Blame: A Novel Read online

  After the waivers came the consequences: Patsy would go to prison and afterward be released on parole; any and each violation of parole would result in another year of prison. And she would pay a restitution fine—two hundred dollars. She stifled a yelp at the paltriness, the joke, of the amount.

  Have you been advised of all these consequences of your plea? the D.A. asked Patsy.

  Patsy saw that the bailiff was looking at her, attentive, interested, like the best of students. Yes, she said.

  Are you pleading freely and voluntarily because you did in fact commit the crime and violate the state penal code by driving negligently and causing the fatal injuries of Jane Robin Parnham and Jessica Parnham?

  Yes, Patsy said, looking back at the bailiff.

  Are you pleading guilty because you are indeed guilty?

  She stood before the court and touched the dark tumult, the awful thumps and booms, bodies on the ground, a wheeling of stars; with such images came the inevitable, engulfing nausea of knowing it could never be undone.

  Yes, Patsy said, the word spanning a sea of uneasy feeling and linking death to blame like a stitch closing the lips of a wound so that healing could begin. Thus could the case, whatever its remaining mysteries, be at least officially closed.Yes, spoken aloud, seemed the least and only thing she could do for the enraged women and shipwrecked man sitting on the other side of the room. She said yes, and cleared her throat and realized from the court recorder’s expectant pause and the continuing gaze of the judge that she might not have spoken at all. Yes, she said, this time loud enough, she hoped, that the man and women felt a loosening, some small uplift, an easing.

  The judge set the sentencing twenty days hence and her bond at three hundred and sixty thousand dollars, same as that gangbanger’s.

  Benny and Burt, who had reappeared, shouldered her out of the courtroom, her mother right behind. At the women’s row, she twisted toward them. I would like . . . , she said to Benny, who grasped her arm above her elbow. Burt, I want to . . . But neither man paused, and Burt wrapped an arm around her waist as if she were stumbling. Even so, as she passed the man, Patsy looked directly at him. Darkness met darkness, though in his gaze she also saw bright, glinting splinters of grief.

  3

  Twenty days, neither in prison nor free. What do I do? she asked Benny.

  You take care of business, he said. And behave. You keep out of trouble. For god’s sake.

  With her mother’s help, Patsy cleared out her office at school. Another day they visited the bank, changed the names on her home deed lest a civil suit be filed, and found an agency to manage the leasing of her house, the mortgage payments, and taxes in her absence. (She’d said, Oh, give them the house, give them everything, but her father had made the down payment, so Pomelo Street was really not hers to relinquish.) She rented a storage unit. She packed her woolens with blocks of cedar, rolled her yard-sale china and glassware in newspapers whose words would be at least two years old when next read. Her home grew ever more sparse.

  One night, as her mother snored, Patsy walked down the hill six blocks to the Sav-On directly across the street from the Altadena sheriff’s station. The man in the liquor section did not know her, and he wordlessly sold her two liters of Jim Beam, lightweight plastic bottles with handles and, because she still had money, a same size bottle of vodka. The bag was heavier than she had anticipated, so she carried it like a real sack of groceries, in that usual practical hug, six uphill blocks to Pomelo Street. A sheriff’s black-and-white passed her going the opposite way; she expected it to turn around and slide up beside her, but this did not happen. Her hair, she realized. She did not look like herself.

  She stashed two bottles under the camellia bush against the shed, took the other to her bedroom. She rinsed out her mother’s teacup and filled it to the brim. Bourbon, she noted, was remarkably tea-colored. The first mouthful, as big and sweet and hot as gasoline, caused tears to spring from her eyes.

  •

  Of course she was found out, sooner than she thought possible, the first thing the next morning, with less than a quarter of one bottle gone, a waste, and of course all hell broke loose, a lecture from everybody, and Benny so angry he grabbed her shoulders and shook until she looked him in the eyes. Listen to me, you ungrateful monster. I busted my fuckin’ balls for that plea, but it’s not written in stone. Screw up now, you’ll get ten to fifteen, easy. Or all twenty-five. And fuck all, you’d deserve it. But what do I care? I’m outta here. I’m through.

