Waiting for Ms. Marie

CONTENT WARNING: Contains descriptions of domestic violence and suicide.

Ms. Marie comes to visit me from time to time, but sometimes it’s a long time between visits. Whenever Ms. Marie is going to be gone for a really long time, she tells me not to worry because she won’t forget about me and she’ll be back. So when I know I won’t see her for a while, I don’t worry, I just wait for Ms. Marie. As long as it takes.

My name is Thomas Jeremy Wright, but everyone called me Tommy growing up, and the guards here call me Tommy, too. But Ms. Marie calls me Thomas. Has from the day we first met, and that was a long time ago.

I can replay our first meeting in my head, just like a movie. She came into the room after the guards got me settled in and cuffed me to the table. She put her briefcase on the table and stood at the other side of the table from me. She’s a tiny lady, I’d say just over five feet, and as I sat there, her head wasn’t much higher than mine.

“Mr. Wright,” she said, “I’m Marie Lopez. I’m an attorney and I’m here on behalf of the Justice Initiative. If it’s all right with you, I’d like to discuss your case.”

I stared at her and didn’t say anything at first. Then I looked at the cuffs and the chain running through the metal ring welded onto the tabletop. I didn’t move my hands because I didn’t want the chain to make that rattling sound when it rubs against the ring. Prisons have sounds all their own, all of them sad, but the sound of a dragging chain is the saddest sound of them all.

“Mr. Wright, I’ve gone through your case, and we have several grounds for appeal. Strong grounds. It will be an uphill battle, but I believe I can help you.”

Then she sat down across the table from me and went quiet. Didn’t say another word. She just sat there and stared at me.

I looked at her, and I noticed how round and dark her eyes were, and how they never wandered from me. Sitting there across the table I towered over her, but when my eyes met hers, it was as though I was the one who was looking up. Like I was looking at someone far above me, someone reaching down to lift me up to a place I didn’t deserve to be. I had to look away. In all the time that has passed since then, I still can’t look at her for long without having to look away. It’s like my eyes have to turn away from hers in the way magnets turn away from each other when the wrong sides come close together. Kind of a force all its own.

“Tommy,” I said. “Just call me Tommy.”

“Thomas,” she said, “let me help you.”

I kept my stare on the metal chain running through the ring on the table. I hoped she wasn’t afraid of me, and I didn’t want her thinking they chained me like this because I might do something bad to her.

“Sure,” I said, mostly so she wouldn’t be disappointed.

Then I looked at her again, and her stare hadn’t changed one bit. She only nodded her head slightly, all the time her brown eyes looking at me in a way that made me feel like she was searching for something inside me. I looked away from her and to the square blocky window made of the thick kind of glass that blurs everything outside. The glass was all lit up, like a gold brick of sunlight.

* * *

The first thing Ms. Marie did was to get a doctor to examine me. Not the kind of doctor you go see when you’re sick, but the kind that talks to you. She said this was to help undo my confession and my sentence. This all seemed kind of strange, because I didn’t know a confession and sentence could be undone, especially when what I confessed was true.

The doctor asked me a lot of questions about what my father had done to me and my older sister growing up. I told him about the beatings. First just slaps when I was little, but when I got bigger he used his fists. Seems like the bigger I got the more he came after me.

I told him about my sister, too. She was two years older than me. I told how she would yell at my dad when he hit me, and then put herself between me and him so he would hit her and stop hitting me. But after he started on her, I wouldn’t do anything to stop him from hitting her like she did for me. I feel ashamed about that now, her being so much stronger and braver than me. I don’t know why I couldn’t stand up for her the way she could for me, and I don’t know why I couldn’t be braver when I got to be bigger than my father. I wanted to be brave like her, but I couldn’t. She never got mad at me for not standing up for her, though, and that made me feel even worse for being afraid.

After my dad was done with us, he would leave the house and I would get ice in plastic bags and go to my sister and we would sit next to each other and just be quiet for a time, holding the ice where it hurt. Sometimes we would start to cry, but other times we would tell each other things to make us laugh. A lot of times we would just hold hands and rest against each other. Sometimes a touch is all you need to make the pain you feel not matter, and when she put her hand in mine and we sat together in the house that was finally quiet and peaceful, everything seemed okay, even though we knew it wasn’t. I miss her.

