The Mars Room(52)

She told him many things about herself in the span of about five minutes. She spoke them in a controlled voice. It seemed to Gordon she had been saving it up. He kept stepping back, to be farther from her, and she kept stepping toward him, and he was not going to be manipulated. One woman had tried to bribe him into smuggling cell phones for her, another tobacco. Staff and guards alike were involved in these schemes. Gordon wanted no part.

She was a lifer, she told him, and the mother of a young boy. She apologized for troubling him. Said she woke up depressed. Could feel the fog in her cell, even without a window, and said the dampness of it reminded her of home.

She wanted him to call a telephone number to find out where her kid was. She had it all written down and this was exactly the kind of thing he’d been backing away from, as she moved toward him. Just because he had bought her books or found her pretty, just because he thought about her sometimes, that didn’t mean he was looking for family dramas.



* * *



The assistance he gave on his own, and against the rules, had all started with Candy Pe?a on death row. Candy had cried like a child because she had no more wool and no money and so she couldn’t help the babies. The others on death row were knitting baby blankets that would go to a Christian charity in Stanville.

He knew he could bring in wool. They almost never looked in his bag. He was eating breakfast at Baressi’s when he made the decision. The place soothed him, with its framed pictures of stock cars, victories from the local track. One side was a diner and the other a bar with a piano in the corner. On Saturday nights, a woman played it.

You could not get dental work done in Stanville. There was no shoe repair. You could not buy a decent cook pot, not even one up to Gordon’s low standards, but there were three hobby and crafting stores. He went to one. Bought four colors of yarn. Candy had said wool, although the craft store sold no yarn that was made of wool, not even partially, but maybe wool no longer meant wool, but instead, fluffy knittables. The next day he gave what he’d bought to Candy. She melted in gratitude, which made him feel obscene. Not because it was against the rules, but because it had been almost no trouble and yet she cried and said no one had ever done anything so nice for her, not once in her life.

The only remedy seemed to be to do favors for others, so that he wasn’t Candy’s saint, to neutralize the act of giving by giving more.

Betty LaFrance asked Gordon if he would mail a letter for her, to an old lover, she explained, who was in a California state prison himself. Prisoners were not allowed to contact other prisoners without express approval from the Department of Corrections, this Gordon knew to be true, but he figured Betty probably imagined this romance she told him about. She’d been yelling to get the guards’ attention the first time Gordon met her. “Officer!” she’d called. “Please tell the parking lot attendant to reserve a spot for my hairdresser!” She snubbed the other women on death row, told Gordon they were not of her caliber. Once, she asked Gordon if he’d ever flown business class on Singapore Airlines. When he said no, she seemed to pity him. She was a deluded woman sentenced to die. He felt for her. He sent the letter.

He bought seeds for a student in his class who gardened. She had brought Gordon fresh mint as a present, and when Gordon asked her where she got it, she said it rode into the prison on old lumber, four-by-twelves they were using for construction. She’d replanted it, watered it. She told him she watched the sky and waited for birds to excrete seeds, and germinated them secretly in wet paper towels. Rules were such that no plants were supposed to grow. But the captain on D yard, where she lived, let her have her plants. She was a lifer. Gordon gave her a seed packet of California poppies. She put her hands to her face to hide her tears. “This is a God shot,” she said. “Thank you for this God shot.” Which started the cycle over again, the discomfort, their outsized gratitude. The packet of seeds had cost him eighty-nine cents.

And so he had been sending books to Romy Hall. You go on Amazon. Click a button. What was twenty bucks to him, if spending it meant several weeks of freedom of thought for someone in prison? But looking into her personal life in the outside world, calling a number on her behalf: that was different. It was honest-to-god meddling, not just in her life but in his own, too.

He put the paper she had given him on his coffee table. A phone number and the name of her child. He did not call, and to his relief, or his mixed relief, she did not ask him about it. They chatted, but about insignificant things. She thinks I won’t help her, that I don’t care. But he wanted her to know that he did care, and that it was not nothing to him that she had asked him that favor.

He sat on his couch, picked up the scrap with the number, and put it back down. Instead of calling it, he went online and figured out how to order a new paint set for Geronima from a catalogue supplier. Something easy, that required no deep deliberating.

Geronima brought the new paint set to class and worked diligently for several weeks before approaching Gordon.

“I’d like to show you what I’ve been working on. Portraits, but the kind you probably prefer.”

“That I prefer?”

“Well, most people prefer.” She showed him. They were skillful illustrations, immediately recognizable. Herself. London. Gordon. Romy. Everyone in class. They had the economy of caricatures. She turned the page to an unfamiliar face staring from the paper, the cheeks streaked in tears. “That’s Lily, who lives on my unit and reminds me of my younger sister. I don’t have a picture of my sister, so I asked her to pose.”