The End of Marking Time (7 page)

The last thing I heard while Wendell Cummings was in the room was that I should expect my counselors to start arriving the next day. I wanted to ask why I needed to talk to counselors, but my eyelids were so heavy I couldn’t hold them open. My head lolled to the left and I fell asleep with Wendell Cummings watching me.

When I woke up, the lights were dimmed to simulate night inside my hospital room. Debbie sat by the door and watched me intently. How could it be nighttime? I hadn’t even had lunch. The last thing I remembered was Wendell blabbing on about his program. Did I nod off and sleep through the entire day? Debbie wouldn’t tell me what time it was and when I found the tender spot at the base of my skull, she warned me not to touch it. She said I had a sore from lying on the pillow too long and that I needed to leave the bandage alone.

Now I know that was a lie. What they did to me was illegal. How could they plant something inside my head and get away with it? I don’t know what kind of justice this is, but you should consider what they did to me as much as anything I’ve done wrong.

Debbie gave me two pills to help me sleep, and the next morning I met my education counselor, Dr. Blake. He was a big guy, not tall but well-rounded in the physical sense and he had a thick beard and dark curly hair. He was young, probably a newly graduated Ph.D.

Dr. Blake shook my hand vigorously and pulled the single chair close to my bedside. He explained that this was the start of my program more enthusiastically than any bureaucrat had ever spoken to me. Blake was excited to help me go straight and be a productive member of society, yada, yada. So I listened to him babble and tried not to interrupt.

“What was the last grade you completed in school?”

“Seventh.”

I guess I should have been embarrassed that I never finished eighth grade. Blake was the first in a stream of people tasked to mold me into shape. Every one of them had been to college. They weren’t geniuses or anything, but they’d made the investment I wouldn’t make in myself, not that I really had a chance where I came from.

“Did you have difficulties in school?”

“Besides paying attention?” I asked. He wanted to know if I was a moron, without sounding politically incorrect.

“Can you multiply twenty-three by three?”

“In my head?”

“Can you?”

I asked for a piece of paper and he refused. When I couldn’t answer, he gave me a few really easy problems I could do in my head. I wondered what multiplying had to do with life but didn’t ask. This was serious to Dr. Blake and to his credit, he didn’t make fun of me. I was embarrassed by how simple he had to make the problems for me to answer them right. He made a few notes and then handed me a typed page and asked me to read the text.

I struggled with the third word and Dr. Blake make a tick mark on his notepad. In my school if you learned to read and write you were a prodigy. I wasn’t a retard, but I spent more time worrying about how to keep my skin intact than reading books someone made up. There might have been a few kids I went to school with who could have read that entire page without fumbling, but not me. I stumbled over lots of words. After a while I stopped trying to sound them out and said pass when I got to a word I didn’t know.

When I handed back the page he asked me to name the seven continents. I got North and South America, Asia and Africa. I had no idea what the other three could be.

He asked me who the president of the United States was. You’d have to be dead not to know Barack Obama was president when I went to prison. Hey, I watched TV, but I couldn’t have known he’d lost reelection while I was sleeping. Blake asked me to name the two halves of congress in the federal government. I had no idea what he was talking about.

He asked me about the court system and I knew everything about it down to the difference between district, superior, and federal court. He was impressed with my knowledge of appeals and other procedures. The problem, he explained, was that this system had been entirely revamped in the last three years. The only part of American government I was familiar with had been erased. My ignorance earned me a civics class. If I had known he was assessing my weaknesses, I would have worked a lot harder to come up with correct answers.

He asked me about Tom Sawyer, Captain Ahab, Mr. Darcy, Moses, Gandhi, and Muhammad. I knew these people were all famous. Some of them were fictional. I told Dr. Blake that Tom Sawyer was a young kid in a book by Charles Dickens. When he grimaced I knew I was wrong and I didn’t try guessing who the other people were. Blake was surprised for a minute but made some notes.

I wasn’t worried about all his notes and questions until he showed me the stack of DVDs I’d find when I got home. There were five or six books he expected me to read, and I told him he was out of his mind.

“You don’t understand,” he said.

“I guess I don’t.”

He pointed to the red light on the ankle bracelet. “No one will hire you until that light goes green.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“That light doesn’t go green until you get your GED. And to do that, you’ve got to prove to me that you’re ready.”

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t need a job. I certainly wasn’t reading all those books, but Dr. Blake’s intensity made me nervous. There I was a convicted felon and they were paying this guy to teach me things I should have learned for free in high school. I didn’t understand what was happening, but I was in no position to argue with Blake.

If my conversation with Dr. Blake was a shock, my meeting with Dr. Charlotte Finch was intriguing. I was delighted to see her walk into my room. Her long red hair shimmered under the fluorescents and her taut body waved and curled as she stalked up to my bedside and offered her hand. She saw me check her left hand for a ring and find none. She smiled a knowing smile that was neither an invitation nor a rebuke.

“I’m the family counselor,” she said.

She stiffened at my horrified expression.

“Don’t worry, this will be the easiest session you’ll have this week. We should be done today.” Boy was that a lie.

“Don’t tell me I need your approval to get that light off?” I looked down at my ankle and the glowing red light.

“Don’t think of it that way, Michael. I’m here to help.”

“Do you do this for everyone who leaves prison? I mean, how can you afford all this? How many prisoners have been let out in the last few years?”

“That’s a lot of questions. Just relax. This isn’t going to hurt. Yes, we do this for everyone. We think it’s important for you to be comfortable in all aspects of your life. If you are at ease, you can work yourself back into society in a positive way. We’ve had a lot of practice. We’ve released two million prisoners in the last three years.”

Two million? How could two million felons rejoin society in a positive way? Charlotte, Dr. Blake, and Wendell Cummings were kidding themselves.

