Visitation
I drove an hour and a half to see you. I pulled into the parking lot and stared at the large brick building. It could have been a meatpacking plant, or an old seamstress warehouse; the outside was so nondescript and industrial. Red brick, at least, like the kind my pap laid for the house my parents built, red brick that leaves grit when you run your fingers over its grooves the way I did when they asked us visitors to line up along it. The sun beat against us, and I thought of ancient Egyptians making bricks and leaving them to bake in the sun. Or maybe it was Native Americans or Mayans preparing to build pueblos. I had the time to think of the ways the heat against my neck had long been harnessed to create structures for holding men. I had the time to think because they made us wait there for almost an hour while they wheeled someone out on a stretcher, a mysterious medical emergency that didn’t seem so urgent. The lady behind me asked about cigarettes and chatted with the older gentleman behind her about last week’s visitation and I wondered at the fact some people here had people every week.
The last time I had seen you had been over a year ago, with scratched plexiglass between us. I sat in an orange plastic seat, some sort of elementary school reject, and picked up a phone with a cord no one in the civilian world had seen since 1987. This bad B-rated version of your life. You came through from the prison wearing an orange jumpsuit and I almost laughed because it was so cliche and yet. Fluorescent lights. No sun. Your smile hurt. I’m sure mine did too. Then you were sent to a state penitentiary and you said you didn’t want me to come there and I used it as my reason not to when the truth is, the place scared me. You scared me for being there. If I didn’t see it I could pretend prison kept you safe from yourself. So instead of my face I sent you my words and that’s how I ended up here, waiting to visit you, where you finished out your felony sentence at a prison rehabilitation center.
When we finally could go inside I had to surrender all my belongings at the front desk where I signed in. My name, your name, my relationship to you. You’d told me you’d listed me as mother and my pen hesitated because I didn’t know if I should lie and write that word on this official register in front of this official security guard, and I hesitated because what is the line between a lie and a truth when I was more mother to you in the eight years I’d known you than your actual mother had ever attempted to be? So I wrote it even though they’d have to know by looking at me there was no way I was old enough to be your mom. But I walked through and into the room meant for visits and my stomach twisted. Everything green. Like mold. Like vomit. Plastic chairs here too, and a low table from an office somewhere. Dirtied board game boxes. I sat by the window, made from those glass squares that aren’t actually see-through. I wanted the sun on our shoulders.
The residents started filtering in and finding their people and suddenly no one else was coming through the door and you hadn’t entered. I sat alone in a rehabilitation center surrounded by addict prisoners and the sounds of their conversations. When you entered minutes later, your smile hurt. It was so genuine. You hadn’t known I was coming because I didn’t want to tell you I was and then not be able to and I’d driven an hour and a half to see someone I barely recognized. You’d been outside playing basketball, apologized for your sweat, but I breathed it in because such proof, such proof you were alive. You had inmate muscles and a shaved head and spoke and your voice carried memory. Fourteen-year-old you with dyed black hair in his face and death in his eyes. I’d held you crying on my classroom floor. I’d told you one of your best friends killed herself. I sat beside you at an NA meeting as a support person. I met you in your driveway at 7 AM on my way to school for you to give me your debit card before you surrendered yourself to the cops. I’d hugged you that morning and you were shaking uncontrollably, not from the cold but from the amount of drugs you’d stayed up doing all night.
I’ve never been able to separate you from the child you must have been. I constantly picture you at six. I sat and listened to you and I heard prison in your words, the infection of it in your thoughts, the opinions you scattered at my feet until I told you I refused to pick them up or tolerate them. I stared at the blurry outline of pine trees through the window. Thought about how long it had been since you’d put your hand against bark. An hour and a half and here I was, ready to walk out on you. Then you looked at me and I saw the boy I love. I hugged you and felt the beat of your heart. What a miracle, the beat of your heart. You belonged there but you didn’t, because no one belongs in a dingy box of glass squares and dollar store paint. No one else had come to visit you in the months you’d been there. Only me. It was always only me. You were there because of me, really, because without me you wouldn’t have still been alive long enough to make it to that bleak place. This bleak place where no one should be.
And I sit here all this heartache and distance later, watching an episode of Ozark on TV where the character Ruth goes to visit bipolar Ben after his sister has him committed to a behavioral center and the room he is in looks so much like that room where I saw you, same green, same musty hopelessness. Ben looks to Ruth and asks what he did to end up there, what had he said that was so insane, starts to sob and apologize because these damn drugs and it’s you suddenly, years compressed onto the television screen, and I’m Ruth on the opposite end of a ratty couch watching you fall apart, so tense I could splinter if I move. The sound of you howling resonates in me still. If I turn my head to the right and close my eyes, the sun filters its way to your shoulders, exposed by the wife-beater you wear. What had you done so insane to end up there, to end up howling at me through a phone two years after seeing you in the midst of the longest clean streak you’d had since eight years old. And am I any better than your real mother now, sitting here typing out the details of this lingering memory instead of texting you. Am I any better if I loved you but grew to fear you, if you became too much, if the way I signed every letter with Always Here became a lie? But what is the line between a lie and a truth because I am still here, aren’t I. Still living the regret of how life beat loneliness into you like bricks left to bake. Still here carrying the miles I traveled, the hours I waited, the uncomfortable realness of it all. Just without you.
Lynne Reeder lives through words. She writes them, reads them, teaches them, and believes in them always. A four-time Perry County Poet Laureate, her work has been featured in multiple online journals and print anthologies, including Recenter Press, The Soapbox Volume I and II, and Strange Magic. When not writing, Lynne finds meaning in mentoring student writers and playing a small part in fueling their futures. Learn more about Lynne and her works at www.lynnereeder.com.