Chapter 9 - The Reckoning
Two weeks before Daniel was scheduled to be transferred from the county detention center to the federal correctional institution in Terre Haute, Indiana, I received an official notice from his public defender.
*Daniel Sterling requests a final fifteen-minute non-contact visitation.*
Evelyn advised me to tear the notice up. "You don't owe him a single second of your life, Clara. Let him rot in silence."
I thought about it for two days, sitting on my back porch, watching the spring buds begin to bloom on Aunt Claire’s apple trees.
"No," I told Evelyn on the third morning. "I’m going."
"Why?" she asked, surprised.
"Because for six years, I only ever saw him from below," I said. "I want to see him one last time, through bulletproof glass, where he belongs."
***
The visitation room at the Kent County Jail was sterile, painted an institutional seafoam green, smelling of industrial floor wax and stale bleach.
I sat on a metal stool in front of station number four.
A heavy partition of reinforced, scratch-resistant Plexiglas separated me from the empty stool on the other side. A black plastic telephone receiver hung on a metal hook beside the glass.
The heavy steel door on the prisoner side buzzed and clicked open.
Daniel stepped into the cubicle.
The transformation was shocking. Without his tailored suits, his expensive hair pomade, and his manufactured executive swagger, he looked hollowed out. His skin had taken on the dull, grayish-yellow hue of long-term confinement. His posture was completely broken, his shoulders sloping downward, his fingers constantly twitching with nervous energy.
He sat down on the stool, picked up the receiver with trembling fingers, and pressed it to his ear.
I lifted my receiver and brought it to my face.
"Clara," he whispered through the crackling intercom line.
"Daniel," I replied, my voice completely flat.
He looked at me through the glass, his eyes red-rimmed, his lower lip quivering like that of a terrified child. "Thank you for coming. I didn't think you would."
"I have ten minutes, Daniel. What do you want?"
He leaned forward, pressing his palm flat against the cold Plexiglas. "Clara... Terre Haute is maximum security for the intake unit. They’re saying the violence there... the gangs... I won't survive fourteen years, Clara. You know I won't. I'm not built for that place."
"You should have thought about that before you picked up that tire lever," I said.
"I wasn't in my right mind!" he pleaded, his voice rising, tears welling in his eyes. "I was drunk! I was out of my head because I lost you! Clara, please, talk to your lawyer. Ask the judge for a sentence modification. Tell them you support a transfer to a minimum-security camp! They listen to the victims, Clara. If you say you forgive me, they’ll move me to a camp!"
I looked at the hand he had pressed against the glass.
I remembered that same hand wrapped around my wrist at 4:40 in the morning. I remembered that same hand shoving me into the kitchen counter. I remembered that same hand slamming through the drywall inches from my ear while Lorraine stood behind him, whispering that I deserved it.
"Forgive you?" I asked, my voice calm, steady, and devastatingly clear.
Daniel nodded frantically, weeping against the receiver. "Yes! Please, Clara. For the sake of the six years we had. For the love we shared."
"Daniel," I said softly, leaning in just enough so that my reflection superimposed over his in the glass. "I didn't come here to forgive you. I came here to tell you something you need to hear."
He stopped weeping, blinking through his tears.
"For six years, you told me that I was weak. You told me that without your brilliance, your protection, and your name, I was nothing. You and your mother treated me like a servant in my own house, convinced that I was too terrified to ever survive without you."
I smiled—a small, radiant, genuine smile.
"Look at me, Daniel."
He looked.
"My name is on the company. My name is on the deed. The firm has had its most profitable quarter in three years. Aunt Claire’s house is fully restored. I sleep eight hours every night in complete peace. I laugh with my friends. I breathe clean air."
I lowered the receiver half an inch.
"You were the parasite, Daniel. Not me. And now that you've been cut off, I am thriving. And you are going to spend the next fourteen years in a five-by-eight concrete cell, remembering every single day that the woman you tried to destroy was the one who built the world you threw away."
Daniel’s mouth fell open. His tears stopped, replaced by a look of sheer, unadulterated horror as the finality of his reality settled into his marrow.
"Goodbye, Daniel," I said.
I hung the receiver up on the hook.
He slammed his fist against the glass, screaming something I couldn't hear through the reinforced partition, his face twisting into that familiar, ugly mask of impotent rage.
A guard immediately stepped behind him, grabbed his shoulder, and jerked him away from the glass, hauling him backward through the heavy steel door.
I stood up, smoothed my ivory coat, and walked out into the April sunshine without looking back.
***
In the visitor parking lot, as I was walking toward my car, a voice called out from the sidewalk near the municipal bus stop.
"Clara!"
I paused and turned.
Standing beside the metal bus bench was Lorraine.
She had been released two days ago on an early administrative furlough due to her medical appeals, pending her transfer to the state community corrections program.
She looked like a ghost of the woman who had worn my mother’s cashmere robe. She was wearing an oversized thrift-store coat that hung off her gaunt frame. She carried a single plastic grocery bag containing her worldly possessions. Her hair was completely silver, brittle and unwashed, blowing wildly in the spring breeze.
She shuffled toward me on swollen ankles, leaning heavily on a cheap aluminum cane.
"Clara..." Lorraine croaked, her voice dry and raspy. "Please... you have to help me. They’re sending me to a transitional shelter in Lansing. It’s filthy. There are junkies there, Clara. I don't have five dollars for a meal. You have so much... just give me enough for a room."
I stood beside the driver’s side door of my Volvo, looking at the woman who had spent six years poisoning my marriage, celebrating my bruises, and plotting to steal my home.
"Do you remember what you told me, Lorraine?" I asked softly.
Lorraine blinked, her rheumy eyes darting with confusion. "What? What are you talking about?"
"The morning you arrived uninvited. When Daniel was crushing my wrist in the kitchen, and you sat at my island drinking coffee."
Lorraine swallowed hard, her papery skin turning pale.
"You looked at me and said: *A good wife would already have breakfast ready. Maybe now she’ll remember who the man of this house is.*"
Lorraine’s hands began to tremble on the handle of her cane.
"Well, Lorraine," I said, opening my car door. "It turns out there was never a man of that house. There was only me. And as for your breakfast?"
I sat down in the driver’s seat and looked out through the open window.
"Stop provoking your circumstances," I said, quoting her exact words back to her. "You know how they get."
I pressed the start button. The engine purred smoothly to life.
May you like
I rolled up the window, put the car into reverse, and pulled out of the parking lot, leaving Lorraine Sterling standing alone on the cracked asphalt by the bus stop, clutching her plastic bag as the city bus rolled past in a cloud of gray exhaust.
***
