The Office of Historical Corrections Page 9

  My mother paused in front of one of the restored jail cells, and the rest of us stopped behind her. She slid the headphones off of her ears and walked in. Nancy followed her. Even with just the two of them, it was crowded, but Sarah and I squeezed in behind them anyway. Under the circumstances, neither of us quite trusted our mothers to their own devices.

  “Tight squeeze,” said Nancy. “Can you even imagine living in here?”

  My mother opened and shut her mouth, but no words came out. I could see in her eyes the first of the tears I’d been expecting since she’d lost the appeal, the practiced composure of the past few weeks slipping from her. She sat on the floor of the cell and began to weep, shielding her perfectly made-up face with her hands. Ken Morton, who was still standing awkwardly outside the cell gate, took Kelli’s hand and led her away. I tried to push past Nancy to sit beside my mother and hold her hand, but Nancy sat down beside her first, and let her cry. Sarah tugged at my sleeve, but I didn’t go anywhere. I felt that the whole escapade was my mistake, and I’d be damned if I was going to let my mother’s family screw her up again on my watch.

  “That was stupid of me,” said Nancy. She put a hand on my mother’s shoulder. “Of course you’ve imagined.”

  My mother had stopped crying, but she didn’t respond.

  “I wanted to say something, you know,” said Nancy. “At the funeral. I saw you sitting by yourself and I knew right away who you were, and I wanted to speak.”

  “But you didn’t,” said my mother, the edge I’d missed in her since she’d arrived in San Francisco finally creeping back into her voice. “You didn’t even say hello.”

  “I was young,” she said.

  “I was younger,” said my mother. “You were the only family I had left when he died. I thought his reputation would matter to you, like it did to me. He was your grandfather too.”

  “Not in the same way he was yours,” said Nancy. “And I can’t change that. It took me years to understand why my mother reacted to you the way she did, and when I did, I was ashamed, but I was still her daughter. There was a lot of sorting out to do. I do think she changed some. I think she regretted some of it. I know I did.”

  “At least you know what you regret. I’m forty-seven years old and after everything, Cecilia is all I’ve got.”

  “That’s not true,” I said, even though I had believed it all my life.

  “Sometimes I think I know how Papa felt—I mean,” she said, noting my alarm, “not that I’d ever want to end it the way he did. Just that I don’t know what there is left to try.”

  I looked at the metal bars, the scratches and fingerprints on them, the open doorway on the other side. How easy it was to feel stuck; how easy it was to walk out.

  “There’s this,” Sarah said finally.

  “There’s this,” my mother repeated, in a voice somewhere between a laugh and a sob. From farther down the hall, tourists were gawking at us. Nancy wrapped a protective arm around my mother, who leaned into her shoulder. Sarah grabbed my arm as she stepped away, and I walked out with her, accepting that it was time to let our mothers cry. I was unaccustomed to that then—to leaving while my mother was in need of comfort, to trusting anyone else to know what to do. I let myself be led away because Sarah seemed confident it was possible.

  In the museum store, Kelli was laughing and dangling a pair of souvenir handcuffs just out of reach of the spiky-haired boy. Ken Morton was outside already, smoking a cigarette. He nodded in our general direction and went back to his smoking. This, I thought, was one of those times it would be easier to be male, or a smoker, to have a ready excuse to remove myself from emotional proceedings without anyone making an issue of it. Sarah pulled the mints out of her purse again and offered me one. She kept snapping the container open and shut.

  “Mom hasn’t been the same since my uncle died,” said Sarah. “It wasn’t even that they were super close, just that he was what she had in the world, you know? Kelli is a godawful pain in the ass, but if anything happened to her, I’d be a wreck. I think that was why she was so excited to meet your mom. She liked the idea of having more family again. It might be good, if they can be friends.”

  “If,” I said.

  “It could happen,” said Sarah. “Nothing like a prison to give you faith in humanity.”

  “A prison with a souvenir penny press,” I said.

  I looked around at all of the things for sale. Chocolate bars in Alcatraz wrapping. Posters with blown-up versions of prison regulations: #21. work. you are required to work at whatever you are told to do. Along the wall a row of bronze cast keys were each engraved with cell numbers. I lifted one up with my finger for Sarah to see.

  “Who buys these?” I asked. “Who walks in here and says this, this is what I need?”

  “People who don’t know what they need in the first place,” she said. “So, pretty much anybody.”

  I considered this. I wondered how much I’d have to steal for it to equal $227,035.87. It seemed strange to me to have the number in my head then, and though it would never stop seeming strange to me, I kept the running tally for years after that afternoon, did the math annually, out of habit, even after my mother had stopped requesting it, even after I had stopped thinking of the world as a place that kept track of what it owed people, even after I stopped thinking of myself as a person who had the power to make demands of the world and learned to be a person who came up with her own small daily answers like everyone else. There was something comforting about imagining I knew exactly what I’d been cheated out of.

