Chapter 35
Thirty-Five
It seemed absurd to Arthur, but his mother was required to complete her sentence in a residential reentry center, a fancy
term for a halfway house—as if a woman who had taught ethics at Dartmouth and was an ordained minister might spend her first
days of freedom scoring meth, booze, and a scorching hot case of gonorrhea.
“Stop that,” his mother said. “This is exactly the right place for me. This is exactly where I need to be.”
“It is?” Arthur asked, giving her side-eye. He was pushing a shopping cart at the time. They were in Wal-Mart, buying sheets
for her bed, a toothbrush, shampoo, and other necessities. “You don’t want to get back to Dartmouth College and resume living
your life? If you don’t want to teach anymore, you could move to Podomaquassy. We could have a place together.” He felt almost
embarrassed saying it—it came dangerously close to revealing how alone and afraid and unmoored he had felt since the day of
her arrest. It was alarmingly close to saying, I want you with me, where I can keep an eye on you and know that you’re safe.
His mother said, “I know where my work is now, and it isn’t at Dartmouth.”
Because of course she wasn’t done with Black Cricket.
There were people she cared about there.
There were some who would never get out.
She had already put in an application to join the Chaplaincy Services Branch of the Federal Bureau of Prisons so she could return to Black Cricket, not as an inmate, but as a spiritual counselor.
She wanted to do advocacy and social work.
“Do you know how many battered women are in there for shooting their abuser?” she asked him.
“Do you know how many were forced into abortions they didn’t want or forced to carry babies they didn’t want or got into drugs because of a lifetime of sexual abuse? ”
He knew all about it, but that didn’t make her decision any easier to swallow. In the days and weeks to follow they argued—no,
that wasn’t quite right. It was more accurate to say he argued and she listened. He didn’t want her anywhere near the place, anywhere near Daphne Nighswander, Daphne Nighswander’s
friends, and the on-the-take security guards who had allowed someone to take a Polaroid of his sleeping mother while someone
menaced her with a shiv. He didn’t talk about the Nighswanders, though. He didn’t know if he’d ever be ready to talk about
them.
“It blows my mind,” he told her once, at the end of an especially fraught phone call. His voice was patient and reasonable,
the way it always got when he was quaking with fury. “How little it matters to you what I might want. It didn’t matter to
you the day you got locked up. It didn’t matter you had a seventeen-year-old in boarding school. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t
look anyone else in the eye the whole last five months I was there. It didn’t matter what I had to go through for four years,
walking into Black Cricket every month to visit you. I wouldn’t want my feelings to get in the way of your newest self-improvement
project. Just remember that the last time you threw yourself into a big act of spiritual activism, a guy got killed.”
“Oh, Arthur—” she began, but he told her he had to go, and he hung up, a sick upwelling of emotion in his breast.
That had been an awful thing to say, throwing the dead man in her face. Officer Einaudi had been killed in the most freakish
of freak accidents, and only a fool or the American legal system could ever have blamed her for it. In this case, though,
his mother was the fool—Arthur knew she had been grateful for prison, grateful to be punished, felt that any suffering at all on her part would be a good start.
He sat at his little kitchen table, feeling tremulous with unhappiness.
It had been an awful thing to say, yes, but he had done and said worse things in the last few months.
He was getting acclimated to the idea that he wasn’t the good guy in the story.
The phone rang again and he grabbed for it, thinking it was Erin, and she would be soothing and understanding and he would
apologize, and they would make it better together. Only it wasn’t Erin. It was Tana.
“What the fuck did you do?” Tana barked into Arthur’s ear. “What the fuck did you do to them? And did you give me a single goddamn thought before you did it?”
Her fury rattled and startled him—startled him so thoroughly, he needed a moment to collect his thoughts. He exhaled slowly,
shifting gears from the Erin Oakes problem to the Tana Nighswander problem. When he finally replied, his pulse was jacked,
but his tone was calm. “Slow down. What happened?”
Ronnie and Jayne killed themselves, he thought. That’s what happened. Murder-suicide, to be more specific. Jayne took the Ithaca and pumped one into Ronnie, then deep-throated
the barrel herself. You drove them to it, Arthur.
“They’re gone! They took the Ranchero and took off. I don’t know how the fuck I’m even gonna get to the grocery store. I am
eight goddamn months pregnant, you dumb fuck. They were my ride. How am I going to get to work? How am I going to get to the hospital?”
“Do you know where they went?” he asked.
“Out west,” she said. “Nevada maybe? Ronnie has a cousin there. She took all her money and she took all of mine too. I had
cash in the box spring of my bed. I didn’t think she knew. I should’ve known I couldn’t keep anything from her. There’s nothing
I have she won’t take.”
“Not anymore,” he said, and that quieted her. “If it comes to it, Tana, I’ll drive you to the hospital myself when you’re
ready to deliver. As for work . . . you didn’t use the Ranchero to make your deliveries. Shut-Up-And-Eat-It has cars.”
“Yeah, well, they aren’t loaners,” she spat.
“I’ll think of something. I’ll help you through this. And you won’t have to give anyone a blow job or a lay this week to keep them happy either.” Including me, he thought, but didn’t say. “That part of your life is over, Tana. Whatever else I fucked up for you, that part of it I
feel good about.”
He listened to her breathing on the other end of the line.
“Did Jayne say anything before she left?”
“No,” Tana said. “But Ronnie said to tell you he’s sorry. That he’s never been more sorry in his whole life. I used to imagine
what it would be like—to see them both like that. Freaking the fuck out. Helpless. It wasn’t as good as I imagined.”
They were both silent, listening to the phone hiss.
“Gwen,” Tana said, finally. “Gwen can drive me. She has her own car and she only lives a few blocks from my place. You owe
me that.”
“I can ask her. But . . . Tana.” He felt an intense discomfort that made it hard to say the next part. “If she helps you out,
I need you to help me out. I’d be grateful if you didn’t tell her.”
Even as he said it, he felt something inside him writhing with shame. What did it matter if she told? He had no claim on Gwen.
He didn’t want Gwen to have a claim on him. He was afraid of his own need, his own wish to have her in his arms, afraid his
longing would take Oxford away from him. If Gwen knew the truth about him, it would make it that much easier to go, but he
didn’t want her to know the truth, he wanted her to go on looking at him with fondness and pleasure. He liked when she leaned
against him, when she bumped her head on his shoulder, had grown used to it, and felt ill at the thought of losing it.
A part of him was astonished at himself, the way he could bully his mother one moment, and wheedle and whine at Tana the next.
He had possessed a functioning sense of shame once.
“Tell her what?” Tana asked. There was a taunting edge in her voice, and for a moment she sounded like Jayne.
“You know what.”
“Say it.”
“That we had sex.”
She was silent.
“Tana . . .” He knew it was a mistake to ask and couldn’t help himself. “Did Jayne make you? To keep me happy?”
Tana laughed: a harsh caw. “What do you think?”
“If I ask Gwen to drive you . . .”
“You’ll just have to wonder what us girls talk about when you aren’t around. You think I want her help? It sucks. And if it’s going to suck for me, it’s going to suck for you, Arthur.”
He shut his eyes and rested his head against the wall. She laughed again.
“Have her give me a call,” Tana said. “Tell her I’d appreciate it. Tell her it’d be real sisterly. I’m already looking forward
to it. I don’t get nearly enough girl talk. And Gwen and I have so much in common. We’re both the kind of uneducated townies
Arthur Oakes gets hard for. Lucky us.”