Two Prisoners Freed

There are a few moments in life where other worlds collide with our own. For me, the big one started with eight little words that my stepsister Alexis spoke. “Jon, I’m sorry,”  she said, “but your mom’s out again.”

I had stopped to answer when I heard her ringtone, leaving the open guts of a radiator-less Ford and scattered tools on the floor. We were busy the day before Thanksgiving, and the boss frowned upon personal calls. No exceptions, even for me, the guy everybody called “Mr. Fixit.” She knew that, and I knew if she was calling me now, it wasn't going to be idle chatter.

“What did you say?”

“She’s out. They let your biological Mom out again. She showed up at Mom and Dad's house. It’s some kind of early release.”

“Damn. She’s not supposed to be out for two more years.” Two more whole years that I didn’t have to think about her. According to the countdown app that measured my freedom from having to deal with her, two years, one month, and three days, but who's counting. “Are they all right? Did anything happen?” 

“No. It was kind of weird, actually. Dad wasn't there. It was just Mom. She asked where you were, politely, I guess. No pushing or yelling or anything. Mom wouldn't offer up any info, and she started crying and just walked off. I guess she was on foot; God knows from where. Mom said she didn’t look well. Anyway, Mom says to come over. They want to talk to you about her now that she’s out again. Mom said it was important. Something they want to give you.”

           “O.K.  I think I’ll go over there tonight. I’m sure she can find my address, and I don't need the drama.” Yeah, I’ll schedule “dealing with her” for the thirty-second of not gonna happen.

          “Your call. Stay safe. I love you! See you tomorrow at Thanksgiving?”

          “You bet. Love you too, sis.”

           In the moment, I remembered the dull gray of the prison that my grandmother took me to during the first incarceration for visits. The chaos of children running in locked rooms. The broken toys that were the system’s poor effort to meet the needs of the visiting kids. The fear and disgust that I felt on a visit where she had grabbed my face. “You’re mine,” she said. “Someday, I'll be back for you. You belong to me. I don't belong here. Not really."

It was always about her. Never about the years that she was taking from my grandmother’s life. It was always about the pain she felt, never about the pain she caused. Never about what she had taken away from me to spend her life with her new family, good old methamphetamine, and her the collection of broken people that were her brothers and sisters in service to it.

For a while, my biological family had been good, or at least normal. I remember my biological Dad taking me to a baseball game. He had saved up and surprised me with a glove and a vertical trampoline-like device that bounced balls thrown at it back. I remember my biological Mom taking me to the park in the evenings after she was off work cooking at the restaurant. Yeah, she was a “cook,” alright.  She eventually graduated to different recipes. Of course, when your “souffle” blows up, wrecks your house, and kills two people . . . You get to go to a different kind of establishment.           

I couldn’t deal with it. Worry about it later.

Quitting time left me on my way to the people I now thought of as my Mom and Dad. The Wayback Machine in my head came on again. I was a kid again, was back in the prison, staring at the woman that had given me some of her genes. This time it was the very last visit. The guard said something about visiting time being over. She grabbed my face, hard, and telling me, "Remember, I'm your Mom. Deb is just your grandmother. Your Mom is the one that loves you. You'll see."  

I hated her. I hated the place, the car rides, my grandmother crying afterward. I lost it. I started slapping, punching, and kicking, screaming about how I hated her. My fingernail managed to draw blood. A guard had to pull me off her, separating the tangle of eight-year-old me, and my jailbird mom. I was crying. She just stared at me. The cherry on the cake was when she yelled at my grandmother, though, “You made him do this,” she said. “You turned him against me. It’s your fault.”  

On the way out, the guard stopped my grandmother. “Maybe it isn’t a good idea to bring him here anymore.”

           My grandmother died not long afterward, probably from a broken heart. She had seen her husband die, and then her son-in-law, her daughter becoming a scheming addict in the aftermath. Three hard strikes from the universe - thanks for playing. Her death started a parade of foster homes for me. But luck struck when I was twelve. A family with a reputation for taking on “difficult kids” took an interest in me. For the first time, I had a sister, pets, a bed that was my own – all the newness of a different world. She had tried to break that, too – showing up unexpectedly once when the system foolishly decided she could live in the real world after the first incarceration. She was arrested (yet again) for trying to pull me out of the door. But fourteen-year-old me had an even meaner punch than eight-year-old me.

That got her parental rights terminated. The Andersons adopted me. A good thing, too, because I avoided the exploding meth house that followed her next release, earning her fifteen to twenty years.    Later, the Army had given me even more. They taught me how to take things apart and how to put them back together. What that clicking meant when a car ran hot. How to fix broken things. A trade that I enjoyed.

I tried to shake that funk as I pulled into the driveway of the Anderson’s house. It helped to see the house that I had lived in for the good part of my childhood. The white siding, the green awning, and the little yard all switched my mental Wayback machine to better memories. The tree that held my swing. The place where the sandbox had been. My bicycle. The little cardboard box that the kids down the hill and I had made roll with wheels and axles made of dowel rods -- arguably my first mechanical project. This was my family. This was love. I called my stepmom Linda “Mom” now, and my stepdad Jim “Dad.” They called me Son. There was no place for the pretender Mom in my family. You don’t want to hear what I called her.  

 “Come on in, Jon,” my Dad said.

There was a weird vibe, something off. He had a serious face, almost a frown. My adoptive Mom ran up to me and hugged me, tight, and held on.  I could tell she had been crying.  

“Son,” my Dad said, “Now that your biological Mom is out, we need to tell you something. Actually, to show you something. But before we do that, we want to tell you that we love you so much that it hurts.”

