Circle

3797…

This was the last place I’d ever expected to see the inside of. It was sticky. A thin film covered everything, from the undistinguishable color of the tortured floor tiles, to the molded plastic seats, to the candy machine. As I waited for my name to be called, I looked around the room at all the others waiting for their names to be called. Mostly women — All women, on the verge of of middle age, with large tote bags at their feet. Clean underwear. Cigarettes. Homemade cookies. Stuff from home.
There were lots of kids. Little kids. Toddlers with their binkies and their sippies, clinging, and sucking. Older kids. Rushing around, snipping and snapping at their siblings. Teenagers. Poured into their sticky seats, simmering like French onion soup under a bubbling cover of melting cheese and croutons.
There wasn’t a smile to be found here. On the kids. The parents. The staff. The air was just too
heavy . . . The corners of your mouth simply couldn’t challenge it.
“Crumpton!”
That’s me. I rose and followed the guard through yet another metal detector and down a long corridor that led to the visitors’ area, when it wasn’t the cafeteria, and across the floor to my usual spot — Our usual spot — A table by the large picture window looking out onto a well manicured courtyard of sorts. Drab, but pastoral . . . Even pretty, if you squinted through the chicken wire glass.
“I’ll get her”
“Thank you — Ehhh . . . Can I ask you? How’s she doing?” My escort drooped just a little, gathered herself together and shrugged one of those painfully positive shrugs.
“Better . . . Better. She’s been helping some of the younger . . . Making a big difference. Sense of purpose, you know?”
She was so small! I mean she’s always been small, but in this place, this room . . . She always seems even smaller.
“Hi Mom”
“Hello Hon” She leaned in but —
“No personal contact!” The guard always says that, and she always takes it in her sorry stride, just another reminder of where she was, why she was there, and how much it had cost her.
“They treating you all right?”
“I can’t complain” My mother in a nutshell. A horse could be standing on her toe and you wouldn’t hear a word out of her. That motherly stoicism, a cross between martyrdom and passive aggression. “I have a job now. In the laundry” A hint of sarcasm — Sending a mother to prison to do more laundry. “And I’ve been working with some of the girls. She glanced across the room and waved. “That’s Thea. She’s really a good kid. Just fell for the Devil’s sweet talk. Like most of them. Smart. Taking her GED next month”
“Once a teacher . . .”
“Yea, I guess. Most of these girls are so behind the curve, their lives paralyzed after their mistakes. This place is a holding cell in Limbo. Not much to do, or learn, without someone to hold their hand and show them that even in the emotional squalor of a place like this you can still find something to hang on to. They can take everything away from you — Except your identity, and with that you can work and slowly buy back your dignity”
“Sounds like you’ve been keeping busy”
“And that’s not the half of it. They’re all so caught in legal red tape — And they don’t know their
rights — Or even if they have any! And there’s boyfriends and kids and . . . You know, family stuff. What a mess”
“But you’re . . .?”
“I’m fine, Bobby. I’m fine. Really. Don’t worry about me. There it is again.
“But I do. And I always will. And I . . . I just keep wondering if I . . . If there was something I could’ve done. Something . . . More . If I’d only —” She slowly slid her hand across the table top, her eyes shifting back and forth and, illegally, blanketed mine.
“Don’t do that, Bobby. I won’t let you. No one could have done more. You mortgaged your house!”
“I’m not talking about that. You needed a lawyer. I’m talking about . . .”
“Stop it. You were just a kid. What could you do?”
“Something. How many times did he send you to the —“
“”That’s all in the past now. We have to move on. You have to move on”
“Why didn’t you ever —” She sighed.
