Life Sentences (5 page)

“I volunteer at Saint Johns, Pilar, remember?” Celeste fidgeted with her pearl necklace.

“Saint Johns is a hospital where the rich go, not the people I see every day.” Pilar scraped the chair across the hardwood floor, secretly hoping to leave a gouge. She stood to face her father, seated opposite at the end of the twelve-foot table. As he adjusted his silk, handmade tie, Pilar made clear her feelings. “You could never understand the difference, or maybe, Father, you don’t want to understand.”

Marcus tried to regain his control when he answered, “Just because you’ve joined N.O.W. doesn’t mean you’ve learned anything, Pilar.”

Did he always think he could have the last word? Pilar’s jaw stiffened, “You’ve been reading my mail.” Her crooked smile showed as much scorn for him as she’d ever felt. “Can’t handle the fact that one of your GIRLS has found her own way in life? That I can be a damn good doctor despite the fact I won’t follow in your footsteps as you think a sonwould? Too bad. This is the twenty-first century.”

She studied her father. The deep lines from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth had turned into a permanent frown. She recognized a lifelong signal in the slight nervous twitch of his nose. He was truly uneasy. Maybe even he realized he’d crossed an unforgivable line.

Head bent, Celeste twisted her napkin in silent frustration.

Pilar felt for her mother’s distress. Yet she was also angry. How had Celeste stayed so long with that hateful, controlling man?

As Marcus lifted his wine glass, Pilar strutted to his side, curbing her urge to laugh at the time it took her to reach him in that obscenely long room. She stood as close to him as possible. Though he didn’t flinch or change the position of his erect back against the mahogany chair, Pilar towered over him and defiantly spit out, “And stay out of my mail.”

Celeste slapped the napkin on the table. “I’ve had enough of both of you,” she shouted.

Startled by her mother’s unnatural outburst, Pilar was tongue-tied, while Marcus nearly dropped his glass. For a moment neither seemed to know the woman at the other end of the table.

Celeste looked at Pilar, then Marcus, and stated clearly, “Neither of you can see beyond your own little world. You treat me like I don’t exist. Well, for your information, othersthink I’m worth something.”

“What are you talking about?” Marcus shouted.

“For the past year I’ve done more than volunteer at the hospital. I’ve put my college degree to work. I counsel battered women and rape victims.” Celeste stood and faced Pilar squarely. “The poor aren’t the only ones who are assaulted.”

Marcus’ face turned red. “No wife of mine …”

“I didn’t know, Mother,” Pilar interrupted. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Pilar never thought of Celeste as anyone but just her mother. And her father’s puppet.

“Would you have cared? Either of you? Look at your father, Pilar. He’s mad, not happy for me. But I’m more alive now than I’ve been in ages.”

“That’s ridiculous.” Marcus punched the table with his fist. The silverware bounced.

“Get over it, Father,” Pilar smirked. “It looks like you’re losing authority over both your girls.” Suddenly anxious to be out of the tension, she moved toward the door, cool, determined. Would there never be an end to this conflict?

“Pilar,” Celeste begged.

Pilar waved her hand in front of her face to let her mother know not to say anything else. Pilar wondered how she could have been so self-centered and blind about Celeste. “I need time to think. I don’t seem to know either of you.”

As soon as Pilar entered the hallway, she leaned her forehead against the wall. Guilt filled her, crown to toe, forfaulting her mother. Hadn’t Pilar always thought of her as a quiet, pliable person? Trained to be compliant at all costs?

“Mother’s right,” Pilar whispered. “I’ve not paid much attention to her. And here she is, taking steps to be in control of her own life.”

Still, she remained angry with her mother for putting up with Marcus for so long. Pilar vowed never to give into another for so many years. She banged through the door down the front steps, kicked the Mercedes’ front tire, threw herself behind the steering wheel and drove off.

M
OTORING ALONG
L
AKE
S
HORE
Road, Pilar let the natural world eclipse any thoughts she had about that evening. The sun reflected that brief pink moment in the east just before it disappeared for another day behind the western sky. As usual, that sensual union with the horizon raised Pilar’s spirits, but short-lived euphoria was replaced with the image of her father’s lips coupled with his wine glass.

Her father couldn’t behave any other way than he did that night at dinner. Yet at the very least he could have listened to her reasons for wanting to work with prisoners. He would have learned about the two incidents that were key to Pilar’s decision. First, she would have told him about Maria, a fifteen-year-old, barely four months pregnant.

