I Love You and I'm Leaving You Anyway (4 page)

Fucked.

I ALWAYS GET A NEW DRESS
for visiting day. June Ericson takes me to Dayton’s Velvet Coach and we pick out something special to wear to see Daddy. This time I get a dress the color of cotton candy with a full skirt and a big sash. I’m pretty confident I’m going to be the best-dressed girl at the prison.

Leavenworth is a long way away. Four hundred forty-eight miles, and those are circa-1970 miles, before the interstate was built. We take a very impressive Braniff 747 and get there in two hours. I’m one of the only kids at my school who has been on a plane, so I feel really special. Even though the only reason I got to go on one is because my dad is stuck in prison for the next four years.

June is my new mommy. She is forty-one years old, pleasantly plump, and wears her hair just like Carol Brady in the early episodes of
The Brady Bunch
. She is the nicest person I have ever met. The fact that she promised my dad that she would drag me all the way to Kansas to see him twice a year gives you an idea of just how nice. This is probably because she is a minister’s wife. I forgot to mention, I am a Lutheran now, baptized and everything. I’m not sure what I used to be.

Last summer, we came here in a car, detouring a couple hundred
miles out of the way on our family vacation to see June’s sister in California. I spent most of the journey in a Dramamine-induced stupor on the floor of our wood-paneled Ford station wagon. I regained consciousness just long enough for June and me to pop into the prison for a quick visit. My dad totally mentioned how calm I seem now.

The rest of the family—my new dad, Pastor Gene Ericson, and my three new sisters, Faith, seventeen; Sue Ann, sixteen; and Connie, eleven—waited for us in the prison parking lot. My other new big sister Elin doesn’t live with us because she married a guy with serious facial hair and moved to St. Paul. Neither does Carl, my new older brother, who is studying to be a minister, just like Daddy Ericson. I’m not the only kid the Ericsons picked up in an act of Christian kindness. My new sister Connie was adopted from Korea when she was four. We share a bedroom, which is unfortunate for her since she’s super-perfect and quiet and neat, and I am Pippi Longstocking without the monkey or the chest of gold doubloons.

In Leavenworth we always stay at the Cody Hotel, which was once owned by Buffalo Bill’s mom. I think that might be her behind the front desk, with a tall chestnut-colored beehive and a twang to match. The lobby crawls with large men reading newspapers and exhaling thick blue smoke from filterless cigarettes. Who knows what they’re doing here? They don’t look like their daddies are inmates.

We call a cab to take us to the prison, about a fifteen-minute drive away. Just outside of town, the road gives you two choices: go straight to something called Fort Leavenworth, which has to do with the army, or take a left and go to the prison. I don’t know exactly how—maybe it is the cab driver’s expression—but I can tell that if you go forward, it means something entirely different than if you turn left. One way and you’re sort of a hero; the other way and you definitely are not.

A couple of minutes after the turn we come to a stop in front of an electronic arm. A guard’s voice booms out of an intercom:

State the purpose of your visit.

June quickly rolls down her window and speaks into the intercom while gazing upward at the two-story tower where the voice is apparently coming from. It looks like there is a gang of air traffic controllers up there.

“We’re here to see an inmate, sir.”

Do you have any firearms, blah blah blah, narcotics, or other contraband?

Maybe it’s just me, but that seems like a stupid question. “Why would we tell them if we did?” I ask loudly. The driver smirks.

“Be quiet, honey,” June shushes me. She’s not at all harsh about it, but she says it in such a way that I’m definitely not going to be raising my hand for a follow-up question. “No, sir,” she says to the guard. “We don’t.”

Go ahead.

The arm lifts and the taxi pulls up to the drop-off area. We get out, and June pays the driver. “Thank you,” she says politely. He takes off without saying anything in response, glad to have these prison-visitor types out of his cab.

I gaze up at the prison. I am wowed by this building! It’s massive and white, with a big dome—not quite as grand as the Minnesota state capitol, which I visited on a field trip for school, but close. With its white marble and neoclassical lines, Leavenworth is both flashy
and severe
. As if Nurse Ratched was being played by the lead singer in an eighties hair band. And the windows! There must be a thousand of them. As we climb the steps, I pick out a window and wave and smile in case my dad is watching me from his cell.