  But he wasn’t really. Somebody talked him back. Patsy thought, not for the first time, that he was probably a little in love with her.

  She had round-the-clock sitters after that: mother, father, her friend Sarah, a burly Russian housekeeper allegedly hired to clean the place for prospective tenants, though that wouldn’t normally involve spending the night, would it?

  Only once more, again on her mother’s watch, did she slip out late one night to the geriatric Wagon Wheel on Lake Avenue. Just two, Jim, she told the bartender.

  I heard about everything, Patsy, he said. And I shouldn’t do this. But okay, two. Any fuss after that, I’m calling the sheriff.

  He poured her one big one, generous as god, then another, then said, It’s time. Ah, Jim, she said, but he reached for the phone, so she left on her own accord and was home in time to answer when her mother called out. In the kitchen, Mom, she said. Just drinking a glass of water. Which was true.

  •

  The morning of the sentencing, she was dressing when she looked out her window and saw, on top of the wooden fence, a squirrel holding an orange. His rusty tail was fluffed and curled over his back to rest between his ears. He grasped the orange the way a child holds a large ball, and efficiently spat peelings aside until the top half of the fruit was all luminous white pulp. Slowing, he ate calmly, sank his face into the meat, his small hands rotating the sphere in quick, tiny adjustments. His cheeks shimmered with movement; he regarded her with a shiny black challenging eye. Abruptly he tossed the half orange to the grass, where it tipped toward her, a hollow bowl. The squirrel scurried along the fence top and down the other side. Patsy fastened her skirt.

  •

  The man and the two women were also at the sentencing, today seated several rows apart.

  Hers was the third case called, after a robbery and a domestic assault. The district attorney—appearing older, more severe, yet even lovelier in a charcoal gabardine suit—announced that the probation report had been filed. She corroborated no previous felony convictions and attested to Patsy MacLemoore’s reliability as a citizen and college professor. Thus she recommended that the plea, as agreed upon by herself and opposing counsel, should be accepted by the court.

  However, Your Honor, she continued with her relentless, dire calmness, family members of the victims have expressed the desire to file victim impact statements prior to sentencing.

  Benny had warned Patsy about this; the mother, he said, was in a swivet about the plea. Indeed, the older woman rose and worked her way out of the long, narrow bench and up to the front, where she faced the court in a mint green dress and paste pearls the size of filberts. She held a gray cardboard folder and opened it to reveal two color photographs, and she held them up as if sharing a storybook with the court. Both pictures revealed the cool, mottled blue background of department store portraiture, and even from a distance were heartless in their detail. A plump dark-haired woman on the left, a young girl with lighter braids on the right, the two in matching red Christmas sweaters. Jane and Jessica, the woman said, and shook the pictures and began to cry. My daughter and granddaughter, she added, her voice breaking. They never hurt anyone, not even accidentally.

  Patsy’s mother, skinny and tanned, tightened her grip on Patsy’s wrist.

  My Jane and Jessica, the grandmother continued, and waved the photographs at Patsy. I know that you were drunk. I know the truth.

  She turned to the judge. How can she kill two people and get only f
our years in prison? Four years—less!—when my girls are dead forever? She sobbed in deep, painful gasps before them until the other, younger woman came up and led her away.

  Anyone else, Counselor? asked the judge.

  The man came forward. Mark Parnham, he said to the recorder, and waited as she typed it in. He wore a suit, pressed well enough—it was his posture that gave him a crumpled, staved-in look. In front of the court he seemed to fight his way up from some deep private place and into the room. He blinked and searched her out. I’ve driven drunk, he said. More than once.

  He reached over and put a finger down on the corner of the bailiff’s desk and leaned over it, a pivot. He frowned. I guess the law has worked out the sentences and stuff. It’s not for me to say how much time anybody should spend in prison. I have to trust the court on that.

