From the Chrysalis: a novel Page 4

  “Maybe my father would pay the tuition.”

  “I doubt that, girl. And do you really mean to keep living here?”

  Listening to her, Liza’s heart sank. You don’t want me, she thought, although it was silly to feel hurt. Her grandmother had already raised eight children. On impulse, she stepped forward and almost flung her arms around the older woman’s neck but stopped herself just in time. Her grandmother hated public displays of affection. Not that Liza blamed her. She was a little like that herself. It was her family’s style.

  Still, she thought her grandmother had gotten used to having her around, that she was company at least. On Saturdays they always talked late into the night. Granny Magill, much as she held her emotions in check, was a born raconteur. Liza knew all the Magill family secrets now, but knowing them wasn’t enough. She was lonelier than she had ever thought possible. Lonely for her old neighbourhood, her sad mother, even her brothers. And as it turned out, lonely, achingly lonely for a man.

  Within a short time Liza had wanted to go back to Toronto as well as the more familiar tensions and rhythms of her own house, but she couldn’t. She hadn’t been gone six months when the worst happened, at least from her mother’s point of view. Her father left for good, leaving her with nothing except the twins. They’d sold the house, so there was no place for Liza in Toronto. Not in her mother’s little place, anyway.

  Then one day, just when she needed him most, Dace wrote again. His parole was coming up for review and he needed to contact the outside world.

  I’m sorry I didn’t write before. I was afraid of what you might think of me.

  As if that mattered. Life wasn’t black and white, like a newspaper, and love wasn’t either. She knew that now. And who was she to judge, based on the decisions she’d made while living here? At least she had a second chance. Everybody said so, her grandmother and the infirmary staff. And as long as she was real careful, nobody would ever know what she’d done in Dublin to survive. It wasn’t all over the news like Dace’s life had been, even if it felt that way sometimes. With any luck, she’d even forget herself, no matter what Granny Magill said. A girl is marked by something like this. Even when she knows it’s the only way.

  Also, I spent a lot of time in solitary, so it was hard to get letters out. Oh, yeah. Then there was a sitdown and I got involved in that. But I’m okay now. I’m taking some correspondence classes and the librarian and I are in cahoots. You’ll like this part. I read all the time. I live in books, just like you do.

  It bothered her, though, all those lost years. What had he been doing? Look what she had done! And his family, how had they coped? Her own family was settling down a bit. They’d lowered their hopes, she supposed. They mustn’t know about her either, and Gran had promised she wouldn’t tell.

  “Okay,” she wrote back, determined to focus on him. “But what about Uncle Norm and Rosie? How are they?”

  Of course he was sorry for what had happened, for what he’d put his family through, he persevered, his energy sparking from his letter to her. And even though there were mitigating circumstances—the man was going to hurt Rick—Dace knew he was responsible. He said he had to accept responsibility for what had happened or he would never be free. And if deep down in her heart Liza felt it might be just what the parole board was waiting to hear, she didn’t say.

  A man died, Liza, he wrote. His words echoed, reminding her of how she had felt when she’d first read about the crime. Somewhere she had also read it took about two or three years to get over a bereavement. If somebody died at your hands, it was more or less the same.

  Do you still think about him? A man you hardly knew?

  Not if I can help it, he answered. I’d go crazy if I did. Besides, I’d really rather think about you.

  At the close of every letter he wrote for the next two years he added, So now you know there’s a wayward cousin thinking about you in some godforsaken place.

  He didn’t mention that he was also writing to everybody else he knew, anybody smart enough to toss him a rope. And he didn’t mention the pond, either. Why? Because she had been fourteen? Or because of the prison censors, those prurient men who got off on reading other people’s thoughts. What a job. She knew he hadn’t forgotten though. Because she hadn’t. And somewhere inside they were the same.

  She ended up staying in Dublin almost five years, and during that time he wrote her eighty-three letters.

  Tell me, Cousin, just how do you feel about me? I’d like to see you open a bit yourself. Or am I blind?