In Pilar’s third month in ER, someone dumped Maria at the emergency entrance, like a bag of trash, with two bullets lodged in her abdomen. Maria clutched Pilar’s hand toher chest, familiar eyes pleading to save her. This time, she looked more like a fifty-year-old rather than a child. Maria was the same girl who had overdosed Pilar’s first weekend in ER.

Maria was a runaway and a prostitute in Cass Corridor. Her infamous pimp was known on the streets as Johnny Good Time. From the buzz in the emergency room, Maria hadn’t been his only victim. Johnny Good Time was unhappy with his women if they didn’t bring in enough money, pregnant or not. Watching the life fade from Maria, Pilar believed Johnny wanted to abort the baby and not kill off his income. But he used too many bullets.

Maria and her baby died before reaching the operating table. Maria’s death certificate read
Jane Doe A.K.A. Maria
.

That night Pilar decided to take a tour of the Corridor.

C
ASS
C
ORRIDOR, THE SEEDIER
part of the avenue that drew Pilar’s interest, was sandwiched between Wayne State University on the north end, and Cass Tech High School on the south end. The unlikely setting for both prestigious schools was about a mile west of Detroit Receiving. Drunks and addicts lurked in the alleys, slumped against buildings, and slept on doorsteps. Even though she could outrun the healthiest of them, Pilar didn’t feel safe. So, she chose to cruise the streets rather than walk. She needed to absorb as much as possible without the fear of being accosted, without anyone recognizing that, though ashamed about it, sheharbored some unpleasant, inherited prejudices. She didn’t think about the attention a new Mercedes would get in such an environment.

Brown-toothed teenage girls, some with children perched on hips, lingered in doorways of boarded up buildings. They took no precautions to hide the needle tracks in their bare arms, or the yellowed baby diapers that drooped from the unchanged load. Dressed in shorts that only covered half their behinds, halters or Spandex cropped shirts and four inch heels from Wal-Mart, they teetered toward possible Johns who exited the many decaying bars which lined the avenue.

It was hard to tell if any of the prostitutes had ever been pretty. Most looked like photographs of Appalachian women from the Depression – blanched, emaciated faces, vacant, weathered eyes, toothless mouths gumming cigarettes, and wisps of hair escaping from plastic clasps fastened at the back of their necks. Few Corridor women took the time to wear makeup. That’s not what a trick was looking for. The nurses in ER told Pilar that many hookers had all their teeth removed to enhance a trick’s oral sex pleasures. Pilar couldn’t believe it.

After several visits to the Cass Corridor, Pilar gained the courage to question Jodie, a teen prostitute, who was soliciting from the shadows of a condemned apartment building. Jodie had known Maria. “We all knows each other here,” she said as she swept one arm in front of herlike a magician at the end of his sleight.

Her welcoming expression quickly changed to suspicion. She crinkled her face into an extraordinary mass of lines. “You a parole agent?” she asked.

Pilar chuckled, “No. I’m a doctor.” But, she thought maybe she should have become a social worker.

Jodie tilted her head to the side, her brow furrowed into a huge valley above her nose. “What’s a doctor doin’ here? Ya with the health department? Because if ya are, this whole street should be quarantined.” Then she pursed her lips. “I take that back. If it was, whadda I do?” She glanced at the needle tracks on her arm.

On Pilar’s third visit, Jodie invited her to her room in a condemned structure next door to one of the bars. “Is it safe to go in here?” Pilar asked as Jodie slid a board to one side and crawled through the opening.

Once on the other side Jodie motioned Pilar through. “Sure. I live here, don’t I?” she answered as if that should be explanation enough for trespassing. “Besides, it’s a helluva lot safer in here than your wheels parked on the street. You be lucky the car’s there when ya get back.” She laughed, showing off the dark cavern that once held teeth. The nurse’s tale must be true.

Jodie’s apartment was on street level at the rear, so they avoided the ancient stairwell where steps were either rotted or gone. Pilar gagged when Jodie shoved the warped door open. The smells overwhelmed her — dirty diapers, unwashed dishes, and human waste. Pilar covered her nose. Flies swarmed unrecognizable chunks of food on plates left out on the table.

