Chapter 8: The Box
On day nine a box came for me.
Ivy brought it up herself and set it on the end of my bunk, which is not how mail is done there.
Mail goes on the hall table and you find it or you don't.
She did it that way because the box had a return address on it and she had read the return address.
Corrugated cardboard, taped twice around, my name printed on the side in marker, my inmate number under my name.
That is the second half of your property.
Whatever does not fit in the bag, they mail to your release address, at your expense. Four dollars and eighty-five cents, deducted.
I sat on the bottom bunk because you cannot open a box on a top bunk.
I used a house key from the kitchen drawer to cut the tape, because we were not allowed scissors and I did not ask.
Contents, in the order I took them out.
One paralegal certificate, printed on cream stock, in a cardboard folder with a plastic window.
Ninety-six weeks of correspondence coursework. My legal name spelled correctly on it.
I want to say plainly what that certificate is worth to a woman with a felony conviction for vehicular homicide.
It is worth the cardboard folder.
One address book, spiral. Eleven addresses in it.
Four of them were people who had stopped answering by the second year.
Three photographs. My mother on a porch. My mother and me at a lake.
One of Dean, which I had not looked at since year two and did not look at then.
A comb.
A paperback dictionary with the cover taped on.
Two hundred and six of its pages were still attached. I read all of them twice in the fourth year, because there was a stretch that year when the words had to come from somewhere.
A Bible somebody gave me on the second tier that I never read and could not throw away, because you do not throw those away in there, you pass them on, and I never found anybody to pass it to.
And at the bottom, under everything, held together with a brown rubber band gone hard and flat, six envelopes.
All six the same size.
Business envelopes, white, the cheap kind that come a hundred to a box.
All six addressed by hand.
Same handwriting. Same blue ballpoint.
Same slight backward lean, the way left-handed people write when nobody ever corrected them.
The name in the top left corner of every one of them was T. Okoro.
Theo Okoro is the son of the woman who died.
He was sixteen that October.
Somebody at the funeral told a reporter that he had been the one who called her phone eleven times.
The first letter came in the first year, in October, on the day.
The mailroom stamped it and I signed for it, because you sign for everything.
Then one the next October. Then the next. Then the next.
Six years. Six letters. Always the same week.
I never opened any of them.
I want to be exact about that, because it is the thing people ask me about most and they always want it to be about strength.
It was not strength.
I did not open the first one because I was nineteen days into a housing unit where I could not have a bad hour in private.
I did not open the second one because I had not opened the first.
By the fourth one, the not-opening was a structure.
Structures hold weight. I was putting weight on it.
I know exactly what is in them in general terms. I knew then. A boy whose mother was killed by a drunk driver writes to the drunk driver every year on the anniversary, and there is only one thing that letter says.
He was right to write them. That is the part I never argued with.
I was the drunk driver on every piece of paper in that county. That was the arrangement. I had signed for it.
I put the rubber band back around the six of them.
It had gone brittle and it broke, so I found another one on the kitchen counter downstairs and used that.
Then I put them at the bottom of the metal locker at the foot of my bunk.
The certificate went on top of them, flat, and the dictionary on top of that.
Ivy was in the doorway. I do not know how long she had been there.
“You want me to hold those in the office,” she said.
“No.”
“Some women can't have them in the room.”
“They've been in my room for six years.”
She nodded and did not push it and went downstairs, and I heard her on the second step, which creaks, the same as the second step at 31 Pell Street.
Six envelopes. Six years. Not one of them opened.
I closed the locker door, and it did not lock, and I went down to dinner.