Total pages in book: 115
Estimated words: 107254 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 536(@200wpm)___ 429(@250wpm)___ 358(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 107254 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 536(@200wpm)___ 429(@250wpm)___ 358(@300wpm)
My head goes back, and I close my eyes, her face haunting me, but not as much as that day so long ago.
“ID.” The man behind the glass window barked out his order. I took my wallet out of my back pocket, opening it and giving him my license. The plastic card fell into the silver drawer at the bottom where he reached in to grab it. Taking it out, he looked at my ID and then at me. “What inmate are you here to see?”
“Tricia Clarkson,” I said, my voice feeling like there was a frog in my throat.
He turned to his computer doing something. “Okay.” He dropped my ID back in the silver part, and I grabbed it back. “Wait over there. They’ll call you when it’s your turn.”
I nodded; my palms sweaty as I walked over to the side where other people were waiting as well. A couple of women waited with their children. A couple of men waited with their phones in their hands. I waited with my back against the wall, my heartbeat echoing in my ears the whole time.
I didn’t know how long I waited. It could have been five minutes like it could have been four days. “Visitor for Clarkson.” A man came out of the silver door, and I stepped forward.
“Follow me.” He turned, and I stepped with him through the silver door, coming face-to-face with a metal detector and a conveyor belt. “Empty your pockets.” He held out a plastic bin for me. “Place it on that.” He pointed at the conveyor belt. “Then step through,” he said, and I emptied my pockets, putting my car keys and wallet in the bin with my phone, before walking through the detector.
Another man stood there and did a once-over with a wand. “You’re good,” he said and motioned with his chin to the plastic bin waiting for me. “You can store your stuff in locker fifteen.”
I grabbed my stuff before walking over to the wall of lockers and putting it in there before turning to the man who walked me in and going to another door. He took his card and scanned it in before the door unlocked. He held the door open for me, and I walked down the empty yellow hallway with nothing on the walls. The lone door at the end, when we got to it. He waited a beat, and then it buzzed him open. “She’s going to be at number seven,” he told me, and I looked at him. “When you’re done, you have to press the white button, and we’ll let you out.”
I nodded at him, not sure what else to say to him. Walking in, I looked right and left, seeing ten chairs all lined up in a row. Three chairs were taken as I looked to see it was by number. I walked over seeing the glass separating the prisoners from the visitors, a phone on both sides with a brown counter in front of each. Exactly the way it was in the movies. I didn’t know why I thought it would be different. I didn’t know what I thought it would be, to be honest.
I saw the number seven on the corner of the glass, so I pulled out the chair and sat down, putting my hands on the top of the brown table in front of me. My foot rose and fell, my head telling me that being there was a mistake. Before I could get the fuck out, I saw a woman walking toward me. She was wearing white, her black hair still as I remembered it, falling around her face. She looked like she gained fifty pounds since she’d been in jail. She pulled the chair out and sat down, looking at me, and I had to wonder if she even knew who I was.
I picked up the phone, and she did the same. “Hello,” I said nervously.
“What the fuck do you want?” I looked down at my hand and laughed, not sure why I expected anything different from her. She wasn’t motherly when I was younger, and she definitely didn’t turn motherly in the past ten years that she’d been locked up. My earliest memory of her was throwing me across the room when I was crying because my father left to go to work and her telling me to shut the fuck up.
“I don’t know,” I answered her honestly. “I figured that I was finally of age to come and visit you and thought maybe you would want to see me.”
“Want to see you?” She put her head back and laughed, and the only thing I could think was that she was evil. “I’m trying to fucking forget you.” I didn’t say anything to her, and I wanted to kick myself for letting her words get to me. “Go to bed at night wishing you were fucking dead, or better yet, never fucking existed.”