The doctor also gave me tests. Mostly the kind with questions that had pictures of boxes and lines that didn’t make any sense or words I couldn’t read. I didn’t know how to answer most of them, so mostly I just guessed.

Sometimes Ms. Marie was with the doctor and she would ask me questions about what my father done to us and about my confession. I especially didn’t like talking about what I confessed to. How I took the revolver and went into my father’s room while he was passed out drunk after beating us and shot him once in the head. How I waited until he was asleep so he wouldn’t be afraid and wouldn’t feel any pain.

A few months after my last visit with the doctor, Ms. Marie came to see me. When she sat down at the table in our little meeting room, she opened her briefcase and pulled out some papers.

“We have a hearing at the end of next week, Thomas,” Ms. Marie said.

“Okay.”

She smiled a little bit. “Thomas, do you remember what I explained about presenting evidence of your level of intelligence and how that could impact your sentence?”

I did remember her talking about that, but since then I had forgotten most of it. “Yes,” I said.

She looked at me for a moment and then started to explain again why me not being as smart as other people could be important for my case. I nodded as she spoke, pretending like I remembered, but I was glad that she explained everything to me again.

She paged through the papers and read for a while. Then she said, “Thomas, we have several issues to address as part of your appeal, but the issue of your competence is on the table right now. This is a very difficult issue to address on appeal, but because your defense attorney failed to properly raise this during your trial, that may help us.”

“Okay.”

Ms. Marie continued to page through the papers. She stopped on one page, and I saw a heading in bold letters with the word Abuse. I couldn’t read all the bold words but I knew that one. She started reading, and as she read her forehead got a line down the middle. Then she looked up at me and stared for a moment, and her eyes seemed very soft.

“But even if we don’t prevail on these arguments here, there is still a lot from the doctor’s report that we can use regarding sentencing. And please don’t be disappointed about any one decision. This is going to be a long process.”

“How long do you think this will take before we’re done?”

“It will be years, Thomas. It’s a very long process.”

I couldn’t believe she would work so long on one case. Especially mine. “And you’ll work on it all that time?”

She nodded her head. “As long as it takes, Thomas.”

I didn’t say anything when she said it could be such a long time for her. I didn’t know what to say to her for wanting to stick with me for so long.

“Do you have any questions about anything else that we’ll be doing during the appeal process?”

“No,” I said. “I just want to thank you.”

“You’re welcome, Thomas.”

She stood up, getting ready to leave. “It may be a long time before I return. But if you have any questions about the case, you know how to contact me.”

“That’s okay, Ms. Marie, I’ll just wait for you.” And then I smiled. “As long as it takes.”

She smiled back at me. “Until next time, Thomas.”

* * *

A few weeks after my visit with Ms. Marie, she sent me a card for my birthday. It wasn’t a real birthday card, it was a card with a watercolor painting of a bird on it, and inside it was blank, but Ms. Marie turned it into a birthday card by writing:

We are thinking of you on this day, Thomas.

The bird on the card was an egret. I grew up near the coast, and the egret on the card looked just like the ones I used to watch in the marshes when I was little. It was mostly white with a long yellow beak, and in the picture the bird was standing in still water, looking down, and from the water its reflection stared back up. Like it was looking at itself.

I never thought much about egrets when I saw them all those years ago. They were just there, like trees and flowers and other birds. But as I sat on the side of my bunk, looking at the colors and reading over and over what Ms. Marie wrote, I tried to remember how egrets would stand in the water, so still, looking like statues. Then I remembered how when I would look at them for a while, I would forget about the bad things happening at home.

I looked at the painting for a long time and read Ms. Marie’s note so many times that when it came time for lights out I could still picture every detail when I closed my eyes.

* * *

It was about three months later when Ms. Marie came to see me again. When she sat down across the table from me I said, “Thank you for the birthday card.”

She nodded and smiled a little as she opened her briefcase. “You’re welcome, Thomas. I know it’s been a while since we last met, but we’ve been working hard on your case. We have a lot of people in my firm fighting for you.”

