Chapter 8 - The Muncy Visiting Room
The State Correctional Institution at Muncy sits among the rolling, wooded hills of central Pennsylvania, roughly three hours north of Philadelphia. From the highway, the perimeter fence looked like a silver line drawn across the gray winter landscape, crowned with coils of concertina wire that gleamed dull in the January sleet.
The non-contact visitation room was narrow, smelling of floor wax, industrial bleach, and stale instant coffee.
I sat on the steel stool behind the four-inch panel of scratched, bullet-resistant polycarbonate glass. My right arm was completely free of the sling now; two months of intensive physical therapy had restored the range of motion in my shoulder, leaving only a thin, pale four-inch silver scar running parallel to my collarbone.
The heavy steel door on the opposite side of the barrier buzzed and clicked open.
A corrections officer guided Vesper into the stall.
The transformation was so total that for five seconds, my brain refused to connect the woman in front of me with the creature who had stood on the stairs in a silk slip dress.
Her long, honey-blonde hair had been chopped into an uneven, chin-length bob by the intake barbers. She wore no makeup; her skin was pale, grayish, and mapped with stress acne along her jawline. The dark brown institutional jumpsuit with PA-DOC stenciled across the back in yellow block letters was two sizes too large, hanging loosely over her sunken shoulders. Her fingernails, once her greatest source of vanity, were bitten down to the quick, the skin around the cuticles raw and red.
She sat down heavily on the metal stool, picked up the black plastic telephone receiver with trembling fingers, and pressed it against her ear.
I lifted mine.
"Rowena," she whispered. Her voice sounded thin, dry, stripped of every trace of that melodic, manipulative purr she had used on our father. "You... you actually came."
"I brought the settlement papers," I said, sliding a manila folder against the metal ledge beneath the glass. "The district attorney agreed to accept a plea to aggravated assault without the attempted homicide enhancement, provided you execute a formal waiver of all claims against the family estate."
Vesper looked down at the folder, but she didn't touch it. Her eyes welled with large, heavy tears that spilled over her lashes, tracing wet lines through the gray pallor of her cheeks.
"It’s cold in here, Ro," she sobbed, pressing her forehead against the scratched plastic. "They turn the heat off at nine o'clock. The women... they take my bread at breakfast. They know what I'm in for. They found out about the recording... they call me the 'Staircase Girl.' They throw wet rags into my bunk."
I looked at her through the glass.
I searched within myself for the familiar, reflexive urge to fix it—the childhood conditioning that had made me clean her room, iron her blouses, and take the blame when she broke Mom’s crystal vase so that she wouldn't have to face our father’s rage.
There was nothing there.
The well of my forgiveness had run dry at the bottom of fifteen steps.
"You told me I should die, Vesper," I said, my voice perfectly level, carrying through the receiver with absolute clarity. "You knelt beside my head while my lung was collapsing, and you told me you wanted my estate."
"I was angry!" she cried, her voice cracking into a ragged scream that made the guard by the door shift his grip on his belt. "I was terrified Darien was going to leave me! You don't know what it’s like to feel like you're drowning, Rowena! You always had your books! You always had your little brain! I had nothing if I didn't have him!"
"You had a family that spent twenty-eight years sacrificing another child so you could play pretend," I told her. "You had parents who gave you an Audi while I bought ramen with a twenty-dollar gift card. You had everything, Vesper. And you threw it all away because you couldn't stand the thought that the girl in the basement was the only one who actually built something real."
Vesper stared at me through the glass, her mouth open, her chest heaving against the coarse cotton of her jumpsuit.
"Sign the waiver," I said, tapping the ledge with one finger. "Take the six years. Learn how to work with your hands. And when you get out at thirty-four, don't look for me. Because as far as the law, the money, and this world are concerned, Rowena Vance died on that marble floor."
May you like
I hung up the phone.
I stood up from the stool, buttoned my coat, and walked toward the steel exit doors without looking back through the glass. Behind me, the sound of Vesper’s weeping was cut off completely by the heavy, hydraulic slam of the security latch.
