The Best Kind of People (18 page)

“Thanks so much. You know, I only really have my sister, since this all … happened.”

Nancy’s face dropped into a concerned frown, and she pushed her hair behind her ears, a useless gesture, before the strand fell forward again. “You know, Joan, I lost my husband last year.”

Of course, Joan knew this already. Nancy’s husband John had hung himself in the window of the flower shop he owned on Main Street. Nobody knew why. He didn’t leave a note. Nancy used to be a laugh; now she startled easily, took more overtime than anyone else just to avoid going home and being alone. The other nurses all used to pity her and started a weekly girls’ night just to make sure she wasn’t alone every night of the week. Some of the younger ones took her out to a pub and did karaoke after work sometimes.

“My husband … had secrets too,” she said, “so I feel for you, Joan.”

Joan nodded, looked down at her feet, and noticed that teardrops were falling.

“Thanks,” Joan said, letting more tears fall onto the top of the casserole dish. When she looked up, Nancy was halfway to her little red Honda Civic already, waving. She reversed back up the driveway. Joan buzzed the gate open again and watched her disappear behind the trees.

Joan walked the casserole into the kitchen, opened the fridge, and nudged aside two heads of wilting iceberg lettuce. “My husband had secrets too.”
George doesn’t have fucking secrets. He’s being set up!
She wished she had yelled that. But she didn’t really know. Not knowing felt worse than knowing something for sure, even something terrible.

She tried to pull herself together, placing the cooler by the front door, catching her reflection in the mirror. What does one wear to a prison? Suddenly Joan’s plan to look clean and presentable seemed ridiculous. It’s not like she was going to park the car and waltz into a prison like she was ducking into a Best Buy. She didn’t even really know what a prison looked like. She had printed out directions from Google, highlighted all the major interstate exits. She drew a pink square around the building.

She eventually dressed in the outfit she normally reserved for student–teacher nights, a sort of plain caramel pantsuit with a scarf, a getup that comfortably blended her age and status in life. Sadie called it her ugly old lady suit. In the mirror the outfit made her almost disappear, except for the red streaks across her face from crying, the deep circles under each eye. She looked old.

She was about to get in the car to go pick up Sadie when her daughter appeared at the door, wearing the same sweatshirt she’d been in for days.

“Give me a minute, I need to change,” she said, briefly stopping to squeeze her mom’s arm.

“Okay. Bennie told us that you’re only allowed to bring your
ID
and nothing else. Also, you have to wear baggy clothing, and no reds or yellows, and no jewellery.”

“Why?”

“I have no idea.”

“I don’t think I really own any baggy clothing except sweatpants.”

“Those will do.”

Joan paced the first-floor hall for a few minutes before announcing that she would be waiting in the car. She found it covered in eggs, and went around to the side of the house to open the hose and spray it down, which was her new morning ritual. She didn’t bother with soap, just adjusted the nozzle to the hardest pressure, not wanting Sadie to see the viscous evidence of their new status in life. She gathered the eggshells in her hands and threw them in the outdoor garbage by the side of the house. Inside the trash bin was Sadie’s red canvas school bag, which she extracted angrily. It was a good-quality bag, with leather straps and detailing, and had been purchased only recently. Then she saw the scrawled black letters across it.
WHORE
.
Joan pushed it back into the trash, punching it down, and covered it with the eggshells as a sharp, hot feeling rose in the back of her throat.

When Sadie came out, she was carrying one of Andrew’s old backpacks, which she tossed into the car.

“The nineties are back again,” she said, shrugging.

Joan wanted to say something but couldn’t, so she switched on the radio and reversed a little too frantically, toppling the trash bin.

SIXTEEN

SADIE WAS NOT
prepared for the dire greyness of the institution that now housed her father. Any prior knowledge of prison architecture had been gleaned entirely from television, but in real life the prison looked even more frightening than she’d imagined. They pulled into a parking lot where a Greyhound bus was unloading visitors, who all joined a line by the front door.

