“Her mother. Because she got a niece named Treasure.”
I nodded. I didn’t know what else to say. Was my visit over? It didn’t seem right to leave yet.
“When was she born?”
“June,” he said.
“So you got to be with her for around three months.”
“Yeah.”
“What does she look like?”
“They say she look like me.” His mouth twitched, nearing a grin. “Big jaw, bright skin.” Then his mouth went slack again, the smile unfinished. “That what they say, anyway.”
“That is really sweet,” I said.
His head fell downward, his mind somewhere else. He lowered his voice.
“Ms. Kuo,” he whispered finally. “Somebody—” He stopped. “Somebody in here told me I stabbed a man thirteen times, fourteen times.”
He looked into my face searchingly. Suddenly I realized that he didn’t know whether it was true.
“Who told you that?”
“Just this guy who said he live across the street from me. He said he was there. He here in the sixteen-person cell now. He told a whole lot of people here that.”
“Patrick,” I said. “Look at me.”
He looked.
I didn’t remove my gaze. “I read the police reports when I came here before,” I said slowly. “They said you stabbed him twice in the chest, once in the arm. So—it’s not thirteen times.” My voice became very low. “Okay? Don’t believe what those people say.”
He let out a breath. Then his head drooped toward the floor. I watched the lines in the back of his neck.
“Hey,” I said. “Lift up your head.”
With reluctance, he bent his head upward. His eyes searched for mine but, finding them, darted away.
“People in your family love you very much,” I began. It had been so long since I had given a pep talk to a young person; I pressed forward with my clichés. “We all do.”
In the air my words sounded empty—who was I to speak, who was I to console him?—but Patrick had already leaned forward, alert for the first time, as if my words fed him in some primal way. I suddenly remembered my student Kayla; while driving her home, I’d given her a word of encouragement—a throwaway line, perhaps that she was an intelligent young woman, which seemed utterly obvious. She radiated gratitude: “Ms. Kuo, that’s the first positive thing I heard all week.”
“I remember you so well,” I said to Patrick. “You were really wonderful in my class, and I know you—” I stopped. “I know you still are.”
He nodded seriously, trying to smile. In this painful gesture of civility, he was trying to show me that my words meant something to him, or perhaps that my effort to say encouraging words meant something.
I stood up to leave. He stood up, too.
“I’ll write you,” I said.
“All right,” he said.
He didn’t say, I’ll write you back.
He didn’t say, See you soon.
I reached for the door, but he got to it first. He opened it for me.
“Thanks for coming to visit me, Ms. Kuo.”
Ms. Kuo. Who else still called me that, with that tone? To him, I had no other name.
I looked for the guard, searching both ways down the dusty hall. Then I saw him, still holding the massive bag of chips. I nodded, signaling that we were done.
We walked side by side, passing by a door labeled LIBRARY. I halted suddenly.
“What’s that?” I pointed, excited.
He kept walking. “There ain’t nothing there but plastic silverware.”
—
I STEPPED OUTSIDE INTO THE motionless heat. The warmth startled me—it had been cold inside.
It was a Saturday morning and the downtown was silent. Businesses were shuttered. Stores were vacant. Next door a jumble of planks and litter lay on the ground. This was the Delta. How to describe this—the stifling absence of people, the stillness that was also beautiful?
I was twenty-two when I first came here. Antarctica attracts misfits who find beauty in the world’s end. I saw a similar beauty everywhere in the Delta: in the kudzu wilding up telephone poles, the cypress trees standing in high water. I had been told teaching here was hard, that it would break the weak. But what was a battle without a wound? Wounding was what I had signed up for.
Now I had left, moved on, survived, progressed. Now I was back as a visitor, and Patrick was alone. Inequality between us had widened. We’d both grown up, and the years divided us. He thanked me without expecting me to come back. He expected little from me or from anyone. Maybe he’d suspected things would go wrong. Maybe the shock that he was feeling was that it had now happened, in this way of all ways, he who stayed out of trouble, he who kept a distance from others, observed others hurt each other, hurt themselves. He hadn’t expected to escape from it all, but he never thought he’d end up here, at the bottom.
In my time in the Delta I had often thought about free will and how the question of its existence was central to rural black life. The looming question—the invisible shadow—that worried and confused the kids in Helena was this: Would you rise higher than those around you? So much of anyone’s identity is determined long before birth. But among my classmates at law school, I’d begun to wonder how it had happened that we, the entitled, could not comprehend, could not embrace, how free we really were—or at least how much freer than most.
Most of my classmates at Harvard had accepted their offers to work for law firms. For a few, law school debt—and the need to pay it off—was very real; for others, working at a law firm really was their dream; but most weren’t sure why they’d accepted. A friend told me he’d just gotten an offer from Arnold & Porter. I had never heard of it, but from his tone I understood that this was an important firm.
I asked, “Are you going to take it?”
His lips twitched. “I’m not sure.” He looked trapped by his good fortune.
I tended to treat people like mirrors, as if they carried secrets about myself, and now, searching his face, I wondered: Was this who I was, too? Did I just go about my life half-making decisions to justify my preferences and comforts?
Standing by my car outside the jail, I thought again of Ivan Ilyich. He behaves exactly as he should. From his bench he commands petitioners. He talks to them in a certain way, aware of his power but softening the fact of it. In every way, he tells himself, his life has been correct, decent, and good. But in general Ivan Ilyich’s life went on as he believed life ought to go: easily, pleasantly, and decently….In all this one had to know how to exclude all that was raw, vital—which always disrupts the regular flow of official business.