Chapter 7 - THE VISITATION ROOM
The visitor processing center at the Franklin County Women’s Correctional Facility was designed to strip away every shred of human pride.
The walls were painted a dull, institutional beige that had yellowed under decades of fluorescent lighting. The air smelled of industrial bleach, floor wax, and cold steel.
At 2:00 PM on Tuesday afternoon, Natalie Vance was escorted through the heavy magnetic security door by two female corrections officers.
She wore an oversized dark-orange cotton jumpsuit that hung awkwardly on her slender frame. Her platinum-blonde hair, usually styled in pristine blowouts, was pulled back in a messy, greasy bun secured by a plain rubber band. Her expensive false eyelashes were gone, leaving her eyes looking small, sunken, and ringed with dark circles.
She shuffled across the linoleum, her orange plastic slip-on shoes dragging against the floor, and sat behind the thick scratched plexiglass divider at Station 4.
Sitting on the other side of the glass was our mother, Helen.
Helen was dressed in her best woolen church coat, her hands clutching a designer leather handbag as if it were a life raft in a stormy sea. Her face was haggard, her makeup cracked around her mouth.
Natalie snatched the heavy black telephone receiver off the wall hook with trembling fingers, pressing it to her ear.
“Mom!” Natalie shrieked through the static-filled line, her voice cracking with wild, manic panic. “Where is Douglas? Why hasn't he posted the bail? The judge set it at two hundred and fifty thousand dollars! Why am I still in this cage? The women in my dorm… Mom, they know what happened! They’ve been banging on my metal bunk all night!”
Helen picked up her receiver slowly, her eyes filling with painful, humiliating tears.
“Natalie… Douglas isn't coming,” Helen whispered, her voice trembling.
Natalie blinked, pressing her face closer to the scratched glass. “What? What do you mean he isn't coming? Tell him to liquidate the stock portfolio! Call Arthur Pendelton!”
“Arthur dropped your case this morning, Natalie,” Helen said, dabbing her nose with an embroidered handkerchief. “Douglas was fired from Apex. Marcus locked him out of the family trust. Douglas has moved into a business hotel near the airport, and his divorce attorney served your civil papers to the county clerk three hours ago.”
“Divorce?” Natalie’s breath caught in her throat. Her knuckles turned white around the plastic receiver. “He’s divorcing me? Because of an accident? That coward! I did everything for that man! I built his social calendar! I made him look important!”
“It wasn't an accident, Natalie,” a new voice spoke into the receiver.
Natalie’s eyes darted upward.
I stepped into the visitor booth, pulling a chair beside our mother.
I wore my everyday denim jacket and a plain white t-shirt. My hair was tied in a simple ponytail. I looked like the sister Natalie had spent thirty years dismissing as an ordinary, boring nobody who didn't understand how the world worked.
I picked up the secondary listening receiver connected to the wall unit.
Natalie stared at me through the plexiglass. For three seconds, the old, venomous arrogance flared in her sunken eyes.
“Claire,” she hissed into the phone, her lips peeling back in a bitter sneer. “Did you come here to gloat? Did you come to look at me in an orange jumpsuit? Are you happy now that you’ve ruined my family?”
I looked at my older sister.
For decades, I had been afraid of her. I had walked on eggshells at family holidays, swallowed her cutting remarks about my clothes, my marriage, and my parenting, always believing that if I just loved her enough, if I was just patient enough, she would finally treat me like a sister.
Looking at her now through the dirty plastic divider, surrounded by concrete and guards, I felt nothing.
No anger. No hatred. Only a profound, liberating emptiness.
“You ruined yourself, Natalie,” I said calmly. “You were so consumed by the fact that Lily was loved for who she was, while you had to buy every smile you ever received, that you turned your own child into a weapon.”
“Lily is spoiled!” Natalie spat, her voice vibrating through the receiver like poison. “You and Matthew act like she’s some kind of miracle! Everyone at the table was looking at her! Singing to her! She’s seven years old, Claire! She needed to learn that she isn't the center of the universe!”
Beside me, our mother gasped, dropping her handkerchief to the table. Helen looked at Natalie as if seeing her firstborn daughter for the very first time in thirty-four years.
“Natalie…” Helen choked out, her voice breaking into a ragged sob. “You… you really did it on purpose. You really wanted to hurt that baby.”
“Oh, shut up, Mom!” Natalie snarled, turning her venom onto our mother without hesitation. “You’re the one who taught me! You spent twenty years telling me Claire was the plain one, the slow one, the one who would never amount to anything! You created this! Don't you dare sit there and pretend you're a saint!”
Helen recoiled as if she had been physically struck across the face. She buried her face in her hands, her shoulders heaving with the crushing weight of thirty years of toxic maternal favoritism finally collapsing on her head.
I leaned closer to the glass, keeping my eyes fixed on Natalie’s shifting pupils.
“Lily’s eye is going to heal, Natalie,” I said, my voice steady, clear, and quiet. “Dr. Al-Mansoor said the scar tissue will fade within a year. She will draw, she will run, and she will be happy.”
Natalie’s jaw tightened.
“And you,” I continued, “will plead guilty to Class 2 felony child endangerment and criminal use of hazardous materials. Marcus Vance is ensuring the prosecutor offers no deferred diversion. You will serve three to five years at the Marysville Reformatory for Women. And when you get out, Chloe will be in middle school—living full-time with Douglas under a permanent protective order that forbids you from approaching her within five hundred yards.”
Natalie’s face twisted into an expression of raw, animalistic terror. She slammed her hand against the plexiglass, the sound echoing through the visitor station.
“You can’t take my daughter! She’s mine! She did what I told her because she loves me!”
A guard immediately stepped behind Natalie, grabbing her shoulder with an iron grip. “Station 4, terminate the call! Step back from the divider!”
May you like
I set the heavy black receiver back onto the wall hook.
I stood up, took my mother by the elbow, and guided her trembling frame out of the visitor booth, leaving Natalie screaming against the glass while the heavy magnetic doors sealed her away in the dark.
