Chapter 16 Roseate Spoonbill #4
of Dots, the kind you get in a movie theater, and a giant hot pretzel. The pretzel was a huge hit. Sparrow would ask for hot
pretzels every time she saw me. I actually learned how to make them for her.
Sam and I decided that I would stay behind while he went to Fond du Lac to bring Felicity home. When she got there, my mother
and I would take over.
Sam had so many details to work out while he was in Madison, and he needed at least to set the various wheels in motion.
There was the matter of the insurance money: Felicity had not harmed either Emil Gardener or Cary Church, so she would ultimately receive the proceeds of their life insurance policies (Suzanne Church would attempt to sue her for those benefits but would have no grounds, as Cary Church could have chosen to leave life insurance benefits to a calico cat).
Felicity offered to give money to both men’s families but Sam put his foot down, saying that might open the door to speculation about a guilty mind.
She also would receive a total of about one hundred thousand dollars from the state, county, and city for wrongful arrest and imprisonment.
In her direct way, Felicity had already decided she would leave the area as soon as it was possible. She thought she might
build a house but wasn’t sure where. Sam was stunned by her forward orientation. For her first days, we agreed that if she
was comfortable with it, she would stay with Sam and me and Miranda in Sheboygan. It was not ideal, but it was a place she
was used to, where she had spent many nights, long ago, and where she could have privacy.
What Sam had underestimated was the tidal wave of media interest in this bizarre reversal. Not only did press throng the car
as Sam pulled out of the prison parking lot with Felicity, but reporters also tailed them to Sheboygan, filming and trumpeting
a narrative about a “homecoming” and a “more innocent time.”
By late afternoon, I had been up and down thirty times, scanning the windows, texting Sam, but, as they approached the neighborhood,
I wanted to lock myself in my childhood bedroom. There was nothing I could say to Felicity, although, of course, I was mad
with joy for her. But hadn’t I doubted her? I had doubted everything.
Then, she was there, standing on the front walk.
Sam turned to the reporters. He said, “Please, have some dignity. Let Miss Wild see her daughter. You can’t photograph a minor
child anyway.”
Somehow, commandeered by Sally Zankow, who told all present to “back the fuck off,” it worked.
I held Sparrow’s hand as we came out onto the front porch. She might be big, but she held on hard. When Sam and Felicity reached
the bottom of the steps, they stopped, and I said, “This is your mommy that you didn’t see for a long time, just like I told
you.”
Her eyes filling, her tone rigorously upbeat, Felicity said, “Hi, Sparrow. I sure did miss you! I won’t try to hug you yet because you don’t really know me.”
Sparrow looked up at me. “This is Felicity? This is your best friend?”
I told her, “Yes.”
Felicity said, “Oh, Reenie . . .” and stepped up and took me into her strong, skinny arms, while Sparrow hovered close and
finally put her own arms around our waists. “This is all you,” Felicity kept saying. “This is all your goodness, Reenie. You
wouldn’t give up.”
And yet, how many times had I tried to do just that?
I finally said, “Wouldn’t you have told the truth? Eventually?” Felicity shrugged. “But why not?”
“I guess I felt like I deserved to be punished. Maybe like I was doomed and all I could do was try to save the only good thing
in my life.”
Once Sparrow had an early dinner and quieted down, insisting that Felicity and I stay in the same room at least until she
was asleep but preferably all night, we opened the adjoining door to what had been Nell’s room and sat quietly, me sipping
tea, Felicity a glass of Chardonnay. It was still light.
“That’s a Carolina wren, that’s a gray catbird, that’s a pine warbler,” Felicity said as the birds bombed the feeder in the
fading light.
“You sound like my Grandpa McClatchey. He used to say, ‘That’s a Toyota Camry, that’s a 1990 Mustang, that’s a Buick Regal,
they don’t make them anymore.’”
We both laughed then. “I’m out of jail,” Felicity said, softly, to me and to herself. “I’m free. I’m with my daughter. I’m
having a glass of wine.”
People don’t ordinarily see those events as miracles. Maybe they should. “No one would blame you if you got hammered,” I said. “You’ve been through a lifetime’s worth of crazy in the past week.”
“It’s the crazy I’m used to,” she said. “I’m the opposite of Occam’s razor. With me, it’s always zebras.”
“Did you think you would get out of jail ever?”