  * * *

  —

  When my mother and Nancy emerged into the gift shop, their eyes were dry. There was something girlish in the way my mother came over to me, lighter after the cathartic tears. I tapped a key absentmindedly and it bumped the others; they jingled like wind chimes.

  “We missed the three o’clock ferry,” I told her.

  “Did we?” she said, ruffling her fingers through my hair. “I think we’ll live, kiddo. Let’s hang out for a while.”

  I watched her walk out with Nancy Morton. The sun was hazy and insistent, and everyone seemed to shimmer as they stepped outside. I watched them walk away, and I had the feeling I was watching something heavy miraculously float.

  In the years that followed, we would try two more holidays with the Mortons before the efforts were suspended indefinitely, victim to all of us being busy and, frankly, happier on our own. When we were alone after the final visit, my mother would confide in me that after all that, Nancy Morton had grown up to be boring. When my mother accepted that the legal system wouldn’t give her justice, she said she would write a book about Papa’s story, and while I heard about it for years, I never saw a manuscript. Sarah and I began a correspondence that started earnest and effusive, but tapered off, until eventually the extent of our relationship was me clicking like on her family photographs, not remembering which of her children was named what, her once commenting “Congratulations, I must have missed this!” when I was tagged in a photograph with two of the children I worked with, me intending but never bothering to correct her assumption they were mine.

  That afternoon at Alcatraz we were all together, and I didn’t know whether I had managed anything good or permanent or healing in gathering us there, only that it had previously been impossible. I slipped a bronze key off of its hook and closed it into my palm. I wanted someone to stop me or I wanted someone to tell me it was mine. I squeezed the key into my palm and walked out without anyone noticing. I walked into the glare of the light, down to the picnic tables near the water, where my family was gathered and laughing. I called to Sarah. I held the key out in my open palm and went to show my cousin what I’d done.

  Why Won’t Women Just Say What They Want

  Everyone had heard that the genius artist had gone to some deserted island, to finish a project, or to start a project, or to clear hi
s head, or to get away from some drama. People heard he had gone, and then no one heard anything for long enough that it became boring to speculate, until it had been so long it became curious again. The running joke about the volcano started when a reporter asked the Model/Actress Who Dated Him a While Ago what she thought the artist was up to, and she said, “Who knows? Who cares? I hope he fell into a volcano.” At cocktail parties that spring, someone would ask where he was and someone else would say “Volcano” and laugh, until it was summer and the artist had been gone so long that people started to wonder if he had, in fact, met some violent and tragic end, and whether someone should be looking for him. Once upon a time any woman in his life would have hiked through lava for him, but by the time he left he had worn out his goodwill to the point that it would have been asking a lot of any one of them to so much as go run him an errand at the corner store.

  When the apologies began, they were public and simultaneous. It was late summer, and they appeared suddenly and all at once, like brief afternoon thunderstorms. The High School Sweetheart’s apology came over the PA system at the grocery store where she was buying bread and cheese, because her husband had promised to take care of shopping for the week but had, for some reason, come home with only deli meat and marinara sauce. The Model/Actress’s apology came on billboards downtown in the city where she lived. The Long-Suffering Ex-wife’s came as a short film projected on a giant screen in the park nearest the house where she lived with their daughter. It played in a loop until the city took it down. The Daughter’s apology was posted on Instagram, marked with all of her frequently used hashtags. The On-Again Off-Again Ex of His Wayward Youth walked out of her apartment one morning, and by the time she returned at night, she found that the abandoned storefront next door had opened as a pop-up bar named after her, with her apology painted on the walls.

  The apologies sounded like him and they did not sound like him. They used correct and known-only-privately pet names. They contained details the wronged parties had carried quietly for years. They used phrases he would use. But they were unlike him in that they were, in fact, actual apologies, and in that way bore no resemblance to his previous efforts at making amends, which had all gone more or less like this:

  To the Long-Suffering Ex-wife, a three-page typewriter-typed letter that used the words “I’m sorry” exactly once, in its conclusion, in the context “I’ve done the best I can here and I’m sorry if even after my attempt to apologize, you are unable to forgive me, although I have, clearly, forgiven you for giving up on me in the first place.”

  To the Former Personal Assistant, two apologies, first, in the middle of everything, a terse email that she knew even then to keep in her in-box forever: “It was a mistake to have sex with you again and I’m sorry you got hurt,” and then, years later, well after she was no longer anyone’s personal assistant, and shortly after she’d turned down working an event because he’d be one of the presenters, a second apology, via the Soon-to-Be Short-Suffering Second Ex-wife, who cornered her at a gala and said, “He says to tell you he’s sorry about whatever’s going on in your life, but you need to stop making shit up about him when he barely remembers you and never touched you.”

