Now and Again (16 page)

M
aggie sat at her desk and tried to appear busy, intermittently craning her neck to get a glimpse of a visiting group of representatives from the ACLU. When they filed into the conference room to get the badges she and Valerie had prepared, she asked, “Should we find out if there's anything else they need?”

“We don't want to make them too comfortable,” said Valerie, who seemed to view the visit as an unwelcome intrusion. “You don't see DC this nervous very often.”

“Why is he nervous?” asked Maggie.

“It's the ACLU! They only come sniffing around if they think there's something to find.”

“Like innocent prisoners?” asked Maggie.

“Like overcrowding. Like lack of medical and dental care. Like exposure to hazardous substances.”

“What hazardous substances?”

“Lord if I know. I doubt there are any, but it's the kind of thing they look for. I guess we should set out more cookies for them after all. Along with some of those yummy tarts.”

Maggie was grateful when a woman with disordered clothing and a large brooch pinned awkwardly to her breast stuck her head through the door and asked where the restroom was, giving Maggie an excuse to walk past the conference room, where the director was holding forth on the subject of “humane rehabilitation” and “market solutions to the overcrowding problem.”

“The visitor's lounge is in another wing of the building, but you're welcome to use the employees',” she said. “I'll warn you, though, it gets a bit stuffy in there.”

“Thank you, thank you,” said the woman, hoisting a large bag onto her shoulder and rubbing a fat pink cheek with a sweaty hand.

Maggie hurried before her down the corridor and said she didn't mind waiting outside to lead her back again, but the woman took longer than expected, and by the time they returned to the conference room, the rest of the group had already gone off on their tour.

“Come with me,” said Maggie. “I'm sure we can catch up.”

The woman nodded and cast her eyes fearfully behind her. “This is a maximum security facility, is it?” she asked as they waited for a guard to open a locked gate for them.

Maggie told her it was.

“I thought so. The ACLU is on a tear about solitary confinement, so they're visiting prisons where they suspect it's in use. My specialty is federal. Nonviolent. Although solitary confinement is used there too—oh, I don't like to think about it. Imagine being shut away by yourself for years. Decades, in some cases. It's really too, too much to bear.”

“I don't think they do that here,” said Maggie, not because she knew anything about it, but because the woman seemed as if she was about to cry. On an impulse, Maggie grabbed her arm, which caused the woman to fall against her, almost knocking her over.

“Don't be so sure,” she said, recovering her balance. “It's a shockingly common practice.”

“I'd have heard about it,” said Maggie.

“Don't be so sure about that either. They count on people closing their eyes to things.”

The woman glanced up the hall and then down it as if she were checking for eavesdroppers before she took a tiny copy of the Constitution out of her pocket and said, “Take a look at this.” She pointed to a chunk of text and said, “See? Right there. It's perfectly legal for people who have been convicted of a crime to be enslaved.”

“That can't be right,” said Maggie.

“As I said, they count on people closing their eyes to things.”

Maggie doubted it was true that slavery was legal. If it was, wouldn't there have been an outcry on
Geraldo
and
Oprah,
and wouldn't people be marching in the street singing “Let My People Go”? She found the woman's air of superiority irritating, but as soon as she thought the word “smug,” the woman's face collapsed in doughy misery and tears welled in the corners of her eyes.

“What do you do for the ACLU?” asked Maggie in an attempt to change the subject.

“I'm not part of the ACLU—not really. A colleague invited me, so I came along. Oh, I give them a little money now and then, but I'm a prisoner advocate for a different group, a group called PATH, which stands for Patrick Henry. You studied him in school, I imagine:
Give me liberty or give me death!
Why doesn't anyone believe that anymore? In any case, that's what we're committed to. Our mission is to free the wrongly incarcerated case by case, although sometimes I think we're going about it the wrong way. And now I might have crossed the line, and I'm trying to figure out how to uncross it. It's all terribly upsetting.”

“What line?” Maggie pictured the yellow lines that striped the floor of the prison, marking the various places where the prisoners had to stand for services or inspections.

“The moral line,” said the woman coyly, as if she knew exactly which word would staple Maggie's wandering attention to her face.

“I don't understand. What did you do?” Maggie tried not to sound too eager, but a fragile hope expanded in her chest that there were other people like her out there, people who cared about something other than sex and makeup and what to cook for dinner, people who were used to righting wrongs and could tell her how it was done. People she could turn to for help with Tomás. “Freeing people is something I'm interested in too,” she whispered, just in case the prison was riddled with listening devices. Even though Maggie was watching carefully to gauge the woman's reaction, she wasn't prepared for the joy that spread across her face.

“Then you know.” The woman was beaming quietly now, and Maggie could see that she had once been beautiful. “Then you know what it's like.”

“I'm not sure,” said Maggie. “At first I couldn't understand why the people here weren't rushing about trying to fix all the things that are wrong, and then I thought, How can I expect other people to do something I'm not willing to do myself?”

“Be the change,” said the woman.

“I'm not very experienced, so maybe you could give me some advice.”

“I…Well…First, I should probably fill you in on exactly what my group does.”

A metallic sound rang from somewhere ahead of them. They had reached an anteroom past which Maggie had no access, so she turned to the woman and said they would have to wait for the guard to call ahead.

“It's just as well, just as well,” she said. “I couldn't bear to see anyone in solitary confinement.”

“I don't think they do that here,” Maggie said again, and again the woman responded, “Don't be too sure.” This time, though, there was nothing smug about the expression on her face, which was filled instead with hope and yearning. She reached out and grasped Maggie's sleeves, pulling her a little closer as if she too was worried that the walls had ears. “My George was in solitary confinement for four years,” she said. “It's why I took him on.”

