He walked down into the family room, mumbling as he approached me. Three blows, in rapid succession, landed against my chest. “Get up now!” he screamed, but he’d knocked the wind out of me and I couldn’t. He sat on top of me and spat in my face, smearing the spittle with his hand. Then he pulled me up by my hair and forced me to crawl across the floor and up the stairs to the kitchen. I sat on the floor, dazed and wheezing, as he fired plates of food at my head, and when I held up my hands to protect myself, I felt a painful stinging in my fingers from the impact. When I tried to crawl away, he took hold of my hair again and forced me into the living room, dragging me across the floor until we’d gotten to the place where he’d thrown up. Grabbing both sides of my head, he forced my face into his vomit. “Clean it up! Clean it up now!” he kept screaming. I gagged and gasped for breath as he pushed my face into the mess again and again.

  When he finally let me go, I stumbled to my feet and into the kitchen. My chest felt like it was on fire and my fingers were so swollen I couldn’t bend them. My throat was parched from crying. I grabbed a roll of paper towels and staggered back into the living room, trying as best I could to obey him. I got down on all fours and tried to clean up the mess, but I guess I wasn’t working to his satisfaction. He began kicking me in my rib cage and on my behind. “Fuck you. I’m going to bed!” he shouted. He stumbled up the stairs, disappearing down the hallway.

  I lay there on my back on the living room floor, staring up at the ceiling. Even after all this time, all the previous attacks, I felt stunned that he’d done this to me. It had been his most vicious assault. Tears streamed down my puffy face, and when I tried to move, my body wouldn’t let me.

  After a while, I made my way back to the kitchen. I could hear him snoring upstairs, so I knew I was safe, at least for the time being. I grabbed the large knife he’d been spinning and eased my bruised body back down to the family room. I slipped the knife under the couch cushion, wondering if I’d have the guts to use it if I had no other choice. After I’d collapsed on the couch, my sister whispered to me from behind the guest room door. “Lynne, are you okay?”

  “I’ll live.”

  “I was so scared for you, Lynne, but Corey told me not to call the police. We thought Paul might hurt you worse if I did.”

  “We need to keep quiet,” I said, careful to keep my voice low. “Go back to sleep, and I’ll see you in the morning.”

  In too much pain to fall deeply into sleep, I kept drifting in and out as I tried to figure out why all of this had happened. I didn’t want Andrea to see me so badly beaten, so early in the morning, I went into the downstairs bathroom and washed up. Looking in the mirror, I felt ashamed. I hadn’t wanted my sister to see the brutality I lived with, but the evidence was all over my face. My nose was bloody and crooked, my eyes and jaw were puffy, and a large bruise discolored my swollen left cheek. I hoped I could use makeup to conceal the damage. With my broken fingers, I could hardly hold the washcloth, but I did the best I could. My chest felt like it had a thousand-pound weight on it, and my right side was tender to the touch. As I made my way up to the kitchen, my toes screamed in pain.

  I cleaned up all of the food and dishes as best I could—and as quietly as I could, so as not to awaken either of them. Maybe if I cleaned up the evidence, we could all pretend it had been a nightmare. After finishing up in the kitchen, I went back downstairs, sat on the couch, and cried. Andrea got up at around eight o’clock and cautiously came out of her room. She took one look at me and said, “Oh my God.”

  We drank coffee and talked quietly. I kept repeating, “Why do I make him so angry? What am I doing wrong?”

  “You don’t do anything wrong,” Andrea said. “It’s not your fault, Lynne.”

  At around ten, Paul came down the stairs with a sheepish look on his face. I knew if I looked at him, I’d start to cry. He sat down next to me and began his familiar soft-spoken apologies. “I’m so sorry about last night, honey. I was a real drunken jackass. And Andrea, I’m sorry you had to hear all that.” When he caressed my face, I flinched. “I’m so sorry if I hurt you, honey. I was so drunk, I didn’t know what I was doing. But it won’t ever happen again. I swear to God.”

  I couldn’t respond—couldn’t even look at him.

  While Paul napped that afternoon, my sister and I sat on lounge chairs in the backyard, trying to absorb some sun. “Famous last words: it won’t ever happen again. Ha!” Andrea said. “You can’t keep living like this. I’m serious, Lynne. You should leave him and come back to Connecticut.”

