CHAPTER 64
Summer
The prison shuttle pulls up to the women’s annex and I climb in and join another crowd of wretched people in this wretched place. The bus bumps along as it winds around the prison complex. It’s razor wire and concrete as far as the eye can see. I get dropped off at the main facility.
There’s a sea of visitors here, and a million hoops to jump through before I finally make it to the visitors’ room.
I check the clock on the wall and see that it’s after two o’clock.
I’ve already been here so long today that if I have to wait another three hours, visiting hours will be over, and this will all be for nothing.
But once I’ve checked my bag and been processed, I wait only minutes before I see my father appear.
He lumbers slowly into the visitors’ room, a protruding gut leading the way. His hair’s gone salt and pepper. His face is drawn in deep vertical lines and so rough with sun damage that he looks like an old saddle.
It’s shocking, really. In my mind, Steve Stevens has always been a wiry and jumpy punk of a man with thick, dark hair and skin so pale he’s nearly see-through. Of course, the man from my past consumed only drugs. This one looks like he lives for his three hots a day.
He passes right by me. I watch as he searches the tables for the woman who says she’s his daughter.
He doesn’t recognize me, and for some reason, this is a relief. It means I’ve grown, that I’ve changed so much that he can’t pick me out in a crowd by the fear in my eyes.
I’m no one to him, if I ever was.
I stand and wave. He shakes his head and stops, leans forward, and squints at me. Finally, it dawns on him that I’m his daughter, and he walks to me.
I sit down. He sits down. I don’t want an awkward greeting, and no way do I want a hug or even a handshake. I don’t want him to touch me at all. I don’t think I could bear it. I might scream. Or punch him.
But I don’t have to worry about any of that awkwardness, since he makes no moves to touch me. I wonder what he’ll say, what his first words to me will be after all this time.
“They let visitors give prisoners whatever they want from the vending machines,” he says. “Did you get tokens on your way in? I want corn chips.”
My lips part. It’s all I can do not to laugh. “Uh, I didn’t know about the tokens.”
“Dammit,” he says and starts to gnaw on a fingernail that’s already been chewed down to the nub.
“I could go ask,” I offer.
“That’s not how it works. If you don’t get the tokens on the way in, you can’t get the tokens at all.
” He puts his gnarled, weather-beaten hands flat on the table and lets his gaze wander to other prisoners and their visitors.
The sight of a man enjoying a bag of corn chips is too much for him to handle, and he shakes his head at me in disgust. “So? What are you here for? Not money, I know. You need something signed?”
“No, nothing like that.”
Suddenly, I’m tongue-tied. Steve’s just hit the nail on the head—I have no idea why I’ve shown up. There’s something inside me, just under the surface, that needs to come out. I don’t know the words for it, though.
What did I tell myself just moments ago, while waiting for the shuttle? I need some closure…
“You came to tell me I was a rotten father? Well, you weren’t such a great daughter, you know.”
His words hit their target, a soft, fleshy part of me I didn’t even know still lived inside my spirit. Seems like it was just hanging out, waiting, still vulnerable to attack from an old enemy.
I wasn’t a great daughter? So I deserved neglect and abuse?
“Let me tell you right up front that the cigarettes weren’t my idea, all right? So don’t go blaming me for it.”
I have absolutely no idea what he’s talking about, and for a moment I think the drugs left him with permanent brain damage. “Cigarettes?”
“That was all your mother’s idea. She told me to mind my own fucking business because she knew how to discipline children the proper way. Now, my daddy liked to use a belt on me, but your mother said a cigarette or two would keep you in your place.”
I rub my right leg. It’s a reflex that I don’t quite understand. And then I feel something move toward me from far away, like the ghost of a memory. I feel it hover over me. So much anger. The pain makes me cry. It hurts so much.
My eyes water.
I must look confused.
“Turns out your mother was right. You never cried after that. I remember thinking that she was treating you like you was a three-year-old ashtray.”
Those three round scars on my thigh… that’s what they are? My mother burned me with cigarettes, and I never cried again.
How did I forget this? How far down have I shoved the memory? What else is in there that I haven’t acknowledged? But I have to make sure I heard right.
“I never cried again?”
“Worked like a charm. But like I said, it wasn’t my idea. So, if you’re going to do some kind of lawsuit or press charges or some shit, go and see your mother about it. I let her take care of you. She was the mother, after all.”
She was a mother like you were a father, asshole.
“I went to the women’s annex. She refused to see me.”
“Isn’t that just like the bitch. She won’t see me either, even though as husband and wife, I could see her once a week. They hand out free snacks over there to prisoner husbands. Did you know that? Good snacks. Stuff I could sell over here.”
I slump into the back of the plastic chair bolted to the floor, stunned.
When I was here a decade ago, I didn’t know shit about shit.
