Cat Coming Home

10

THAT MORNING AS Joe Grey eavesdropped in plain sight from Maudie Toola’s stairway, forty miles southeast of the village at the California State Prison at Soledad, the warden picked up the phone to dial an inmate’s family. This was a mission Walter Deaver seldom had to perform, and one he didn’t look forward to, particularly in this case. Jack Reed didn’t have any family to notify except his little girl, who was only maybe thirteen. Lori’s mother had died of cancer several years before, and Jack was all the child had. At thirteen, a little girl badly needed her father—in Lori’s case, even a father in prison was better than no father at all.

Jack Reed wasn’t a troublemaker, a long way from it. This was his first offense and, Deaver would be willing to bet, would be his last scrape with the law once he was out. In Deaver’s view, Reed shouldn’t be in prison at all but should get a medal for what he’d done. But then, he didn’t make the laws.

Reluctantly he picked up the phone, not wanting to relay this news. Hoping, in the days to come, not to have to bear worse news, although Reed’s condition was critical. If Jack Reed died, the child would have no one.

Except, of course, her guardian, Cora Lee French. Lori was lucky in that respect; Jack had chosen well when he chose the woman who, in his absence, was helping to shape the child’s life. He knew that Lori was in a private school, and that she spent much of her free time in an apprentice program working for a local building contractor, a woman who was close friends both with Cora Lee and with Chief Harper.

Deaver generally didn’t take this kind of interest in the personal lives of his prisoners; he couldn’t, with a population double what the prison had been built to accommodate. Nor did he care to, when most of them were members of prison gangs, vicious, high-maintenance dregs on society. Men so seduced by the criminal culture they were too far gone for anything to be done other than keep them off the streets, keep them from killing anyone else. But because of Harper’s special interest in this case, he’d learned a good deal about Jack Reed and his daughter—he just wished the parole board, instead of releasing dangerous prisoners, would release the few men like Jack. But what the hell, who could figure what was in the minds of some state-appointed officials?

It was two hours since Reed had been stabbed in the prison yard outside the mess hall. The shank was a knife made from a length of water pipe that had been removed from the sink in the cell of the would-be killer. The prison was on lockdown, and all cells had been searched for further weapons. Reed had been tended briefly by the prison doctors before a helicopter transported him to Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital where, in the civilian ICU, he would remain under guard, hooked up to life support, closer to death than to life.

The phone rang five times. When a woman answered, Deaver asked for Lori’s guardian.

“This is Cora Lee.”

Deaver had seen the woman and child on visiting days. Cora Lee was striking, a tall, slim woman with short-clipped, curly black hair streaked with silver. He thought she might be Creole, from her café au lait complexion and her faint accent, as if maybe she’d grown up in New Orleans. Her manner was quiet, self-contained, and she seemed truly fond of Lori.

You got a lot of scum among the visiting crowds, grossly fat women in low-cut T-shirts, women in skintight jeans and flip-flops. As if it made no difference, as if no one cared how they looked when they entered the institution, as if his prison were some fourth-rate bordello. But Lori and Cora Lee always arrived well groomed, as neatly dressed and appealing as if they were headed for Sunday church, where they might indeed be judged—by the congregation or the Almighty—for their grooming and cleanliness.

He identified himself to Ms. French, told her as gently as he could that Jack had been stabbed and was in the ICU in Salinas, and that she had his permission to take Lori to visit him. There was a long silence at the other end of the line. Waiting, he wondered idly whether, if Reed died, the guardian would adopt the child. It was none of his business, but he sure didn’t like to see any child become a ward of the state. Lori Reed appeared to be a serious and sensible girl, and she’d need that steadiness now, if Reed didn’t make it. When these things happened to a prisoner like Reed, someone who wasn’t part of a gang, who tried to keep to himself and stay out of trouble, just trying to make it to the end of his sentence, the situation sickened Deaver. At the other end of the line Cora Lee French finally spoke; her voice, which had been light and cheerful, was low and subdued. “How bad is he?”

“He’s critical.”

“I’ll tell Lori. When can we see him?” She was direct, straightforward, but she sounded sick at having to tell the child. They talked for only a few minutes, he gave her instructions for their arrival at the hospital, told her who to ask for, told her how long they would be able to stay. She thanked him in a naked voice that left him feeling like hell.

