Chapter 9

Sunday, bright and early at eight in the morning, it was time for me to return to “work.” The same officer that had escorted me to my visit with Joey and JC walked with me to the infirmary – but to the surprise of both of us, Abby wasn't there yet.

“I guess I'll have to take you back to your cell until she gets here,” he said.

“I can get started on my work without her,” I said cautiously. “With you here, of course. I have a lot of stuff to finish for her.”

“Well,” he hesitated for a moment, “I guess that would work. Abby's rarely late, I can't imagine she will take long. Go ahead and get started on your work.”

The truth was, I didn't have so much work that it couldn't wait. I just needed time out of my cell. Ever since the visit with Brayden the night before, it felt like the three concrete walls and the metal bars were closing in on me.

About twenty minutes later, Abby burst through her door, almost hitting the guard standing there watching over me, her arms full of papers.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she said, incredibly flustered. “I had some stuff to deal with this morning, and it ran late and...”

I turned around in my seat to look at her as she dropped a full folder of papers out of her arms and onto the ground. The guard immediately bent down to help her pick them up.

“My morning is not going very well. Thank you, John. I need to get my act together, I guess.”

“You doing okay, Abby?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she responded. “I had to drop off those papers at the office this morning that I told you about.”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “How'd it go?”

She looked up at me as they gathered the last paper off the floor.

“Thanks for helping John, and thanks for watching him until I got here. I really appreciate it. You should probably get back to your hall now.”

“Okay,” he said hesitantly, briefly looking over at me. “If you have any trouble out of him, or need to talk about it over lunch, call over to the hall.”

“He's no trouble,” she said with a smile, then she looked over at me again. “I'll...call you later, after your shift. Okay?”

After he left, I turned back to my work, ignoring the way she had dismissed him in front of me.

“You know, I'm starting to take it personally that everybody keeps saying 'if you have any trouble out of him.' Do I look like a troublemaker or something?”

“No,” she said, and laughed. “John is a little green to his job. He's only been here about two years. It doesn't help that in his first two months here, they assigned him to Ad Seg and he got stabbed in the shoulder by one of the inmates.”

“Oh my God, really?”

“Yeah. Guy put him in the hospital for a month. He stabbed him because he was off his schizophrenia meds and the voices told him John was going to steal his food. Or his TV. Or something.” She chuckled. “I don't remember. Anyway, he's Riker's mental health unit's problem now.”

She grabbed a coffee cup out of one of her cabinets, then looked at me.

“You want some?” she asked, holding up her cup.

“Are you supposed to let me?”

“I probably shouldn't. But John's gone, and I doubt that me giving you coffee will get me fired. I'm not that worried about it.”

“I'd love some. But don't get yourself fired.” I smiled. “Rule breaker.”

“I prefer the term 'rebel',” she said as she poured two cups. “I probably shouldn't have told you what I did about John, though. We're not supposed to give out personal information to the inmates.”

“Why?”

“Because then they know our weaknesses.” She sat one of the cups down in front of me, and took a drink out of hers. “Wives, girlfriends, kids, family, old injuries...inmates can take any bit of information and find a way to use it against us for their own benefit.”

“I don't think I could learn to deal with that. But just so you know, I'd never do that to anybody here.”

“Why should I believe you?” she said. “Aren't you still technically a criminal?”

That was the first time in the week that I'd known her that she'd called me a criminal. I thought about it for a couple of seconds, and even though it stung my ego a little, I realized that she was right.

“I guess, technically, I am. Maybe you can't believe me – but you said yourself that I'm not a troublemaker.”

“You're right, I did.”

“I guess it's kind of like you said the day we met – you have to trust me, even though you're blind to me.”

She looked in my eyes and a smirk came across her face – probably a twisted satisfaction of knowing that I actually listened to her that day, and took something away from our conversation.

“Speaking of trouble,” she said, “I heard you had a visitor yesterday.”

I looked away quickly. “I plead the fifth.”

“Your trial is over, criminal,” she said with that same smirk across her lips. “You can't plead the fifth.”

“You know too much,” I said, laughing at her.

“Guards and staff gossip – sometimes even with the inmates. So, who was she? Was she one of your old band groupies?” She said it in a suggestive manner, leaning against the desk next to me with one hand on her hip, like a teenage girl gossiping at her locker.

“No,” I said. “Not even close.”

“Well she wasn't your sister, and she sure as hell wasn't your mom. So who was she?”

I stopped smiling; I didn't want to talk about it, but she wasn't going to let this one go.