“What did she do? She wasn’t even here, and she was hurting me.

“Nothing happened, Son. She didn’t look well. We really need to show you this.”

He handed me a shoe box. I looked at him, confused.

“Open it. What you do with what’s in there, that’s completely up to you. We’ve been lucky enough to have you in our life all these years, and we know how painful she is for you. But you need to see this before you decide anything.”

Letters. Letters and more letters. “Mailed from a State Correctional Institution” in the upper left. “My Dear Son” in the address part, her handwriting. “I am so sorry," and hearts in the lower left. No, no, no, just no. Burn it with fire. Wipe it from existence. How dare she!

 I dropped the box.

 “We didn’t show you these before.” my Dad said. “One or two a year, starting about five years ago. We thought we’d have more time to talk about it before she got out. We just didn’t know what to do. Honestly, we’ve dreaded this day. We thought about just throwing them away”

Words. The part of me that made words wasn’t working.

Emotions. Swirling. Anger at gene-donor Mom. Fear. Confusion. Why am I just finding this out? It was like I was watching myself from somewhere. Why did this have to happen?

“I wish you had,” I choked out.   

My Dad shook his head and reached out to touch me. “Son, it’s like in the Army. Sometimes you’re better for doing the stuff you don't want to do. I’ll make you a deal. Take them, look them over. After that, you and I will burn them in the fireplace, if that’s what you want. Hell, if nothing else, think of it as knowing what you’re up against.”

I really didn't want to do this. Really. Did. Not. They were looking at me, their eyes full of love. Full of sorrow. How could I say no? I had to at least put on a show.

I headed to my old room and there we sat. Me, the box, and the untouched food. The box and me. It was staring at me, daring me.

I pulled the first letter out.  

"Dear Son," it read. "I have ruined my life and yours, and I know that now. It took me a long time to realize that. I guess I was just too proud. Too afraid to really admit to myself who I am. Too afraid of losing you forever. I don’t know if you can ever forgive me. I want you to know that if you hate me, I hate myself more. It hurts me so much to think about what you went through. I can’t blame the drugs, either that was my choice . . . .”

I don’t even really remember picking up the next letter, or the one after that, or any of them.

“Dear Son – I don't know how much you know about addicts or the twelve steps. I hope and pray you don’t know them, actually, at least not from the inside.  I’m on the one where you make amends. I don’t know how I can ever do that with you. I'm stuck, and it's killing me . . ."

"Dear Son – I don't know if you are reading these but knowing what I did to you is a hole in my soul that I put there myself. I know that. They tell me that I have to accept the consequences of my actions and accept the things I can’t change and move on, but this one is so very, very hard . . .” Water spots on the paper, maybe teardrops.

“Dear Son – I guess you should know that I am sick. They say they caught it early, but I had to have an operation, and they don't know if it will come back. If only it were so easy to cut out the pieces of my life that were their own cancer . . .”  

A change in the stamp on the last one – “Blackburn Correctional Compound.”

“Dear Son –. They say I might be getting out soon, time off for good behavior. That’s hollow, it can’t wipe out what I’ve done, and the only behavior that I care about was I did to you and those people who died. All the people I hurt, you the very most of all. I think about you every day, every minute – I wish I knew if you were O.K. I guess this is my last letter; it isn’t up to me anymore . . .”

Emotions again, swirling. Enough. I needed to not be around these letters. Enough. I came down the stairs. The music was off, and they were sitting there. They were looking at me, waiting to find out what their secret had wrought.

“I need to think.” Was that true? Or was it a lie, a kindness to convey that I didn’t hold their secret against them? Why hadn’t they shown me this?  I just wanted to get out of there. Ii wanted to be somewhere the letters weren’t.

"It's up to you, Jon," Linda said. "If you want a relationship with her, we’ll figure out how that all works together. We’d walk through fire for you. If you don’t, and if she’s a problem, we’ll get her thrown back in jail.”

I needed out. The world had turned on its head. I needed to think. “Whatever that woman is to me, I’m thankful for you.”

It was raining, hard. Maybe it had been all evening; I hadn't been paying attention. Too much focus on the storm in my head. I drove home, no radio, pretty much numb.

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to find her sitting outside the door to my apartment building, drenched. She was just sitting in the rain, no umbrella in sight. A wet backpack by her side. No car in sight. She cast a shadow across the threshold from the streetlight, like the shadow she had cast across my life. Her appearance was striking. Frail. Broken. Alone. Not the monster that lived in my mind all these years.

Maybe if she hadn’t been sitting there drenched, it might have been different. Maybe not. But at that moment, the world changed yet again. As a lightning bolt broke across the sky, I suddenly saw my own brokenness – the anger, the resentment, the power that I had given it.

I saw that even as she had been in prison, so had I, and so was I still.

But in that instant, I knew how to fix the broken thing that was me and how to end the hatred that made me a prisoner too. How to put everything back together, better. There was a clarity, an edge, a certainty. There was this moment and nothing else. I parked on the curb and walked up to her.

“Mom,” I said, “I forgive you.”

Our tears mixed with the rain. Mine and hers. “Ohhhh,” she said. “Ohhhhhhhh.” A reaction, not a reply. Not quite a word, not quite a cry. Primal somehow. Deeper than language. The sound that years make when they fall away. The sound of redemption. The sound of pain, leaving.  

We were two prisoners freed, standing in the rain, the past washed away.

She started shaking – either from the cold or the weight of what was leaving her - and almost fell. I grabbed her.

“Come on in, Mom,” I said. “Let’s get you dried off. I don’t know how this works now, but we have to start somewhere. It’s Thanksgiving tomorrow.”