Chapter 4: Three Point One Miles
I walked out of the lot at the far end, past the sign that says visitor parking, and turned right onto County Road 9.
The plastic bag had a handle cut into it. By the second mile the handle had cut a line into my fingers, so I carried it against my chest.
She followed me in the car.
She did it at walking speed with the window down, which takes a certain amount of stubbornness, because the car wanted to go faster than I did and she kept having to brake.
“Cass. Get in.”
“No.”
“You're being ridiculous.”
I did not answer that, because it was true and answering it would not have made it less true.
“It's twenty-two miles,” she said.
“I'm not going twenty-two miles.”
“Where are you going?”
That was a fair question. The answer was written on a card in my back pocket and the card had a curfew on it.
At the pre-release class in January they gave us a sheet. One page, both sides, printed crooked.
On the back was a list of transportation options for people leaving the facility.
Item four was a van run by a nonprofit out of Dunmore called the Second Street Project. Tuesdays and Thursdays. Pickup at the crossroads of County Road 9 and Route 14, 11:00 a.m.
I copied it onto the back of a commissary receipt on the ninth of January and kept the receipt.
Three point one miles from the gate to that crossroads. The mile markers on County 9 are the only thing to look at from the east windows.
So I walked, and my cousin drove beside me at three miles an hour with her window down.
“You're going to look like this in front of everybody,” she said.
Everybody was one truck and a road grader.
“Dean's going to ask me what happened.”
“Tell him.”
“Tell him what? That you assaulted me?”
I said, “Tell him I said no.”
She got quiet then, and drove beside me for another quarter mile, and I could hear her tires picking up grit.
Then she said the thing she had been holding.
“You know we tried,” she said. “We put money on your books.”
I did the arithmetic while I walked. It is not hard arithmetic.
Six years. Eleven deposits. Four hundred and forty dollars total, and three hundred of it in the first ten months.
Nothing at all in years four, five, or six.
I could have said all of that out loud. I had the numbers. I have always had the numbers.
I did not say it, and I want to be honest about why. It was not restraint.
It was that saying it would have told her I had counted, and I did not want her to know how much of my head she had been living in.
“Thank you for the eleven deposits,” I said.
The car stopped. I kept walking.
Twenty seconds later she came past me fast, and the last thing I saw of it was the rear window.
The sticker, bottom left. Faded red, almost pink.
I walked the rest alone. It took one hour and four minutes, which is slow. Six years inside a fence does something to the length of your stride.
The crossroads is a stop sign, a culvert, and a metal pole with nothing on it.
I sat on the culvert wall with the bag on my knees.
The van came at 11:06.
It was white, with a magnet sign on the door. The driver was a man in his sixties named Curtis. He asked me nothing.
There were two other women already in it. Neither of us looked at each other, because you do not, on that day.
The van had cloth seats. I remember noticing that they were cloth.
Six years of steel and plastic and painted concrete, and the thing that got me was upholstery.
Curtis handed back a paper bag with a sandwich in it and a bottle of water. Turkey. I ate the whole thing in about ninety seconds.
“You got a placement?” he said, watching the mirror.
“Bertrand House.”
“Anselm Street. I know it.” He put his blinker on for nobody. “Curfew's ten. They're not soft about it.”
“I know.”
“Sign the book every single time,” he said. “In and out. Every time. That book is the only thing that says where you were.”
I have thought about that sentence for years. A man driving a van said the truest thing anybody said to me that month.
I said thank you.
Then I sat back and watched twenty-two miles of a county I grew up in go past a window, and none of it looked the way I had kept it.
There were eight beds at Bertrand House and one bathroom.
I did not know that yet.
What I knew, at 11:06 in the morning, in the third row with a bag on my knees, was that I had not gotten into my own car.