“There’s a down-on-their-luck bunch if I’ve ever seen one,” Joan said, making Sadie shudder a bit.

When Joan turned the car off, she unclipped her seat belt and turned to Sadie. “This is going to be very weird,” she said.

“Duh.”

“Some things might shock you,” Joan said, “but I’m here for you, and soon your father won’t be here anymore and we’ll be back to normal.”

Sadie nodded, wishing she could be as hopeful as her mother, and opened the passenger-side door. They headed towards the lineup, which had only grown longer since they’d arrived. They took their spot and Sadie stared at the patterns on the cement, the lace-up sneakers and shiny high heels in bright blue and soft pink, and one particularly vibrant pair of red knee-high boots. They stood quietly in the line for close to an hour, Joan rocking back and forth from foot to foot. They didn’t even try to make small talk with each other, just withstood the discomfort in silence. Children ran around, their mothers periodically scolding them, but they were doing what everyone wished they could do, running off the energy and nerves that raged inside them. Sadie curled her toes and then uncurled them, over and over, until she could barely feel them.

Eventually the line moved. One male guard who looked as though he was cast from a 1980s prison exploitation film waved them through to a stern, blasé female guard with a red mullet and raccoon eyeliner. She gave both women a pat-down. Sadie tried to open her eyes naively, betray a hapless uncertainty. The guard looked right through her, touched her roughly, and exhaled a sour smell through her mouth as though she had a cold. Sadie grimaced, feeling so anonymous but guilty at the same time, with every prod and pat of the woman’s hands, as though they would find something that could keep her out or, worse, force her inside.

After the security and
ID
check, they walked through two sets of electrified gates made of razored wire, past the gun tower, and across a courtyard. Their ultimate destination looked a lot like a grammar school cafeteria. They sat in rows and waited on hard-backed chairs.

It was announced outwardly — by their clothing, their straight white teeth — and inwardly in an uncomfortable, involuntary monologue — 
I do not belong here 
— that Joan and Sadie Woodbury were outsiders in the penitentiary waiting room. Sadie, as she realized this, felt ashamed of her feelings of superiority.

“Thirty-five percent of people of colour are imprisoned in America for bogus reasons. We have more people in prison here than any other industrialized nation,” she whispered to her mother.

Joan looked at her when she spoke but did not respond. Eventually she said,
“
You might want to keep your voice down,” and looked around anxiously, as if talking about race in this context was implicitly racist and they were, as they both wanted to scream,
good, civil people,
and
not racists.
Their discomfort said otherwise.

All of the other visitors seemed to know how to
be
in this environment. Their postures betrayed the kind of relaxed waiting stance one adopts at the dentist’s office. Joan picked at her nails, her clothes, and could simply not be still.

When Sadie had watched her mother work in the hospital — something that had happened only a few times, when she was a child — she admired the assured way she could command a chaotic situation. Amanda’s mom was always deferring to other adults, especially Amanda’s father. It never seemed as though she knew how to make a decision for herself. She was afraid of what Joan might do if she knew they’d watched a scary movie or eaten some ice cream. “Does your mother allow sugar?” she’d ask before scooping into a brick of Heavenly Hash. And Sadie would nod, even though desserts were a rarity. Watching her mother now, after the humiliation of their entrance, and now having to meet her husband in this environment, was almost as destabilizing as the whole ordeal itself.

When they called Joan’s name, she and Sadie were led into an adjacent room and given some rules. They were told that they were allowed one hug when they met and one at the end of the half-hour, but no contact in between. They had to keep their hands on the table and in sight at all times.

Sadie didn’t have her lucky eraser to squeeze, because she wasn’t allowed to have anything. She’d left it sitting on the front seat of the car, where she hoped its proximity would still help her through this. If she got up and ran out, as she was beginning to feel that she wanted to do, she was sure she would be breaking some jail regulation and be arrested. She felt the need to get close to the floor, as they tell you to do if a building is on fire.

George walked into the room in handcuffs, in the same orange jumpsuit he’d worn at the hearing. He looked like an actor playing a criminal. Some white-collar crime.