While they waited for the guard, the woman told Maggie that the members of her group adopted specific nonviolent prisoners and tried to help them. “We publicize their cases and bring injustices to light. We find attorneys who will donate their services, and then we run various errands in order to keep the cases from falling through the cracks.”

“How noble!” said Maggie. It was the kind of thing she was hoping to do, and she could see she had gotten off track by merely befriending Tomás and teaching him math.

“Noble? More like exhausting! But you start off filled with idealism, anyway. Then, at some point, you become aware of the line. Oh, you pretend not to see it. You act all prim and dance around it like a schoolgirl, stepping very carefully whenever it's in sight. But after a while, you want to be close to it.”

The woman opened the swimming pools of her eyes wide, as though she were noticing something unexpected or trying not to cry.

“And eventually you just step over it. But you don't cross it in a blaze of righteous glory, which is how you thought it would be. You cross it, really, on a dare. Or you cross it because you want a bigger and bigger dose of whatever it was that made you step up to it in the first place. You cross it because you are now an addict. Because, frankly, it is exhilarating and because it's a lot more fun than housework or your day job.”

The moment ended, and the woman's eyes snapped shut. When she opened them again, the hope had vanished, and everything about her sagged with defeat.

“I don't understand,” said Maggie.

“Of course you don't. How could you?”

“But what did you do when you crossed the line?”

The woman's face softened, and her lips quivered into a smile. “I fell in love with George,” she said. “But now I'm about worn out, which is why I came here today. The ACLU people—they're very structured and focused. And disciplined! They all respect the line. That's what I came for—to get advice on that.” The woman's mouth settled into a tight barrier between her running nose and quivering chin, and she seemed to be waiting, as Maggie was, to hear what words would come out of it next. “No, that's not entirely true,” she said. “I came to pass George on to someone else.”

She held up a quilted bag with the name
GEORGE
appliquéd onto the side in contrasting fabric. “Of course the work can be very rewarding if you get your prisoner out of jail, which is why it's so frustrating to be representing George. There seems to be a vendetta against him. If you read the file, you'd see for yourself. Not to mention that George is very…well, dashing. It's been an honor to advocate for him, but nothing I did made one bit of difference. So I came here to find a replacement, and then I'm going home—if I still have a home to go to.”

At first Maggie felt cheated—why couldn't Tomás be dashing? Why couldn't she be passionate and strong? But then a rush of excitement and possibility surged through her. If befriending Tomás was murky and ambiguous, representing George would be a completely good and noble thing. There was a vendetta against him! He was handsome and nonviolent! He had been kept in solitary confinement for four long years! “I'll represent George,” she blurted out.

Relief flooded the woman's eyes. “I want to assure you that the advocacy program is completely rewarding,” she said.

While they were talking, they had circled back toward the director's office. When they reached the conference room, the woman thrust the quilted bag into Maggie's hands and said, “The appellate attorney's name and contact information is in the first folder. He's part of a network of attorneys who take these cases on.”

Maggie asked if he might represent Tomás too.

“That depends on where Tomás's case was adjudicated. Anyway, you'll find a lot of information here—telephone numbers and email addresses and official documentation, as well as copious handwritten notes—everything indexed and color-coded.”

When they reached the conference room, the woman snatched up her jacket and hurried back along the corridor and down the stairs, not even bothering to call the elevator. Maggie was left with the quilted bag sitting in her lap like a bloated and limbless child and the sinking feeling that even if she took on George's case, she couldn't abandon Tomás. And then, from the heaviness of the burden emerged a sense of sureness and direction. If she really wanted to help Tomás, she would stop buying him little presents. She would stop trying to make prison tolerable. Instead, she would start trying to free him.

When Valerie and DC left for the day, Maggie picked up the telephone and dialed the number for George's lawyer. “Send me the fellow's paperwork,” said the lawyer. “I can't promise anything, but I'd be happy to take a look.”

Maggie said she would, but first she had to get the file out of the prison, which, given the tight security, might prove problematic. If she couldn't handle Hugo, she told herself, she didn't deserve to be George's advocate. She didn't deserve to be anyone's. Besides, the blouse incident had given her an idea, and one soft summer evening, she was able to smuggle the file out of the prison by unbuttoning an extra button on her blouse. She laughed at the way Hugo, with his handsome face and muscle-bound physique, had fallen so easily into her trap.

T
he health-care clinic where Tula worked was twenty miles away. To get there, she either had to borrow her mother's car or ride the bus, which took a lot longer. Because Will had baseball practice every afternoon, it wasn't until school was out for the summer that she was able to arrange a day that was convenient for both of them. Tula was so preoccupied with the logistics of the trip that it was only when they were in the car that she thought about what the clinic was set up to do. How was she going to explain to Will that most of the clinic's patients came in for gynecological services and prenatal care?

The car rattled whenever it reached cruising speed, making it noisy and hard to talk. After a few attempts at conversation, Tula pushed the button to turn on the radio, but the sound was mostly static, with only a few bars of music coming through. Will opened the window and let his hand lift off like the wing of an airplane. When a pebble flew up from the wheels of the truck they were following and made a tiny star pattern in the corner of the windshield glass, Will said, “Now they're attacking,” as if Tula would know what he meant by it. And she did know. At least she almost did, for it seemed as if the car was traveling right along the frontier that divided the land of safety from the land of peril.

“They,” she said.

“You know, aliens, or terrorists. What would you do if they did attack us?”

“We couldn't outrun them in this old rattletrap, so I guess we'd have to fight them off.”

“Never fear,” said Will. He pulled a scouting knife from the pocket of his jacket and waved it around like a sword.