Sometimes I think Rob McNally and I shared the same kind of need for Ryan. Although fortitude for his clients was depleted, I hoped his patience for me never would be. I tried to behave, to respect moral decency, to want less, to count my blessings, and I hoped he’d never express disappointment in my choices as he did with McNally. A few months passed after the New Year before McNally called Ryan again, this time with somewhat surprising news. He’d met a girl, fallen in love, and was living on her hog farm in Missouri.
“I quit the junk, man,” he said. “I’m clean.” Whether McNally was clean or not and, if so, for how long, we’d never know. Shortly after this phone call, he turned up back in the Winnebago County Jail. According to him, an “associate” down in Missouri threatened to turn McNally in to the cops if he didn’t keep supplying him with meth. When the cops showed up at the hog farm, they were able to quickly identify Robin Marks as Rob McNally. A warrant was out for his arrest. Now he faced the meth charges alongside charges for violating the conditions of his bond. He’d end up serving two years in prison with three years’ extended supervision upon his release.
Conversations about prison center on the likelihood of rehabilitation and recidivism rates. McNally was certainly the quintessential revolving-door criminal. I’ve often wondered what kinds of pleasures kept him afloat when he was serving time. Was it possible that this girl in Missouri had fixed him, at least temporarily? They say meth and love both manifest as euphoria. They release dopamine in the brain and signal pure felicity.
“Would you ever think about ending the pregnancy?” I had asked Ryan, shortly after the Fourth of July, worried still that he might be mad or resentful, holding back his anger for some surprise attack. Of course, nobody I knew used the a-word. Abortions were not something we admitted to considering, even among liberals and women’s rights activists. People did not imagine such procedures; they simply performed them in secret.
“I would never want to destroy something we made together,” he said, as if the line had been scripted, but I also knew he meant his devotion to me. In that moment, love was an elixir, a magic potion, a drug, and whenever we expressed it openly, I felt like I’d popped a happy pill or begun to buzz with warmth.
But when my miscarriage was complete, when the summer of love failed to produce a viable baby, Ryan was also relieved. His heart could always clear space for another baby, but nothing in his rational brain had budged regarding our responsibility tally. Children were stressful, expensive, and exhausting. My midwife told me to wait a few months before trying to conceive again, believing we’d planned our June conception, but I knew I’d struggle convincing Ryan to “try again” when we hadn’t tried in the first place.
I rejected the recommended waiting period, fretfully aware of women in the world who’d lost babies after much greater investment and bided their time. The urge to replace, repair, redo was stronger than the urge to make a baby from scratch, and in those few weeks of viability, I’d been reminded of my baby cravings. I’d been hooked back in, and I admittedly felt desperate. Whatever happened to the woman at Koreana, ready to move on in life, to bigger, less sacrificial things?
Then Ryan said, “Maybe it was a sign we’re not meant to have another baby.”
In other words, he would love whatever we made but was not sure he could knowingly do it again, aware as he was, the transcripts of his arguments still logged in recent memory. My miscarriage had consumed me with self-indulgent grief while it had freed him from the burden he was willing to but no longer required to accept.
My purple Avett Brothers T-shirt would become the garment I’d associate with miscarriage. I had imagined the thin fabric stretching over my abdomen, that convex dome where my baby would incubate until early spring. In Milwaukee, only twenty-four hours after confirming the existence of a baby we imagined keeping, I had leaned against Ryan and faced the music, just as Ryan faced the unexpectedness of our fifth pregnancy with love and willingness. But by August, Summerfest became a distant memory, and I had become unwilling to face the sad song my body played. My heart was beating, but my stomach was not. Ryan’s job was convincing his clients to face the music, in a courtroom, before a judge or jury. “You’ve committed this crime,” he’d tell them. “The only way to take matters back into your own hands is to accept responsibility and the kinds of conditions that will help you turn your life around.” If he could convince the most obstinate, drug-addicted, mind-altered of his clients, could he convince me too?
At one point, after Agnes Jacobson “kidnapped” her son from the Winnebago County Jail and drove him across county lines on their afternoon joyride, Ryan had assured Agnes and his client, Wyatt Jacobson, that as part of his two-year prison sentence for all his heroin-related offenses, he would be afforded the opportunity to shorten his stay in the big house by participating in a rehabilitative program designed for nonviolent drug addicts. In fact, Jacobson was accepted into the St. Croix State Correctional Center, known for its Challenge Incarceration Program, where physical activity, military training, and manual labor, along with drug counseling, might rehabilitate him.
But more than halfway through his effective completion of the program, he and two fellow convicts escaped from the minimum-security facility. We saw it on the news, Jacobson’s mug shot pressed up against the