HALF AN HOUR after the warden’s call, Lori and Cora Lee were headed inland to the Salinas hospital. Cora Lee drove in silence, her right hand holding Lori’s small, cold hand, offering what comfort she could. Lori huddled down in the seat like a hurt little animal, her school uniform, white shirt and navy skirt, rumpled from the playground where Cora Lee had picked her up, her dark hair tangled, her face pale with fear as she tried to understand how Pa, her pa, could suddenly be so injured that he was fighting for his life. Pa wasn’t a bully, he wasn’t into prison gangs, he wasn’t mean, he had never hurt anyone—no one that didn’t need hurting, Lori thought. She couldn’t imagine that Pa would die, she wouldn’t let herself believe that could happen.

But Ma had died. There was nothing Lori had been able to do, to make her well, to stop her from dying. Certainly her little-girl prayers hadn’t turned away the cancer. She’d stood by her mother’s bed in that faraway North Carolina town praying and praying, and watched her mother’s life drain away.

This hour of the morning, the traffic was heavy with commuters and with trucks: huge, loud, diesel-stinking trucks crowding them, and moving in the other direction, too, along the two-lane, their closed sides marked with bakery and beer logos, or their railed sides penning in cattle headed for some slaughter yard, Lori thought, feeling sad for them. Cora Lee didn’t talk, she left Lori to her own thoughts, and for that Lori was grateful. Cora Lee’s silence soothed her, she was there for her, but not intrusive. Not since before Mama died, when Lori was little, had anyone understood so well what she was thinking, and known, just by being there, how to make her feel better. In the year and a half since Pa was sent to prison, she and Cora Lee had visited him seven times. Sometimes, at first, she hadn’t wanted to go, hadn’t wanted to see Pa behind bars. But Cora Lee had urged her.

And then later, she hadn’t wanted to go because the other prisoners stared at her. You had to wait in line for hours outside the prison, sitting in a camp chair if you’d brought one, and it seemed like everyone in line stared at you. Then when they finally got inside to see Pa, in the big visiting room at the long table, she and Pa couldn’t be alone. Visitors sat lined up along one side of the long table, prisoners on the other, and there was that heavy glass barrier between her and Pa. How could she and Pa even try to be natural, crowded among all those strangers, and talking through a telephone? Each time, as they drove down to Soledad, she’d felt torn between her excitement to see Pa and her disgust at going into the prison.

And then she’d start thinking about the years when she and Pa were together after Mama died, when Pa had locked her in the house and boarded up the windows, and didn’t tell her why. She hadn’t understood, then, that it was to keep her safe, to save her life. She guessed Pa wasn’t comfortable enough with her to tell her. If she started thinking about that while they were driving down to see him, by the time they reached the prison she didn’t want to go in, she’d want to turn around and go home again.

But now they weren’t going to the prison. They were headed for a hospital where she’d see Pa lying helpless in one of those narrow beds with iron sides, like another kind of prison. Pa, so lean and tall, lying limp in a hospital bed hooked up to machines like Ma had been, bandages around his chest where he’d been stabbed. And even with the machines, the oxygen, the IV, maybe Pa wouldn’t live, maybe he’d die in the hospital. Die this morning before they ever got there. Or die after she went away again leaving him alone in a strange place. She didn’t realize she was squeezing Cora Lee’s arm hard until Cora Lee flinched.

“I’m sorry,” she said, easing up her grip. The wind through the open windows smelled of onions from the fields, of freshly turned earth and commercial fertilizers, and the early sun slanted sharply into their eyes. She sat nervously telling herself Pa wasn’t going to die; she wanted to kill the man who had stabbed him, she thought he should be the one in ICU or in the morgue, not Pa.

She knew when she saw Pa she’d have to be cheerful and positive, try to make him feel better, but she didn’t feel positive. She just felt scared. Pa was all she had; sometimes she missed him so bad, missed how he had been when she was just a little girl, before the bad things started to happen. When she’d run away from Pa and hidden for two weeks in the library basement, she hadn’t understood then why he’d locked her up. While she was sitting in the dark little concrete hole on the old mattress she’d dragged in, living on peanut butter and canned peaches, sometimes, not knowing why Pa had made a prisoner of her, she really had wanted him dead.

But then later when she’d understood that it was to save her life, then she’d been ashamed. When she’d learned about the children that Pa’s own brother, and that other man, had murdered, that Pa was trying to save her from them, she didn’t know what to say to him.

And now Pa’s own life needed saving. She prayed for him. She wanted to tell him she loved him, she hadn’t told him that in a long time. Right now, Cora Lee’s presence was the only thing that held her steady. As if, without Cora Lee, she’d fall into some endless dark space with nothing at all to hold on to.