Out of Orange (34 page)

The official wake was held on Tuesday night at the T. P. White home, a beautiful old Victorian in Mount Washington. It had started snowing when Ms. Bright and I landed in Cincinnati and our plane was a little late getting in, so we arrived at the funeral home two hours after the wake had started. It doesn’t snow in San Francisco or Dublin. It was so beautiful when we walked up to the entry of the funeral home. I had a feeling Dad had arranged the snow; it was too perfect a scene.

The place was packed. The casket was set up at one end of the living room. Someone with very expensive taste and a love for antiquities had decorated the house. It felt warm and inviting, like you were walking into someone’s holiday party. Dad had a lot of friends and a huge family. He was the oldest son and the first of their brood to pass. His brothers and sisters knew about Hester’s and my situation; so did many of the friends there. So when I did walk in, everyone turned in my direction. I was once again like a bloody car crash: everyone had to get a peek at the poor daughter who had come from prison. They knew how hard I had tried to get there before he died and that Hester had barely missed him. They knew she’d had to go back before the funeral. I guess they expected a mess.

I made my way through the crowd in the living room, toward Dad. As I approached him, the people parted and there he was. Mom was cool as a cucumber, standing at the head of his casket, accepting condolences. My brother was at the foot, bawling his eyes
out, and I finally saw for myself, my dad was dead. I’m not sure what it is I had thought prior to that moment, but it hit me like a fucking freight train. I fell to my knees on the pew alongside him and looked at his peaceful face.

“You sleeping?” I whispered to his corpse and waited for a response I knew would never come. I held his cold, waxy hand, saying nothing, just being still, the same way we would be doing if he were alive. He couldn’t put his arm around me anymore. My bawling brother knelt down next to me. “Cleary, I love you. He knows you tried.” And that was it. The floodgates opened and I was a mess of snot and tears. Mom tapped on my shoulder and handed me a bunch of tissue.

She put her hand under my elbow. “Pull yourself together, honey.” She stared at me with an utterly blank gaze. Then her pupils flashed at me, like a cat’s eyes do in the dark, but Mom’s pupils were white. I freaked out and stood right the fuck up. Dad had insisted my mother have eye surgery six months before. She had lens implants and this was the first time I was seeing them. They caught the light and reflected it back. Until I could get used to them, it was quite freaky looking, like horror-movie weird. She was like a stranger. A vacancy sign hanging around her neck would have been a better accessory accompanying her alien and glassy stare than her special-occasion jewelry. Mom, the normally inconsolable basket case, was completely shut down, devoid of all emotion and personality. I could barely feel my mother’s presence, even though she was in front of my face. She told my brother to take me outside for some air, and when I tried to hug her, she said, “No,” and turned away.

It was right after this that Ms. Bright took me to the Hamilton County jail to spend the night. My dad’s family was taking Gene and Mom to Smokey Bones for dinner and drinks, but Ms. Bright didn’t want to get to the jail too late; she wanted to make sure they got me into a bed. So we passed on the dinner part of my father’s wake and my chance to try to comfort my mom. She was a train wreck. I had never seen her so devoid of any emotion and it scared me a little.

The next day we went to the house I had grown up in. It’s a beautiful
home. When I’d lived there, it had been canary yellow with white trim. They had changed the color scheme to dusty rose with cinnabar trim. This was probably as close to pink as Mom would let Dad get. When we pulled into my parents’ private drive and made our way up the long wooded lane, Ms. Bright blurted out, “I knew it!”

It was a bizarre twist of fate that this lady was the one accompanying me from prison to the home I had grown up in. Of all the people who could have escorted me, Ms. Bright was someone I had considered to be such a perfect evil archetype in my incarceration that I had turned her into the villainous antagonist in one of my novels. I guessed she had just pegged me for a spoiled brat.

We parked next to the hundred-year-old oak trees, and I stared at the house and snow-covered woods I used to play in. It looked like an enchanted scene from a movie I had once watched, but it wasn’t; it was my real life. We got out of the car and Ms. Bright asked me if I was okay. I had forgotten for a split second why we were there. I needed to change into clothes appropriate for a funeral. We made our way to the door and went inside. My aunts and uncles were all there with Mom. She was sitting in front of the fireplace with a blanket over her lap but otherwise ready to go to the cathedral.