She closed her eyes tight. “I really thought I would never get convicted. I know that’s hard to believe. Then I thought I
would get parole first try. But then I read about women forced to commit murder, like by cult leaders, at gunpoint. And they
were never, ever going to get out! It was a double murder. A carefully planned double murder for profit. How could I prove
that I was a good person who made one terrible mistake? That’s true for most people who kill, by the way, except professionals
or serial killers. I could do good for twenty years and maybe it wouldn’t matter even then. And then, I thought that I’d tell
Sam the truth when my mom died. But then Ruth got new medicine. And it worked. She’s not even fifty. She could live twenty
more years.”
“All this is so strange and, if I can say this, not very well planned. For somebody like you?”
“Well, gee, Reenie, I really did never plan what I’d do if I was ever charged with a double murder . . . and then I was in
a prison van!” Felicity shuddered. “It was so much worse, not just cold and dirty. I expected that. The people, they weren’t
just women who did wrong because of men. It wasn’t Anna Karenina. Some of them were pathetic. But some were vicious women, child killers. Not everybody who has a hard life ends up bad.”
She went on, “I was bad, but I wasn’t bad like that. Remember when we were kids and we used to say, he wasn’t all bad, just
middle-evil? That’s what I was.”
I tried to visualize Felicity, beautiful, neurotic, and refined, facing a ladle of beans, a slice of white bread, and a few
strings of meat, repurposed from a previous meal, while across from a woman who wanted to eat her for dinner.
“They respected me for killing those poor men. I was their hero, a murderous hooker. They just wished that I’d gotten away with it. They wanted to be my friend; they wanted to have sex with me. They suggested all kinds of things even I’d never done.”
I tried to smile. I don’t think I managed. This was something I had not expected. The Felicity I knew was reticent, even with
people she cared about. This Felicity was flayed bare.
“What did you do?”
“I pretended I was born-again. I pretended I was like a nun, always reading my Bible, always praying in the chapel. Either
they thought I was holy or they thought I was nuts.”
“How did you not actually go nuts?”
“I’m not sure I didn’t,” she said. She seemed to look down a dark corridor, into a cave, her eyes adjusting to what she saw.
“I would wake up and forget where I was. The women laughed and screamed and fought and screwed all night long. They just never
stopped. There was no silence. They wouldn’t let me have earplugs. When somebody stole my headphones, they said I had to wait
three months before I could get more because I was careless. If I really were a nun now? One of those people who could only
speak once a week for the rest of her life? That would be okay with me.”
“Why wouldn’t you talk to Sam? Or anybody?”
She avoided Sam, fearful that any human kindness would crack her wide open. She was afraid that she would confess that she’d
made it all up and that Ruth had done it and please, please save her. Some nights, she thought she was dying, and some nights,
she wanted to die. Her brief encounters with the no-nonsense psychiatrist helped her.
That doctor was clearly down on his luck as well.
He wasn’t doing this because he was tired of a three-hundred-dollar-an-hour practice and wanted to serve humanity.
He must have done something bad to end up in a nauseous green concrete windowless room at Manoomin, facing a woman whose ankles were chained to the floor.
“Practice denial,” he said, “until you can retreat into yourself and go to a meadow or a lake. Meditate. Do yoga. Take four naps a day. Do anything to give yourself some mental distance.” Eventually, she got permission to eat alone in her cell or in the library.
She wondered how many other “middle-evil” women were fighting for their sanity with small spoonfuls of privacy.
She lied to Sam.
She let him think that the conditions were tolerable.
The few clients of Sam’s who’d been convicted of crimes were mostly white-bread people, corporate fraudsters, none of whom
ended up in a maximum-security lockup. But even they complained of the degradation. So when Felicity sent him a single note,
about starting a book club and learning to paint, he suspected that the big picture had big holes in it. He also suspected
that Felicity’s story had been suspicious from the jump.
When she ended up on IVs in the hospital, dehydrated to the point of collapse for the second time, Sam sat by her bed and
grilled her: “What really happened, Felicity? What really happened? I promise that I won’t betray your confidence. I just
need to know the truth, Felicity . . .”
“But he couldn’t really keep my confidence!” she said now. “He couldn’t let me go to prison for life if he knew the truth!”
“What was it like?” I asked her finally. I wasn’t sure that I’d ever again catch her in this mood, in a place where she felt
at home, in a room so dark we couldn’t see each other’s faces. She knew I wasn’t asking about prison.
“You mean, what was it like being an escort.”