The Keep (29 page)

“It wasn’t a visit. I was picking up my cousin Calgary. He’s a CO there.”

“He has a vehicle of his own, doesn’t he?” Rufus says.

“So?”

“So why pick him up?”

“Because that’s the plan we made, okay? Is that against the law?”

Pete’s pink skin is wincing up around his eyes. Gabby holds my arm.

“Did you see inmate Dobbs at any time during your visit?”

I hesitate. And once I’ve done that I know I have to answer yes. “He was working outside with some other prisoners when I came in.”

I think Rufus is disappointed I’ve answered honestly, and that calms me down. Keep it together. They don’t know anything—there’s nothing to know! I keep wanting to glance out the window at the place where Ray’s manuscript is buried, but I stop myself. It’s not what they’re looking for, but they’d take it.

“Did you greet the prisoner?” Rufus asks.

“No.”

“Did you acknowledge at any later point that you’d seen him?”

“Yes. I told him I’d seen him.”

“He tell you what kind of work he was doing out there?”

“No.”

“Well, I’ll tell you right now: he was working on
the exact pipe he and Davis would later escape through,
” Rufus says. “That’s what he was doing.” He drains the coffee I’ve poured him and sets down the cup.

“I didn’t know that.”

“Of all days you choose to come to the prison outside of work,” Rufus says, “it happens to be that day, when he’s paving the way for his escape. And you come to the prison for a reason that doesn’t sound like much of a reason to me.”

“I told you why.” My mouth is dry. I look at Pete. “Please tell me what you want.”

“We’d like to look around the house,” Pete says. “With your permission. We don’t have a search warrant—”

“But we can get one.” Rufus jumps in. “We have probable cause.”

“We
may
be able to get it. And you know, Holly, those types of searches aren’t too respectful of personal property.”

Oh yes, I know. As in: breaking, smashing, slitting open pillows and mattresses. As in, your home will never be the same.

“Okay,” I say. “But please, be careful in the girls’ room.”

Rufus is already making a beeline down the hall to our bedroom, where the door is closed. That’s when I realize they think that Ray is actually in my house. Which makes it seem possible for a second, and just thinking of that fills me with longing. I hug Gabby to me.

When they get to the girls’ room, I dash in after them. “That little screen over by the window,” I say, “be careful over there, okay?” I look at my watch. Megan will be back in forty-five minutes.

In the front room, Gabby’s kneeling on the couch, looking out the window. I sit down next to her and say, “Hey.”

She doesn’t answer. There’s a blankness to her face that reminds me of Megan.

Rufus sticks his head out of the girls’ room. “What’s this bed between the other beds?”

“That’s where I sleep,” I say. I almost add,
Since the breakout,
but I stop myself, thank God.

They come back out and start looking around where Gabby and I are sitting. We move to stools by the countertop where we eat. Our dinner plates are still there, the food half eaten. I wonder if giving Pete and Rufus the manuscript I’ve buried will stop all this, but I don’t think so. I think it’ll make things worse.

Gabby leans forward and rests her head on the counter between the two plates. I rub her back. Rufus is going through Seth’s tool kit, which he keeps on a shelf above the TV. He pulls something out and says, “Pete.” Just the tone of his voice makes me turn and look. And even when I see what Rufus found—a bag of crystal—even when I feel the sick horror of what’s about to happen because Seth broke our ironclad rule: never in the house, keep it on your body but never in the house, or we’ll all be liable (but what do rules mean to junkies?), even with all that going on in my head, I keep rubbing Gabby’s back because she’s peaceful, and the longer that peace lasts for her the better. Even if all I can buy her is one more minute.

I look at Pete, my barometer of how things are going. He looks like he’s about to puke. Rufus comes over to me, holding the bag. “Do you know what this is?” he booms out, and Gabby jerks upright, terrified.

“It looks like a bag of crystal,” I say.

“Looks like? You’re saying this isn’t yours?”

“It’s my husband’s, I think. He still has a habit.”

“We’re going to have to take you in.”

“Whoa, whoa,” Pete says. “There’s no reason to take
her
in.”

Rufus looks at Pete in disbelief. “We just found a bag of crystal on the premises and you don’t want to make an arrest?”