I borrowed a black dress, coat, and heels from my mother, put on some makeup, and wandered around upstairs. Hester and I had had this whole floor to ourselves when growing up. I felt like I was in a museum looking through the artifacts of someone else’s life when my tour was interrupted. My brother had ordered my favorite pizza from Mio’s, just for me, and my aunt Jane yelled to me upstairs to come get a slice. This was my first food from the real world in four years. I stood in my father’s gourmet kitchen and savored every bite of my slice, as if it were one of the gourmet delicacies my father used to prepare in this space. Gourmet cooking had been my dad’s other hobby.

We went to Saint Peter in Chains Cathedral, where Dad had a full house. Then we all drove around Cincinnati, looking for a hole to put my dad in. We found one, and once he was in the ground, I went back to the car. I changed from my black funeral clothes back into
the sweatpants and sweatshirt I had traveled in. I gave my aunt Jane the clothes, coat, and shoes, kissed my mother goodbye, and went back to jail—it didn’t feel like going home this time.

The last eighteen months of my sentence went by quickly. I stayed busy and stopped giving a shit about anything. The illusive boundary between “us” and “them” had been irreparably violated and the magic spell broken; staff and officers didn’t scare me anymore. They were just people, and miserable ones, for the most part. I started smoking again, got busted for possession of tobacco, and went to the SHU on Christmas Day 2007. On New Year’s Eve, I called my sister at home from the SHU. That was the best Christmas present ever: she was at home, her home.

I was alone and in the SHU on the anniversary of Dad’s death. It had been my first holiday without him and probably the best place for me to be. I called Mom and Gene every day I was in there, just to make sure Mom was doing all right. If I had not been in the SHU, I would have been so busy trying not to focus on the holidays, I might not have been there for her.

Patches, my sidekick and partner in crime, came over to the SHU and slept right outside the long, thin window I couldn’t see anything out of the whole time I was in there. She would hop up onto the small exterior sill, where I could see colors up against the frosted glass while she was sunning, and I could hear her meow a few times at night.

On October 4, 2008, Saint Francis of Assisi’s feast day and eleven days before my release date, I went to the SHU again. This time it was for releasing a baby skunk from one of the traps that had been set at the camp to catch the raccoons. Someone had fucked up a few days earlier and called Animal Control instead of Noah’s Ark to come deal with the baby skunk’s mother, who had accidentally been trapped. They killed the mother skunk in front of everyone in C4 during count time, then tossed her body into the garbage bin. You have to remember that the women considered these creatures their pets, their children, even the skunks. It was the baby skunk that had next been accidentally trapped and that I released a few days later.

The morning of this jail break, Patches was frantically trying to get me to go behind the C4 building, out of bounds. This is where I discovered the little baby skunk—who by then had been adopted by the crazy cat Angel—stuck in a trap. I made a skunk-spray protective suit from garbage bags and freed it. I got put in the SHU for tampering with prison security devices.
Huh?
I was threatened with a 200-series shot. A shot this severe meant I would lose my release date and could be facing a new charge, or so the guards in the SHU told me.

On October 10, 2008, my original release date, my mother needed me and didn’t know it. My brother knew it and he was scared. Alzheimer’s was setting in. She would have that glass of wine she loved, forget about it, have another, and repeat. She crashed her poor Cadillac nine times that year and kept forgetting to pay her bills and take her medications. You get the picture. After the skunk episode came to a happy conclusion, I was released on
my date
to a halfway house. But I did not go back to San Francisco as I had always planned. I went home to Cincinnati and took Patches, the prison kitty, with me. She got to go straight to Mom’s. I had one more obstacle to get through: the halfway house.

Halfway houses are supposed to be where people without support networks or family can get their bearings and get a little help and guidance getting themselves prepared to reenter the world as a responsible and employed human being. In reality, the people with the least support are the most likely to fail the gauntlet of meaningless and sometimes insurmountable obstacles a halfway house presents to reentry. Those poor people just get ground up and spit back into the prison system, pronto.