  To the Short-Suffering Second Ex-wife, just before the divorce, in a chain of text messages:

  The Artist: I do concede that I owe you an apology for the way that I phrased things. There was probably a kinder way to express my frustration with your unreasonable expectations than to say that you just didn’t understand why so many women I had history with were still in my life because you’d never known what it was like to be as successful as I am, and, as a woman, in order to understand it, you’d have to imagine what things would be like for you if you were beautiful. But it’s unfair of you to accuse me of being cruel to you in public when we were not in public. We were, for the record, in a crowded bar.

  TSSEW: WTF? A crowded bar is literally the definition of public. How can that not be public? If you were making a book about places to have fights, a crowded bar would be the textbook definition of “in public.”

  The Artist: Well, I was hoping to leave things amicably, but if you’re going to be childish and condescending like this, then we clearly can’t have a reasonable conversation.

  To the Daughter, a note slipped under the door she’d locked herself behind while visiting him for the summer. It read “I understand it was upsetting for you to find out this way, but ‘SAT tutor’ is not a proprietary relationship; she is not your SAT tutor in the sense of belonging to you, and there’s no reason for you to be so upset about our relationship, or to compare it at all to Shannon, who I’m sorry is no longer your friend, but, I remind you, was redshirted in kindergarten because her parents didn’t want her to mature late, and is a year older than you, and was eighteen when I asked her out, which I’m sorry made her uncomfortable, but reasonably assumed was what she wanted at the time.” It was signed “Love, Dad,” with a hand-drawn smiley face.

  Now he was sorry without caveat or redirection. He was sorry without taking the opportunity to tell a long story about the things that had brought him to this point, a story causing the person whom he was supposed to be comforting to comfort him instead. He was sorry in specific and concrete ways. He was sorry about the time he cost the Former Personal Assistant a job by off-the-record calling her a crazy bitch, and sorry for lying to her face about it. He was sorry for telling the Short-Suffering Second Ex-wife that things were over with the Long-Suffering Ex-wife when in fact he was still fucking her most nights and fighting with her most mornings. He was sorry he’d said that thing about the Model/Actress’s mother, and also sorry he’d said that thing about the left side of the Model/Actress’s face, which was really exactly like the right side and perfectly lovely. He was sorry for telling the Long-Suffering Ex-wife that she was lucky she’d met him when she had because she had never been good enough for him, and if they’d met a year later he would have already known that. He was sorry for bringing the Daughter along and seating her beside him on multiple occasions when he was afraid a woman would otherwise yell at him, sorry for teaching her that however much he loved her, she was still a tool for him to use. He was sorry about the time he’d playfully squeezed a hand around the High School Sweetheart’s throat and kept it there well past the point where her eyes showed a flicker of real fear, because he could, and then removed it and laughed and said, “What, you don’t trust me?” He was sorry for the time he argued with the On-Again Off-Again Ex of His Wayward Youth and gripped her arm so hard he left a bruise, and sorrier still for insisting, when she pointed to it the next day, that the bruise wasn’t there and she was seeing things. He was so sorry for everything.

  * * *

  —

  The Long-Suffering Ex-wife thought that perhaps the apologies were his latest art project. It made her nervous and upset to think of him watching for a reaction. She hired a private detective to see if he had cameras on her somehow, but nothing turned up.

  The High School Sweetheart went home from the store and hugged her children and kissed the mouth of her husband who had forgotten all the important groceries, and tried to remember what being dramatically wounded by the artist had felt like, but found that she could not, that when she tried to find the words to explain to her husband the things the artist had said and done to her and now finally apologized for, she was describing some other person’s ugly life, a life that did not belong in her kitchen. She left the groceries sitting on the counter and went to have a glass of wine in the living room. When she came back, her husband had put the groceries away, and had lasagna in the oven, and their teenager was at the table doing homework and humming along with her headphones, and she almost cried at how stupid she’d been all that time ago, feeling bereft when the artist went off into the world without her.

  The On-Again Off-Again Ex of His Wayward Youth spun in circles in the pop-up bar to read her apology and wondered if it would have meant somethin
g to get it two decades earlier, if she would have been a different and kinder person if she hadn’t believed it when he told her that she was too smart to want kindness over honesty and she would never have both, if she hadn’t learned so young that you could wring yourself out on someone’s front lawn, and even after everything he’d said about you being the muse, the spark, the reason for it all, he could shut the window, could not just not love you, but not even really see you.

  She thought if the artist could make amends, then anyone could, so she called the married man she was sleeping with and canceled their vacation, then called the man she’d once left for the artist years ago and said she owed him an apology, at which point he reminded her that she’d already apologized specifically and profusely years ago, and he did not forgive her then or now. She texted a paragraph of urgent feelings to the man she’d wished she’d left the artist for, who had moved on by the time the artist left her, and he texted back Who is this? The next day she called back the married man and told him to uncancel their vacation, which he’d never canceled in the first place.