The Bone Box

Birdy wanted to disagree with her long-lost cousin just then, but she knew he was probably right.

“Do you hear from your family?” she asked, regretting the question almost the instant it came from her lips. Birdy hadn’t meant it to hurt him, she just wanted to know. Tommy’s mother, her aunt, had pretty much iced her out of that side of the family-payback for her testimony.

He looked away at a little girl playing a card game with her father and Birdy answered for him.

“I’m sorry. I thought …” she said.

“Mom’s been married twice now. Somewhere along the way she’s been too busy for me,” he said. “Not like I’m a kid anyway.”

Birdy didn’t say so, but she understood. “I think I’ll get a Coke. Sure you don’t want one?” She looked at Tommy and a guard one table away. The man with a faint moustache and eager-beaver eyes nodded that it was okay for her to get up and go to the vending machines. Tommy followed her across the room filled with wives and girlfriends mostly, a few kids. Some passed the time playing checkers. Others read books in tandem like they were in some library for criminals.

Birdy inserted three quarters and the change tumbled to the coin return.

“Damn,” she said. “Must be out of soda.”

“Just tricky,” Tommy said. “I’m not allowed to touch the machine, but I’m told you have to drop the change in very slowly. One, then the next, then the last.”

Birdy did as he suggested and was rewarded with a cold can of diet soda.

“I’ll take one, too,” he said.

She looked over at the guard watching them. He nodded that it was all right for her to hand him the pop. She dropped three more coins and retrieved another can.

As Birdy turned, Tommy leaned a little closer and whispered, “I don’t want anyone to hear me. Please, Birdy. I need you to believe in me.”

“Are you being mistreated?” she asked, her voice as quiet as possible.

“Please return to the table,” the faintly mustachioed guard said.

Birdy felt a chill and it wasn’t from the icy cold soda.

“You’ve been up for parole twice,” she said. “Just tell them you’re sorry.”

“I didn’t do it. And if you don’t get me out of here, I’ll probably die here. I don’t want to die in this place.”

“You’ve served your time,” she repeated.

“Here’s something that might not have occurred to you. Prison is more than bars and the guards. Prison is how people see you. I have some honor, Birdy. Help me get home as a free man, a man who didn’t kill the girl. I never would have done that. Tell me you understand that.”

“I do. That’s why I’m here. I came because of your letter.”

Tommy looked confused. “What letter?”

“The letter you sent me. The reason I’m here.”

Tommy shook his head. “I’m glad you’re here, but I didn’t send a letter to you. I mean, I did write to you years ago, like I wrote to everyone. You know, asking forgiveness for what I’ve done. Part of the program.”

“I never got that letter,” she said. “The letter I’m talking about came last week.”

Tommy touched his chest with his forefinger. “Not from me it didn’t.”

They sat back down and faced each other. She hadn’t dreamt it. She’d read the letter. She’d come all that way. But if Tommy didn’t send it, then who did?

Birdy knew that she’d carried Tommy’s case in the Bone Box all those years for a reason. Deep down, she didn’t believe he really could have killed Anna Jo Bonners.

At the same time she wondered just why it was that he-or someone-called on her to help now. It would take only moments for that answer to come to her.

An alarm sounded and the visit was over. Just like that. There was an awkward quiet, like the conclusion of a first date when both parties know there will never be a second. Birdy wasn’t certain what she could really do, or why she should do it. Tommy and the other inmates stayed at their tables as the visitors filed out. Outside the visitation room, the forensic pathologist from the other side of the mountains lined up with the friends and families of Washington state’s most notorious.

It was obvious from their chatter that many knew each other. Regulars. The word fit. For the most part the people leaving their men and boys behind were so very average. There was nothing scary about any of them. Not a single one of them, save for a woman who never managed a smile, looked like they even knew a hardened criminal. They were the other side of a violent crime. They were on the side of the perpetrator, the convicted. Every one of them had come to show an inmate something they could get nowhere else-compassion and love.

Birdy, at the rear of the line, started for the corridor that would lead her out of the prison, out the door to lives where no one knew they’d spent four hours and a bag of quarters playing table games and talking about the dullest of things. Like anyone. Like people at home. That is, if home included a baby-faced rapist, an axe murderer who ironically worked in the prison kitchen as a meat cutter, and a seventy-year-old man who had strangled his wife of almost fifty years one Christmas morning with the very necktie she’d given him (“Bea knew I hated plaid,” he joked whenever the subject came up).

For every inmate with a visitor that afternoon, Birdy knew, there were probably scores of others who never had that human contact with anyone from outside. Never had visits with anyone, except maybe the occasional convict groupie or an eager-beaver churchgoer who wanted to save someone’s hardened soul from the system that only existed to make them pay for their sins in an earthly way.

And then there was Tommy.

As far as Birdy Waterman knew, until that afternoon when she came calling, he hadn’t had a single visitor. Birdy wondered if someone could be the same person they always were if they had no contact with those who knew him. Wasn’t part of who you were how others related to you, feeding your personality traits, shaping your character with their own? And yet Tommy still seemed like Tommy. A little subdued, certainly thin and haggard, but still Tommy nevertheless. During the visit he occasionally punctuated what he said with a short laugh-even if nothing was funny. When she heard the laugh, she was transported back to the Tommy he was before he became the Tommy who killed Anna Jo.

Birdy remembered how the two of them had spent one insufferably hot day picking huckleberries. They’d cursed how small the berries were and worried that they’d never get enough to fill that half-gallon container that her mother had insisted was required for a pie. It was a couple weeks before Anna Jo’s murder. Now it seemed like days ago, not decades. She and Tommy had picked and picked and picked for hours. When it looked like they’d never get enough berries, Tommy had the bright idea of buying some from a vendor.

“Your mom is too much of a stickler,” he’d said. “So let’s give her what she wants to make her happy.”

The berries cost him his last dollar, but he didn’t care.

Natalie Waterman did care. The berries they bought were not huckleberries, but blueberries.

“Sorry, Aunt Natalie,” Tommy said. “I thought they looked a little large for hucks.” He flashed his bright white smile, gave that little laugh, and shrugged in the way that just made it easy. Everything was easier with Tommy, back then.

As Birdy followed the queue and turned the corner toward the metal detectors and the glass-walled station where the guards monitored every blink of someone’s eyelash, a finger jabbed at her shoulder. It startled her.

“I know why you’re here,” a man’s voice said, as she spun around. “Maybe even more than you do.”

It was the same guard-the one who’d watched her and her cousin as they visited.

“Excuse me?” she answered, looking him over. She read his ID badge: Ken Holloway. He was smaller there in the corridor than he was when he commanded a chair upfront overlooking the prisoners in his quadrant of the room. He had soft green eyes and a pockmarked face. Not handsome, not ugly. Despite the fact that he carried a gun, worked with the worst of humanity day in and day out, Sgt. Holloway seemed concerned.

“Your cousin isn’t well,” he said.

“What do you mean well?” she asked.

The guard stopped walking. Birdy stayed with him as the other visitors shuffled toward the doorway. “It was all he could do to get out of his cell and get down to see you.”