“How many years do you have to go to school to be a doctor?”

“Eight years of college usually, depending on the specialty.”

I couldn’t believe all these people spent eight extra years in school. I hadn’t even finished the first twelve, not even close, but it was clear to me you couldn’t empty the prisons and expect it to go well. They might have spent a lot of money on fancy educations, but they had a lot to learn.

“Let’s get started,” she said, opening a folder. “Would you like to talk about your parents or your siblings first?”

“Parents?”

“I only have record of your mother here in the file.”

“Does it say ‘fat menace’ under her picture?”

“Come on now, Michael. You need to be honest with me and yourself. Your mother wasn’t a menace, was she? She brought you into this world and cared for you, didn’t she?”

“She stuck a gun in my face and said she was going to kill me.”

“When was that?”

“The first time, I was thirteen.”

She looked surprised, but I could tell she’d heard stories like mine before. All she said was, “Why?”

“I was her original ticket out of the house. She got pregnant with me when she was fifteen or sixteen. It wasn’t an accident. She knew the government would give her an apartment in the projects and enough to feed the two of us. It was ok at first, but she never stopped getting her ticket punched, if you know what I mean. By the time I was thirteen, there were six other kids. Money was tight. She never got a job, just kept getting pregnant and angry when there wasn’t enough to go around.”

“So you started getting into trouble?”

“I was hungry. I clipped a can of peaches from the grocery store and I got caught. DSS and the cops brought me home.”

“Your mother had good reason to be angry then.”

“She wasn’t worried about me. She was worried about DSS taking her kids away. Without us, she’d have to get a job. When she stuck that gun to my head she said, ‘You bring DSS here again and I’ll shoot you dead, boy.’”

Charlotte had to stop and think about that a minute. “But you stayed until you were eighteen.”

“Is that what your file says?”

She turned it toward me knowing I couldn’t read the small print.

“One of the kids found some fancy jewelry in my bedroom two years later. My mom went crazy looking for the gun and I split. I was fifteen and I never went back.”

Charlotte wrote something in her file. I wondered if she’d bust my mom for collecting when I wasn’t even there. It would serve mom right. Charlotte asked about my brothers and sisters and I told her I saw them sometimes on the street. Nothing regular.

“What about your father?”

“Never met him.”

“Would you like to?”

“What are you talking about? My mother doesn’t even know who he is.”

“We have a new program,” she said. “When a baby is born without a father, we put the DNA into our computer systems. Every man who gets a DNA sample taken by the government is compared against the list of fatherless children.”

“You can tell me who my father is?”

“About eighty percent of the time. Do you want to know?”

I’d never really had a family. My mother didn’t count. She was too young to know what she was doing. Finding my father was likely to be a huge disappointment. He certainly wouldn’t want any part of my mother and he’d have no real obligation to me. I was twenty-five. What did Charlotte think I was looking for? A handshake? A ballgame?

Charlotte nodded up and down, like I had to find my father to stop the little red light from glowing, but she couldn’t force me to do it. I said sure. What could it hurt?

She gave me a clipboard with a paper, pointed to the X, and I signed it.

“That brings me to one last thing,” she said. “Children.”

“I don’t have any.”

She looked at me funny and took a picture out of her folder.

Melanie Michaud, that bitch. She’d talked to the cops while I was in a coma. How could she? Just like my mother—in it for the money.

The picture Charlotte handed me wasn’t Melanie Michaud.

I recognized her curly red hair instantly. I’d spent a week with Kathleen Fitzgerald before I’d hit the district attorney. Seeing her picture I felt like I should have gone back.

Charlotte handed me a second picture. He was three years old, sliding down a red plastic slide in someone’s back yard. As I took the photo, I felt foolish for the glances I’d shot at her earlier. She’d known what she was about to reveal, maybe that’s why she kept her cool. Maybe she was just playing me and had no real attraction at all. Certainly, being a felon didn’t put me at the top of her list.

“Jonathan,” Charlotte said. “Jonathan Fitzgerald. The DNA match was conclusive.” I’d been careful, but even without the DNA test, there was no doubting he had my square chin and stubby nose. I could almost see his mother’s green eyes, but the picture was too far away.

The financial thing didn’t hit me right away. Sure, Charlotte was showing me the picture because she wanted me to help pay for little Jon’s care. I got that. After growing up with barely enough to eat, I had to help the little guy. It wasn’t a mix up. DNA tests don’t pick some random girl and it just happens she’s the last girl I slept with before I went up. No. It was my mistake not the computer’s.

I thought about Kathleen. Was she different now that she was a mother? What would she expect from me?

Charlotte passed me a card with Kathleen’s address and phone number in blue ink on the back. I had to see her and work things out. Once Kathleen and I agreed on how to take care of Jonathan, Charlotte would approve my release from the dreaded red light.

How absurd? How hard did they think I’d work to turn off the little red light on that anklet? The folly was blocked by thoughts of Kathleen and Jon, what I’d find at their new address, and what they’d say when I came to see them.

I was overwhelmed. The physical therapy alone was a major strain. While I was learning to walk and talk and move, counselors streamed in, one after another, and told me things that completely upset my understanding of the world. I might have been able to digest the changes if they were spread out over a year, but they came so fast I could barely listen to everything the bureaucrats spouted off. I told them what they wanted to hear, even though I expected to be robbing houses as soon as I was out. I knew the government was going to great lengths to help me. It’s not like I didn’t appreciate it, but I couldn’t picture myself at a mindless job day after day. Sure, I would have been proud to have a legitimate job. Maybe I didn’t believe in myself. Maybe I didn’t believe anyone would hire me. Whatever my reasons, I dismissed the BS my counselors slung at me.