She mentioned a lot of people, but I was pretty sure it was mostly her.

She pulled a notepad and a pen out of her briefcase, and then she started writing something.

“There’s still no decision on the sentencing issue. We’re also working on some issues about your confession, and that’s what I’d like to talk about today.”

I still didn’t like talking about my confession with Ms. Marie, but I nodded okay.

She put her pen down and folded her hands together and looked right at me. “I’ve listened to the recording with the detectives, Thomas. But I again want to go over what happened before the recording started and some things the detectives told you during the interview.”

“Okay,” I said.

She dug through her papers and then pulled some pages that were all stapled together, and the words on the papers were written in all capital letters. I think those words in the papers might have been what was said in the recording, but I’m not sure. She read for a while.

“Thomas, in the recording, one of the detectives told you that you had a right to an attorney and that your confession would be used against you. Did you understand what he meant about your right to an attorney and your confession?”

“I did,” I said.

Ms. Marie started writing on her note pad. “Okay, Thomas. What was your understanding?”

I watched her writing letters on the paper. She had pretty handwriting, and the letters looked like they flowed out from her pen. She never made mistakes when writing, never scribbled out a word. “Well, it was only me and my sister there, and I was the one that … shot him. It wasn’t hard to figure out. So I figured I’d save everyone time if I told them what happened.”

“Why did you want to save time, Thomas?”

“Well, it was easy to figure out what happened. Why have them waste all that time if they would get to the same place.”

“Why didn’t you ask for an attorney?”

“Same reason, I guess. Having a lawyer sitting there wouldn’t change what happened, and they knew what happened anyway. Could tell by looking …”

Then I remembered. I closed my eyes tight and I rolled my lips in between my teeth and bit down a little. I remembered how my father’s head opened up when I shot him and how blood and other stuff went all over and how some came back on me and on my shirt and how I wasn’t expecting that and how I dropped the gun and yelled and started crying when that happened. I started breathing heavy, and when I opened my eyes I saw my hands clenched into fists and Ms. Marie was blurry in my vision because of the tears.

“Please, Ms. Marie, can we not talk about this right now? Please?”

Then she did something I won’t ever forget. She reached across the table and put her hand on mine. And I remembered how my sister’s hand would feel in mine and I started to feel a little bit better. “Okay, Thomas,” she said. “We can come back to this later.”

She moved on to other things about the trial. We had been talking a long time, maybe over an hour, when she finally asked about my sister.

“Thomas, when you last saw your sister, did she tell you if she was planning on going somewhere?”

“No,” I said. “She never said she was going anywhere. She was sad that I was in here but she’s always sad about that. But she didn’t tell me she was going anywhere.”

“Do you know of anyone she might visit for an extended time?”

“Nobody I know of. Why?

“We’d like to speak with her. We would like an affidavit … we would like her to tell the court about your home life and what your father did to you and her.”

“I don’t think that’s gonna help,” I said. “I already told you what he done to us, and she did talk about what he done to us at my trial.”

Ms. Marie nodded her head up and down. “I know she did. But we think there’s additional information she can provide, information that will help you. We’ve contacted all her friends and relatives that we know of. Nobody has seen or heard from her for weeks. Can you think of anyone we may have overlooked?”

I got a little worried when Ms. Marie told me that. I didn’t know where my sister would go, and she never told me she was leaving. “I don’t know where she’d be,” I said. “You going to keep looking for her?”

“Yes, yes we will. And Thomas, the police are looking for her, too. She’s missing, Thomas.”

“Will you tell me when they find her?” I asked.

“Yes, definitely.”

“I don’t really care about her being able to help me. I just want her to be okay.”

“I know, Thomas,” she said. “That’s very clear to me.”

* * *

Ms. Marie came back a week later. When she left after her last visit, she didn’t say she would be back so soon, so I wasn’t expecting her. Then I thought about my sister and what Ms. Marie had said, and I started to feel a little scared.

She sat down at the table and pulled out a single piece of paper from her briefcase. She paused and just held the paper in front of her. Her shoulders started to slump a little, and she looked at the little block window. Outside there must have been clouds because the block window was about as gray as the walls.