I’m secretly proud my daddy lives in such an impressive place.

Right inside the front door is the guard station where you check in, which looks like a cross between a drive-up bank and a single-room-occupancy hotel—a few guards behind bulletproof glass and a little silver vent to talk through. June fills out some paperwork saying who we are and which inmate we’re here to see.

Then we’re off to the waiting room to cool our jets for a while.
The waiting room is a medium-size institutional square with built-in molded chairs in shades of olive, mucilage, and rotten sherbet lining the wall. At one end of the room is a bank of vending machines. The Pepsi machine takes thirty-five cents and of course I want one, but June says no. So instead, I go around in a frenzy, checking all the coin returns, hoping someone else’s forgotten nickel or dime will turn this into my lucky day. June rummages through her bag, pulling out the coloring books, Rook playing cards (“real” cards would be, like, the Devil), and Barbie dolls that I’m allowed to take into the visiting room.

There’s a clock staring down from the wall, and I watch the second hand sweep around and around. This part of the visit always seems to take forever, but today it’s taking forever and a day. It’s not just me, either, because I can see that June is starting to lose her patience as well.

“
What’s
taking so long?” June glances at her tiny wristwatch, the one that I play with in church on Sundays, which leaves deep indentations in her cushy wrist. “Man alive! You’d think they went to China to get him.”

We are not allowed to say “gosh,” “golly,” “gee,” “gee whiz,” and
certainly
not “god,” “jeez,” “Jesus,” or anything else that even comes
close
to taking the Lord’s name in vain. That doesn’t leave much except “man” and “man alive,” which isn’t much to work with at a time like this.

(June told me that when I first came to live with her, I used to sit on my suitcase and swear a blue streak. Just reel off a litany of crazy swear words, the kind pimps, drug dealers, hookers, and other less god-fearing individuals tend to favor when provoked. I don’t know what she did, but I learned real quick.
We don’t say those words here.
)

After what seems like forever, we hear our name called over the intercom.

“Ericson,”
the voice says.
“To the guard station.”

June gets up. She’s got a stricken look on her face. She grabs my
hand and puts it in a Lutheran death grip, where her pinky wraps around the outside of my hand so tightly, it chokes my palm. Usually, this particular handhold only happens at the Brookdale Mall. I loathe it, since it ensures that I cannot so much as turn around to look at the lady with the especially interesting makeup and hair.

“What in the world could be going on?” she mutters worriedly as we make our way back to the guard station. She leans forward to speak into the silver vent, and then it speaks back to us. Worrisome things.

“Mrs. Ericson, the inmate you’re trying to see is not allowed visitors today.”

“I beg your
pardon
?” June is aghast. “There must be some kind of mistake—”

“His privileges have been revoked. Until next week. You can come back then.” The guard says it with a straight face. They don’t give
anything
away around here. Not even smiles. “I’m sorry.” The guard shakes his head.

“He’s not sorry,” I pipe up. June yanks on my arm. It’s obvious the guy’s not sorry.

June looks around in that way people do when they suddenly find themselves in a moment they could never have expected and are therefore totally unprepared for. A moment without a map. Her shoulders heave, and it looks like she might be about to cry. There’s a lost-slash-wild look in her eye. Something I’ve never seen there before. She’s usually a rock.

She pulls me away from the guard window, her breath laboring hard against the constricting polyester dress, the nylons, and the boxy-toed heels. Even her clip-on earrings look strained. She closes her eyes for a second. She’s probably talking to god right now. And he must have said something back, because suddenly, her energy changes. She makes her way back toward the guard booth.

“I need to see the warden,” she says through the silver vent.

You can see the guard, with his Smokey the Bear hat and heavy
golden badge, perform a quick calculus:
Likelihood of getting this woman out of here without a scene, times likelihood of the warden seeing her, times risk I’m taking by putting my ass out there even to ask
.

He looks from June to me. I call upon my deep reserves of Dickensian ragamuffin pathos and gaze back at him with my most heartbreaking expression.