Gray, threadbare sheets covered a mattress in the corner. Spent syringes lay in complete view on the floor next to the bed. The table, one chair, and the mattress were the only furnishings. Jodie let her baby spill to the gummy floor as if he were a bag of laundry. A fleeting vision of Maria slumped against the hospital wall filled Pilar’s head, to be quickly erased by the horror of the baby crawling through the cockroaches and dried feces. Jodie was too high to care. Did Jodie bring her Johns here?

Jodie recounted that she, like Maria, had run away from an alcoholic mother who let her boyfriend teach Jodie about sex. She had just got back on the streets after six months in the county jail. “I can do six months easy, but them girls that go to Scott, that’s another thing all together. That’s hard time.”

As Pilar surveyed Jodie’s hostile environment, she was convinced that six months in any prison or jail had to be better than the Corridor. Or it should have been. The women’s prison had made the headlines and onto national news programs when inmates filed a class action suit against the state over the sexual abuse and harassment they endured at the hands of male guards. Even Geraldo Rivera did a special about abuse of women prisoners that featured Michigan. He reported that those women had few choicesbut to accommodate their keepers. Any harassment Pilar thought she faced paled in comparison.

“What happened to your baby while you were in jail?” Pilar asked.

Jodie’s head jolted up. Though she spoke with a drug-induced slur, she made it clear that Pilar had better not tell social services about her baby. “They’ll take Clifford away from me as sure as not.” Her face filled with intense distrust. “My social worker already took Cassandra, my three-year-old.”

Meeting Jodie inspired Pilar to read the special report by Amnesty International that Geraldo Rivera had referred to on his broadcast. Pilar was especially interested in the lengthy section on women in Michigan prisons. When she finished the report, Pilar was positive she could help those women.

The report also opened the guilt she felt about her friend Susan’s murder. Why had Chad Wilbanks picked Susan as his mark, and not her? More troubling, why hadn’t Susan told her about Chad? She and Susan had been inseparable at the University of Michigan, yet she had somehow failed her friend. She couldn’t help Susan now, but perhaps she could help others, including women prisoners. Pilar saw them as victims just like Susan. So, Pilar prevailed upon her medical supervisor to let her volunteer at the Scott Correctional Facility for Women once a week, when she got to her third year of residency and wasn’t on duty in the ER. Though a long way off, Pilar would use the time until then to gather as much experience as she could to aid those needy prisoners.

The other event that made Pilar decide to work in corrections was the night an ambulance brought in a walkaway from Northeast Corrections Center, a halfway house for men about to be paroled. He had jumped from a fourth-floor window, crushed his legs, and broke his arm. When Pilar met him, he was in traction and confined to a hospital bed in a private room. Both his legs were in casts attached to wires and a pulley that raised them about six-inches off the bed. His right arm, the only limb not in a cast, was handcuffed to the metal bed frame behind his head. The position of his shackled arm seemed uncomfortable for the prisoner. Each time he tried to reposition himself, he winced as his arm twisted in the chain.

Pilar asked the sheriff’s deputy who guarded the escapee why the patient needed to be cuffed when there was no way he was capable of leaving the hospital in his condition. The deputy simply shrugged and said, “It’s regulation.” His large lips flapped as moisture slipped from the corners. He shifted his body, which hadn’t seen exercise in years, so he could rest his feet on the bed rail. The lumbering motion strained the seams of his brown uniform pants. The prisoner’s face paled when the deputy’s heavy booted foot forced his body to bounce. The unconcerned guard never noticed.

Regulations, Pilar discovered, often appeared to get inthe way of humane and healthful treatment when it came to criminals and the poor. And in the case of the walkaway, he wanted to go back to prison rather than be paroled into the hell of eastside Detroit. The inmate’s eyes widened with terror when he told Pilar that. He wanted her to swear to him that he would not be put back on the streets. So, the handcuffing was a superfluous, bureaucratic mandate. That escapee was only going where he and the corrections department wanted him anyway — back inside the walls.

When Pilar’s residency ended, she joined the Michigan Department of Corrections. She was disheartened when she was denied a position to work with women prisoners at Scott Correctional Facility, a decision made despite the self-education programs she had developed on venereal disease, birth control, and breast exams. Maybe Warden Cooper at Scott was uneasy when she discovered Pilar, while volunteering at the prison, also counseled the inmates on their right of choice when it came to their bodies and partners. Cooper was a no-nonsense policy administrator and Pilar knew that kind of counseling wasn’t among any outlined by the MDOC. Yet Pilar had hoped that during the third year in her impeccable residency, her credibility would outweigh any uneasiness about her motives.