  P.S. Take care of yourself. I don’t know what happened to you there in Dublin, but it seems to me you haven’t valued your heart.

  She counted and re-counted his letters the same way some girls do their friends, poring over them like the poems she loved. She agonized over droughts, for there were still periods when he either couldn’t or wasn’t allowed to write.

  … because some nut stabbed me in the back. We both had to go to the hospital. The blade broke off in my back. So the director charged us both with fighting. He put us in lockup and took thirty days good time off us. Can you believe that? Can you?

  Her grandmother was usually scouring pots or hand washing clothes in the background, a sour expression on her face, although Liza helped with the housework now. Gran had turned sixty-six in 1971, but she seemed older. She’d been almost used up by the time she was forty-five, and if she’d ever had any use for a man it was hard to remember it now. Strong hands, strong backs, but most of them don’t use them, she said. And dear Jaysus, they wore out so soon. Just look at her. Her boys sent what they could, but she’d been on her own for almost fifteen years.

  “You’re a right lunatic, girl,” she’d say, scrubbing the cutting board until the thin skin on her knuckles glowed. “What do they call it in the States? Boy crazy? I’ve never seen a girl so bewitched by men. First that would-be actor and now a jailbird. Never seen nothing like it. Unless it was your mother Maeve.”

  Just one man.

  Liza yearned, reluctantly letting go of dream of Trinity and scouting out the closest university to Maitland Penitentiary instead. She also wrote more and more letters to Dace, to everybody except her estranged parents, the closer she came to going back. It had been a long time coming, but she and Dace were both grown up now. They could do what they wanted. When she got home everything was going to be all right.

  Chapter 4

  Yard-Out

  Maitland Penitentiary is about to explode. We are doing everything to prevent it, but so much is outside our jurisdiction. First, we are understaffed. Roughly one third of our inmates require psychiatric care, but our hospital is too small and our staff too overworked to process the necessary paperwork. Second, there is still widespread anxiety about the scheduled transfer of inmates to Maitland Supermax.

  [Unanswered letter from the Warden to the Regional Director of Ontario, 17 June 1971]

  I am not of that feather to shake off my friend when he must

  need me.

  [Shakespeare, William, Timon of Athens, Act i]

  Recreational Yard, Maitland Penitentiary, July 1971:

  Sun sprayed through the barbed wire and sparkled on the mica in the dirt. For a super-sized dog kennel, Dace Devereux thought the Big Yard looked pretty good.

  Dace, a.k.a. #2909, was soaking up the sun. It took a lot of heat to reach the chill in his bones. B Block had just got out, so they had almost an hour in the Yard unless some stupid fucker jerked the screw’s chain. His eyes cut to the black scaffolding in the corner. Fat Frank stared down the barrel of his gun, aimed directly at Dace.

  So let him. The last thing he needed was to get some institutional charges written up, like Rick had the other day. Dace had gotten all that fuck you stuff out of his system the first year, thank you. Prison had its charms all right, giving losers a lifelong sense of belonging, but it was high time he left.

  Although he was taking a bit of a chance and he knew it, he leaned back against a brick wall and
closed his eyes. The bricks felt hot. What the hell was keeping Rick anyway? It made Dace nervous. Maybe he had gotten slammed down again. Or maybe … His mind leaped ahead, anticipating a variety of calamities. The sun was a two-faced bitch sometimes, but an hour in her rays sure as hell beat eighteen hours in his cell.

  He had almost dozed off when he was accosted for the first time that day. “Hey, Iron Horse,” somebody said. A friend, since he’d used a nickname. It sounded like Eugene, a guy up his tier. Dace cocked an eye open just in case. Yeah, it was Eugene.

  “Hey, man,” he said without moving his lips.

  “Hey, man,” a different, unexpected voice said. “Stay alive.”

  His eyes popped open, but there was nobody there.

  Maybe he was going crazy, this close to parole. Some guys did. Straightening up, he panned the yard, something even the dumbest fish did if he valued his life—and he did, he did, he did. People were waiting for him Outside. His father, his sister Rosie, and little Liza. Every time he thought about Liza, he grinned.

