It's a Crime (9 page)

Two weeks later, LinkAge was forced to issue a major financial restatement.

If Pat had counted right, she was on her two hundred and ninety-eighth, two hundred and ninety-ninth, and three hundredth bulb. She went inside, washed her hands thoroughly in the mudroom sink with her Gardener’s Friend, and sat down and wrote a note to Ellen Kloda on one of her sunflower cards. Before sealing it, she added a check for ten thousand dollars.

CHAPTER
9

T
o get to Allenwood Federal Correctional Complex you drive west from Hart Ridge through the heavily screened and decorated suburbs of the New York metropolitan area, past rows and rows of trees being strangled slowly by Asiatic bittersweet vines, and into a rural corridor of towns like Lake Hopatcong, once a little resort where Frank’s family had been proud to go for two weeks every summer and now a mix of expensive summer houses and ramshackle starter homes for people who commute to Morristown. New Jersey turns into Pennsylvania at the raffish Poconos, where fraudulent development left a scrim of pink champagne and pink bathtubs. Keep going and dairy farms give way to the Appalachian Mountains. Amid a rolling feast of forest that was gorgeous even on this black and white day were several prisons, a clutter of small but valiantly kept-up houses, a few trailers and shacks, and a scattering of motels more dismal than the one in Florida. “TV” bragged one sign, and more meanly, “American owned.”

Ruby kept her eyes fixed out the window the whole trip, headphones from her CD player stopping up her ears. She was looking rather tarty, if truth be told, in her magenta lipstick, tight bright pink top, rolled up painter pants, and three-inch heels. Until recently she had been a tomboy, and she had always thought she could do anything, maybe because she was able to climb trees and swim lakes and make caterpillars do her bidding while other girls hung back and watched.

Her mind was as unfathomably twisty as the inside of a shell. Rose, who was very smart, much smarter than Pat, had never gone through a “code” phase. But after Pat took Frank to Allenwood, Ruby started using a code that was as obvious—and confusing—as pig Latin. She doubled up her responses, first saying the socially acceptable, then “slash,” and finally what she really thought—or wanted people to assume she thought. Pat got lost somewhere way back.

When Pat got an envelope from the Bureau of Prisons, Ruby said, “Are they after you, too?” And when it turned out to be a form advising them that inmate Frank Foy had submitted Pat’s name on his list of approved callers, Ruby said, “It will be nice to talk to him slash oh my God.”

In the Touareg, on the way to Allenwood, Pat reached over and squeezed her daughter’s knee as she always did when struck with a memory, and Ruby jabbed her back, hard, with her elbow, which was probably due to surprise. Route 78, of course, wasn’t the best place to be jabbed, because here she was alone with Ruby—and hundreds of cars, trucks, and SUVs ready to kill them both after an instant of her inattention. Still, the intense physicality of her daughter’s reaction reassured Pat that she was still a tomboy under all that fabulous tawdriness. Evidently Ruby felt she needed a different costume for her adventures now. “Do your friends dress like that, honey?” asked Pat.

“Like what?” said Ruby, one of her earpieces having shaken loose in the struggle.

“Oh, you know, like a prostitute.”

“How colorful,” said Ruby, straightening up with dignity.
“Slash disgusting.”

Up in the country, where poverty must lead to problems with wayward children, Pat had once noticed a youthfully dressed man give Ruby a measuring eye. It was annoying, because he was clearly of the helping professions, and he must have thought she was “at risk.” Pat wanted very much to say that Ruby was most at risk from men like him, but she had to force all this information into one steely look.

The handsome, locally quarried stone pillars that marked the entryway to the prison camp loomed ahead. There were no gun turrets, no enveloping spirals of barbed wire. A month ago, when she’d been dropping Frank off, they’d snacked on black caviar, red grapes, and Bucheron cheese in the visitors’ parking lot until an official in a blue suit rapped on the car window and said, “We were wondering what you were doing here.” She had been quite nice, as Pat pointed out a dozen times, but the picnic took on a pathetic, tattered air, and Frank ended up reporting to the prison door fifteen minutes before it was absolutely necessary.

There had been no other cars in the parking lot that time. Now that it was visitors’ day, there were many, and Pat noted uneasily that they were mostly cheap American sedans. Frank probably did stand out a little inside. A prison population, even here, was not going to be confined to accountants and bankers and disbarred lawyers, with a couple of doctors convicted of Medicare fraud thrown in for diversity. That would have been boring, anyway.

