The Office of Historical Corrections(26)

“Mom hasn’t been the same since my uncle died,” said Sarah. “It wasn’t even that they were super close, just that he was what she had in the world, you know? Kelli is a godawful pain in the ass, but if anything happened to her, I’d be a wreck. I think that was why she was so excited to meet your mom. She liked the idea of having more family again. It might be good, if they can be friends.”

“If,” I said.

“It could happen,” said Sarah. “Nothing like a prison to give you faith in humanity.”

“A prison with a souvenir penny press,” I said.

I looked around at all of the things for sale. Chocolate bars in Alcatraz wrapping. Posters with blown-up versions of prison regulations: #21. work. you are required to work at whatever you are told to do. Along the wall a row of bronze cast keys were each engraved with cell numbers. I lifted one up with my finger for Sarah to see.

“Who buys these?” I asked. “Who walks in here and says this, this is what I need?”

“People who don’t know what they need in the first place,” she said. “So, pretty much anybody.”

I considered this. I wondered how much I’d have to steal for it to equal $227,035.87. It seemed strange to me to have the number in my head then, and though it would never stop seeming strange to me, I kept the running tally for years after that afternoon, did the math annually, out of habit, even after my mother had stopped requesting it, even after I had stopped thinking of the world as a place that kept track of what it owed people, even after I stopped thinking of myself as a person who had the power to make demands of the world and learned to be a person who came up with her own small daily answers like everyone else. There was something comforting about imagining I knew exactly what I’d been cheated out of.



* * *



—

When my mother and Nancy emerged into the gift shop, their eyes were dry. There was something girlish in the way my mother came over to me, lighter after the cathartic tears. I tapped a key absentmindedly and it bumped the others; they jingled like wind chimes.

“We missed the three o’clock ferry,” I told her.

“Did we?” she said, ruffling her fingers through my hair. “I think we’ll live, kiddo. Let’s hang out for a while.”

I watched her walk out with Nancy Morton. The sun was hazy and insistent, and everyone seemed to shimmer as they stepped outside. I watched them walk away, and I had the feeling I was watching something heavy miraculously float.

In the years that followed, we would try two more holidays with the Mortons before the efforts were suspended indefinitely, victim to all of us being busy and, frankly, happier on our own. When we were alone after the final visit, my mother would confide in me that after all that, Nancy Morton had grown up to be boring. When my mother accepted that the legal system wouldn’t give her justice, she said she would write a book about Papa’s story, and while I heard about it for years, I never saw a manuscript. Sarah and I began a correspondence that started earnest and effusive, but tapered off, until eventually the extent of our relationship was me clicking like on her family photographs, not remembering which of her children was named what, her once commenting “Congratulations, I must have missed this!” when I was tagged in a photograph with two of the children I worked with, me intending but never bothering to correct her assumption they were mine.

That afternoon at Alcatraz we were all together, and I didn’t know whether I had managed anything good or permanent or healing in gathering us there, only that it had previously been impossible. I slipped a bronze key off of its hook and closed it into my palm. I wanted someone to stop me or I wanted someone to tell me it was mine. I squeezed the key into my palm and walked out without anyone noticing. I walked into the glare of the light, down to the picnic tables near the water, where my family was gathered and laughing. I called to Sarah. I held the key out in my open palm and went to show my cousin what I’d done.





Why Won’t Women Just Say What They Want


Everyone had heard that the genius artist had gone to some deserted island, to finish a project, or to start a project, or to clear his head, or to get away from some drama. People heard he had gone, and then no one heard anything for long enough that it became boring to speculate, until it had been so long it became curious again. The running joke about the volcano started when a reporter asked the Model/Actress Who Dated Him a While Ago what she thought the artist was up to, and she said, “Who knows? Who cares? I hope he fell into a volcano.” At cocktail parties that spring, someone would ask where he was and someone else would say “Volcano” and laugh, until it was summer and the artist had been gone so long that people started to wonder if he had, in fact, met some violent and tragic end, and whether someone should be looking for him. Once upon a time any woman in his life would have hiked through lava for him, but by the time he left he had worn out his goodwill to the point that it would have been asking a lot of any one of them to so much as go run him an errand at the corner store.

When the apologies began, they were public and simultaneous. It was late summer, and they appeared suddenly and all at once, like brief afternoon thunderstorms. The High School Sweetheart’s apology came over the PA system at the grocery store where she was buying bread and cheese, because her husband had promised to take care of shopping for the week but had, for some reason, come home with only deli meat and marinara sauce. The Model/Actress’s apology came on billboards downtown in the city where she lived. The Long-Suffering Ex-wife’s came as a short film projected on a giant screen in the park nearest the house where she lived with their daughter. It played in a loop until the city took it down. The Daughter’s apology was posted on Instagram, marked with all of her frequently used hashtags. The On-Again Off-Again Ex of His Wayward Youth walked out of her apartment one morning, and by the time she returned at night, she found that the abandoned storefront next door had opened as a pop-up bar named after her, with her apology painted on the walls.