Chapter 11 - The Visitation Behind Glass
By Thursday of the second week, they had moved me out of the intensive care unit into a private recovery room on the third floor of the maternity wing. The room had a heavy steel door with an electronic card reader and an armed sheriff’s deputy sitting on a metal stool outside, checking the credentials of every nurse who entered with an antibiotic drip.
The skin on my back was no longer raw meat. It had hardened into a thick, purplish-black carapace of scar tissue, crossed with the thick keloid ridges where the thirty-two stripes of split rattan had torn through the fascial planes. Dr. Kincaid had removed sixty-eight fir splinters from the front of my abdomen, but the transverse friction burns remained—a permanent, four-inch-wide belt of blackened tissue circling my belly like an iron hoop.
"Clara," Sarah said, walking into the room with her overcoat over her arm. "Warren’s attorney has requested an emergency deposition. Warren wants to see you."
"No," Martha said immediately from the window, where she was peeling an orange with a small pocketknife. "She doesn't see that bastard until he’s standing in the dock."
"He has a statutory right to request a formal reconciliation conference under the old domestic relations law before the indictment is certified," Sarah explained, her voice low and calculating. "Sterling thinks they can use it to establish that Warren was acting under duress from his mother. He wants to put Warren on the record begging for forgiveness, claiming he was brainwashed by Evelyn since he was seven years old."
I looked down at my hands. The fingernails had grown back, but the skin around the cuticles was still rough, stained with the gray residue of the gravel ditch where I had dragged myself to the truck. Inside my belly, my daughter moved—a sharp, sudden turn of her limbs that pressed against the scar tissue with a fierce, living weight.
"Bring him," I said.
Martha dropped her knife. "Clara, have you lost your mind?"
"Bring him to the closed visitation room on the ground floor," I repeated, my voice steady, stripped of all tears, all fear, all the weakness they had spent five years breeding into me. "Put him behind the three-inch polycarbonate glass. Let him speak through the steel grille. I want to see what is left of the man who held my head down in the wood."
Two hours later, they wheeled my chair into the secure interview booth in the basement of the county courthouse.
Warren sat on the other side of the partition. He had lost fifteen pounds in ten days; his orange jumpsuit hung from his collarbones like a sack over fence posts. His hands were cuffed to a chain around his waist, the steel links clinking against the stainless-steel table whenever he drew a breath. His thick forearms—the arms that had held drainage pumps and pinned my shoulders—were covered in nervous scratches where he had dug his own nails into the flesh.
He picked up the heavy plastic telephone receiver with both hands, his knuckles trembling violently.
I did not pick up my receiver. I leaned forward, resting my elbows on the laminate ledge, looking directly into his watery, bloodshot eyes until he was forced to drop his gaze to the scarred partition.
He tapped the glass with his knuckles, gesturing desperately toward the telephone on my wall.
Talk to me, his lips shaped through the thick plastic. Clara, please. Talk to me.
Slowly, using my left hand, I lifted the black plastic phone to my ear.
"Clara," he cried, his voice breaking into a wet, desperate sob that sounded like grease spattering on an iron griddle. "You have to tell them. You have to tell the district attorney that it was Mother. Mother made me do it, Clara! She’s been doing it since I was a boy! If I didn't hold you, she was going to take the timber rights away, she was going to write Thomas into the deed, she was going to leave me with nothing!"
I listened to him panting through the line, listening to the small, pathetic rattle of his fear.
"You sat on my back, Warren," I said. Every word was cold, measured, dropping into the receiver like lead shot down a dry well.
"She gave me the orders!" he screamed, his face pressing against the glass until his nose flattened into a pale, greasy oval. "She had the cane! She mixed the brine! I didn't want to use the pepper, Clara, you know I didn't! I told her the truck was in the lane, I told her the driver might see, but she wouldn't listen! She said you had to be broken before the child came, or the child would belong to your people!"
"The child will belong to my people," I said softly.
Warren froze. His eyes widened, staring through the glass at the bulge of my belly under the clean hospital gown.
"What... what did you say?"
"Tomorrow morning, Judge Van Horn is signing the termination of your parental rights," I told him, each syllable hitting him with the force of an unplaned timber. "You will never see her face. You will never know her name. If you ever speak her name in the exercise yard at Dannemora, your fellow inmates will know that you held a woman six months into her term down on a fir slab while your mother rubbed red pepper into her open meat."
Warren began to shake his head violently, his mouth opening in a silent howl of denial, his cuffed hands rising to beat against the polycarbonate pane with dull, booming thuds.
"You can't do that!" he shrieked through the line. "I’m a Vance! My father cleared the river lot! That child carries my father's blood!"
"Your father's blood is in the drainage pit under the tractor bay, Warren," I said. "And the state police are digging up the pump house floor with a backhoe as we speak."
May you like
I hung up the receiver.
I did not look back as the guard wheeled my chair toward the elevator. Behind me, through the reinforced steel door, I could hear Warren Vance screaming my name, his fists hammering on the bulletproof glass until the emergency alarms in the corridor began to wail their dry, mechanical warning into the cold fluorescent light.
