I Will Find You(2)

“Did you fill out a form this year saying you wanted no visitors?”

“No.”

Curly spread his hands. “There you go. Now get up.”

“Can’t you just tell the visitor to go home?”

“No, Burroughs, I can’t, and I’ll tell you why. That would be more work for me than dragging your ass down to Visitors. See, if I do that, I’ll have to explain why you’re not there and your visitor might ask me questions and then I’ll probably have to fill out a form myself and I hate that and then you’ll have to fill out a form and I’ll have to walk back and forth and, look, I don’t need the hassle, you don’t need the hassle. So here’s what’ll happen: You’ll go with me now and you can just sit there and say nothing for all I care and then you can fill out the correct forms and neither of us will have to go through this again. Do you feel me?”

I have been here long enough to know that too much resistance is not only futile but harmful. I am also, truth be told, curious. “I feel you,” I say.

“Cool. Let’s go.”

I know the drill, of course. I let Curly put on the handcuffs, followed by the belly chain so that my hands can be shackled to my waist. He skips the leg cuffs, mostly because they are a pain to get on and off. The walk is fairly long from the PC (protective custody, for those not in the know) unit of Briggs Penitentiary to the visiting area. Eighteen of us are currently housed in PC—seven child molesters, four rapists, two cannibal serial killers, two “regular” serial killers, two cop killers, and of course, one filicidal maniac (yours truly). Quite the coterie.

Curly gives me a hard glare, which is unusual. Most of the guards are bored cop wannabees and/or muscleheads who look upon us inmates with staggering apathy. I want to ask him what gives, but I know when to keep quiet. You learn that in here. I feel my legs quake a bit as I walk. I’m oddly nervous. The truth is, I’ve settled in here. It’s awful—worse than you imagine—but still I’ve grown accustomed to this particular brand of awful. This visitor, whoever it is after all this time, is here to deliver rock-my-world news.

I don’t welcome that.

I flash back to the blood from that night. I think about the blood a lot. I dream about it too. I don’t know how often. In the beginning, it was every night. Now I would say it’s more a once-a-week thing, but I don’t keep track. Time doesn’t pass normally in prison. It stops and starts and sputters and zigzags. I remember blinking myself awake in the bed I shared with my wife Cheryl that night. I didn’t check a clock, but for those keeping score at home, it was four in the morning. The house was silent, still, and yet somehow I sensed something was wrong. Or maybe that is what I believe—incorrectly—now. Memory is often our most imaginative storyteller. So maybe, probably, I didn’t “sense” anything at all. I don’t know anymore. It’s not like I bolted upright in my bed and leapt to my feet. It took time for me to get up. I stayed in my bed for several minutes, my brain stuck in that weird cusp between sleep and awake, floating ever upward toward consciousness.

At some point, I did finally sit up. I started down the corridor to Matthew’s room.

And that was when I noticed the blood.

It was redder than I imagined—fresh, bright Crayola-crayon red, garish and mocking as a clown’s lipstick against the white sheet.

Panic gripped me then. I called out Matthew’s name. I clumsily ran to his room, bumping hard into the doorframe. I called out his name again. No answer. I ran into his bedroom and found…something unrecognizable.

I’m told I started screaming.

That was how the police found me. Still screaming. The screams became shards of glass careening through every part of me. I stopped screaming at some point, I guess. I don’t remember that either. Maybe my vocal cords snapped, I don’t know. But the echo of those screams has never left me. Those shards still rip and shred and maul.

“Hurry up, Burroughs,” Curly says. “She’s waiting for you.”

She.

He’d said “she.” For a moment I imagine that it is Cheryl, and my heart picks up a beat. But no, she won’t come, and I wouldn’t want her to. We were married for eight years. Happily, I thought, for most of them. It hadn’t been so good at the end. New stresses had formed cracks, and the cracks were turning into fissures. Would Cheryl and I have made it? I don’t know. I sometimes think Matthew would have made us work harder, that he would have kept us together, but that sounds a lot like wishful thinking.

Not long after my conviction, I signed some paperwork granting her a divorce. We never spoke again. That was more my choice than hers. So that’s all I know of her life. I have no idea where Cheryl is now, if she’s still wounded and in mourning or if she’s managed to make a new life for herself. I think it’s best that I don’t know.

Why didn’t I pay more attention to Matthew that night?

I’m not saying I was a bad father. I don’t think I was. But that night, I simply wasn’t in the mood. Three-year-olds can be tough. And boring. We all know this. Parents try to pretend that every moment with their child is bliss. It’s not. Or at least that’s what I thought that night. I didn’t read a bedtime story to Matthew because I just couldn’t be bothered. Awful, right? I just sent my child to bed because I was distracted by my own meaningless issues and insecurities. Stupid. So stupid. We are all so luxuriously stupid when things are good in our life.