Part 40 (1/2)
”They won't let him visit. The court won't. Not until he's fourteen. If your article can do anything for me maybe it can at least do that. Get them to allow us to at least see each other now and then.”
Secretly the reporter doubted that it would. She felt that Lydia Danse was still fighting a losing battle with the system. But she wasn't going to say so. This was a woman who had already failed in one appeal for clemency. She couldn't imagine how trapped she must feel. The reporter wasn't going to add to that.
”How many years before you're eligible for parole, Lydia?”
For the first time during the interview her eyes flashed bright with anger.
”Fifteen years,” she said.
”Before parole is even possible?”
”Yes. Robert will be twenty-four. A man. I'll have lost the rest of his childhood. All of it.”
Her eyes said she'd been cheated in a nasty game that was never of her making and that she knew it. What Lydia Danse had been through and was still going through seemed to press in on the reporter like an invisible heavy weight. A kind of push. It was personal.
What would I have done in the same situation? she thought. What would any woman have done?
The reporter had seen Robert's tape and knew he was telling the truth about his father. She believed the tape completely.
She thought that Lydia Danse had walked through fire and that the fire was still burning.
She felt suddenly ashamed at simply being able to leave this place. At being able to walk free on the outside while this woman whom she suspected was far stronger and braver than she was wasn't free and probably would not be free-not for a very long time. And for being part of a world that had put her here.
Fifteen years.
She didn't know what to say.
Unless something happened to change things Lydia Danse would be a woman approaching old age.
My G.o.d.
”How do you ... I don't know how to say this but ... G.o.d! How do you live with that? How do you possibly bear it?”
She watched Lydia draw herself up in the hard metal chair.
”Robert's with Ruth now,” she said, ”he's with his grandmother. The very same woman who raised his father. Who broke the law allowing Arthur to stay there in the first place. For some insane reason the courts decided Arthur forced that on her and would rather give custody to her than to my sister Barbara, basically because Barbara's single.
We're fighting that and I don't like it one d.a.m.n bit but that's not the point. The important thing is that the men in that family are all dead. That n.o.body's pointing guns at anybody anymore. The important thing is that I know Robert isn't being abused by his father anymore, that he's safe. That's the one good thing I can see coming out of ... all of this. If it weren't for that I'd probably go crazy. But I have that much, anyway. He's safe.”
Even the matron was looking at her openly now in what appeared to be a kind of stony empathy.
”I have that much,” she said.
The reporter found that she could think of nothing more to say.
She's just fallen through the cracks, she thought. Another one the system's failed to protect. This one had fallen deeper and harder than any she'd met-yet look at her, she thought. She's refusing to be buried by it all. She wants out, yes. Badly. Of course she does. Yet something in her clearly remained uncirc.u.mscribed by dull gray walls and bars and empty looks and all the monotony of her days. Something which stood outside these walls, in the mind and body of her son-and grew there, with her and without her.
It was a waste. It was a G.o.dd.a.m.n crime.
The reporter could despair for her and feel for her and knew that she would do exactly that in anger and in cold print for the audience of a major national magazine just a couple of weeks from now. But Lydia Danse was not despairing.
She's done the right thing, the reporter thought. And she knows it. No matter what anybody thinks.
There's a n.o.bility in that.
There's grace.
The reporter realized that Lydia Danse was gazing deeply into the reporter's own troubled eyes and knew that the interview was over.