Visiting Hours

The county jail had a visiting room on the ground floor, with a row of stools bolted to the floor and a long pane of scratched glass, and Luna Vaughn sat on the fourth stool from the left because it was the only one that the deputy had not wiped.

She noticed things like that. She had been noticing them all her life, the small sticky or crooked or forgotten things that other people walked past, and she had long ago given up wondering whether it was a talent or a wound. She sat with her handbag on her knees, in her good gray coat, and looked at the sheet of glass in front of her, in which she could see the pale reflection of her own face laid over the empty chair on the other side, and she waited.

It was the eighty-sixth day. She knew it exactly because she had counted, not as her son counted, in a notebook, but in her body, as she had counted the days of her girlhood at the school in the hills, by the loosening of the light on the dormitory wall. It had been a cold, bright, windy morning. She had taken the early bus. Tomas had offered to drive her, and she had shaken her head, and he had looked at her with his heavy sad dark face and not insisted, because he was her brother, and he knew. At the door of the jail she had given her name and been searched by a kind square woman with a ring of keys, who took away her lipstick and her hairpins and let her keep, after a long consultation with a superior, a small paper packet and a pencil.

She had asked for the pencil. She did not intend to use it. It was only that she had written to him, in notes, for fourteen years, and she wished to know, in her hand, that she could.

The door on the far side of the glass opened.

…

He came in between two deputies, in an orange shirt that did not fit.

It was the first thing she saw, and it astonished her. In fourteen years she had never seen him in any garment that did not fit. His suits were made. His shirts were taken in at the sleeves. His shoes had been resoled so many times that the cobbler on Fenwick Street knew his foot by heart. And here he came across the cement floor in a loose rough orange cotton, with the sleeves too long, and the collar standing away from his neck, and the thin gray ankles showing above the plastic slippers, a tall stooped man with his hands in front of him, in a short chain.

He had lost weight. It was in his face. The cheekbones stood out; the nose was sharper; the mouth, which had been so even, so closed, was a little slack at the corners, as if it had been holding something up for a long time and had finally been told it might stop. His glasses were gone. They had been taken, she supposed, with the belt and the shoelaces. Without them his eyes looked naked and strange, pale gray, a little near-sighted, a child's eyes in an old man's face, and he came to the glass and stood in front of the stool for a moment without sitting, peering, as if at a figure across a street.

Then he saw her.

She watched it happen. She watched the whole long slow change cross his face from the forehead down: recognition, and then something like alarm, and then, very quickly, something drawn up over both, like a cloth over a table, that was composure. He sat. He put his shackled hands on the counter. He lifted his chin, and he smiled at her, the old smile, small and grave and courteous, and she thought: how is it possible that I ever thought that was gentleness?

There was a telephone on the wall beside the glass. He looked at it. She shook her head, and he nodded, and one of the deputies, a young man with freckles, unlocked a small hatch at the base of the glass and slid through a plastic tray, in which lay a yellow pad and a stub of pencil.

Eric took the pencil in his fist. He wrote, in the neat blue-black upright hand that she had known for fourteen years, and turned the pad against the glass.

Luna. It is good of you to come. Are the boy and the house in order?

…

She did not answer at once.

She sat with her handbag on her knees, and looked at the words. The pencil was a poor one and made a gray soft line, but the letters were exact. They stood on the lines as they had always stood, on the backs of envelopes and the margins of calendars and the little white sheets, folded once, that he left at her place at breakfast. Please see to the supply room. The curtains need pressing. Thank you for tidying. She had a drawer of them in the bedroom. She had kept every one. She had told herself that it was because she was sentimental, and it had taken her eighty-six days to understand that it was because they were the only things he had ever given her that she could hold in her hand.

She lifted her hands.

I will tell you, she signed, slowly. I will tell you in my own language. I know that you cannot read it. I have waited fourteen years to say it to your face, and I would like to say it, once, and have you not understand.

He watched her hands with the faintly polite attention of a man at a lecture in a language he has not studied. A line appeared between his brows. He wrote, and turned the pad.

I regret that I do not follow. Please write.

She smiled.

No, she signed.

…

You never learned, she said.

She said it as she had said many things in the dark of the kitchen in the early years, in the quiet and the lamplight, with the dishes in the rack and the child asleep above, signing to a man who looked at her with courteous incomprehension. In fourteen years you never learned one sign. Not good morning. Not thank you. I used to think it was that you were busy. I thought, he is a great man, he has so much to carry, he will do it when the work is lighter. I thought it for three years. For ten. And then one day, in the garden, I understood that you had not learned because you did not want to.

His face did not move. He had put the pencil down.

You wanted the notes, she signed. You wanted me to have to wait for the paper. To stand there while you wrote. You wanted the time between the thing I asked and the thing you answered, so that there would be a space in which I was waiting for you. It was your favorite part of the day. I watched you. You wrote slowly. You never wrote fast, not once. You held the pencil above the page, before you began, so that I could see you decide.

He wrote. I do not understand. He underlined it.

I know, she signed. That is why I can say it.

She was shaking. She noticed it as from a long way off, the tremor in her wrists and the tightness at the base of the throat, where the voice would have been. She had never in her life been so calm. She felt, in the cold bare room with its bolted stools and its scratched pane, with the deputies standing at the wall and the sunlight lying in a long dusty bar across the floor, that she had walked to the edge of something and found it was not an edge but a doorway.

You asked me, in the first year, why I sat at your table, she signed. I asked you, I mean. I wrote a note. I wrote, why me? And you wrote, You were at the right table. And I was so happy. I carried that note about for a month in my pocket. I thought: it was fate, it was a small accident, God put me in the wrong chair and it was the right one.

There was no wrong chair.

