Unlike during the first year I’d spent in prison, my days were full, but no matter how much I kept myself busy working and studying, my girls were constantly on my mind. Brooke would be eleven soon, and Natalie would turn seven. The ache I felt for them was a wound that wouldn’t heal—if I allowed my thoughts to pick at its edges too much, it began to bleed.
Still, I wrote to them, gradually filling up the pages of five spiral notebooks that I kept on the shelf next to my bunk. They were nothing profound, just thoughts I had about them, things I wanted them to know about me. They were too young, yet, for me to write about the things that mattered, the things I really needed to say.
I wonder what your favorite subject is, I wrote to Brooke. Which you love more, words or numbers. If you are finished playing with dolls or if you still hide one or two of them in your closet, the same way I did when I was ten years old, bringing them out, hoping I didn’t get caught, unsure if I was ready to let go of that little girl part of me. Do you fight with your sister, or do you still take care of her, the way you always did when she was a baby? I wonder if you’d recognize me if you saw me on the street, with our same black hair and violet eyes. Do you look in the mirror and see me, the same way I see you?
You have my lips, I told Natalie. The top one a bit thinner than the bottom. I’d hold you in my arms, feeding you a bottle because from the moment you were born you refused to nurse, and you’d rest one of your soft, perfect hands on my chest, on top of my heart. When you looked up and smiled, I saw in your round, brown eyes the kind of mother I wanted to be.
On their birthdays every year, I wrote each of them a longer letter, filling it with as many memories of my own childhood as I could. I fell down the cement stairs at school in the first grade, I’d written Natalie last year, when she turned six. I broke my arm and I knocked out my two front teeth. Have you lost any teeth yet? I hope you believe in the Tooth Fairy . . . and in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. I hope you believe in magic. And that the people who are taking care of you love you as much as I do. I hope you love reading as much as I did when I was your age. I hope you have lots of friends and a room full of toys. I hope you have everything I couldn’t give you.
I tried not to think about the fact that it was doubtful they’d ever have the chance to read any of what I wrote them. On a warm, sunny morning in May, four months away from my parole hearing, I climbed into the back of the gray prison van and reminded myself that I was writing the letters more for me than for them. I wrote them to help ease my own pain.
“Ready?” Mendez asked, glancing at me in the rearview mirror. A broadly built, stoic guard from the Dominican Republic, Mendez accompanied me into town three times a week for my participation in work release at Randy’s clinic. He was required to be in the same room with me while I worked, or at least very nearby.
“Yep,” I said. Most of our conversations went like this, monosyllabic statements and replies. I was anxious to get to work that day. After two weeks of intravenous antibiotics for a systemic infection, Winston, one of the dogs I’d been helping care for, was still struggling. I wanted to see if the new round of meds Randy had prescribed had taken effect. I put on my seat belt and settled in for the thirty-minute ride.
As we drove along the back roads from the prison into town, I eyed the landscape that had become so familiar to me during this commute. At its heart, most of Skagit County was farm country, and over the past couple of weeks, the plowed fields had begun to sprout green with the promise of bountiful summer crops. Ancient houses alongside red, rickety barns were scattered across the hillsides. The Mt. Vernon Animal Clinic was located just on the edge of downtown. Not quite the city, but not the country, either. It was a sprawling, one-story building with lots of large, square windows and an enormous fenced area that we used for exercising and training the dogs. There was an indoor-outdoor kennel in the back of the building as well, and that was where I spent the majority of my time.