Pat took Ruby’s hand as they walked up the bright white steps, and she was pleased when Ruby, instead of pulling away, squeezed her fingers so hard they hurt. Pat tried to remember a period of her life when she’d been as close-mouthed as her daughter had become lately, but she couldn’t. Even when Pat’s father had run off with the woman from the Chamber of Commerce, a subject that was actively discouraged in conversation, the family had found plenty of other things to talk about, maybe even more than usual. A rush of words was a good way to wash an event clean.

The guard who let them into the tiny glass foyer looked normal, too muscly maybe, but not at all sadistic. Pat was admittedly a bit nervous. Frank had told her to bring a hundred dollars in small bills for the vending machines, so she’d brought an assortment in a transparent cosmetic case, the only type of purse allowed in the visiting room. But the idea of gourmand Frank eating food from a vending machine was too ridiculous. (Jelly Bellys? Tootsie Rolls? A minuscule bag of oversalted, underflavored potato chips? Never.) So Pat had also put five hundreds in her bra, because you never knew what nefarious plots were afoot in prison and she thought that the mention of a hundred dollars might be code for “Bring me some real money.”

The guard showed no inclination to search her. His lip did curl up at the corner when he talked, but you couldn’t really call it a sneer. Fortunately Pat had never been a person who embarrassed easily. “Great. Perfect,” she said several times in her sweeping soprano.

The people in the visitors’ room looked normal, like any crowd at a bus station. Well, not quite normal. In every group was a man wearing khaki pants and a gray sweatshirt. Also, the proportions of the room were odd. Usually a room this size would have higher ceilings. Frank looked squashed when he appeared suddenly in the doorway, dressed like all the other inmates. The weight he’d gained before going to prison had disappeared. He was as skinny as he’d been in his twenties. In his forties he had earned a certain gravitas—not the killjoy sort, but the sort that comes naturally with age and comfortable living and unquestioned authority. That was gone now. His new leanness made him look older and frailer, and his eyes seemed to have sunk back a little in his head. As he moved toward his family, his cheap tennis shoes splayed out awkwardly. They might have been designed for something straighter and narrower than human feet.

As Pat embraced him, her face flushed, her pulse raced. The combination of strangeness and familiarity left her breathless. He didn’t even look like himself. Yet she knew him through and through. She could reach in and touch his heart. It would be even easier now that he was smaller. Was that an age spot on his hand? Incredible.

As Frank tried to hug Ruby, who remained stiff and stricken, Pat looked over her shoulder to flash the guard at the desk a big smile. “What’s he like?” she asked Frank in a low voice.

Frank shrugged. “He’s okay,” he said.

“You hear all these things about prison guards.”

“Really, he’s okay,” he said. “Why don’t you sit down.”

“Happy Thanksgiving!” she said, perched on the molded plastic chair. She told Frank he was looking good, a little white lie. Because he had been defined by his decisive and sometimes overbearing energy, it was difficult to see him so restrained, so skinny, so watchful.

“So how’s Winky?” he asked. Ruby had been given Winky as a puppy years before.

“Good,” she said briefly.

Pat decided not to mention that Ruby’s social studies teacher had called yesterday to find out why she was missing so much school.

“It’s not bad here,” said Frank. Then he attempted more jauntiness, maybe even irony: “Yesterday we had apples.”

“How nice!” cried Pat. “I love apples! You know that the Forbidden Fruit was a fig, not an apple!”

“Sometimes I wish you were in here with me,” said Frank.

“That’s so sweet,” said Pat.

“I don’t know why you shouldn’t be,” said Frank, still smiling. “You’re the one who’s still reaping the rewards of my evil behavior.”

“Oh, wow,” said Pat, too startled to know what to say.

“Daddy—”
said Ruby intensely.

“What, honey?”

When Ruby did not seem able to elaborate, Pat jumped in to say, looking down at the bright linen-white tiles, “I have never seen a floor glow the way this one does.”

“An inmate buffs it every day,” said Frank.

“Oh,” said Pat.