“Thomas, your sister,” she said.

I think I knew then, right before she told me. Something inside me, between my heart and my stomach, began to flutter, like something had come undone.

“Your sister. The police found her. Thomas, she died. I’m so sorry.”

Then I didn’t feel anything. Like everything in the world had shut off and disappeared and all that was left was this room. Like right outside the door there was nothing but a gray cloud that went on forever.

“How?” I asked.

I saw in Ms. Marie’s eyes a pain that I couldn’t feel right then but I knew I would feel soon. “Thomas, she took her own life.”

The next thing I remember was just hearing myself say “No, no, no” over and over, and I must have been doing it for a long time. Finally, I stopped when I noticed the paper again. It looked like a copy, and I recognized my sister’s handwriting. “What did she say?” I asked.

“It’s not long,” Ms. Marie said, and she held the note out to me.

Then it was hard to breathe, and my vision started blurring. “Just read it for me, please.”

Ms. Marie nodded. “Okay. Okay,” she said. And then she read the note, and it was as if I heard my sister’s voice. “Tommy, if you hear about me, I hope you get this note. I’m sorry. But I can’t do this anymore. I can’t bear to see you in there, and I know there’s nothing that can be done now. I’m sorry for it all, for everything. I’m sorry. Please forgive me. The best times I ever had were with you. I love you baby brother. Brighty.”

I was crying by the end of the note, and when Ms. Marie read out loud my nickname for my sister, I folded up my arms and put my head down on the table and cried some more. She didn’t say anything, I think she knew words couldn’t help right then, but she stayed with me until I finally stopped crying, and I cried for a long time.

* * *

After my sister died, Ms. Marie never brought her up again. But the next year she came to me with good news. The court agreed with her and said I needed to be resentenced. She was very happy, and I found that I was happier for her than I was for myself.

It was a long time before the court got around to me again, but Ms. Marie would come and see me from time to time when working on my case. In that time, I received another six birthday cards from Ms. Marie. Each one had a bird painting. Except for the egret on my first card, I didn’t know the names of any of the other birds, so I asked one of the guards if I could have a book with bird pictures in it. He asked me why I wanted a book about birds, and I showed him the cards, and told him I wanted to know the names of the birds. He just nodded and he said he’d check the library for me. A few days later, when he was on shift again, I asked him if the library had a bird book and he just said, “I’m looking for one, Tommy.”

I didn’t want to be a bother, so I didn’t ask him again after he said he was looking for a bird book, and I never brought it up again. When my birthday came he showed up with a new card from Ms. Marie, and he also gave me a thick book with a picture of a bird on the cover.  On almost every page in the book there was a color picture of a different bird. This book wasn’t like other books in the prison, it looked brand new, and it wasn’t stamped with the prison name on the inside of the cover.

“Is this from the library?” I asked.

The guard smiled at me. “Happy birthday, Tommy,” he said, and then he walked away before I could thank him.

In the card, Ms. Marie wrote:

May this birthday find you peace.

I looked at the bird painted on the card. It was brown with a yellow bottom and yellow tips on its tail. Feathers stood up on the back of its head, and a black stripe ran across its eyes. I paged through the book until I found a picture of a bird just like the one painted on the card. A cedar waxwing.

I looked up each bird in the other cards she’d sent to me, and I dog-eared each page in the book that had a bird in one of my cards. I couldn’t read a lot of the words in the descriptions, but from what I could read I learned that all the birds painted in the cards she sent me meant things about goodness. Things like hope and healing and peace and forgiveness. And when I looked at all those birthday cards again and what the birds meant I couldn’t see how words like that could be meant for me, but I knew she meant them for me, and that made me feel both happy and sad at the same time.

* * *

When I next saw Ms. Marie, I could tell she was a little upset, because she didn’t smile when she came into the room.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I don’t know how to say this to make it any easier, Thomas.” Then she paused, and she waited until I nodded before she started talking again. “The court heard all the evidence, considered our arguments, but when you were resentenced, the decision was the same. I’m sorry.”

I knew what this meant, but I didn’t want her to be upset. “Ms. Marie, you always said this would be hard.”

