Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian (23 page)

She wasn’t the only one. I had created a Plath shelf in the poetry section at the behest of Plath’s ardent fans—mostly among the women inmates—and reluctantly on my part, given the suicidal tendencies of Plath’s martyrdom-obsessed cultists, particularly those in prison.

I asked Jessica what she liked about the Plath letters and journals. She brightened up at the question.

“
So
much,” she said. “Everything.”

She began flipping through the book and for a full twenty minutes, read me favorite passages. She seemed particularly interested in Plath’s mysticism. She was drawn to a comment in a letter to Plath’s mother, dated June 10, 1958, that read, “had my fortune told by a subway gypsy whose card, ironically enough, showed a picture of a mailman and said I’d get a wonderful letter soon that would change my life for the better.” Fifteen days letter, Jessica said, flipping a few pages ahead, Plath writes ecstatically of wonderful news that she got through the mail. She sold two poems to the
New Yorker
for a total of $350. This, as Plath herself noted, was surely the fulfillment of the subway gypsy’s vision. As a Bostonian, Jessica was especially charmed by Plath’s comment that the $350 would be enough for “three full months of Boston rent!”

Jessica was also interested by how often, and how thoroughly, Plath wrote to her mother with good news. Every last cent she or her husband, poet Ted Hughes, earned from their writing was touted with an exclamation point, every good tiding recounted with dramatic embellishment. And yet, as amateur Plath scholar Jessica noted, her journal entries from the same period—sometimes overlapping the very same days as letters to her mother—told a more nuanced story.

“That’s always the way it is, right?” Jessica said.

One episode in Plath’s life made a particular impression on her. Plath and Hughes had found a dying baby bird. They tried desperately to save the badly injured creature. Plath became enamored of the “plucky little thing.” But in the end, they had decided to put the chick out of its misery. They gassed it in a box. The bird “went to sleep very quietly,” wrote Plath, “but it was a shattering experience.” Jessica shook her head when reading this.

“You know,” she told me, “that’s how Sylvia went, right? Gas.”

I told her I did know—comments like these from Plath fans were the worrying kind. But she was right, it was an interesting connection.

Jessica also told me that Plath had worked in a mental hospital, which I hadn’t known. “She was obsessed with this one patient,” Jessica told me, “who was afraid she was gonna give birth to an animal—like an actual furry little rabbit! Sylvia was into some pretty messed up shit, right? But that’s why I love her.”

Jessica had clearly given these books a serious read. But she was done with them. Back to square one, she told me. Searching endlessly for a book.

W
e continued browsing quietly for a minute or two. I pulled out some candidates. She unequivocally rejected them. And the process continued.

“I remember the time I laughed the hardest,” she said, for no particular reason, clearly absorbed in some private reverie. “Do you remember yours?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’d have to think hard about it.”

“I remember,” she said. “It was when my friend Billy’s casket was lowered into the ground.”

She gave me another sidelong glance.

“Pretty fuckin’ funny, right?” She said.

Billy, a friend from childhood, owed a lot of money to the mob. It wasn’t like in other neighborhoods, she told me, where they’d shoot you and leave you to rot like roadkill. In Whitey Bulger’s Irish mob, they’d kidnap you and that was it. You’d never be seen again. In the case of Billy, his mother was told to pay a ransom for his body. This was an attempt to extort money from his rich uncle. The uncle had refused to pay the ransom and so the body was never returned. The uncle, however, paid for the casket, which was buried empty.

“It was a bad day,” she recalled.

On that bad day, Jessica had started drinking again. She had been clean for almost two years, having weathered various storms of her recovery, including a friend’s suicide and her sister’s murder. But the pain was cumulative. At the wake, she got trashed on Jamesons and Long Island Iced Teas, and screwed a near stranger upstairs. Soon after that, she was using again.

Why did she laugh during the funeral?

First of all, she said, she was drunk off her ass. But it wasn’t just that. “It’s not that it was funny,” she said. But something about it, something in the absurdity of watching everyone crying as a big empty box was put into the ground. She couldn’t identify what it was, but something made her laugh.