It was better to ignore his flash of maliciousness about her incarceration. He had never before been anything worse than callous. Or obtuse. Oh, well, it was no wonder, considering all he’d been through. She smiled even harder. She wanted to reassure him with her own greater calm, the way she would one of the dogs. She knew she could pat him without being bitten. His weapons could not be fully unsheathed here, maybe they’d even shrunk with the weight he’d lost. Yet fear lurked behind this calm of hers, making it brittle. She was afraid for both of them—for Ruby, too—afraid that he might now possess a despair so great Pat would be incapable of divining the magic words to dispel it and he would say or do something that might never be undone.

Then he said, “It’s wonderful to see you both,” and of course he meant it—truly—anyone could see that. What could she have been thinking? But the visit was going to go on for
hours,
and she was exhausted already.

“Did you remember the cash?” he asked.

Pat lifted the see-through cosmetic case with its furled bills.

“Let’s eat,” he said with an uncharacteristically greedy gleam in his eye. Okay, he’d been greedy in the past. That, after all, was partly why he was in prison. He had never been greedy over petty matters, though. No matter how aggressive a driver Frank was, he wouldn’t fight over a parking space. He would dismiss anyone who did, saying, “I guess he’s too weak to walk a step or two.”

But there was undisguised longing in his voice when he said, “We’ll start with chicken wings.” Evidently his request for cash for the vending machines had been completely straightforward.

Still, Pat had never heard of getting chicken wings in a vending machine. Self-consciously she looked around the room. A number of people did seem to be eating with great relish.

“Oh, I’ve been looking forward to this,” said Frank. “You know some inmates never have visitors, so they never get to eat anything but prison food.”

“Chicken wings,” repeated Pat. “Do you want to be the one to get them?”

“I can’t,” said Frank, sitting on his hands. “It’s against the rules.”

So Pat gathered herself up and obediently strode off to one of the tall gray machines. There were the wings, in little plastic bags, slot after slot after slot of them, along with pizza and cheeseburgers and “beef steak,” all for six dollars a piece. With the help of a chatty Ecuadorean woman in a white drawstring blouse, she microwaved one of the packages while looking over her shoulder at her family and once even archly waving. Ruby and Frank were not speaking to each other.

“Don’t you want any?” asked Frank when she returned with only the one serving.

“Maybe later,” she said.

He wasn’t paying attention. He fell upon the chicken wings with little scrabbly motions of lips and fingers, which got shiny with grease; his age spot danced. Pat felt Ruby trying to catch her eye, but Pat couldn’t let her do it; she was afraid of what might be written plainly across their faces.

“When Alice Paul was in prison, she organized a hunger strike,” said Ruby.

Frank broke off sucking long enough to say, “Who?” His eyes flicked between his wife and his daughter, his face fell, and he abruptly dropped what was left of the wings into the packaging on his lap.

There was an embarrassed silence.

Then Pat said, “I wouldn’t be any good at a hunger strike. And don’t those wings look tasty! I think I’ll have some, after all.”

They were awful, of course, stringy and off in the way that chicken heated in a microwave always is, but there did not seem to be as much meat as sauce, which had a certain tang to it. Plus, of course, Pat hadn’t eaten since breakfast. So she really wasn’t insincere when she said, “My, yes, Ruby, you should try some,” although she knew she may have
sounded
so, because of the way her voice swooped and soared.

Considering Frank had asked Pat to bring a hundred dollars, he must have expected her to buy a lot of these tiny meals, at least a dozen. That would be four apiece. But he continued to ignore the chicken wings in his lap.

“You have to have a real Thanksgiving dinner,” he said, as if to obliterate the wings’ existence.

“That sounds good,” said Pat. “But we’re happy to be here with you.”

“Stop near Camelback on your way home.”

“That’s an idea,” she said.

“The inn there isn’t bad,” he said peevishly, as if his taste had been questioned. “They had rather good rémoulade if I remember. No! Don’t go there. Drive down to Lancaster. There’s a fabulous five-star restaurant among the Amish there. Remember? Go out and get your cellphone and see if you can still get reservations. I wish I could speak to them. I’m sure I could get you a table.”

“I think I’ll just get some more of these delicious wings,” Pat chirped. Clearly she was going to have to do a very good job of pretending to like them, if she wanted Frank to pick up his again.

“Give me a moment, and I’ll remember the name,” he said.

“Are you sure you don’t want any, Ruby?”

“Daddy—”
she said, sounding strangled.

At the vending machine Pat wondered if she really had to get another package of those awful wings or if she could switch to another, no less unappetizing-looking food, like the “beef steak.” Better to stick with the wings, she figured.