  A flash of light distracted him, but it was just the sun glinting off the Iron Pile at the bottom of the Yard. A crying shame. Not that he expected much from the stupid bastards who ran this place when they’d cut athletics, school and work programs. Boo hoo, he thought, mocking himself and wiping sweat from his brow. The sight of all that rusty metal still bothered him, though. It cost nothing to maintain a set of weights.

  His shoelace had come undone. Damn, he thought, as he bent down to retie it. A pale blue letter dislodged from inside his shirt and began a slow, tantalizing descent to the ground. Lunging forward, he swiped the letter in mid-air, almost crushing it in his hand.

  The next thing he knew, a couple of greeners were staring him in the face. Stand a little out of my sun, the library con always said.

  “Hey,” the smaller, bespectacled man said.

  The second suckhole must have thought Dace was deaf. “Fuck,” he said, “Look at his sneer! What’s he mad at us for?”

  Undeterred by their poor reception, the smaller goon held out a smoke. Dace really wanted a cigarette, but he declined. The Pen was a small society with a three-tiered hierarchy of men and laws governing where everybody belonged. People were always better off with their own kind.

  “Hit it,” he said just as Rick showed up.

  “Yeah, get the fuck out of here,” Rick added, kicking at their rears.

  Both guys jumped. “Okay, okay, we’re going,” they said, bowing away. “Looks like you don’t need no more friends anyway.”

  “A real sharp pair of jerks, eh?” Dace said, high-fiving his friend.

  “Brilliant,” Rick said and looked both ways before he opened his shirt. Dace caught sight of cigarettes and something else that was white.

  Rick had done hard time, but after five years in—with a bit of a break—everything was cool. “Where the hell you been?” Dace asked, as if he didn’t know. The guy loved to talk. And bum cigarettes. Hallelujah, he thought, taking the tailor-made Rick was waving under his nose. Some of the T.M.s weren’t bad.

  He could have happily stayed right where he was for the next forty minutes or so, but Rick wanted to go walking. Peeling his body off the wall, Dace checked his sweaty outline on the bricks. Dace was here, it said. Where the hell did Rick get his energy? The guy was practically skipping while Dace’s own legs felt numb. At the door back into the Big House they got a couple of lights from a droopy little joint man, the prison trusty posted there.

  Rick inhaled half his cigarette in one drag, the way he always did. “Jesus,” he complained as he expelled the smoke. “Nothing ever happens in this stupid place.”

  Dace shrugged. Shit happened, but it was the same old, same old. What the hell did he care? He was getting out soon. Still smoking, they strolled around the high-walled gravel yard while Dace mulled over Liza’s letter again.

  Dear Dace,

  I got accepted into Maitland University! I’m coming home. Well, not to my mother’s flat on Clinton. And as for my father’s house in Scarborough—yes, I’m a wonderful girl, but when are you going to understand he really doesn’t want to see me? It’s okay, I don’t mind. He’s not the only man in my life. You’re my family, too. I’m going to stay in a new student residence, in a fresh, modern room overlooking a stream. I’m so glad I’ll still be near water. I got a scholarship and Granny Magill is helping. I feel guilty taking her money, but I don’t know what else to do. Besides, she has good reason for wanting to see me gone. She thinks it will be better for me, too. I just hope I can pay her back someday.

  Dublin is so beautiful. I wish you could have visited. But everything here is so tired and old and although the Troubles are a hundred miles north, people are afraid. And a woman’s life, well, it’s not good. No birth control, and Women’s Liberation has been a little slow, probably because most of Ireland still feels like it’s enslaved.

  He grinned, noting that “Goddamn the English” had been struck out.

  Even so, I’ve walked the streets so much, Dublin’s in my soul.

