Stranglehold. Part 40

"They won't let him visit. The court won't. Not until he's fourteen. If your article can do anything for me maybe it can at least do that. Get them to allow us to at least see each other now and then."

Secretly the reporter doubted that it would. She felt that Lydia Danse was still fighting a losing battle with the system. But she wasn't going to say so. This was a woman who had already failed in one appeal for clemency. She couldn't imagine how trapped she must feel. The reporter wasn't going to add to that.

"How many years before you're eligible for parole, Lydia?"

For the first time during the interview her eyes flashed bright with anger.

"Fifteen years," she said.

"Before parole is even possible?"

"Yes. Robert will be twenty-four. A man. I'll have lost the rest of his childhood. All of it."

Her eyes said she'd been cheated in a nasty game that was never of her making and that she knew it. What Lydia Danse had been through and was still going through seemed to press in on the reporter like an invisible heavy weight. A kind of push. It was personal.

What would I have done in the same situation? she thought. What would any woman have done?

The reporter had seen Robert's tape and knew he was telling the truth about his father. She believed the tape completely.

She thought that Lydia Danse had walked through fire and that the fire was still burning.

She felt suddenly ashamed at simply being able to leave this place. At being able to walk free on the outside while this woman whom she suspected was far stronger and braver than she was wasn't free and probably would not be free-not for a very long time. And for being part of a world that had put her here.

Fifteen years.

She didn't know what to say.

Unless something happened to change things Lydia Danse would be a woman approaching old age.

My G.o.d.

"How do you ... I don't know how to say this but ... G.o.d! How do you live with that? How do you possibly bear it?"

She watched Lydia draw herself up in the hard metal chair.

"Robert's with Ruth now," she said, "he's with his grandmother. The very same woman who raised his father. Who broke the law allowing Arthur to stay there in the first place. For some insane reason the courts decided Arthur forced that on her and would rather give custody to her than to my sister Barbara, basically because Barbara's single.

We're fighting that and I don't like it one d.a.m.n bit but that's not the point. The important thing is that the men in that family are all dead. That n.o.body's pointing guns at anybody anymore. The important thing is that I know Robert isn't being abused by his father anymore, that he's safe. That's the one good thing I can see coming out of ... all of this. If it weren't for that I'd probably go crazy. But I have that much, anyway. He's safe."

Even the matron was looking at her openly now in what appeared to be a kind of stony empathy.

"I have that much," she said.

The reporter found that she could think of nothing more to say.

She's just fallen through the cracks, she thought. Another one the system's failed to protect. This one had fallen deeper and harder than any she'd met-yet look at her, she thought. She's refusing to be buried by it all. She wants out, yes. Badly. Of course she does. Yet something in her clearly remained uncirc.u.mscribed by dull gray walls and bars and empty looks and all the monotony of her days. Something which stood outside these walls, in the mind and body of her son-and grew there, with her and without her.

It was a waste. It was a G.o.dd.a.m.n crime.

The reporter could despair for her and feel for her and knew that she would do exactly that in anger and in cold print for the audience of a major national magazine just a couple of weeks from now. But Lydia Danse was not despairing.

She's done the right thing, the reporter thought. And she knows it. No matter what anybody thinks.

There's a n.o.bility in that.

There's grace.

The reporter realized that Lydia Danse was gazing deeply into the reporter's own troubled eyes and knew that the interview was over.

Ruth watched him from her armchair in front of the television. He was working on his homework at the dining room table. Erasing with a pencil.

Persevere, she thought. That's right. Persevere.

He'd grown taller in the year since it happened-taller and skinnier. She thought the skinniness suited him as it had suited Arthur at that age and didn't fuss when he left a bit of the food on his plate at dinnertime. Just so long as he ate a little something, she was happy.

In fact she was having no trouble at all with him these days. Oh, he was still too quiet, he still stumbled into furniture not looking where he was going sometimes, but the stuttering had stopped and she was thankful for that because the stuttering, to be honest, had always embarra.s.sed her. His work was going well at school. He was diligent and respectful.

He was a good boy.

The same way Arthur was a good boy.

Most of the time he was.

The only problem she had with Robert was-and it didn't happen nearly so often now, but G.o.d knows at her age once a month was still quite enough to frazzle her-the only problem she had was this messing the bed at night. She'd wake up in the morning or even in the middle of the night sometimes to a smell like something had crawled up into her house and died. And there would be the boy, sleeping in his own s.h.i.+t or else stripping the sheets off the bed or else just sitting there looking sad and guilty.

She made him wash his sheets when it happened and kept plastic on to protect the mattress underneath at all times. But she wasn't buying any diapers for him. She wasn't spending money on diapers for a nine-year-old.

She'd have to find some way to break him of the habit. And soon.

She couldn't stand the G.o.d-awful stink when it happened. It wasn't correct.

It wasn't sanitary.

And it wasn't necessary.

He was far too old for dunking.

She'd have to find some other way.

Of course there was always what had worked with Arthur what helped to put him back in line when he was out of line-on those rare occasions. But the world was different now than it was when Arthur was a boy and people were a lot more nosy. Teachers were nosy and they had counselors at school who were nosy and even other parents got nosy a whole lot of the time. She'd heard stories. People who had their kids taken away from them by the G.o.dd.a.m.n county. She'd have to be careful.

She'd have to use it where it wouldn't show.

A thin peeled stick. Birch.

It had always worked for Arthur.

And then afterwards in the darkness of his bedroom she'd go to him and hold him close to her breast and feel his sweet warm tears soak through her housedress and she'd rock him and tell him that it was all right now, it was over, that he was her boy, her good boy, her one and only child and the love of her life, forever, never mind old Harry, never mind anybody because n.o.body else in the world mattered the way he mattered-they belonged to one another forever there in the sight of G.o.d and she would stroke him, stroke him, stroke him.

ALSO FROM JACK KETCHUM & CROSSROAD PRESS:.

NOVELS:.

Ladies' Night.

The Woman.

COLLECTIONS:.

Sleep Disorder with Edward Lee.

ESSAYS / BIOGRAPHY:.

Book of Souls.