He could do anything at this point. It was both the right and wrong time to leave.
I moved on to an essay—we still called it a free write—he’d composed about stress.
The first time I encountered stress here in jail is when Ms. Kuo first came to see me. I cried after the visit was over inside of the visiting room. A dude was in there said “you are the one who threw your life away.” It is the thought that somebody cares about me that’s stressful because I stress them. There are responsibilities that I have to meet the standard of, he wrote. Then later: I cried because somebody cared for me.
I hadn’t expected to hear that I was the first source of stress in jail—I’d meant to be its relief. I didn’t know he cried after he saw me. I didn’t know he was caught crying and was told it was his fault. Did it always circle back to this, to one’s culpability?
I tried to remember the first day I had come to jail. Yet, like his memory, mine centered not on the visit itself but on what happened afterward: the sudden warmth of dusty air when I stepped outside, the shock and confusion of being seen by someone who knew me formerly. Was this why I had come back? To be known that way, to live up to that memory?
“Did I tell you that I went back to Stars with Aaron…?” I began.
Patrick looked up. He had started to leaf through the pages of the atlas one at a time.
Oklahoma, Oregon.
“It’s all fallen apart. Everything’s still there, trash cans in the yard. But the gate’s all locked up, so we had to look through barbed wire.”
“They didn’t bulldoze the place or nothing?”
“No. That would’ve taken them—”
“Too much work.”
Patrick grunted in recognition, able to picture the school abandoned and in decay.
“Let’s be honest. You went to crappy schools. What would have happened to you if you hadn’t?”
“But I had you.”
“That’s not enough.”
“It is for me.”
I shook my head.
He looked down at his sandals, now neatly tied with string.
I was worried about Patrick’s life after jail. What would he do in Helena? What employer would take him? Would he wander the streets again, sit on his porch? I couldn’t imagine his future.
“You with Danny and Lucy last night?” he asked.
“They asked me to be the godmother of their son,” I said, beaming a little.
“Aww, Ms. Kuo. Bet you wish you around for the baby birth.”
“I know. Lucy is so big now.” I made a gesture.
He smiled.
“You were there for Cherish’s?” I asked.
“Yeah.” He named the date without thinking, in June.
I jotted it down. “Danny and Lucy, they showed me the ultrasound picture.”
“The what?”
“It’s a picture of the baby before it’s born. Did you get to see one?”
“Naw.”
“You can see the head.”
He squinted, as if he was trying to imagine the picture.
“What was it like holding Cherish for the first time?”
“It felt—amazing, really. To have a daughter, a baby—my own baby. She be real tiny, four pounds and three ounces, like a little pink pig. Her eyes look real big, like—real bright on her face. I just remember her eyes looking into my eyes. And I be thinking, this…this my daughter…” He faltered.
Now his voice deepened. “I wasn’t ready to have no baby. I wasn’t doing nothing. I just looking into her big eyes and thinking I don’t got no degree, no job…”
His voice choked and he turned away.
I looked at his homework.
Dear Cherish,
I dreamt of us yesterday. In the dream you and I are crossing a rushing white mountain stream. The family in the farmhouse cooks for us fresh water salmon and the most delicious potatoes. Night is nearing. You point out the cabin lodge just above the hill. I say, “Yes, that’s where we will sleep.” The hike up the mountains is a six hour walk in length and a two hour walk in width, and is one of the most marvelous sights in the world. The trees are a gorgeous evergreen. The mountains are smoke gray with snow covered tops and jagged edges. The climate is always cool even in the summer. In the stream the water flows so rapidly, forming white bubbles like a Jacuzzi, and it runs into a beautiful waterfall. There is also a mysterious ditch the people have dug like a moat. It runs the length of the one farm and cabin. No further. The family told us that this is some of the most pure water in the country. We make our way along the mountain trail where blue birds, bald eagles, and sunbirds rest on low branches.
We see a flower called stargazer lily and it had pink and white polka dots. In the evening, when we are sitting by the stream, you say, Once we leave there will never be another place like this.
I am still awake in the middle of the night, amazed of the land. You roll over and look up at me. Suddenly a lizard, perhaps alone in the night, comes through the window and hides in a corner, as if it couldn’t have found a better place. You say it looks like a snake on little legs. At daybreak, when you awaken, it is already gone. Across the stream, above the hills, the smoke gray mountains of paradisal lines are clear in the sunlight.
He had come so far, but what struck me then and for many years afterward was how little I had done for him. I don’t mean this in the way of false modesty. I mean that it frightens me that so little was required for him to develop intellectually—a quiet room, a pile of books, and some adult guidance. And yet these things were rarely supplied.
Patrick had collected himself and turned back toward me.
“Can I keep this?” I held up his notebook.
He shrugged casually. Then he saw my face: It must have betrayed my disappointment. His notebooks, now nearly sacred objects to me, were not sacred to him.
Swiftly, he explained, “I be transferred in a month; they might not let me bring them. They get lost. You keep them, Ms. Kuo.”
I agreed. “Somebody might take them.”
At this he corrected me. “Ain’t nobody want that.” He chuckled to himself.
Maybe a record of someone’s private thoughts is worthless anywhere. Certainly in jail—contraband is worth more. But I wondered if it was especially worthless in the Delta, where a calm place to read was hard to come by; where there wasn’t a bookstore for a hundred miles and families couldn’t afford a book, anyhow; and where a teacher had once burst into my classroom to scold me for having the kids write about the death of a classmate, not wanting them to feel sympathy for him.
Patrick returned to the atlas, studying the legend as if it were a poem he was decoding. An inch represented a hundred miles.
“Ms. Kuo, where you from again? Massachusetts?”
“No. Michigan.”
He found Michigan. I showed him the county where I’d been born, Kalamazoo. “It was a good place to grow up,” I said, and he nodded soberly, as if my comment was profound and explained a lot about me.
Then he found Arkansas and, tracing the river, Helena.
Then: LITTLE ROCK, FAYETTEVILLE. He pointed at BATESVILLE and announced, “I be looking here.”
Batesville was small but still bigger than Helena.
“Making my escape route,” he joked. “I just need my getaway car.”