“I dunno,” she said, “I was thinking,
fuckin’ Billy probably’ll show up in back and say ‘fuck is everyone crying about?’
That’s something he’d totally do. We didn’t even know if he was really dead. It was crazy.”

As she was telling me this, and as we continued looking in vain for a book that probably didn’t exist, I couldn’t help but think of the absences in Jessica’s life. Those, like Billy, who were not there, but there. And her son, in the same facility, visible, but impossibly far away—there, but not there.

A Ribbon to a Stranger

Jessica’s portrait and letter. I was moved by this use of the library. So much of my job involved intercepting letters—a practice I hated—disrupting communications, trashing people’s written words. But here was a chance to do the opposite. To create a conduit of words, to connect people through a letter. Who knew what it would mean to Chris and Jessica? Maybe it would begin a new chapter. If not, perhaps one day Chris’s children would find the letter hidden in a drawer—as my mother had found her mother’s photos—or collecting dust on a shelf, as I had found my grandmother’s interviews on my parents’ bookshelf. In this way, they’d gain a tiny view, for better or worse, of where they came from.

A
week passed. Then another. She wanted the portrait touched up more, she said. She needed to rewrite the letter. She apologized. I told her not to; she wasn’t doing this for me, she was doing it for herself.

Then she was gone, transferred to a different prison. She’d departed without saying goodbye, without leaving the letter or portrait. My first thought was of Chris. I’d told him—through a messenger; he never came himself—that I’d be giving him the gift from his mother. At first, his messenger had curtly informed me that Chris didn’t want a fucking thing from her and seemed justifiably skeptical of me. But a week later the messenger had come in asking for the letter and portrait. I’d told him it was on the way. He had visited almost every day for a week. I’d see him waiting patiently behind a crowd of inmates who had stormed the library counter with their requests. He had come for this reason alone. And every time, I told him the same thing:
It’s on the way. It’s in the mail
. After a while, the messenger had stopped asking me about it. He stopped coming to the library altogether. But still, I had remained hopeful.

Now Jessica had left without giving Chris a thing. I sent him a note through another inmate. It said, “I tried, Chris. I’m really sorry.” I felt bad for having raised his hopes. I shouldn’t have been so optimistic, shouldn’t have said, “it’s in the mail.”

I couldn’t get Jessica’s letters out of my mind. That horrible letter of abandonment that she had placed into toddler Chris’s pocket at the church that day in 1987—and now this, the letter she did
not
put into his hands. The small thing that would have been the immeasurable difference between something and nothing. Still, I held out some hope that Jessica would send him something through the actual mail.

But then Martha the gossip approached me in the library. Jessica, she told me, had ripped up the portrait and a draft of her half-finished letter shortly before she was transferred. Martha saw the shreds in the garbage bin.

I thought about how isolated Jessica seemed that night when I saw her standing in line, as the prison commotion swelled around her, the laughing inmates, the shouting guards. Oblivious to her surroundings. She had just told me the story of abandoning her son. Her guilt and shame, her deep regret had sapped her senses. Just by looking at her that night, waiting for the officers to finish their count, waiting to march back to her prison cell, it was clear: Jessica was done. She hadn’t been tuning out the noise around her. She wasn’t ignoring the others. No, it was that she herself barely existed. Her presence then was papery and insubstantial. No wonder she’d ripped up the portrait. Ghosts cannot give gifts.

T
here had been one gift, though. Given to her cellmate, the Vietnamese woman who didn’t speak any English, whose inability to communicate with Jessica had formed the basis of their relationship. The woman was acutely anxious and would stroke a tiny piece of fabric compulsively, day and night. I witnessed this myself in the library. After a couple of weeks, she’d stroked her worry-totem down to a pile of furry threads. From the prison black market, Jessica had procured a tiny black ribbon, the kind used by mourners. The deal was done in the library—and she gave her cellmate the gift on the spot. The exchange happened near the bookshelves closest to the counter, where the Vietnamese woman had been flipping through books in a language she couldn’t read. The woman smiled at Jessica, and proceeded to stroke her new ribbon. Not a word was exchanged

A
few months after she’d given this gift, after she’d ripped up Chris’s letter, Jessica was dead. The news came by way of Martha the gossip. She had arrived red-eyed one night in the library. Standing a few feet from where Jessica had sat for the portrait, Martha leaned on the counter and told me what she knew. Less than a month out of prison Jessica had overdosed.