Mrs. Dunmore has told the detective. She has told everything. The seating was done with a pencil. I was sent late on purpose. The empty chair was a trap, set by an old woman who thought she was doing a kindness, for a man who wished to buy a quiet wife. I was not found. I was assigned.

He was looking at her hands. His eyes were quite steady, and the line between his brows had deepened, and his lips, she saw, had parted a little, as though he were making an effort to read the shapes.

And do you know what is terrible? she signed. I would have said yes anyway. If you had asked. I was thirty-two and I had never been asked. I think I would have said yes to a man with two heads, if he had been polite.

…

She stopped. The deputy with the freckles cleared his throat and shifted his feet.

On the other side of the glass, Eric had picked up the pencil again. He seemed to be about to write. His hand hovered above the pad, in the old way, in the way she remembered, held a little off the paper so that she could watch him choose. And then he wrote, in a hand that was not quite as steady as before, a single line, and turned it to the light.

I observed you every day.

She looked at it.

Something rose in her. It was not anger, which she had expected, and which she knew how to meet. It was something older, and quieter, and sadder, a kind of tired recognition, the sort that comes when one finds in the pocket of an old coat a coin that was lost. She thought of the green ledger that the detective had described to her in the little room with the radiator. She thought of a boy of five in a gray school coat, and of a rush-seated chair in a corridor, and of a lamp. Observed by. She understood, all at once, that this was the only way he had ever known to say that he had loved her. And she understood that it was a true thing, in its way. He had watched. He had missed nothing. He had noticed the moment she changed the soap, the day she cut her hair, the hour that she began to hum. He had written it all down, somewhere, in his mind, in blue ink.

That is not the same as looking, she signed.

He wrote: I do not follow.

No, she said. You wouldn't.

She opened her handbag.

…

The paper packet was small and flat and tied with a white thread, and she laid it on the counter, and untied it, and unfolded the tissue. In it lay a square of white linen.

It was a man's handkerchief, ironed to a crisp, with a hem so fine that it was hardly there, and in one corner the faded blue-gray ghost of an E.V. worked in thread. She had kept it in the night table drawer for fourteen years. She had washed it every spring and ironed it with a cool iron so as not to scorch the monogram. She had held it, once, on a long white night in the second year of her marriage, against her cheek, and had wept into it, silently, over something she had not been able to name, and had ironed out the tear marks in the morning so that he would not know.

She laid it in the tray.

It was yours, she signed. You put it on the table, at the dinner, when I stood up to go. I sat down again because of it. I want you to have it back.

He looked at the handkerchief for a long time. His hands lay on the counter. His shackled wrists were thin as a boy's, with the blue veins standing, and on the left forearm, just above the cuff of the orange shirt, she saw the small dark mark like a postage stamp that she had kissed on their wedding night and never since. He did not touch the linen. He seemed unable to. He sat as he had sat on the bench in the corridor as a child, with his knees together and his eyes fixed on a thing in front of him, and she saw, with a shock that was nearly tenderness, that his lips were trembling.

Did you ever, she signed, did you ever once look at me?

He wrote it down. She saw the pencil go. She saw him begin the answer, and stop, and cross it out, and begin another, and stop. At last he turned the pad to the glass, and the line on it was short and uneven, in a hand she did not know.

I do not know what is the difference.

She read it twice.

And she knew that it was the only honest thing he had said to her in fourteen years, and that it was the end.

…

I forgive nothing, she signed. You should know that. I forgive nothing and I will not come again. But I will tell you three things, because you are the father of my son.

He eats. He sleeps. He has stopped counting.

Tomas stirs the soup seven times and knocks the pot. The house is in order. I did not fold your napkin this morning.

She stood. She put the handbag on her shoulder, and smoothed the front of her coat, and looked down at him through the glass for the last time, at the thin gray crown of his head, and the empty hands, and the white square lying in the tray. He had half risen. His mouth was open. He had gripped the edge of the counter, and she saw the knuckles go white, and the deputy at his shoulder stepped forward, and she saw that Eric was saying something.

He was speaking aloud.

She saw it quite clearly: the lips shaping the word, once, and again, with the jaw working, and the throat swelling above the collar of the orange shirt. It was a word she had read on his mouth a hundred times, calm and low, over the breakfast table. Luna. But it was not calm now. She could see it in the cords of his neck. She could see the cry in it, rough and broken and enormous, a sound that she would never hear, wrenched out of a chest that had held it down for fifty-one years, and the young deputy flinched from it as if from a blow.

She did not hear him.

That was the grace of it. That was the thing that no one had arranged, and that no old woman with a pencil could have foreseen. She stood on the other side of a pane of scratched glass with a bar of sunlight across her feet, and a man was calling her name, as he had never called it in all their married life, with his whole voice, with his whole broken heart, and the room was perfectly silent.

She turned.

She walked across the cement, past the bolted stools, with her handbag against her hip and her back straight, to the steel door, and the square woman with the keys held it open. Behind her, in the glass, in the corner of her eye, a tall man in orange was pounding the counter with a shackled hand. She did not look back. It was not that she was afraid to. It was that, for the first time in fourteen years, it did not matter in the least whether he was watching.

The door shut behind her. In the corridor it was cold, and bright, and smelled of floor polish, and at the end of it the glass doors opened on the wind and the sky. She went out into it with her hands loose at her sides. Tomas's old car was waiting at the curb, with the engine running and the window rolled down, and in the passenger seat, with his school bag on his knees and his face turned toward the jail, sat a thin dark boy of thirteen who had not been told to come.

He saw her.

He lifted his hand, a quarter inch, from the bag, and she lifted hers, and neither of them smiled, because they had never needed to, and she crossed the pavement to the car, and got in…