“It’s not hers,” Pete says. “It’s Seth’s. I know these people.”

“Yeah, I know you do. You’ve been bending the rules from minute one trying to protect this lady. But we’re officers of the law, Pete. You don’t look the other way when you find a bag of crystal just because you’re pals with the lady who lives there, unless you’re looking to get into trouble. Which I’m not.”

“Please,” I say. “Please.”

Pete looks like he wants to die on the spot. And then I know it’s going to happen, because Pete has four kids and he can’t afford trouble of any kind.

Gabby’s clinging to me, begging, “Don’t go, Mommy, please don’t go,” but something has gone dead inside me. “It’ll be fine, sweetheart,” I say, and I pry her arms off me. “I have to call Grandma.”

I pick up the phone and dial my mother’s number, praying she’ll be home. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to make a call like this.

The phone rings. Gabby starts to cry. Pete looks at Rufus and says, “You find this kind of thing fun?”

Rufus looks down at his shoes. He doesn’t look like he’s having any fun at all.

My mother answers.

As we’re winding down the drive, I see Megan coming up from where the soccer bus lets her off. She looks thin and narrow in her red uniform. The headlights hit her and she covers her eyes and steps to the side of the road, and I watch it all move over her face: curiosity about this car driving away from our house, anxiety when she sees it’s a police car. Pete rolls the window down.

“Hey, Meggie,” he says.

“Hi, Mr. Konig.”

“How’d you and Amy do out there tonight?”

“I’m not on Amy’s team. She’s varsity.”

“Listen, your mom’s coming in to help us with something. Shouldn’t take but an hour or two.”

“What about Gabby?”

“Here, talk to your mom.” He rolls my window down and Megan comes over and leans in. I hide the cuffs between my legs.

“Honey, it’s nothing,” I say. “I just have to go in and talk to them.” It feels strange not to reach up to her, but I can’t let her see those cuffs.

“Okay.” When she isn’t being sarcastic, Megan sounds very young.

“Grandma’s up there. Can you go up and meet her?”

“Okay.” She turns and keeps walking.

Pete and Rufus take me to the county jail and hand me over to corrections. At that point I’m officially out of their hands. It’s evening, and no judge is on duty, so I’ll have to spend the night in jail and go to court in the morning. I’ll be late to work, if I get there at all.

I’ve been to this jail before, but always high, so this feels like the first time. A female CO takes me into a little room and leaves the door open. She makes me strip and toss my clothes on a bench. Naked, I have to bend over and spread my cheeks. At that point I sort of leave my body the way I did in the kitchen with Gabby; I think, this isn’t me. This ass isn’t mine, and all these parts of me spread out in front of this lady don’t belong to me. I hear a new sound and when I drop my head and look between my legs I see two male COs standing behind the lady, taking in the view. This isn’t me, I think. We’re all just looking at each other through a window.

“Now squat and hop up and down,” the lady says.

“What?”

“You heard me. I asked you to squat and hop.”

“Why?”

“Are you refusing?”

“I’m asking why.”

“I’m not here to answer your questions.”

As soon as I start squat-hopping, I know why: so any contraband I might have hidden inside me will pop out. My breasts are flopping and I can feel sweat dripping from my underarms onto the floor. I’m terrified that something bad will come out of me, some awful thing I don’t even know is there. I want to stop so it won’t come out, but the lady keeps telling me to hop, maybe because she feels my worry, maybe to punish me for asking a question, maybe to keep the guys behind her entertained. So I keep hopping.

As a little kid I made up stories; they bubbled up in me like something that couldn’t be stopped. There was a voice in my head all the time, whispering. We had a secret, the voice and I: I was one of the ones who would go away and do things that everyone back home would know about. There weren’t many of those around here, but there were a few—an ice skater, a comedian—and when they came home to visit, everyone buzzed about what bar or church party they were supposedly going to. My teachers thought I was special. And my mother. My green-eyed girl, she called me.

My first mistake was being in a hurry. I grabbed for what was in front of me: marrying Seth the rock star, having a child—I’d always been special and I thought the specialness would still be there no matter what, but this other stuff might not.