“And what good would that — He’d be locked up and . . . How were we . . . Your brothers and
sisters . . . On a school teacher’s salary — A Catholic school teacher’s salary. Your father made good money. And besides, they’d let him out eventually. And he’d be even more . . .” Her head dropped. Her shoulders dropped. Her whole body dropped. It was all she could do to resurrect. “How’s your sister?” I just shrugged a desperate shrug, and sighed desperate sigh. “I don’t blame her but . . . I’d sure like to see her. You don’t think she —“
“Why didn’t you report him? Elly needed your help. She feels like —“
“I abandoned her” I could barely hear what she said, a gentle breath, hardly enough to push it passed her lips before fading into the thin air of remorse.
“He set the fire, y’ know. When you took us to that shelter. After you caught — He was willing to burn three families to death just to get his way — Or get even — Or whatever the hell was going through his sick mind. One kid was burned so bad they had to take him to Saint Agnes’s. He was there for . . . Months! They said he may never . . . They don’t know if . . . ” She clasped her hands together as if in prayer. Or pain. Or both. “And you took him back. You always took him back. Why? And don’t tell me it’s about money. You could’ve divorced him”. I bit my lip.
“Divorce?” Terror. Nothing her husband ever said to her, or did to her — Or us — struck that much fear in her eyes or heart. *”What would Father Timothy say?”
“Mom, I know how important your faith is to you, and I respect that, but self preservation has to trump anything Father Tim has to say”
“But divorce . . .” The harrowing word was still holding her fragile mind hostage.
“A . . . Restraining order. The court would’ve mandated he pay child support. And, who knows? Might’ve put the fear of God in him. As long as his situation didn’t change, he wasn’t gonna change. At least he’d be out of the house, and if he ever came around . . . It wouldn’t be some half ass . . . Murky . . . domestic domestic . . . Lip service that cops could just step around like a burning bag of dog shit on the front porch. Without . . . Something signed by a judge . . . Their hands are tied. It’s a lose, lose situation for them. I mean, why go through that whole tired routine? All that paperwork — They know ninety-nine percent of the time the woman drops the charges? You would’ve. But this would have real teeth. Fines. Contempt of court! He couldn’t come near us. If we just saw him— Anywhere — 9-1-1! More headaches for him, hoops to jump through. He couldn’t come back. It wouldn’t be a one shot deal. You wouldn’t have to press charges. He wouldn’t be in jail, seething . . . Waiting to get out and make you . . . All of
us . . . Pay”
“They didn’t arrest him. They said they didn’t have any proo —“
“You’re still defending him! Proof ? Is that what you’re gonna tell Elly?” She started to quake and shiver. Her eyes transfixed.
“I didn’t know about that. I swear! I didn’t know — Bobby, you have to believe me!” I got up and reached across the table to embrace her.
“It’s okay, Mom. It’s okay. I believe you! I —” I felt myself being pulled back and away from my inconsolable mother. “What’s the matter with you, Lady? Can’t you see she’s —“
“I’m sorry, sir, but it’s not permitted” I never felt so helpless in my life. My mother was breaking down right in front of me and I wasn’t allowed to hold her, squeeze her with all my might because . . . It was against the rules?
“Don’t you see? Bobby? Don’t you see? I had to do it. I had to. I . . . I . . . No priest! No priest! Promise me, Bobby! Promise me! You can’t do it without my consent! And no last rights! Promise me!”
“Last Rites? Mom, what are you talking about? You’re not gonna die”
“No. But when the time comes . . . I want you to promise me now. And I’ll hold you to it. Promise me.
Promise me!” I reluctantly agreed, to keep her from a straight jacket. “Okay, Mom. Okay. No priest. No priest. Not even Father Timothy?”
“No . . . Priest! Especially Father Tim”
I never asked her why she did it. I just assumed, just like everyone else, that after more than thirty years of systematic terrorism and torture she’d just snapped. But I was wrong. We were all wrong.
I got her the best lawyer I could afford — Or rather couldn’t afford. Second mortgage. The best in Philly, on the east coast, specialist in these kind of cases. But even with the best defense attorney, and a parade of expert witnesses on domestic abuse, and character witnesses, and an actual parade of loyal supporters marching outside the courthouse, people on juries just don’t like people who kill other people. Even people who some might say ‘They just got what they deserved’ or “These are monsters who through their own heinous behaviour inadvertently orchestrate their own execution’, a kind of extended suicide by cop.