Joan hugged him and then stifled several sobs.

Sadie gave him a hug, as though he were a stranger at first, patting his shoulder, until the comfortable memory of thousands of hugs brought her closer, feeling safe, and then she remembered where they were. When she pulled back, at the urging “Okay, enough” from a prison guard, her body was an earthquake. She could not look at him and feel anger. When he spoke, her facade broke.

“This is just a mistake,” he said. “Someone is out to get me and I know that sounds crazy, but that is what has happened.”

“Okay,” Sadie whispered to him, sitting down again. In that moment, no matter what had happened, she wanted him to be okay. She wanted him not to be beaten in prison by the people inside who truly
were
evil. She wanted him not to be despondent. She wanted him to get out of there. The flood of empathy she felt for him was unstoppable.

“You can feel more than one thing,” Clara had said the night before over the phone. “This is a complex situation, and you can have an open heart.”

Sadie watched and listened as her mother and father talked non-stop about the hearing, about his health and safety, and about
Bennie said this
,
Bennie advised that
,
Andrew said this.
There was no talk of media reports, or the things girls whispered to each other at school, or the death threats on the voice mail. It was all about how they were going to get him out. Pragmatic and pointed, fake calm. This was all Joan. She was deeply practical and results-oriented. George didn’t break until the end, when a single tear formed in his eye. “I miss my girls,” he said.

Later, Sadie wouldn’t remember leaving; all of a sudden they were in the parking lot again, gulping for air.

Joan sat in the driver’s seat and sobbed so hard that the car shook. Sadie placed her hand on her arm, squeezed it, and then gently prodded her to change places so that she could drive them home.

“You’re in no condition,” she offered.

“Neither are you, Sadie. Just let me get some air and I’ll be fine.”

“A hundred thousand crashes per year in America are a result of driver fatigue,” Sadie said as Joan clicked open the driver’s-side door and began to pace the parking lot, clutching her arms around herself. Sadie got out and circled the car, hoping her mother’s pacing wouldn’t concern the men in the high tower with the sniper rifles.

She got into the passenger seat without protestations, and Sadie drove all the way home. Having something to do and things she had to pay attention to allowed the trauma of what had just happened to recede into what was, at that point, a bubbling and full reserve of pain she would rather avoid thinking about.

I can keep it together. I can just be stoic.
Just like Grandma used to say before she went senile. “Don’t let anyone see you break,” she’d said when Sadie was upset over a girl who’d stolen her favourite pony toy and then smashed it to pieces. “You are better than her, and it’s just a stupid toy. Just pretend it doesn’t bother you, and eventually it won’t. You’ll see.”

And even though Joan had the child and her mother over and they sat in the living room talking about their feelings, and the child feebly apologized and they all had a good laugh about children and the crazy things they do, Sadie kept her grandma’s words in mind.

When they stopped at the roadside for gas, Sadie checked her phone. There were five texts from Jimmy, all asking if she was okay.
Do you have reception? Are you ok?

Just say it is and it will eventually be so, she thought.

She slipped her mother’s credit card into the slot to pay for the gas, and then washed the front window. Her mother slept in the front seat unaware.

“It will be almost a year before the trial,” her father had said, resigned. “And that’s being optimistic. So, hold tight. I’m going to try to finish that old thesis of mine, so maybe there’s a bright side.”

“But that’s doubtful,” Joan had replied. “I mean, doubtful that that is really a bright side, right?”

“Yes, yes, it is doubtful. I’m trying … to create something of worth out of this whole … mess.”

Sadie got back in the car and turned on the radio again. Joan stirred, adjusted her head to lean against her rolled-up sweater. Sadie texted Jimmy back.
I’m totally fine. It was weird. I want to watch movies and forget about it. Go steal some pot from Kevin so we can just relax.

The phone blinked again and she put on her headset to answer. It was Andrew, wanting details about the visit. He’d been to visit George earlier and had to return to the city. “I don’t know what to tell you. Wasn’t it so sad, how tired and old he looked?”