“Wait here,” he says.

THE WARDEN’S OFFICE IS QUITE LARGE
. I have been deposited in a chair toward the back and June is sitting across from the big man’s desk, looking fierce. Make that as fierce as a pastor’s wife can look.

“Warden,
what
is happening here?” The words come out like a plea; there’s a beseeching tone, like you might have when speaking to god after, say, a hurricane.

“Mrs. Ericson, the inmate, Mr. McMillan”—he shuffles some papers on his desk looking for the right one, the one with the answer to why I can’t see my dad, and finally finds it—“is in solitary confinement.”

Ooh, that doesn’t sound good
. June sits back, unsure how to respond to this bit of information.

“He’s being punished,” the warden adds for effect. He looks like any other sixties white guy—Brylcreem, gray two-toned glasses, short-sleeved dress shirt, and pants that are fashionably too short. He’s not an unreasonable man, but even a first grader can tell that there is something about his absolute power as the warden that he enjoys. No—gets off on.

“We came here all the way from Minneapolis, warden.” And just to show our level of financial investment, she adds, “By plane.”

June has a way of sighing while she talks that is both very affecting and sort of exhausting at the same time. You can just
feel how
much good she’s doing every day out there on the front lines—and
for people like my dad, who really haven’t done a thing to deserve it. They’re just the lucky beneficiaries of her serious Christian love. That shit is no joke.

“Ma’am, I’m sor—”

“I brought this little girl five hundred miles to see her daddy”—pan over to me, looking cute in my pigtails and felt hair ribbons—“and I just
can’t
get back on that plane without this visit.”

“Ma’am,” the warden says feebly, “I appreciate your circumstances. We have rules.”

“She only sees her daddy twice a year. Are you going to do that to this child?” June is starting to raise her voice, something you don’t really want to make a minister’s wife do.

“Ma’am—”

June stands up. She leans over the desk. She’s really up in the warden’s face now! I’ve never seen her like this. I think she’s…she’s…
angry
.

“I don’t care what he’s done. We’ve come all this way to see this child’s father. You are the warden. You are in charge here. I am asking you,
please,
can you find it in your heart to let this visit happen? Please.” She’s not begging, she’s
appealing
to the warden. To his sense of decency, of family, of god, justice, and all things good.

The warden doesn’t answer. Instead, we are ushered out of his office and back into the waiting room. It’s now been almost two hours since we arrived. June is slumped in one of the olive-colored chairs, her hankie in her right hand. She’s not crying, but she’s misty, more out of frustration than anything else.

“Are we gonna get to see Daddy?” I ask. I’m awfully concerned about whether I’m going to get the Kentucky Fried Chicken they order in for the inmates and their families on visiting day.

“I don’t know, Tracy. We’re waiting to see what the warden says.” There’s no mean-spiritedness in her. She’s a woman of faith, so this must be what faith looks like. No bad-mouthing, no calculating odds, no wavering at all. Just a simple standing up for yourself and
holding on to an inner yes just one more time than you hear a no.

A guard shows up in the doorway to the waiting room. The one with the Smokey the Bear hat. We look up at him expectantly.

“The warden says to tell you the inmate will be right down.” The guard smiles.

June lets out a loud sigh. “Oh, thank you, Lord.” When she says it, it’s not taking the Lord’s name in vain.
“Thank you, Lord.”
No, she’s praising the Jesus she knows who can walk on water and multiply loaves and fishes and convince the warden at a maximum-security prison to let a man out of solitary to visit his little girl. She scoops me into her arms and nuzzles me close. “You’re going to get to see your daddy after all.”

And she sways back and forth as she hugs me tightly.

Good thing, too, because this is a really cute dress I have on, and my dad’s really going to like it.

I JUST FELL IN LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT.
Accidentally. With a guy on my computer screen.

I am at my TV news job, killing time while waiting for the next car chase or plane crash to happen, when my girlfriend Lisa and I start talking about guys. Specifically, how I should find myself one. I am, after all, thirty-nine years old. The odds of having a marriage that lasts for a lifetime are getting better every day.