And they don’t buy that temporary insanity bullshit in any of its guises. To them, self defense means he’s coming at you with a chainsaw — full on topiary. If he hasn’t killed you in thirty years he’s probably not going to kill you today. He’s dangerous, to be sure, but what you’re really worried about is his lack of self control, an accident — A garbage disposal with a hinky switch and a stubborn peach pit fucking with the blades down in the hole beckoning your fingertips.
When they came back with their verdict I was, naturally, distraught. How could they be so . . . unmoved by her story? So unforgiving? Dismissive of my mother’s heart. But I was wrong. And they were right. The jury wasn’t emotionally blinded the way I was in her defense. She wasn’t their mother. He wasn’t their father. But neither were they manipulated by the prosecutor’s portentous attempt to create yet another monster. It wasn’t self defense. She never claimed it was. My mother didn’t take her sharpest kitchen knife from the drawer, walk up to my father, passed out in his favorite chair, bathed in the colorful strobe of the tv, and run it straight into, and through his rye soaked heart out of self defense. Nor was it a crime of passion. Whatever love my mother once had for her husband had long been squeezed out of her and swallowed up by an insatiable, calculating python a long, long time ago.
A jury is instructed to consider every aspect of a defendant’s motivation and action. A jury is inclined to show mercy, and welcomes the chance and opportunity to do so at every turn. But there is one facet of a defendant’s version of the truth the jury simply will not abide. And if only one of the bloodhounds in the box senses a single molecule of selfish blood in the cracks and creases of their cold, wet, disinterested nose, the attorneys, the witnesses — The judge might as well pack it in and call it a day. And though the jury did not know the motive, they were convinced that this was a cold and calculated murder in the first degree.
She was calmer now. They’d given her a shot of something and it was working. The nurse who gave her the shot looked at me with even measures of sympathy and reassurance.
“She’ll be all right. She just . . . Gets this way . . . Sometimes. It’s such a shame. She’s so kind and good hearted and . . . Compassionate. Always offering to help. A shoulder. A sympathetic ear. All the girls — We all just love her so much. She really is a . . . Saint”
As she was just starting to come around I was tempted to just ask her, once and for all, without giving her any time to think, find a seam in that chainmail straightjacket she’d been painstakingly knitting ever since she reached for that drawer with all those neat and clean and sharp answers lined up in a neat and clean and sharp row — Just . . . Blurt it out and move on. It’s not like I’d never wanted to ask her before. But I’d made a promise to myself a long time ago that if and when she did finally tell me, it would be on her terms. After all, it was her life, her story to tell — Or not tell. She and only she held the complete intellectual and personal rights. And I wasn’t going to be the next bully in that life.
A part of me, the selfish part sensed that this was the perfect time — And probably the only time to strike but . . . Maybe I didn’t have to. Maybe she’d already blurted it out. ‘Don’t you see, Bobby? Don’t you see? I had to do it. I had to!’ She had to . . . Had to . . . What? Punish him? That wasn’t my mother. She wasn’t a member of the Justice League or the Hague. That’s not what moms do. Moms look out for their family. Protect their kids. Soothe their aging parents. Stand by their husbands — Through thick and thin. For better, for . . . Worse.
‘No priest! No priest!’ Of course. I didn’t ask her. I didn’t have to. I just looked at her. Without blame or pardon. She recoiled. She knew that I knew. She wasn’t afraid of him. She didn’t hate him. She wasn’t afraid of losing her life, to him, or to prison. She was afraid of losing her purpose in life. He was going to hell. And she . . . Well, the nurse said it . . . Was a saint.
No priest. No confession. No last rites. Not even Father Timothy. No chance of a last minute heart to heart with a friend. Or confidant. Too risky.
“You’re following him — You’re taking him back . . . Again”

“Bobby. He needs me”

O.B.