From the Chrysalis (10 page)

D’Arcy Devereux smiled too, the left side of his mouth pulling higher than the right. When he sat back down, the other prisoners and visitors pulled their eyes away to give him more space.
 

A small, careful smile blotted out the darkness in his eyes, but he had aged ten years in the last five. Little wrinkles radiated from the corners of his eyes like spokes in a wheel, although he wasn’t yet twenty-five. Almost as if he were shy, he kept smiling. Suddenly she was fourteen again. All she wanted him to do was, well, speak to her. She thought briefly of the pond and a veil dropped. It always did. What else could a pubescent girl have wanted in 1966? With her own cousin, yet?

She opened her mouth then closed it. It didn’t matter. He couldn’t hear what she said. The glass divider was in the way. But for the first time since she’d gotten off the plane at Toronto International, her arrival unheralded, she felt a powerful sense of homecoming. Here she was in this strange place, this
prison,
and she never wanted to leave. Forget her dual citizenship, forget school. She belonged
here
. She belonged with him. And she’d die to keep this feeling. No matter what happened, no matter what people said.

When Dace motioned her to pick up the telephone receiver and said into his, “You’re so beautiful. I can’t believe my eyes,” joy flooded her veins, but the words didn’t matter. All she cared about was his voice.
 

She shook her head, blushing. “I am not beautiful,” she said, shifting under his intense stare. Of course he was staring at her, she thought, stiffening on the stool like a butterfly impaled on a pin. Where else was he supposed to look? She was backed by a green wall with a round-faced clock ticking the seconds off, and already she was praying their hour would never end. Her own view was more compelling. A scowling, fat-faced guard was scrutinizing her and Dace more closely than he was watching anybody else.

“You really don’t know?” he asked, a puzzled expression on his face.

She shook her head again, her throat almost swelling shut with unshed tears. There was a steady hum of chatter in the visiting room, then the bus blond in the next stall erupted, yelling at the shrunken little Dustin Hoffman creature she was visiting. “I can’t take anymore! You’ve got to stop!”

Stop what? Stop stealing? Stop drinking? Stop killing? Stop hurting me?
Anxious to write her own script, Liza shut the woman out. “But,” she demurred, “at least I’m not getting acne anymore.”
 

“You?” He shook his head, trying to look serious. “Acne? You’re imagining things. You never had acne. Although I do remember a certain yellow polka dot dress.” He grinned when she flushed again at this distressing evidence of his memory. “And the way you drank tea. The old aunties wanted to get rid of us, but you wouldn’t leave.”

“Old? I’m not sure. Everybody had their children so young in those days.”
 

“That was the last farm-do I ever went to.” He paused, staring off into space. “I think that’s why I remember it so well. That … and you,” he added. “And the butterflies. It was my final outing before I came here. All those rednecks, well, most of the cousins turned out okay. Except for Randy.”

“What do you mean? I thought he was a police detective in Hamilton.”

“Yeah, he’s a copper all right,” Dace agreed, his hand tightening on his telephone receiver. “Remind me. What was happening at the farm that day, an anniversary?”

“Aunt Sadie’s and Uncle Tom’s thirtieth or fortieth or something. Who knows? We have so many aunts and uncles I don’t know how anybody keeps track.”

“Jeez, forty years is a long time. My father was so mad that summer he used to slam me into a wall every time he looked at me. And my mother—“

 
He suddenly stopped talking and stared down at his hands.
 

 
Wait!
Liza almost shouted.
Come back to me!
“Oh, she’d understand,” she said. Planting her hand against their glass partition, she appealed to him with her eyes. “She would! She’d come to see you every visitors’ day.”

Their fat overseer materialized so fast she almost fell off her stool. He gestured at the reinforced glass divider and Liza dropped her hand without taking her eyes off Dace’s taut expression. There was no time to spare.

“What’s his problem? Is he worried about me smudging the glass?”

Dace’s face relaxed. “Maybe,” he said. “You know, I’ve been away so long, Liza. I’ve done my best to pay, well, as much as anyone can. When I get Out, it’s going to be for good. I meant what I wrote you last time.”

She nodded because she had memorized everything he wrote:
I’m going to be a son my father can be proud of. You’ll be proud of me, too.
Of course he couldn’t be expected to say a thing like that out loud. Not here in this place, where it would be met by a chorus of jeers.

 
She searched her mind for the right thing to say. Every word was so precious today. “In your last letter, you said you were getting out real soon.”

“Well, maybe.” He shifted. When he jerked his eyes in the guard’s direction, she felt such a fool. She should have known. Of course the guards could lip-read. Locking her hands between her knees, she leaned in even closer until their reflections collided in the streaky glass.

“My parole review’s coming up in November,” he volunteered.

“That’s good, right?”

“
If
I get paroled. But that’s a big If. I can’t say I’m looking forward to my parole review.”

“Things will go better this time. They will. It’s not like you’re a shit disturber anymore. You’re what, one of those ‘solids’?”

“Sure, it’s just like I told you, I’m a good boy.
But that’s when hard time begins. When you’re just about out.”

A chill passed through her.

“If you’re a quick change artist, it’s okay. Except sometimes it comes back to you, how
fucking stupid
you’ve been. You want everything
right now
, and you don’t care how you get it.”

“Hey, are we talking about you or some other guys?”

He shrugged. “Other guys, I guess.”