The other type of people not going to benefit from this environment are professionals. For example, a research scientist from Columbus placed in a Cincinnati halfway house (a hundred miles away) was encouraged to take a job at McDonald’s rather than attempt getting a job in her field. The rationale was that since the United States was on the verge of an economic collapse, she had better take the job or risk finding nothing else and being sent back.
Her case manager told her, she said, she also thought it might help curb her arrogance.

I knew getting back on my feet in Cincinnati would require a Herculean effort. Without the personal and professional connections I had established and maintained in San Francisco, and the felony conviction hanging around my neck, it was going to be a challenge. It took me almost two years to finally get a job in software again. I even worked for nothing on a couple of projects in California just to keep my skills honed. But in the meantime, being employed was a requirement of the place I had been sent to.

The Cincinnati halfway house had a whole array of rules that didn’t exist or had been deemed obsolete or unenforceable in the San Francisco halfway house. These would make my job hunt harder. For example, while there, I was forbidden from accessing the Internet or owning a cell phone. That ruled out returning to work for a software company or even finding one that was hiring. I had very little time to find a job before they would start threatening to send me back. It became clear very fast that it wasn’t yet time to really go back to work.

In order to go job hunting I had to submit a request to go to a specific address and get it approved—that meant filling out an application. If I were granted this privilege, I had to call when I arrived at said address, then call again before I left said address, all without a cell phone. I learned there were very few pay phones left in Cincinnati, I guess since everyone has cell phones. That meant I had to ask to use the phone wherever I went to fill out an application so that I could call in, twice. I was not allowed to get rides from family members or friends to go to these places. I had to take the city busses. When I got past all this and found someone who would hire an ex-felon living in a halfway house, they also had to accept frequent unannounced visits at work from my case manager.

I was happier than I should have been when I found a job. I washed dishes at Uno Pizzeria about a mile from Mom’s until I got out of the halfway house. There was a bitter kind of irony to scrubbing the original Chicago deep-dish pizza crust from three hundred
pans a night. Chicago was where it had all started. But four weeks after returning to Cincinnati and depositing Patches at Mom’s, I finally got to go home for a four-hour pass. Patches had adjusted well to her new surroundings. She had already trained the dog and had made peace with Dad’s surviving cats, Buddy and Kitty Kat. But Patches was not allowed to go outside yet, and that made her angry. I was afraid she wouldn’t come back in though, and winter was coming.

Hester and I ended up with the same very rigid probation officer. It made no difference to us; we weren’t trying to do anything they wouldn’t have approved of. But there were a few notable exceptions.

We couldn’t travel outside of the state without written permission. Cincinnati sits on the Ohio River, and on the other side is Kentucky. The best route to downtown Cincinnati from my mother’s house is south on 275 to 471 through Kentucky. It’s the route I had taken a million times. The first time I made the trip to town from home with Gene and Mom in the car, I wasn’t thinking about the specifics of my driving direction. I got onto 275 south as I had always done and immediately freaked out. I had to reverse up the shoulder of the busy entrance ramp to avoid violating the terms of my supervised release. My poor mother actually threatened to ground me while I was backing up the ramp, she was so frightened we were going to get rear-ended.

Our first holiday season back in Cincinnati was complicated by my sister and me sharing the same mother and brother. She had to get permission to have dinner with me. I was still in the halfway house, so I didn’t have to get permission from my PO yet. But the best I could do was to get a pass to go to dinner with my family, but not in Kentucky. So rather than go to the Mallecki house in Kentucky, as was a decades-old tradition for my family, we went to a restaurant. Hester got permission to see me and we settled on a new family ritual.

Only a couple of things happened while I was in the halfway house that almost pushed me over the edge. I called home one night after work. Patches snuck outside on the night of our winter’s first
snowstorm. She had never seen snow in her life and certainly never experienced temperatures in the teens, but she would not come back inside for my brother. I was just about to make a run for it and drive back to Mom’s to get my silly cat inside before it got dark. But on my fiftieth panicked-screaming-crying call home, she had finally come back in for my brother. I made him chase her around with the phone in hand so I could talk to her. That’s when the women at the halfway house decided I was nuts. When I told them where Patches had come from, they knew I was.