A Knock at Midnight(68)

    I called Marc and Mike Junior back on three-way and told them that in fact there would be no waiting period. Their dad was coming home today! They were ecstatic. “So do we need to pick him up or what?” Mike Junior said. Silence followed as realization set in. Mike was getting out in a few hours, halfway across the country. And we had no time to make arrangements.

We started to panic. My phone beeped with Mike’s mother’s number.

“Brittany?” Her voice was hoarse from crying tears of joy, but she sounded worried. “Mike’s cellmate just called. They said a guard came and told him to pack out. Told him he was getting out.”

“Already?”

“That’s what he told me. Said Mike left all his stuff, didn’t take anything with him. He’s just gone.”

When I finally did reach the prison, things got even worse. “He’s already been released,” the administrator told me. “We took him to the Greyhound station. Mike Wilson is no longer an inmate at this facility. And he’s no longer our responsibility.” After twenty-two years in a maximum-security penitentiary, every movement monitored and controlled, without the ability to read or write or speak clearly, the Federal Bureau of Prisons had released Mike Wilson onto the streets outside Victorville with nothing more than a bus ticket clutched in his hand.

Our elation turned to desperation. Mike Junior frantically searched the bus routes to determine the best way to drive and try to intercept his dad—if he’d even made it onto the bus. Marc would fly out and see if he could reach him sooner—but fly out to where? Mike’s mom started calling every bus station from Victorville to Dallas to determine the exact time buses were expected to arrive. I was livid—the prison’s lack of care was sickening. Mike was a liability to them, nothing more. Even after seven years at the same facility, nobody cared enough about him as a human being to even try to help him get home. They didn’t even know if he’d gotten on the bus.

    “Can you tell me his bus ticket number so that his family and I can track it?” I asked another BOP staff member. “Do you know what time the bus is leaving?”

“We aren’t allowed to give out that information.”

I had to keep from screaming. “Not even to his lawyer? His mother? Can you confirm his final destination is Dallas?”

“We aren’t allowed to give out that information,” she repeated.

I made a series of frantic calls to Victorville. Mike’s case manager confirmed that because of his whirlwind release, the prison had provided him with only two days’ worth of his prescription medication. He had a prepaid debit card, which at least gave him food money for a few days, and a means to call home, but after two decades of incarceration and in his current medical condition, I wasn’t sure if he’d be able to figure out how to use it.

We couldn’t get anyone at the Victorville bus station to confirm that Mike had gotten onto the bus. Even if he had, the bus ride to Dallas from Victorville was more than twenty-nine hours. To make matters worse, Mike would have to change buses nine times, starting with the first stop in San Bernardino. Marc was beside himself. “At our visit, there was no way he could do something like that! How’s he supposed to know what bus to get on? His reading’s not back yet. And he can hardly speak, especially when he’s stressed out!”

A few hours later Mike’s mom answered her phone. “Mama?” A stranger in the San Bernardino bus station had let Mike borrow his cellphone to call home. Speaking slowly and with great difficulty, he was able to explain that he’d been able to contact a friend he knew who lived a few hours from San Bernardino. She was driving up to the bus station and would help Mike get a hotel room. We all breathed a collective sigh of relief. Mike was safe for the night. Now we just needed to get him the rest of the way home.

The next morning we bought him a plane ticket to Dallas, after confirming with the airport that Mike could use his prison ID to board. We got permission for Mike’s friend to walk him all the way through security to the gate to make sure he got safely on the plane. On the phone Mike was a jumble of emotions—anxious, excited, overwhelmed with the sights, sounds, and sensations of an outside world he hadn’t laid eyes on in twenty-two years. “I just packed out before they could change their minds!” he said, his stammer agitated by the stress and exhaustion of his solitary journey through the night. “I didn’t take anything with me!”

    At DFW in Dallas a kind stranger guided him through the airport to arrivals. Mike walked off his first plane ride as a free man into the arms of his oldest son, whom he hadn’t seen in ten years. The two men clung to each other, root and branch, as the other passengers bustled by.



* * *



—

MIKE JUNIOR CALLED me from the car just outside the airport. “My dad wants to know where you are!” he said. “He says he’s gotta see you and give you a hug.” In all the years I’d been working on his case, Mike and I had never met face-to-face.

“Tell your dad to take his time,” I said. “I’ll be here!”

But Mike’s mom told me later that he insisted on seeing me that day. They fed him some home cooking, took him shopping for something other than prison-issue gray sweatpants, and then Mike’s sons drove him over to my new apartment building in the center of Uptown Dallas, across the street from the Dallas Mavericks’ home court.