursing in the basement at the laundry, kicking at the walls. It was that kind of duplicity: talking one way but acting another. Rebecca had stopped scribbling and was leaning on one leg, twisting her opposite heel into the floor, stubbing out her cigarette. Randy looked at that arrant, flirtatious foot out of the corner of his eye, or at least I think he did. Rebecca had her pencil in her mouth, and when I turned to face her, I saw her tongue well up and a bubble of saliva burst as her teeth closed down on the pencil's eraser tip. To see inside her open mouth like that, the mouth of a child, clean, pink, bubbling with youth and beauty, hurt me deeply. I burned with envy. Of course Randy would choose Rebecca over me. She was easy to love. I donned my death mask, bristling underneath with shame. When Lee's seven minutes were up, I knocked on the door frame and Randy motioned to Rebecca to step aside so that Mrs. Polk could exit. But first Mrs. Polk made sure to let a few tears splat on the table, and then said, more to us than to her son, “I blame myself.” Lee looked up at the clock, unfazed.

I followed Mrs. Polk back out into the office, but turned to watch as Rebecca stepped into the visitation room and slid the mother's now vacant chair up close to Lee's. She spoke to him, and his grin faded. His head bowed as he listened. It looked like they had an intimate rapport, but when could that have
developed? Rebecca had just arrived at Moorehead, and already she was leaning in close toward him, bending her face down below his, her eyebrows raised, eyes sparkling and searching up at his. I guided Mrs. Polk toward the counter, handed her a pen, and watched her sign her name: Rita P. Polk. It wasn't an angry penmanship. It was casual, unconcerned—irrelevant. She didn't look back at her son, just blinked heavily, sighed as though clocking out at work, then swung her coat up around her shoulders and walked back down the hall. I imagined her returning to her home to crochet another terrible sweater, swear and grind her teeth every time she missed a stitch. I felt sorry for her. I knew instinctively that the woman, this widow, had no other children.

Following protocol, I signaled to James to prepare for the next boy's visit. But Rebecca was still talking with Lee. Lee had turned away from her and laid his hands across the table. I walked into the room to tell them to clear out, suddenly full of courage. I saw clearly then the word tattooed on Lee's fingers. It was “LOVE.” That disturbed me deeply. I said nothing, but watched as the boy sniffed, and gruffly swept a tear off his cheek with the butt of his hand. Rebecca put her hand on his shoulder. And then she put another hand on his knee below the table. This, in plain sight, and with me standing there, she dared get so close to the boy, touching him like that, leaning over enough that he might simply lift his gaze to peer down the front of her blouse, that he could easily raise his chin to meet his lips with hers. I stared disbelievingly. Did they really not see me? How was it that the boy didn't fidget and squirm? He seemed
quite comfortable, really. How could I interrupt them? I stared at the floor. When James returned with the next child, he knocked lightly on the door frame.

“I'm sorry,” I managed to say, “but we need the room.”

“Of course,” said Rebecca. Then she spoke quietly to Lee. “We can talk more in my office. You want a Coke?” Lee nodded. “I'll get you a Coke,” she said. As they got up, Randy came in with handcuffs. “Oh no,” Rebecca said. “That isn't necessary.” And she took Lee by the arm back down the hall, leaving James stunned and blushing until I cleared my throat, pointed at the new boy at his side. I watched Lee's now tepid gait as they walked away. It was so very odd, and it angered me because I couldn't understand what had happened and because Rebecca seemed to care more for this Lee Polk than she did for me.

For the remaining visiting hours, I replayed the scene again and again: Rebecca leaning so close to the boy, her hair spilling across her back and shoulders, so near that surely he could smell the scent of her shampoo, her perfume, her breath, her sweat. And she must have felt him responding to her, the tension in his shoulder building under her hand, chest rising and falling with every breath, the heat coming off of him. But then to put her hand on his knee, I couldn't imagine what that could mean. If I hadn't been there, if they'd been alone, would her hand have begun to knead the boy's thigh, travel up along his inseam, gently cup his private parts? Would he have swept Rebecca's hair away and would his lips have parted as he inhaled the scent of her neck? Would he have kissed her neck, held her face between his almost manly hands, run his fingers, LOVE,
over her slender wrists and up her arms to her breasts, kissing her, pulling her toward him, feeling all of her, warm and soft and all there in his arms? Would they have done all that?

I fantasized as best I could, jealous first of Rebecca, then of Lee, and switching back and forth as I considered their roles and how they'd betrayed me, since already I'd decided that Rebecca was mine. She was my consolation prize. She was my ticket out. Her behavior with this boy really threatened all that. Was this what they'd taught Rebecca to do at Harvard—to win these boys over with charm and affection, then educate them? Perhaps this was some new way, I tried to think, some kind of liberated thinking. But the more I considered it, the crazier it seemed. What was she saying to him? How close could they have become in a matter of days? What had Rebecca done or said to earn Lee's trust? I imagined the scene back in Rebecca's office. I wanted to know what was happening. Visitors came and went. I felt sick with abandonment. I was so very dramatic. I figured I ought to leave then and there, to spare myself any more misery. Once again I imagined driving my Dodge off the cliffs and down onto the rocks by the ocean. Wouldn't that be thrilling? Wouldn't that be the way to show them all that I was brave, that I was tired of following their rules? I would rather die than stand around, be among them, drive on their nice streets, or sit in their nice prison—no, not me. I nearly cried standing there. Even Randy, beautiful and smelling of smoke and polished leather, couldn't cheer me.