I was only just beginning to understand that I’d escaped a situation that was about to drag me to my grave.
That I’d wandered into heaven on earth and found a place where I was safe.
The last time I was here, I still hated them, and I was still working to find a way not to blame myself for all their failures. But now?
Now I’m just amazed and horrified that I ever wanted these people to love me. Kids are like that, I guess. They need love and belonging more than anything, more than air.
I’m not that kid anymore.
“Hey, I have a question for you,” I say.
He waits. His eyes are vacant.
“Out of curiosity, have you ever thought of me? Not the stuff you did to me, but just me, as a person, as the child you brought into the world? Have you ever wondered what happened to your daughter after you got arrested?”
He removes his hands from the table and drops them into his lap. “Wonder about you? What do you mean? Are you trying to trick me or something?”
It takes me a moment to regain my footing. I’m sitting down with a human being who can’t think outside himself. It’s all about him. Are you here for my money? Are you trying to trick me? Have you come here to blame me for what your mother did and file a lawsuit against me?
Steve Stevens is a product of his own abuse and neglect. So is my mother. I get that. But they had no business bringing a child into the world, and yet they did.
It’s a fucking miracle I made it out with even some of my soul intact.
“Did you ever worry about me or wonder if I was okay?”
He shrugs. “Why would you ask me that? The government took you. You were their problem, not mine. Look at where I am, Lurlene! It’s not like I could have done anything for you from here!”
At the sound of my father’s outburst, a guard steps toward us.
A rush of nausea floods me. “Lurlene is my mother. I am not Lurlene.”
“I know that! Do you think I’m stupid?”
I try once more. “Did you ever wonder about your daughter? Were you even the slightest bit curious?”
His lips pull into a straight line, and his eyebrows knit together. I know this expression, but I had forgotten about it until now. He always looked at me like this right before he locked me in a closet or bathroom or basement. But he can’t do that now. Not here.
Not to this version of myself.
“You were always a pain in the ass,” he hisses. “Always a selfish brat, going on about your fucking toys and useless school and asking for something to eat. It was so much bullshit that a man couldn’t think straight.”
I say nothing.
“I see you’re married,” he says, nodding to my ring. I forgot to take it off. “Who’s the unlucky fellow?”
“Someone who would squash you like the roach you are.”
“You were never worth the trouble, stupid girl.”
I freeze. A bright light flashes in my mind and the nerves in my body buzz with awareness. This horrible moment with this horrible man has just blown the lid off my life.
I see it now. I get it. Why I’m the way I am.
Why it’s always been so hard to see myself as worthy.
I’ll be damned.
But I’m not that helpless and terrified little girl today, am I? I have options, choices. I’ve experienced love, and it didn’t make me a pussy. In fact, it’s made me a fucking fighter.
And I know I’m worth the trouble.
Even if I’m not perfect and can’t have children. I’m worth the trouble. And I need to fight for the goodness I thought I didn’t deserve.
I laugh out loud. The guard stares at me.
No more.
Never again will I carry a burden that doesn’t belong to me, garbage thoughts that were shoved deep inside me by people so awful that they’ll be spending the rest of their days behind barbed wire.
I stand. I lean my hands on the table and look directly into those lifeless, beady eyes.
“You vile, pathetic bag of human garbage.” I spit the words at him. “I was always worth the trouble. You were just too damaged and broken and high to see it.”
“Miss, step away,” the guard says, clasping my elbow.
“I’m leaving,” I tell him, yanking my arm from his grip. “I need to say just one more thing.”
“Make it quick.”
My upper lip trembles. I point at my father. “I didn't deserve your ugliness and the ugliness of the woman who gave birth to me. I am too good and too decent for either of you. Fuck you, you pathetic piece of slug shit.”
The guard grabs my elbow again and leads me from the visitors’ room. My heart pounds in my chest, and I hear the swish-swish of blood racing through my veins. My hands shake as I collect my bag and walk from the visitors’ wing and out the public entrance.
As soon as I’m outside, I step off the walkway and into the grass. I gulp down the air and send up a prayer of gratitude for my freedom and the lessons I still have time to learn. I lean my hands on my knees until my heart slows and my breathing steadies.
I don’t know what my next step will be, and I don’t know where I should go, but at least I understand why I came here. It had to be done. I had to clear out the past pain to make room for any kind of future happiness.
I straighten. I feel scooped out inside. My lungs feel strangely open, like there’s suddenly more room in there. I may have just lost some of my stubborn self-assuredness, but it was a fair trade.
I’m free.
I look up at the sky. I breathe. Then I look around me. I have no idea what I should do next.
And then I feel everything vibrate, as if an electric current is swirling around me.
I turn toward the source.
There he is.
Declan’s hanging back near the parking lot gate, the sun setting behind him, watching me with stark violet eyes.