“I heard she died in a boarded-up building,” Martha told me through her tears.

This apparently wasn’t quite true. A more reliable source later told me she’d overdosed and died at home. But I suspect this detail—that Jessica died alone in an abandoned building—had somehow made sense to Martha. When she’d delivered the news to me, there certainly had been an awful kind of plausibility to it.

The other inmates gave Martha space to cry at the library counter that night, though a few came over occasionally to put an arm around her.

“She was my friend,” was all Martha could say.

When she had calmed down a bit, she added, “Jessica thought of you as a friend, you know.”

“I know,” I said. “I considered her a friend too.”

In prison this was a complicated, impolitic thing to say. I was surprised how easily it had slipped out of my mouth. But at that moment, the shock of the news had forced out the uncomplicated truth.

W
as it a suicide? With addicts it is sometimes unclear. Often unanswerable. So indeed was the related question of why she’d turned her portrait, and the letter to her son, into a pile of ripped paper in a prison garbage can. I could speculate but I’d never really know. Even if I did, I probably wouldn’t truly understand.

A ribbon to a stranger—this may have been the last gift she had in her. Perhaps it was as much as she had left to give. My mother once said that the one gift she’d received from her mother was her mother’s long life. Time. A gift given accidentally, but no less precious. It had been the single factor that allowed my mother to forgive my grandmother. Jessica was not able to give even this passive gift to her son. An early death was the final affirmation of her belief that forgiveness was not possible for her in this world. She’d given birth alone at Boston City Hospital. She’d abandoned Chris alone in a church. And in prison, when she was so physically near to him, she may have finally realized, or perhaps decided, if she hadn’t already, that she would remain alone. Perhaps it was precisely this proximity, the sight from that window in my class, and the unavoidable challenge it presented her, that finally brought this grim truth to her. That possibility weighed on me.

For days I kept imagining the fate of the world’s misplaced letters. I started noticing them everywhere. All the right letters sitting on desks and dressers, slipped into purses, abandoned in email Draft folders, forever sealed and unsent. Shredded. Forgotten, sometimes intentionally. And the wrong letters, placed in someone’s hands—which, once delivered, may never be taken back. Emailed and immediately regretted.

When I looked around the world, I couldn’t see these letters. But I became aware of their indirect presence. They contained life’s great subtexts, embedded between the lines of cell phone conversations of strangers on the bus, in the hazy motive of a coworker who told me she was taking a “mental health” day off after receiving a difficult email from her mother. These notes were virtual, folded up, hidden, like letters tucked into books of the prison library. A kite, barely visible in the sky, bound to a person by an almost invisible string. Even the unsent ones are very much present. Especially the unsent ones.

Man Down

I was stuck. It was a Friday afternoon. After finishing up an early shift, I found myself detained longer than usual in the sallyport, together with a group of officers and assorted staff. The doors rolled shut, locking us in with the loud metal-to-metal crash that alarms visitors, and which staff members don’t even notice. It had been months since I’d passed into this second category. It was only after the second door—the one that would let us back out into freedom—had failed to open, that I realized we were locked in together. An emergency call went out. I heard it clearly from the radios strapped to the belts of the officers locked in the sallyport with me.

Man down in 3-3
.

“Oh fuck,” said an officer next to me. “Here we go.”

“This could take awhile,” a nurse said to me, on the presumption I was a volunteer.

Until things were settled in 3-3, we were locked in this little limbo between freedom and prison. Everyone was coming off of a long shift, some were coming off double shifts. It smelled like overworked officers: a combination of worn rubber, leather, stale coffee, and sweat-soaked polyester. Not even a nurse’s overpowering perfume could mask it.