She said her eyes were finally open. She said saving someone else’s son was the only way to save her own.
I like fairy tales as much as the next gal, but Maggie actually believed she could change things. She wanted to save them all.
I think there was another side to her. I’m not saying she didn’t love Lyle. I’m just saying that he was her ticket out of that house way back when, and maybe she was looking for another ticket now.
3.1 Maggie
Hurry, Maggie said to herself as she rushed down the prison steps in the evenings, and then she said it again as she took the bus to the shopping plaza to buy something for dinner, after which she waited impatiently in the parking lot for Lyle or he waited impatiently for her. Mornings, it was the same thing in reverse. She would arrive at the prison breathless, her head spinning with competing admonitions: Move a little faster! Haste makes waste! Nobody cares if you’re late or not! She shivered to think that defeat was lurking and might be inevitable. But late for what? And why defeat?
The prison was set on a rise, dwarfing the people who flocked every day from the employee parking lot up the long flight of granite steps and through a gauntlet of metal detectors and guards charged with keeping the prisoners in and contraband out. Every time Maggie stepped through the gate into the chilly welcome center, she winced as if she were guilty of something, as if the metal detector could see the image of the top-secret document that was squirreled away in her brain or as if the escaped one-eyed men with hooks for arms her father had invented to scare his children into obedience were watching her from wherever they were hiding. It was easy to imagine her father waiting in the shadows too, to shout at her for something she had done or not done — a shoe unlaced, a toy left carelessly on the stair instead of put away in a closet, for crying or not crying when he smacked her, or the only jam to be found in the cupboard was strawberry when didn’t he always like peach — or to chase the four of them into their rooms, bolting the doors from the outside as if order in the house, as in the world, depended upon incarceration.
And where was her mother while all of this was going on? By the age of thirty-nine, Mary Sterling had taken to the shadows too, her body shrunken inside her paisley dress. She sent the children for the shopping and rarely ventured out. Maggie had looked helplessly on as her mother was buffeted before the winds of her father’s rages. That will never happen to me, she promised herself, and it hadn’t. Lyle always asked her what she thought before voicing his own opinion, and even though her father was long gone by the time Lyle had come along, Lyle seemed to understand that paternal absence was a kind of presence, so he tiptoed around it and helped with the dishes and remembered not to slam the door.
Every morning, Maggie took off her bracelets and put her purse on a conveyor belt so it could be x-rayed and searched. Every morning, she smiled at the guards and wondered if they too shouted at their wives. The head of the morning detail was a narrow man with furrowed skin and furtive eyes whose name was Louis, but in the evenings, the burly Hugo was in charge. Hugo exuded an air of tense restraint, as if he was holding his manliness in check or training for some test of stamina and determination. He seemed to find the intimacy implied in searching Maggie’s purse or running a scanner over her body amusing, and their thirty-second interactions began to feel like aggressive physical encounters. Hugo would say, “We have to stop meeting like this,” in a way that could be interpreted as a joke or as something more serious disguised as a joke. Or he would scrutinize Maggie’s face or dress with a savage gleam in his eyes until she blushed and fumbled for just the right lighthearted comment that would acknowledge his superiority in terms of size and strength, while also reminding him that she had a family and that she wasn’t available now and never would be.
But something about her interactions with Hugo suited Maggie. The layers to their little conversations fit with a growing sense that she was leading a double life, and she wondered if Hugo also thought of himself as two people: as the determined warrior he was at work and as the virile masher she imagined him to be when he went out on the weekends with his friends. Occasionally she allowed herself to respond to him in a way that hinted at the dual roles both of them were playing. “I see you’re wearing your Schwarzenegger smile today,” she might say, or “Prison guard by day, lady-killer by night.” And then Hugo would smirk at her and reply, “I haven’t killed anybody yet.”
This wasn’t the kind of banter Maggie was used to, and she was shocked at her own boldness. But something about it meshed with an inner readiness, as if she had spent the last sixteen years not only mothering and keeping house, but also training for a clandestine project she didn’t yet understand.
“She’s too old for you,” Louis would say to Hugo if he was working a double shift, and Hugo’s face would become a cartoon of regret. Or Hugo would say, “Good morning, Momma,” and Maggie would reply, “So now they’re giving badges and guns to children — what is the world coming to?”
But most of the time Hugo and the other guards only leered silently as they pawed through her things, and then Maggie would give her best imitation of a sultry smile and call them heartbreakers before gathering up her belongings and hurrying along the corridor to another set of locked gates and a walkway that led past the prison yard to the office block where she worked and thinking only about practicalities and the logistics of her day.
3.2 Dolly
Dolly could smell whiskey on the doctor’s breath when he flicked his fingernail at the lab results for an underweight baby and thrust the folder back at her, saying, “Don’t you damn women know enough not to drink?”
Dolly knew he didn’t mean her. She knew she was only a convenient ear when the doctor complained about inadequate insurance reimbursements or working conditions at the big city hospital where he spent most of his time or when he told her about a vacation he was planning or about a task force he had been asked to chair. He had been divorced twice from the same woman. He had a daughter in San Francisco and a son in New York. Over the years Dolly had learned many things this way, while the doctor would have been astonished to find out that she came from a family of seven children, all born at home, that her boyfriend was a soldier in Iraq, that many of her clients paid her late or not at all, and that there was an entire consciousness ticking behind her eyes.
But the doctor also worked many cases for free, which was what convinced Dolly that underneath the gruff exterior a heart of gold was beating, trapped there like a caged bird and just waiting for something to free it. Each time she caught his eye over a swollen belly or a wriggling newborn, she thought she saw a window slide open, and sometimes she swore she could see right through the window to where the bird was flapping its wings against the bars and singing. But then he would cow a pair of anxiously waiting newlyweds into silence by barking, “While you’ve been sitting here reading magazines, I’ve been saving lives!” and she would go back to thinking he didn’t have a heart at all.
Dolly liked the feeling of lives in her hands too, but for her, it wasn’t the power she liked, but the mystery of new life springing from the very atoms of the earth, animated by love and the merest puff of grace. She could imagine vast potentials in the tiny curls of the fingers with their even tinier nails. “You can be anything you want to be,” she would whisper to the babies. Even though she knew that half of them would succumb to drugs, abuse, or lives of crime, she had to believe that each little life she brought into the world would be one of the lucky ones, that each word she whispered into its ear would make a difference, that each happy thought would help it beat the odds.