We were already in the parking lot of a Residence Inn on the frontage road, so we followed a smudge of light that seemed to be the lobby and parked under the portico. I booked a two-bedroom suite, but that quickly seemed like an iffy idea so I changed it to a room for Stefan to give him privacy and one for me, not even on the same floor, because why would you want to share a suite with anyone, even your mother, especially your mother, on your first night out of jail? The rooms were generous vistas of downtrodden brown tweed carpet and the kind of overly pebbly white walls that could rip an elbow out of a sweater. Down the hall from Stefan was a woman herding three little girls and three miniature greyhounds, all of them yipping up a storm. A slight, pretty girl in a crop top and squeeze-tight leggings, her extensions coiled around her regal skull, gave us handfuls of emery boards and press-on nail kits as we passed her, sweetly sharing her fear that her home-salon event was going to be snowed out. I saw her heavily-kohled dark eyes sweep appreciatively over Stefan, saw him notice how she looked at him, and wondered if anything would have happened had I not been there. I almost regretted that I was.
Fluttering around Stefan’s room, I said, “This is awful.”
“Not to me,” Stefan said. “It’s heaven.”
The hotel had a sort of little convenience store in the lobby that carried a few things we would need to stay overnight, toothbrushes, bottles of water, the most cursory kinds of comfort food. Although it was only late morning, Stefan wanted the kind of meal he would have craved as a teenager. He flopped on the bed with a spoon and a carton of ice cream, H?agen-Dazs Rum Raisin, his favorite, which he had not tasted in years, and a microwave cheese pizza. As I sat across from him, drinking black coffee stirred up from the hot tap water and stingy little packets, he ate the whole pint of ice cream and three-quarters of the pizza and, and then, to his humiliation, threw it all up.
“I’ve been hungry for years,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
He looked so young. I thought of him on his first day of preschool, when he gravely explained that he no longer wanted his fried eggs flipped over. When he finished breakfast that morning so long ago, he said to me, “You know what, Mom? You’re my sunny-up egg.”
Now he told me, “In AA, they say the whole thing is to trust the process. You just do one thing at a time.”
“You went to AA? But you had regular group counseling.”
He was silent. Then he said, “No.”
“What? Stefan!”
“I had a half hour a week in the hospital, right after, right after Belinda. This doctor, he looked a lot worse than most of the patients, his face was all red and chewed up, like he had a sunburn, and he smoked in this windowless room, they all smoked like it was vitamins. And all the doc would say was, are you taking your medication? Are you having nightmares? Are you having thoughts of suicide? I said yes sometimes and I said no sometimes. He didn’t seem to care what I said. But in jail, there’s no therapy in jail, Mom. Not unless you’re in a maximum security nut place, like Mendota.”
“You said there was.”
“No, I never said there was. You just thought there was and I never told you anything different.”
“Is there other stuff like that?”
He said, “Yes.”
“You can go to counseling when you get home.”
“Okay. But not yet. I just have to sit here right now and be grateful I’m free. Like, I can go to sleep right now, and it will be dark and quiet all night.” He didn’t seem to notice the woman shouting at her kids and her greyhounds. There were many worst parts of prison, but one of the worse worsts he had shared with me on visits was the sobbing and screaming and rustling and laughing that went on all night, under lights that were never dimmed.
There was a surreal quality to this middle passage, neither here nor there, neither morning nor night. After we had purchased the clothing, picked up food and checked in to the hotel, the blizzard enclosed us like a glittering tower. Just as a big storm can feel comforting when you are safe in your own nest, this one felt isolating, hazardous, as if we were stranded at sea. Stefan ate and got sick and then the both of us were suddenly, simultaneously, exhausted. He wanted to nap, the cheap square laminate bedframe looking to him like a tropical paradise.
“Are you okay if I leave? Do you want to watch a movie or something together?” I said.
“I’m good. I’ll probably just sleep.”
I went to my own room. For some reason, you had to walk out into a courtyard to go up a floor. The snow fell steadily around me, more a column than a cloud, light and dark, metal and gem. Once inside, I sat on my bed, damp and shivering with nerves. I got out my phone and dialed up my Kindle and tried to read something, but by the time I got to the end of a sentence, I couldn’t remember the beginning. Finally I lay down, pulled the hood of my coat over my eyes like a tent. I must have fallen asleep myself, because later the knocking at the door hit me in the chest like a fist, and I gasped awake, rolling off the bed and stumbling onto the floor. I opened the door and Stefan stood there, snow spangling his hair.
“I can go out in a blizzard anytime I want,” Stefan said.
“Most people wouldn’t consider that much of a privilege,” I told him.
And he said, “Mom, it’s letting up. I thought I could sleep, but I can’t.”
“How come? Are you still sick to your stomach?”
“No, but there are all these crazy...noises. The heater keeps going tick tick tick like a bomb or something. You just settle down and then somebody slams a car door.”
A car door? How could that bother him after years of men wailing and banging on the pipes?
“I’m also just shaky. I still feel like I’m too close to The Hill.”
I flinched at the convict talk: The Hill was what prisoners called Belle Colline. Going down the hill, they said, when someone was freed. Jack and Jill went up the hill, they said when a convict got married. “What I really want is, I want to go home. Mom, please. Right now.”
I put on my shoes and jacket, unplugged my phone and charger, grabbed my purse and we left.
The blizzard wasn’t really letting up, but I thought the weather might get better the farther south we got. So we inched along the 320 miles at twenty miles an hour.
I will never be able to think of that nightmare trek as a “ride.”
A “ride,” even a long one, seems to me like something you do with cheerful purpose, like a biking event to raise money to defeat a disease—just as a “drive” is something you do with your grandparents on a summer Sunday.
This felt like a sort of rolling brawl, studded with strange thoughts and incidents.
At first, Stefan was chattering, apologizing over and over for wasting the hotel room and the food, me reassuring him, promising to make chicken noodle soup and homemade rye bread when we got home, although I could think of nothing more than lying flat on clean sheets when we got there. We stopped every torturous twenty or thirty miles, and I fell into frantic short bouts of sleep, then wakened to find snow mounded like bolster pillows against the windshield. We would get out and push the accumulation away with a plastic windshield brush until that soon broke. Then with the corner of a cardboard box I found in the trunk, and then when that got soggy, with our hands, because somehow, no one ever prepares for such a storm. The dashboard indicator read two below. So much for it being too cold to snow.
Start, then stop. Start, then stop, from noon until six that night.