  When I get to university I want to major in English or maybe Psychology. Anybody can read books, so I was tempted by Biology, but I don’t have enough Math. More than anything, I want to see you. I’m coming straight there. How do I get in? Please, please, make sure I’m on your visitors list. Are you behaving yourself? Dear Cousin, you’ve just got to make parole.

  Although he didn’t understand all the things she said, he liked the way she said them. She worried him, though. She was hiding something, but he had no idea what. Take that stuff about her grandmother, her other grandmother. What was all that?

  He put the letter away and looked around. A small crowd had gathered near the dismantled weightlifting equipment.

  Rick didn’t notice the crowd. “What’s the problem?” he asked when Dace steered him in the opposite direction.

  “It’s just Sandy McAllister preaching again. He’s NG, absolutely no fucking good.”

  “I mean your cousin, you lucky bastard. What did she say?”

  Dace looked away. If it had been anybody else, he would have ignored him. But a friend could take liberties. He took a couple of drags on his cigarette, hoping to make the smoke last, but they both knew he was stalling. “She’s coming home soon,” he said.

  Rick’s face lit up and he actually did a little jig. “Really? When?” His words tumbled over one another. “Why didn’t you say something before?”

  “Jeez, I dunno. I guess she’s coming when school starts.”

  “So when the hell’s that? Do kids still start school in September? Hey, can I read it? I like the stuff she writes about the I.R.A. and her dear old Granny. Let me over there and I’d bomb the hell out of those bastards too. She’s cute, right?” Rick asked, shaping an hour glass with his hands.

  Dace groaned. God, maybe the prison authorities—make that “Authorities” with a capital A—were right. Cons didn’t learn fast. Talking about a girl around here? How stupid was that?

  “Yeah, I guess,” he said. He had to say something. Rick hardly ever got any mail. Jesus, could the guy even write? He’d had a lot of trouble in their parochial school and the nuns hadn’t helped. “At least she was. But you’d look cute too if you were the last set of tits I saw before coming to the Joint.” He stopped, a bit uncomfortable. “Ah, scratch that, she was just a kid.”

  At this, Rick looked even more interested. “Well, if she’s eighteen or nineteen now, she’s probably done it.”

  Done it? Done it? What the hell did that mean?

  “You hear the stuff that’s going on out there,” Rick waxed on. “Everybody’s getting it on. No more of this wait-until-we’re-married shit. And if something does happen, you don’t even have to marry the broad. They’ve all been living together in little free-love communes since about 1967, man.”

  Dace tried butting Rick on the shoulder, but he danced out of the way. Little Liza with somebody else? Crazy. She wouldn’t, would she? Not that she belo
nged to him. Or ever would. What the hell did he have to offer a girl like her? The way he was, the place he was in. Not to mention she was his cousin. Sure she flirted a little in her letters. To pass the time. For years, she had been a young girl far from home, far from everybody who loved her.

  Somewhere a door slammed shut. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Anyway, who cares? You know me. It’s her mind I love.”

  “The hell you do. Give me that,” Rick said, making a grab.

  Dace feigned an upper cut, but Rick ducked out of the way. “Not here,” he said, nodding at Sandy McAllister, whose head and shoulders had just popped up above the crowd, straight across the yard.

  “Ah, he’s just a lunatic,” Rick said, grinding his cigarette butt into the dirt.“The silly bugger never knows when to stop.”

  Maybe, Dace thought.

  Sandy was about their age, but he wasn’t getting out anytime soon. Nobody knew exactly what he had done, but he was a lifer, so it probably had something to do with a cop. With nothing to lose, Sandy usually had something up his sleeve. A born storyteller and a natural agitator, he was responsible for most of the rumours circulating the Joint. The proposed move to the new Supermax had really got him going, and he’d let everybody know it. He said he wasn’t putting up with that electronic surveillance shit. As if he had a choice.

  Sandy’s solution was a takeover. Every so often he buttonholed a couple of strong guys like Dace and Rick to make them see things his way. Somebody had squealed to the Authorities, but they didn’t care. For once, they were relying on their shrink. The shrink speculated that Sandy had a “conspiracy mentality.”