  Every breath I took resulted in sharp pain, but I tried to hide how badly I was hurting. I didn’t want her to worry. I kept apologizing to her for ruining her vacation.

  The next day was Sunday, June 30, my birthday. Paul talked us into going out for brunch. I put on a lot of makeup to cover my bruises. I was hoping I looked normal, or at least presentable. After we ate, we took a drive up into the mountains. I barely spoke to Paul all afternoon. I didn’t feel much like celebrating—another year of pain, I thought. “Up there on the right is Idaho Springs,” Paul told Andrea, pointing to the place he meant. He’d been chatting with my sister all morning, trying to charm himself back into her good graces. “They have the caves and mineral baths and natural springs there. Remember what a good time we had there, Lynne?”

  “Yeah,” I said, staring out the opposite window. I was thinking about what Andrea had said: that I should leave him and move home.

  We took Andrea to the airport the next day. Paul waved to her with one hand, his other hand around my waist. We watched until her plane took off.

  We drove home in silence. I went downstairs and slept for several hours. When I got up around 10:00 P.M., Paul was already asleep in our bed.

  The next day he brought me roses and began another round of apologies. I hated myself, because I knew I was weakening. I wasn’t going to leave him. I loved him, and I was afraid of what he’d do to me if I tried to leave. Besides, I thought, he does seem genuinely sorry. I was sorry, too.

  That night, in bed, when he tried to touch me and kiss me, I felt nauseous. When I didn’t respond, he whispered, “I love you,” and left me alone. I cried softly, listening to his slow, shallow breathing as he slept.

  Without Paul knowing, I went to the medical clinic the next day to get my fingers wrapped. When the doctor accidentally touched my side, I winced. He took an X-ray: three broken ribs. He wrapped my fingers, wrapped my ribs. I had never been to this doctor before, but he urged me to extricate myself from my relationship.

  I cried in the car on the way home. I knew I was not going to follow that doctor’s advice and I hated myself for my failures, my weaknesses. Another small piece of my soul had died during my sister’s visit. I was more Paul’s discarded toy than his wife. I was his broken marionette.

  Falling

  BY ROBIN LEDBETTER

  A drop falls in slow motion.

  Breath, heavy from anger, hurt, confusion.

  Another drop

  Tears blur my vision.

  A faster drop

  Why do you do this to me?

  Drip drop

  I hate you!

  And then a rain storm falls, blood red

  What have I done?

  I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

  I love you.

  Please forgive me.

  Panic assaults me as blood falls like perfect rain.

  What the fuck? What the fuck? What did I do?

  I am afraid, but not because life spills.

  I am afraid of being alone.

  Please don’t leave me.

  The tears that have been threatening break free as

  I drop to my knees, towel in hand, and try to rub away my felony.

  I cannot be alone.

  I rub harder. Can’t breathe. Can’t keep up.

  Another wave of panic paralyzes me, forces me still,

  and I remember our first kiss,

  the falling head-over-heels in love.

  The joy. The peace.

  Finally, I’m complete.

  Then I remember each blow, every punch,

  every venom-soaked accusation.

  Every scratch, bruise, and scar.

  Every tear ’til now.

  I remember falling again, this time out of love.

  Yet as the floor grows redder, I am afraid only of being alone.

  It is I who have fallen.

  IV.

  Crime and Punishment

  Killer movies, violent television, and political hot air about “getting tough” on crime create heat and smoke that obscure the fact that prisons warehouse and destroy the lives of our most poverty-stricken Americans—people who would never spend a day in jail for the same crimes if they had economic resources.

  —KATHRYN WATTERSON

  Nothing lovely flourishes here. Little that is good is nourished here. What grows here is hypocrisy, obscenity, illness, illegality, ignorance, confusion, waste, hopelessness. Life in prison is a garden of dross, cultivated by those who never check to see what their crop is.

  —JEAN HARRIS

  People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.

  —JAMES BALDWIN

  Lost and Found

  BY ROBERTA SCHWARTZ

  The last time I slept over at my mother’s house was the night before my sentencing. In the morning, my mother got up early with me. I remember her standing in the doorway wearing her lavender velour bathrobe, even though it was July. She liked velour bathrobes with zippers down the front and pockets for tissues. The bathrobe was old, stained, and comfortable. “What can I make you for breakfast?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said, “I’m not hungry.”

  “How about a glass of juice?”