“I know. But that doesn’t make it easier to accept.”

“That’s okay, Ms. Marie. Sometimes nothing comes easy, I guess. And sometimes nothing comes at all. But you tried, and I appreciate that. So, it’s over now?”

She quickly shook her head no. “Not at all. We are going to keep fighting. Because this is not right. This is not justice.” She sounded angry, but I knew it wasn’t me she was mad at.

Ms. Marie went on to explain about the other appeals she would take in the state court, and then there was another set of courts after the state court if those didn’t work. I didn’t understand how there were all different kinds of courts that would hear my case, but Ms. Marie told me she knew how to do this and I trusted her so I said for her to do what she thought was best, and she said she would.

I could tell that she was still sad after we were done meeting, so when she was getting ready to leave I brought up my birthday cards. “I really like your cards,” I said. “I look forward to them every year.”

She smiled a little. “Thank you, Thomas,” she said.

“I never seen cards so pretty. Where do you get them?”

Then her eyes got that soft look again, making her look a little sad, but her voice didn’t sound sad when she spoke. “I paint them, Thomas.”

* * *

In all, Ms. Marie made me seventeen birthday cards. The last one was a painting of a mourning dove. The last time I met with her, she was sitting across from me at a table and her hands were folded together in front of her. I noticed how small her hands were and I thought about how those hands painted all my cards.

That meeting was different from all the rest. She was very sad. I could tell she had been crying, because her eyes were red.

“It’s okay, Ms. Marie,” I said. “You did everything that you could. Sometimes there’s fights you can’t win. But you fought for me. Just like my sister fought for me. And I have something that I’d like to give you.”

I looked at the envelope on the table. The envelope was the big kind that holds lots of papers, and it was bulging in the middle.

“Go ahead and open it,” I said.

Ms. Marie slowly opened the envelope and pulled everything out. All seventeen cards and my bird book. She didn’t say anything, but her brow furrowed up and her lips parted a little. She looked at my bird book, then opened the book to some of the dog-eared pages, and then looked at the cards.

“I kept them all.” I reached over and I started laying out the cards in the order she gave them to me so she could see each one. “Seventeen. More than seventeen years you helped me. I don’t have anything to give you but those. And my bird book. I want you to have them.”

Her eyes started to fill with tears and she placed her hand on her chest. Then she did something that she never did before. She looked away from me.

“Oh, Thomas,” she said. Her voice was soft and broken, like a wilted flower in a place where sunlight couldn’t reach.

I smiled and waited for her to look back at me. When she did, I didn’t feel the need to turn away. She finally knew who I was, and I didn’t feel ashamed for her to see me. And I could finally see inside of her, and there inside I saw a kind of sadness that only a good heart can feel.

“Thank you for everything you done for me over the years,” I said. “You keep saying you’re sorry and that you failed. But you didn’t. You give me something I ain’t had in a long time.”

She moved her hand from her chest to wipe away a tear. “What did I give you?”

“A long time ago I asked you why you were doing this. Do you remember what you said?”

“I don’t,” she said.

“You said you weren’t mostly doing this for me. You said you were doing this so that the system stayed fair.”

She nodded her head. “I remember that now.”

“But that ain’t how you feel now, is it?”

“No. No, it’s not.”

“My sister was my only light. She saw something in me that I couldn’t see without her, and without her, whatever she once saw inside of me was in shadows, getting smaller and growing colder until I had forgotten about it. But after a while, you started looking at me the same way she did. You saw something in me that I couldn’t see. There’s good inside of me, but I’d gotten blind to it. But after a while, you could start to see it, and then I could, too.

“I know what I done was wrong, and I wasn’t able to be truly sorry for it for a long time, but I’m sorry now, I truly am. And I’ve forgiven him for what he done to us. So that’s what you give me.”

She pressed her lips together and more tears started building up in her eyes.

The guards knocked on the door and then came in. “Sorry, Tommy,” one of them said, “but it’s time.”

Then all her tears started to run down her face, and suddenly I felt tears running down my face, too, but instead of feeling sadness, I felt like I had been washed clean of all the bad feelings I had ever known.

“Until next time, Ms. Marie. I’ll be waiting.”