  His shoulders sank, and he winced, perhaps trying not to cry. Above his nose, his forehead creased in two deep lines. A victim impact statement, he said. Hard to know the impact, it’s still so new. I’ll try. He spoke to the two women. For me, it’s like two bright lights have gone out and the world is just a much darker place. And it’s probably going to stay like that. He waited—they all did—to see if he had more to say.

  Surely, Patsy thought, he would mention the boy now doomed to a motherless life.

  Thank you, Mark Parnham said to the judge, and walked back to his seat.

  Nobody else came forward, so the judge sentenced her to four years in the state penitentiary and asked if she cared to address the court.

  She made her own way to the front. On the benches before her sat the other cases waiting their turns in family clusters, all indifferent to her own proceedings. She and Mark Parnham looked at each other directly, steadily. They might have been alone in an empty field.

  I’m sorry, she said. I’m sorry for the pain I’ve caused the family. I hear there’s a young son, and I—

  Her words seemed so trite and inadequate, but none others came to mind.

  I didn’t intend to hurt anybody. I don’t really even remember what happened. But I’m sorry with all my heart, and if I could, if there was any way—

  She stopped herself. As for prison . . . She lifted one hand helplessly. It can’t be worse than what it’s like now.

  She wanted to say more, something honest and comforting, but nothing came to her. Okay, she said, and looked to Benny.

  The judge spoke rapidly, conclusively, too quickly for her to catch. She waited for his final word, his turning to a new page, the gap between cases, so she could feel the clasp of her family’s arms, press her face against each of theirs. And someone did touch her: the tall, barrel-gutted bailiff had come up beside her and grasped her upper arm.

  I must demand any personal property on your person, he said.

  She had been told to expect this, and last night had removed watch and rings and necklace, the gold hoops from her ears. Today she’d dressed in a basic old teaching skirt and white cotton blouse, a wool cardigan. Clothes she’d be comforted to see again when she was settled in prison.

  Her family stood up behind the partition, her mother trying to hurry them forward, her father’s face dark and curiously wrinkled. Was he weeping?

  What? she said to the bailiff.

  Your pin.

  It seemed she must also hand over the bobby pin holding the hair off her face. Too long for bangs, too short to tuck behind her ears, this hair fell forward and curtained her eyes.

  He gave her a minute to kiss her family one by one, Mom, Dad, Burt; then she again felt his touch on her arm.

  Turn around and put your hands behind your back. He spoke with the same tender firmness he might have used elsewhere, in private. With the clasp of handcuffs came a warmth and pressure from his hands. A light touch on her lower back—a gentlemanly nudge.

  Dad, she whispered, pausing, wanting to touch her father’s face.

  Come along now, said the bailiff, and decisively led her by the arm past the recorder and the witness stand. The door the prisoners passed through swung wide at his push and slammed shut behind them.

  Down they went, on concrete steps. Flight by flight, the bailiff’s large hand remained on her arm, not cruelly—in fact, almost companionably—all the way to the basement, where they pushed through thick metal doors into a corridor and passed through other doors and corridors to a central lockup where half a dozen women crouched on a concrete floor still moist from a recent hosing. Patsy waited against the wall alongside two silent prostitutes for an hour or so. A single steel toilet sat in the middle of the room. Clogged, it overflowed with each use. Her name was called. Eventually she and the prostitutes were led to a loading area. The sheriff’s bus took them the three blocks to the jail. There, she was asked to strip, then sprayed with some pressurized corrosive delouser, allowed a tepid shower, and issued the usual scratchy poly-steel gown. She rode an elevator half a dozen stories up to a cell occupied by a Korean-speaking bar girl with a nasty head cold. For two days she sat or lay on the upper concrete bunk, listened to her cellmate cough and spit, and searched for patterns in the bubbles of the poured concrete ceiling. Then the state prison’s bus arrived and took her east.

