So now it’s just her new attorney from the public defender’s office and her mother, and her mother’s mouth set in the same thin line, and her mother’s hands raw with penance and prayers.
Every month Ruth looks past her visitors to the same white-tiled walls, scratched with initials and curses and promises. But Frank, sitting opposite her today, seems to suck everything out of the room. His size means that he fills the small space and somehow she can’t see the tiles or the table or the guard—just his familiar, solid figure. And as she sits down opposite him, memories rise like bubbles: each one a complete story of their past. She remembers him singing along to Buddy Holly on the car radio. She doesn’t know when or where they were headed, but she knows there was rain on the windows, that his fingers tapped the wheel and that he sang falsetto just to make her laugh.
She remembers the way he sprawled in his seat in class, legs stretched out, hands in his pockets. She sat behind him in study hall for two years and she can still conjure up a picture of how he looked at fifteen. The line of his jaw. The way his hair curled against his temple. The mole on his neck that was the first detail she noticed about him.
And she remembers their wedding night and how serious he was, how determined that this would be done right. The smell of him as she woke up next to him for the first time. The warmth and the solidness of him that she still reaches for, before she’s fully awake. After all these years.
She adjusts her chair and gives herself a moment to get used to him again. Because she can now. She’s grown into the habit of not caring what other people think or feel, because there’s nothing left to lose. And so only when she’s ready does she raise her eyes to his.
“Frank.”
He smiles at her. The same slow smile that made her heart skip when she was seventeen and irritated the hell out of her by the time she was twenty-four.
“Ruthie. How you been?”
“Oh, you know.”
He nods as though she’s said something interesting. “You look good.”
And now she smiles back because she knows she doesn’t look good, even for thirty-two. She looks thin and tired and worn down. When she lets herself glance in a mirror, she can see the gray hairs, the lines around her eyes. She looks like someone who hasn’t been able to take a long bath or choose her own bedtime for almost four years.
“You too.”
And she sees that he does look good. He’s lost the paunch he had during the trial. His skin is bright and flushed: she can almost smell the fresh air on him.
“Been a long time, huh?”
More than three years since he stopped visiting. Not such a long time on the outside but in here, where each sleepless night lasts thirteen hours and there isn’t a whole lot to make the afternoons go by faster, three years feels like a lifetime.
She doesn’t answer him because he’ll never understand what time means to her. She just shrugs and lets him make of that what he will.
“Think the hearing’ll go well?”
She wonders if he only answered her letter, if he only came today, because he wants to know where she’s headed if she gets out. He wants to know she’s not going to come asking for anything.
He needn’t worry.
She lifts her head and forces a smile.
“My attorney says there’s a very good chance I’ll get parole. God bless prison overcrowding, huh?”
He nods but she sees from the shadow that crosses his face that he doesn’t understand her last remark.
She lights a cigarette and thinks how odd it is; not just the fact of him in here, but this conversation. The mention of prison and parole between them as though those words have nothing to do with their children. The ordinary tone of this strange exchange.
But even as she thinks this, she can feel the fear building. She knows she needs to say it. She needs to tell him why she asked him to come today. She needs to put a question to him and she needs to hear his answer, and then she can close the door.
In the end, it’s simple. She looks him in the eye and takes a breath and pushes the words out fast before she can stop them.
“It was you. All the time, it was you.”
And he looks right back at her and nods, as though he’s been expecting this. He brings his head close to hers so the guard can’t hear and talks in a sigh, as though he’s been waiting a long time to let it out.
He’s lying on an old couch in the storage room below her apartment, a warm bottle of beer in one hand. His shoes sit neatly on the floor beside him, his head rests on a pile of old magazines.
Sometimes he flicks through one to make the time pass, but it’s too hot tonight to read the same stories again, so his eyes are fixed on the ceiling. He’s found that if he lets them roam along the damp stains, looking for patterns, the hours go by faster.