“That was my ex-girlfriend, Brayden,” I said with a sigh.

“Oh.” The smirk disappeared from her face and she shifted her stance uncomfortably. “Well, I guess I know why it was such a big deal around the staff break room, then. So how did that go?”

“I wish I could say it went well, but I can't.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“There's not that much to talk about.”

“Sure there is,” she said. “There's always something to talk about when the ex-girlfriend shows up to visit.”

“Let me rephrase that – there's not much that I want to talk about.”

She looked at me and took another drink of her coffee.

“Bottling it up inside won't help, you know,” she said.

“I'm not bottling it up,” I scoffed. “I just don't want to talk about it.”

“Whatever,” she said with an eyeroll. “That's like, the definition of bottling it up.”

“You are so damn persistent and stubborn.”

“I prefer tenacious.”

She smiled at me, but I didn't smile back.

“Come on,” she said, lowering her voice. “Talk to me about it. You might feel better if you talk about it to someone who listens and actually cares.”

I had relived the whole visit with Brayden all night long. I hadn't gotten any sleep, because it was all I could think about – what I had done wrong, how I had pushed her away in the first place, and why she would want to be with a guy like Jason when I had tried to give her everything I ever could. I couldn't come up with anything.

“She came by to tell me that she's getting married,” I said. I took a drink of coffee, feeling her eyes on me. “She's running off with the guy that she was cheating on me with and they're getting married.” I half-scoffed, half-chuckled in disgust. “In Vegas.”

“Ouch,” she said in a low voice. “That's a marriage just destined to last.”

“Why do you women do it? Why do you cheat?”

She had been pulling some medical supplies out of her cabinet to start her day, but she stopped what she was doing and looked at me again.

“First of all, I don't cheat,” she said. “Second, why do you men cheat?”

“I didn't mean to offend you.”

“Oh, you didn't offend me. I don't have a guilty conscience.” She went back to organizing her supplies. “But you made a general statement towards women. Why does anybody cheat? Why does one woman cheat on a man, when his next girlfriend doesn't? Women cheat, like men cheat. But not all women cheat, like not all men cheat.”

I had to chuckle. “You've thought this out.”

“I'm fascinated by the science of the mind and psyche. I started getting interested in it shortly after I started working here. Why do some men commit heinous murders without breaking a sweat about it, while others do it once and feel guilty about it and never get over it for the rest of their lives? How can one man rape a girl who isn't even past puberty while another wouldn't even dream of touching a girl that young? Our fantasies, relationships with other people, sex...” I noticed her blushing a little. “It's all controlled by something in our heads, and we can't see it or understand it, let alone control it.”

“You sound like you're justifying Bray's actions – not only that, but it sounds like you're justifying the actions of some of the other people here.”

“It does raise the question of who's responsible for their own actions and who's not, and how that responsibility is determined.” She smiled. “But I'm not justifying anything for anybody. It's not my responsibility. I'm not one of them, and I don't have any of their sins to atone for. As for Bray – I can't justify anything for her, because I'm not her. I can only give you my pseudo-diagnosis.”

“And your 'pseudo-diagnosis', doctor?”

She stopped again to look at me, looking serious.

“She must be crazy to cheat on a guy like you.”

I didn't know whether she was trying for flirtation, flattery, seriousness, or something all together different. Her face was so difficult to read.

“Daniels told me that you nearly broke the glass in the room when this girl left. Is that because she's getting married, or is it for another reason?”

“I'm pissed off that she's getting married, yes.” I went back to my work, putting a couple of papers that Abby needed to look over in a separate pile on the desk. “I'm hurt, more than anything. But is that the only reason I'm pissed off? Probably not.”

“Why are you so mad? Especially since she's the reason you're here. I would think that if she screwed you over enough to land you here, you'd be more than willing to pass her off onto another guy.”

“I fell in love with her, had a daughter with her, and committed myself and my life to her. For some reason, I thought half the job description of a girlfriend was screwing you over in some way.”

“You're not bitter,” she said with a laugh.

“Maybe I am,” I agreed. “But I've never met anyone like Bray. She was a different person when I met her. I miss the Bray that fell in love with, and she's in there somewhere still. I just don't know where.”

“She didn't just cheat on you, did she?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that it isn't the cheating that bothers you. Men get over cheating, usually pretty quickly I might add. Most of you don't waste your time and energy on a failed relationship like us women do.”

“It's not like I'm not sitting on a couch stuffing my face full of ice cream and watching movies in my sweatpants all day.”