  The orange juice she gave me was freshly squeezed, the way she’d always squeezed it when I was a child. She hugged me as I left her house to go to court with my brothers, Mike and Joe. “Okay, so we’ll have a cookout tonight,” she said.

  “Fine,” I said, though I think that, intuitively, neither of us believed that cookout would happen.

  In spite of his faith, my boyfriend Alex also must have known I was going to prison. All the other times I had traveled back from Texas to Connecticut for court dates, he’d let me wear his watch so I would have something close to me that was his. The morning he was to drive me to the airport, I had sat on the edge of his bed, watching him brush his teeth. He had come and sat beside me, had held my hands, and looked into my eyes. Alex is such a sweet man and has the most beautiful, soulful eyes. When he asks me why I love him, I tell him, “Because when I look into your eyes, I can see into your good heart.”

  “I’m proud of you,” he’d said that morning.

  “I don’t want to go.”

  “You’ll be back in a week.” He’d held my head to his chest to reassure me. But he hadn’t reminded me to take his watch with me and I hadn’t asked.

  I didn’t call Alex the morning before I left my mother’s house for the sentencing hearing. I was afraid it might show a lack of faith—that if I called, I would go to jail. I drank the orange juice, took a shower. I had the TV on, the YES Network. An avid Yankees fan, I was watching the rebroadcast of a Paul O’Neill “Yankeeography.” Joe, the older of my two brothers, came in and turned off the television. “What do you want me to tell Alison and Laura?” he asked.

  “Tell them I’m in Texas,” I said. “Tell them whatever you think is best.”

  I turned the television back on. Paul O’Neill and Yankees broadcaster Michael Kay were my friends. They’d been with me almost daily since 1998, and I felt safer with them there. Joe left the room. He’d have to figure out for himself what to tell his daughters.

  Joe was dressed for court in a navy blazer, khakis, a yellow dress shirt, and a tie. Mike, my younger brother, wore a pinstriped suit, still looking like a lawyer though he wasn’t practicing at the time; his health problems and my legal entanglements were about all Mike could handle. Joe drove. His willingness to go with me to court had surprised me, but I knew he was really there more for my mother and Mike. We didn’t argue in the car, or about the parking space on Main Street, a few blocks from the courthouse. This was unusual because we were a bickering family. We picked at each other, little nits.

  I was wearing a black sleeveless shell dress to the knee and a long-sleeve long jacket, about an inch longer than the dress. My mother and I had found this suit in Lord & Taylor at the Trumbull Shopping Park, and it had been my favorite outfit until I’d worn it over the previous six months to my arrest, my arraignment, my divorce, and my presentencing conferences. I knew I was wearing these clothes for the last time today. I’d bought my black suede pumps at Wal-Mart the previous January for a wedding. I wore them all the time because they made me feel more confident. Shoes can sometimes do that for me: make me feel better about myself. Because it was July, I wasn’t wearing stockings. I was about fifteen pounds overweight so the dress felt tight. As I’d gotten older, I’d gained weight around my stomach, and it had made me angry and self-critical. I’d pulled my shoulder-length hair into a ponytail and had not put on makeup or jewelry. This is why, in spite of the faith I proclaimed that God would send me a miracle, I think I must have known I was going to prison: no jewelry. Still, I hoped the sad, tired, pudgy, middle-aged, no-makeup look would show who I was: a woman who deeply regretted all she had done.

  As I walked down the block between my brothers, everything looked different. But it was I who’d changed; I was a different person heading to court as a criminal than I had been as a lawyer working in Bridgeport. I’d become like the city itself: scandal-ridden, stumbling along, trying to rebuild. Walking through the courthouse doors, I felt like everyone could see the words branded across my chest: liar, cheat, drug addict, thief. I was relieved when we got into the empty elevator that would take us to the third floor, but just before the doors closed, a woman I knew stepped in. “How are you?” Liza asked.

  “Fine, thanks.” My brother pushed three and the elevator rose.

  Liza’s husband was the son of my father’s best friend. When she’d gotten married and moved to town, she’d come to my father’s law firm because she couldn’t find a job. She hadn’t been very happy then, and I’d felt badly for her. My father had asked me to teach her how to do real estate closings. Now she was successful, the mother of twins, and I was a fat convicted felon about to be sentenced. During that endless thirty-second elevator ride, my humiliation was nearly unbearable. “Good luck today,” Liza said. She knew, of course. Everyone knew.