Almost sagging in relief, Liza smiled again. “Do you miss things as much as you did when you first came in?”

“Not as much. You can’t or you’ll go crazy.”

“What things do you miss most?” she stammered, surreptitiously glancing at her watch. Oh God, visitation was almost over. And here she was behaving like a stranger at some stupid social tea.
What’s your horoscope? Are
you anything like me?
She’d already asked about that stuff in her letters anyway. That was when they had all the time in the world and everything was going to be all right.
 

I’m a Gemini like you,
he’d written back. He was good at chitchat when he wanted to be.
A quick-minded, dual personality, easily bored. Of course a girl like you craves excitement. I do, too.

Although she was careful not to touch it, she leaned even closer to the glass divider, hoping to recapture their initial intimacy. And it worked. Extracting a loose Export `A’ from his shirt pocket, his smile widened and he let her in.
 

“What do I miss most? Well, talking to a normal person like you, little darling. Although sometimes when you get a visitor, you feel like such a goddamn jerk. Because there’s no way you deserve such …
kindness
. There’s gotta be a reason you’re doing time with a bunch of losers, right? And you get scared when somebody comes to visit that you won’t even remember how to talk. Hey, don’t look like that. You know I don’t feel that way with you. Look, just stop me if it sounds like I’m feeling sorry for myself. I’m on a real roll today. Because you … But that’s why I liked writing letters to you, I had lots of time to think about what I wanted to say. In a letter you have a world of time to make things right.”

A world of time. That’s what we need,
she thought, wanting to be the smoke he sucked into his lungs. “Well, you’re talking today. But what makes you think I’m normal?” she teased.

“You gotta be, darling. You’re on the right side of this glass.” Dace was doing nothing more than pointing at the divider, but his overseer still looked alarmed. “Okay, now. That’s enough about me. Now you. You’re a bird in flight all the way from Dublin. A clever little college girl.”

“Oh, well. You know.” Liza sat up straighter and smiled brightly, although her unsupported lower back had already started to ache. “I was allowed back to go to university after being in exile just like you. It was actually a toss up between Dublin and you.”

“Really?”

“I got … I wasn’t going to, but somehow I got attached to the place. Did you know there are no monarch butterflies there? And Trinity, I wanted to go to Trinity but I wanted to come back to my home, too. Besides, I was never going to belong in Dublin unless I had goddamn children or something.” Yes, a baby. Right. She stopped, reluctant to go on. What would he think of her, if he knew?

He mimed astonishment, his eyebrows riding right up into his hair. “Ah now, little Liza, you were always such a lady in your letters. I had no idea you ever swore! What else don’t I know about you?” he teased. “And there I was, always in such a sweat to clean my letters up for you. I can’t tell you how good you’ve just made me feel. So you got back Tuesday last? Who met you?”
 

“Well, nobody. I didn’t tell anybody I was coming home except you. I don’t know. Um, Gran, I had sort of made a bargain with the old dear. Oh, don’t look at me like that. Trust me, she was glad to get rid of me. She’s getting old, you know. She’s like sixty-five or something. So I went ahead, making one plan at a time, like applying to Maitland University. I didn’t expect to be accepted. Boo-hoo, it looked like nothing was ever going to work for me. But then
boom!
I was on my way home. Gran paid my way back and I had nothing left to lose, sort of. Then there was you.”

Dace was starting to look puzzled.
Oh God,
she thought, almost halting.
Keep talking. Don’t stop now.
She chattered some more, feeling like a complete fool.
 

“You should have told everyone that you were accepted at the U!” he interrupted. “You’ve got to tell your parents, Liza. Don’t you want to see them? I know they’ve had their troubles, but, well, your Mom was in the hospital for a while, wasn’t she? And go see my Dad, too. They’ll be so happy to have you back. A grown girl. They’ll be so proud of you, little darling. The first person in our family to go to university.”

“Oh, our family doesn’t dream so big.” She snorted. “As long as we’re all respectable. The Devereux used to be such big shots in Wexford, don’t you know.” Tapping her memory for the family history, she recapped some of their story, her mouth pulled into a grimace, although the Devereux story was common enough. Like Steinbeck’s family in
East of Eden
and half the Irish, they had been almost kings in Wexford, Ireland at one point, but then …

“Ah, c’mon. You’re respectable enough for both of us.” Dace laughed, not caring how far the Devereux had fallen or even if he’d helped them in their downward spiral. “Your accent. I could listen to it all day. All you have to do is talk and you sound so educated, so respectable.”

“But I’m not …”

…
respectable,
she almost confessed. She couldn’t help it, she was definitely jet-lagged, because her eyes filled with tears for the second time that day. Except now she had an audience. Dace glanced to either side of him then back at her. She nearly laughed in spite of herself. Here he was, a prisoner, and like most of the men she’d encountered, he was attracted to a soft-hearted woman but embarrassed by emotional displays.
 

“Educated or respectable. Maybe I can still be both,” she confided.

He stared into her eyes, a quizzical smile on his face, oblivious that his cigarette had burnt down to his brown, calloused fingertips. “C’mon, Liza,” he urged. “You’ve danced around some problem in your letters for two years now. Open up and let me in. There’s nothing you can say that would upset me. Hey, look at me. Look where I am. There’s nothing so terrible you could have done. What’s wrong, darling?”