  •

  Surely, county jail had prepared her for prison. She expected no amenity, civility, or consideration from the guards. She expected grime and hopelessness, and how the refrigerated hours slowed to a standstill. She knew how to pull in deep. But who could go deep enough for the bus ride to prison, a two-hour coed excursion. From the moment of boarding, the male prisoners said everything imaginable to the women, about their faces and bodies, their wrinkled, stinking genitals and not-so-secret passion for rape. Patsy found the guards’ noninterference as shocking and hateful as anything the men said. No, more so.

  She was twenty-nine years old; her dissertation had been accepted six months earlier, almost to the day.

  They rode east for more than an hour; then the driver left the freeway and drove through the backside of a warehouse district, the factory yards full of rusted and leaking metal drums, heaps of pipes and rods, and unidentifiable pieces of steel. The bus bumped over train tracks, passed pockets of houses with tiny yards, people sitting on porches, dogs standing in the streets. They came to what looked like a vast, ugly elementary school in dark pink stucco. Flower beds spilled crabgrass, and what might have been lawns were expanses of packed dirt and low, trash-snagging weeds. A few dark, tenacious, struggling juniper bushes hugged the buildings; otherwise the yards were bare. The bus swung around the back, stopping for a long time by a high steel fence. On the bus, the men went from fractious to frenzied, ready to rampage the place and its female population, if that were only possible. A gate opened; the bus pulled in and idled in the sun on an asphalt field. After some minutes a guard in the back of the bus stood and herded the women off. They filed out, clutching small totes, trash bags, grocery sacks. Patsy had her gym bag. They moved slowly in their clanking shackles while the men whistled and catcalled and banged the windows with the flats of their hands.

  Once off the bus, the women funneled through solid steel doors into an entryway. Once they were all inside, a set of iron gates opened with much buzzing and creaking, and they were ushered into a longer passageway where three guards frisked them, patted them down, and took their bags. Gone were Patsy’s books and asthma inhalers. The next gate opened, they funneled through, and the gate shut behind them. The whine of the hinges, the clangs of closure were terrible, loud, unnecessarily theatrical.

  The guards told them to open their mouths and shake their heads. The waxed floors and empty hallways and wide stairs divided by steel pipe handrails resembled nothing so much as an abandoned school, one so battered and harshly lit, so completely devoid of any nicety, the effect could only be intentional. The women shuffled finally into a large, open room where more guards were stationed all around, their legs apart, their right hands poised over their guns. Along a counter on the far end, six women waited like bank tellers. Registration, so
mebody said. It takes hours.

  No talking, said a guard. That means no talking.

  Even though the new prisoners were silent, the noise of the place was intense, layered, insane: the banging and clanging of steel, the slamming of doors, the incessant pinging of vehicles in reverse, the voices of women nearby and far off, yelling and shrieking, their words bouncing off the floors and walls, echoing, pouring in through open transoms. And from underneath their feet came a constant mechanical throb, as if some enormous engine rumbled in the basement. Outside, it had been ninety degrees, but in this room the temperature was no more than fifty-five. The guards wore jackets.

  Patsy waited in a long line for fingerprinting, then stood at a taped line on the floor for a photograph. A male guard took her into a smaller area, where she and three other women were instructed to take off their street clothes, squat with knees pointed out, and cough. Still naked, she was led to the showers. She’d done this before, but always under female supervision. She had two minutes under cool water.

  The guard gave her a towel. What happens next? Patsy asked him.

  You want to know what happens next? Hey, this one wants to know what happens next, he called to another guard. Imagine that. Well, I’ll tell you what happens next, young lady. Anything I want to happen happens next.

  I’m just worried about my asthma inhaler.

  You should have worried about that before you did what you did, he said, and, taking her towel, led her, still naked, down a long hallway. This one’s worried we won’t take good care of her, he said to a female CO coming up the hall. The woman gave Patsy a quick, worried look and hurried on. The guard unlocked a small cell-sized room with only a narrow concrete shelf in it and motioned her in. Here, madam, he said. Here is what happens next.