“No, you're not. Instead you're sitting on your bed in your jumpsuit stuffing your face full of prescription pills.”

I smiled; of course she'd pull that out. “Touché. There's no winning with you, is there?”

“Usually not. I'm tenacious, remember?”

I chuckled and rolled my eyes, and both of us went back to our work.

“I'm curious,” she said after a few minutes. “If your ex-girlfriend is running off with another guy to Vegas, chances are she's not coming back to New York. What's happening with your daughter? Is she going to take her away from you?”

“That's the weirdest thing – she's signing over her parental rights to my friend Joey, and leaving her with him and his wife.”

“Out of the blue like that?”

“Yep,” I said. “My lawyer asked her to sign the papers and she did it. I still can't figure out whether she had some kind of weird epiphany, or if she has her own motives and it's all about selfishness like normal.”

“Sounds pretty selfish to me. Who gives up their parental rights when a lawyer asks them to? I'd fight like hell.”

“Normally, so would Bray,” I responded. “Which is exactly why I can't figure it out.”

“What is there to figure out?” she asked. “She's a drug addict. It's not too easy to party with a child under your feet.”

“You don't know Bray. We fought for an hour one morning over what to have for breakfast. You're pig-headed and stubborn, but you have nothing on Brayden. No matter how ridiculous or small it seems to anyone else, Bray never admits defeat. I don't think she knows the meaning. To her, the ultimate selfish act would be taking Bailey away from me and never letting me see her again – it would even trump not having to take care of a child and being able to party and do drugs whenever she wanted to.”

“How long has she been doing drugs?”

“That's a question I think only Bray and God know the answer to. All I know is that she started changing a couple of years ago; staying out late, meeting new friends, partying until all hours of the morning, and coming home with enough alcohol in her system to get a frat house drunk. She would come home completely unreasonable and unpredictable. Some nights she would want to fight, sometimes she would start a fight for the hell of it. Other nights she would come home and push me down on the bed without any warning, but she was violent. Disturbingly insatiable, actually.”

“You're painting such a pretty picture of her,” she said sarcastically.

“Like I said, she was different when I met her. But the Bray I saw yesterday was different, too. That wasn't her, at least not the one that I left at that house a week ago. I don't understand it.”

“Drugs make people do weird things,” she said. “They make you...different. Like you know a person one minute and the next they're under the influence and they're a completely new person. The good twin and the evil twin.”

“I just wish I could tell which one was which,” I said.

“Maybe she's in pain, like you, and it's hiding deep down inside there somewhere. Maybe she's using the drugs to cover it up.”

“Could be. Could also be that she's a psychotic bitch.”

She looked at me with shock in her eyes. “Well,” she said with a smile, “at least you can forgive and forget.”

“Sorry. I guess I'm a little jaded. I can't understand how you can work here and not be.”

“What do you mean?”

“There's so much bad shit in this world; people abandoning their kids, guns in schools, starving and homeless people, raping and killing. I don't remember it being this bad when I was a kid.”

“Well, I don't either. But as a parent you should know that parents try to shield their kids from that stuff. They read us fairy tales at night, not the local newspaper. We probably wouldn't remember it.”

“True. But you work in a prison. You see new guys come in here every week. Some of the new ones' crimes are worse than the older ones I'll bet. How do you manage to stay as happy as you always seem to be? I'd be hopeless and miserable by now, thinking that the whole world is lost.”

“I don't like to think that the world is lost. I really prefer to think that some people are lost, and a few of them have a harder time finding their way than others. It helps me sleep at night.”

For some reason, I could understand that philosophy.

“You know,” she said, getting back to pulling out medical supplies. “If I didn't know any better, I'd say we had a whole conversation with each other and actually got along.”

“Weird, isn't it? Knowing the two of us, you probably shouldn't get used to it,” I said.

She laughed. “I've been thinking.”

“That can't be good.”

“Shut up,” she said with a chuckle. “I've been thinking that you've been really helpful to me. You've been working wonders for my paperwork, you've been amazing with some of the inmates, and look at my desk.”

Her desk had improved – I had managed to organize all her office supplies and clear off the growing pile of paperwork, neatly filing it away for her. You could actually see the wood grain now.

“Please stay with me,” she said. “I know you were on the fence about it before, but you're improving things for both of us. And I think you need something to do with your time now more than you did before.”

“Unfortunately, I think you're right,” I said with a sigh.

“Will you stay then? Will you be my full-time assistant?”

After a pause to think it over, I said, “I think I will.”