What I Did Not Say

What I Did Not Say

Standing count is at 6:15 and you are on your feet inside the cell door with the light on until the officer's hand comes down. I am on my feet at 6:13. In 11 weeks I have not been the last woman up on this gallery, and the officer who works mornings has stopped looking at me twice.

The cell runs seven feet four by 10 feet six. I pace it heel to toe my first afternoon, and then I pace it again before lights to check the first number against the second, and the numbers hold.

Steel bunk, a mattress a little under 3 inches, a footlocker, a sink and a toilet cast as one piece, one shelf at shoulder height. On the shelf: a plastic cup, a comb, six envelopes, two paperbacks off the cart, and a photograph of a hellebore bed on Academy Street that I drew and never planted. Property limit is four cubic feet. Everything in here sits where I put it, which is the same arrangement I have had in three places now.

The job comes through in the third week. Grounds crew, 22 cents an hour, outside from eight until two thirty with a count at eleven.

We take the dead wood out of a row of crabapples nobody has touched in about nine years, and we cut the yews along the administration walk back to live growth. The north slope drains toward the building instead of away from it, because somebody graded it that way and then poured a walk over the mistake. I say so once, to the civilian who runs the crew. He writes it on a clipboard and nothing comes of it, which is what I expect, and it is still worth saying out loud in front of six women.

* * *

The interviews run 14 sessions over five weeks, in a room off the visiting corridor with the table bolted to the floor and a camera in the corner with a red light on it.

Two federal investigators and a woman from the U.S. Attorney's office. They bring the same brown accordion folder every time and they take the pages out in the same order, and by the fourth session I can read the day off the thickness of the stack before anyone speaks.

I give them the account numbers. I give them the gas station on the highway outside Poughkeepsie with the floodlight over the air pump, and the make of the car that takes the box, and the fact that the man who drives it has never once given me a name or asked me how I am.

I give them 20 years of dates out of the green site notebook. Six columns, ruled with a scale rule. They photograph every page and hand it back to me across the bolted table, and the woman says thank you, and I say you are welcome, and we both go on.

I give them the carbons from behind the seed packets in the garage. Nine written recommendations to close, over 11 years, signed each time. They spend two full sessions on those pages and they never once ask me the thing I sit there waiting for, which is why a woman who wants a program ended keeps asking on a form the program prints.

They show me a photograph of a man who is 78 years old and wanted, and they slide it across and leave it in front of me for a while. I tell them I have never seen that face. That is true, and it is the only answer of mine they write down without following up.

They ask me four times about A. Four times I give them the one sentence I was handed 20 years ago and have never been given anything past, and four times the woman writes it out in full as though it has just arrived.

Here is what I do not give them.

I do not give them the man who buys me lunch in Albany 20 years ago. I can draw his face and I can tell you what he orders and what he leaves on the plate. I say I do not remember. She writes no recall and goes down the page.

I do not give them my grandmother's formula, and they do not know to ask, because the lab report in their folder says the bottles came out of a supply chain in Kessler's name, and a lab report is a document, and documents are what these people are here to collect.

I do not tell them about the eight drops. The monthly forms say 12 in my own handwriting, 11 years of them, and 12 is what the forms say. A form outlives the woman who filled it out.

* * *

My assigned attorney is replaced in October by a man from a firm in White Plains who comes up on a Tuesday with a leather case and a folder with my name spelled right. He tells me a family member has retained him and that the fee is handled.

My mother is 74 and lives in Albany on what my father left her and has not sent me so much as a money order, because I have asked her not to.

The plea is eight years. He tells me at the second meeting that eight is what eight is and that I should stop reading the statute. I ask him twice who retained him. Both times he turns a page.

* * *

Commissary is Thursday. The sheet lists 214 items and I buy the same nine every other week: coffee, creamer, the soap that does not crack my hands, envelopes, a pen, oatmeal, peanut butter, aspirin, stamps.

Stamps are the currency in here and everyone knows it. I keep mine in the toe of a sock at the bottom of the footlocker, and I count them going in and I count them coming out, because I am a person who counts twice. There are 60.

Mail comes at four. In November a card arrives from the heavy woman with the reading glasses at the Hannaford on Route 9, who has somehow found this address, and who writes that she has not seen me on a Thursday in a while.

* * *

I write him a letter on a Sunday, at a steel table in the dayroom with the television going and 30 women in one room.

It runs four pages on both sides, which is one page over what they will process, and I number the corners the way I number a set of drawings.

The third page is the page I write first. It begins: You will want the night in the bedroom to have gone the way the tape has it. The tape is not wrong. It is also missing 40 minutes, and you were in the room for all of them.

Lower on that page, after a paragraph I am not going to set down twice: Twenty years, and the only lie I ever told you that I would tell you again is the one about the pantry drawer.

On the fourth page I put down the nine nights in April, and what I did with them, and why. Then I square the pages, fold them in half, and put them in the footlocker under the sock with the stamps in it.

I do not seal the envelope. Sealing it would mean I have decided something.

* * *

He comes on a Wednesday in the first week of December.

He is through the door at 1:12 by the clock over the officer's desk and out of it at 1:53. There is a sheet on that desk with a line for time in and a line for time out and a signature under each. He will say the visit ran 15 minutes. I am in that chair 41 minutes and my knees are stiff when I stand.

He will say I handed him the last bottle out of Kessler's lab, original, never opened.

I mix that bottle myself, at a folding table over a dry cleaner in Poughkeepsie, in September. Four parts of the base warmed to the inside of a wrist, then the herbs, then the mint, in that order and no other. The date is on the label in pencil in my own hand. He has only to turn it over.

He will say he took the black leather notebook off me the night in the bedroom in Milton.

I carry that notebook into the state police barracks in Poughkeepsie three days before that night. I hand it across a counter and I sign a property receipt for it, and there is an evidence sticker inside the front cover with a number and a date on it, and both of those things are still there. I have asked my attorney to pull the receipt. He says it does not help me.

Through the panel he looks thinner than he does on a television and about 10 years older than 46. His left cuff stays where it is the whole 41 minutes, which is the first time in 11 years I have watched him tell the truth and hold still for it.

I tell him I am not going to apologize anymore. That is the one part of the 41 minutes I work out in advance, and it comes out flatter than I want it to, and it is true.

* * *

The approved visitor list is posted on the unit and updated on the first of every month. Mine has three names on it. My mother, my attorney, and James.

On December 1 it has four.

The fourth is a woman's name I have never heard, entered under clergy, with an approval date two weeks earlier than any request I have put in, because I have not put in any. In the last column are the initials of the approving officer, two letters, pressed into the paper hard enough to read off the back of the sheet.

They are the same two letters that were on the routing slip in Poughkeepsie and on the envelope squared to my baseboard.

I do not put in to have the name struck. On the morning of the second I take the sheet down off the board, fold it in four along the creases, and set it in the footlocker with the letter I am not sending.

On the morning of the third there are 59 stamps in the sock.