  My lawyer was waiting by the courtroom door. We went in and I sat on a hard wooden bench in the second row. A few moments later, Bernie Green walked in. Bernie was a well-respected lawyer and a personal friend of my uncle, and he had been a business friend of my late father. He was also the father of a man I’d once loved—a man who’d liked me well enough but had not been able to love me back. Tears came to my eyes when Bernie sat down beside me and patted my shoulder. He had come out of the kindness of his heart.

  The man I’d stolen from was also there, and though this sounds strange, I believe he, too, had come out of the kindness of his heart. I’d written a twenty-page sentencing statement to explain what had happened to me; how my father’s death had overwhelmed me with grief and depression; how I’d continued to work in his office trying to save everything he had worked on; how I’d gone forward with marriage plans that should have been postponed or canceled. My statement explained how I’d begun writing checks, how I had taken drugs until they’d taken over my life. I suspect my victim felt both anger and pity toward me. We had known each other as children. Now he was president of his father’s company, my father was dead, and I was probably going to prison.

  I think the scariest thing I ever did was the thing that may have saved me. I’d been writing checks for fees to myself for about four years, and because I was using cocaine round the clock at that point, I was just barely functioning and covering up. At first, I’d been getting the legal work done but not the paperwork—the keeping track of time and billing. Near the end, I’d been managing to work only the bare minimum, covering the real estate closings, returning phone calls haphazardly. I needed money for the drugs, or for whatever my husband, Denny, wanted money for, or to keep my mortgage afloat and pay my office expenses. It had started innocently enough: I’d written a check for fees I was owed. It was a Friday and I had to pay my secretary, so I told myself I would bill on Monday. But Monday never came. It had been a slow thing—never a plan, never anything I’d meant to do. Yet I’d done it over and over. If there wasn’t enough money during the week from real estate closings, I’d write checks for more fees due from other matters, intending to bill later. Then I’d started inventing matters that needed to be billed. There’d been other things as well: a bank had mistakenly sent me closing proceeds twice and I’d neglected to return the second payment. I’d failed to put the funds from an estate settlement into an interest-bearing account. When finally I was pressed to return the loan proceeds and closing funds, there was the escrow from the condominium development to draw from. The reason I hadn’t sent the money back at first, or set up the interest-bearing account right away, was because I’d kept telling myself I would do it the next day. “I’m going to do it” became my mantra of denial when, in truth, I was rushing through whatever I had to do to get through each day so that I could go home, walk my dog, lie on my bed, watch sports, smoke cigarettes, and keep myself medicated with cocaine, and, later, OxyContin. When I was drugged, I didn’t have to think about my deceased father, or the mess of my marriage, or how I had not been able to save everyone and fix everything.

  Here’s how I was finally caught. Darren, a company vice president, met me at my office early in the morning to pick up a check for money I owed his firm for the sale of three houses. I knew this was it, but I didn’t know how to confess. Darren accompanied me to the bank but waited outside while I went in for the money, half-hoping the funds would miraculously appear in my account. Telling this now, I feel again the horror and fear in my chest as I went back outside to face him. “I don’t have the money,” I said. We returned to my office. When he picked up the phone to call the man I’d stolen from, I asked if I could speak to him in person. Darren agreed, so I got in my car and followed him from my office in Bridgeport to the company offices in New York. The day was bright and sunny. I weighed about ninety pounds and looked like a concentration camp victim. I chain-smoked cigarettes and snorted cocaine the entire ride. I was still doing coke, but I had begun detoxing from the pills. My heart was pounding; I could hear its thump in my ears. I was such a mess that I didn’t fully understand the consequences, but I remember wondering if I would be arrested then and there. Seated in the company’s conference room, I told my victim how I’d written checks on his escrow money. He was shocked, both by what I’d done and the amount of money involved. After he’d sufficiently recovered, we made a plan: I would give him all the money left in my business escrow account, sell my house, give him a mortgage on a share of a building that was to have been part of my inheritance, and resign from the bar immediately. In return, he would not have me arrested. But I’d been arrested after all, six months later, by the state; I was a lawyer who had become a thief and I had to be punished. The weekend I was arrested and arraigned, I was also divorced. Denny had left me while I was in rehab and I had moved to Texas and gone into recovery.