And by the time I saw how really bad things were—Seth fighting with his band, disappearing for days while I scrambled to take care of two kids—by the time I realized what a pit I’d fallen into, it was too late. I had two little girls, a husband who was smoking meth, and one year of community college. I still lived twenty minutes from where I grew up.

I smoked my first pipe with Seth. I knew the stuff was bad, but I was so tired of being the cop, begging and raging at him, throwing Pampers in his face when he walked in the door. I wanted to be on the same side again. So I smoked with Seth one afternoon when the girls were napping, and oh my God, I can only think about this for a minute or every part of me will turn into a mouth wanting more: the sexiness of it, fucking Seth like wild for the first time in months, going on even when the girls started to whimper and bang on the door. Then looking out the window and seeing the world shake itself to life: the heavy trees, the sky. And I was back on top. We were going to make it, Seth and I. The voice in my head was back again, telling me stories, too many to write down or even tell one from another.

And after all the horrors, the searches and arrests, after losing Corey and those dark blank months in the hospital, after all that I was just relieved to be alive and clean and have my children back, the two that were left to me. I moved carefully, like the world was made of glass. I got the job at the college and finished my BA and started a master’s in writing. But even with all that, which I was grateful for and knew full well I didn’t deserve, I can’t exactly say I was happy. Relieved, yes. Lucky, God yes. All that. But I thought happiness only came from getting high, and I was never doing that again, never, even if it meant not being happy one more day in my life.

And then Ray brought it back. The excitement that rocks through your body when you’re a kid like lust does when you’re grown up: just pure excitement—for Christmas, for grape Kool-Aid, for playing in a treehouse—I felt that all week long as my teaching night got close. I started reading again, finishing a novel every few days. On my lunch break I’d sit outside at my picnic bench and listen to the traffic, those big loops of sound, and behind it I’d hear something else, barely there, so shadowy I tried not to scare it away by paying too much attention, but I knew the voice was back.

The next morning I’m arraigned before the judge with my courtappointed lawyer. Pete is there. He tells the prosecutor that the meth isn’t mine, that they found it in Seth’s toolbox and that it’s only an eighth of an ounce. The judge dismisses the case and I go home to shower and change before work.

That night, I fold up the cot and roll it out of the girls’ room. It’s been a month since Ray escaped, and I know he’s gone. If he were still around, they would have caught him.

A depression comes on me suddenly, like a blanket I can’t get out from underneath. It’s summer now, and I barely can get the girls to camp. At work I lay my head on my desk if no one’s around. I hear my computer clicking, the shouts of summer school students, distant phones. I lie very still and watch the colors behind my eyes. When footsteps come near my cubicle, I sit up and put my hands on the keyboard.

On weekends I can’t get out of bed. My face puffs out and the girls are scared to look at me. I lie on the cot in the room I share with Seth. Sometimes Gabby comes in and lies next to me. I know I’m doing damage just by lying there, bringing more unhappiness on her. But I can’t move.

“I want you to feel better,” Gabby says.

I hold her in my arms. The effort of it makes me breathe hard. I want to say I’m sorry, but I know that’s pure selfishness—asking her to forgive me.

“I love you so much, my little girl,” I say. “Do you know?”

She nods.

“Do you really know?”

“Yeah, I know.”

Which is something, I guess. Megan doesn’t come in, and I don’t blame her.

Finally my mother shows up—the girls must have called her. I’m dreading what she’ll say, but she puts a hand on my forehead and holds it there. Her cool fingers feel so good, I close my eyes. “You need to get away,” she says.

“Away?”

She takes her hand off my forehead to adjust one of the ivory combs she always wears in her wild gray hair. “To replenish yourself for a few days,” she says. “I’ll be happy to take the girls if you can think of a place you’d like to go.”

“I can’t leave them,” I say. “I’ve already done that enough.”

One day at work, while I’m eating lunch at my desk (no energy to walk into the heat), I google
hotel
and
castle
and
Europe
and start looking at the little pictures that come up on the screen. One site leads to another site like you’re falling through trapdoors. I’m thinking, How can there be so many castles? They always say Europe is small, so I guess in my mind there wouldn’t be enough room for all of them.