Nicolai Houm - The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland

She shifted position, picked up the phone, and carried on listening to the voice. The chaplain had another question on his mind.

“Perhaps this is too much to ask? I’m not even putting the request as a preliminary question. I simply pass it on.”

Jane longed for a feeling she could do something with.

“He is very anxious to talk to you. Naturally, I will be present.”

Her voice grew out of the darkness. “I’ll do it if I can see him alone.”

“No problem at all, this isn’t a high-security institution.”

The following Tuesday, Jane parked by the side of the road near a tall blue-painted water tower a little way from the prison, and waited there while the shadow of the tower moved across the car and into the edge of the forest.

The visiting area was a café run by the prison inmates. Jane’s cup of coffee was presumably charged to Scott Myers’s account. Myers ordered nothing for himself. Jane sat opposite him at a picnic table outside the café. Between them on the table lay a key on a loop of white string. Myers had grown paler but also bigger. As if he had been to a training camp, Jane suggested. That extra weight must be an advantage on the field.

“I got sixteen years, Mrs. Ashland. I will be forty-one when they let me out.”

One year older than Jane was at the time.

“They tell me you’ve been trying to hang yourself.”

He nodded slowly.

“Is it the slipknot you can’t get right?”

Myers searched her face and eyes for a sign of humor. Jane knew he would find nothing. Other people served as mirrors, and, in their blank faces, she saw reflections of her own baffling lack of expression. There was something wrong about the fit between what she said and what she looked like, a disconnect that upset people profoundly. Deep down, they felt impelled to exclude her from the flock. Jane knew she was close to losing her already tenuous grasp of how to be human.

“It wouldn’t have been so difficult at home in the garage but they take everything away from you here,” Myers said.

At a neighboring table, a Latin American family nearly filled the quota of six visitors. Two teenage daughters picked unenthusiastically at a casserole dish and responded in single syllables when their mother urged them to join in the conversation. A little boy had climbed up onto the lap of the prisoner and was hitting his chest with his fists. The sky above was wide open, contradicting the idea that one place should be shut off from another.

Jane put the coffee cup down and fixed her eyes on the clay-like dregs.

“Where do I come into this?”

“I wondered if you could forgive me, Mrs. Ashland.”

“Ms.”

“What?”

“Ms. Ashland. I am a widow. Besides, it is usually regarded as sexist to define a woman by her marital status.”

“Oh. Sorry.” Myers held out his hands.

He had no idea what she was on about.

“So, you believe it would be helpful if I forgave you?”

Myers raised his large hands to his face and kneaded his cheeks and his greasy forehead.

“It might make some things easier for me,” he said.

He was large and sheepish. Jane thought he was a beast harboring all kinds of lusts, imagined him grunting on the football field and making coarse comments about the cheerleaders. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she wanted to think he had violated Julie.

He placed his large hands on the table and pushed the key around in little circles.

“I see. You feel that it’s my job to make things easier for you?”

“No, Ms. Ashland.”

Myers kept looking over his shoulder. There was nothing to see except a soda machine against a cement wall. She registered suddenly that he was trembling inside his green jumpsuit.

“I can’t feel free, if you see what I mean, not free for real , but free inside my head. It’s not about being locked up here. But I’m scared all the time that I’ll go crazy.”

“Join the club,” she said in a low snarl.

“I didn’t mean it like that, Miss Ashland.”

“Ms.!” A noise like a snake. “The s is sounded. It’s not the same as Miss .”

“Yeah, sorry.”

Myers turned his head toward the vending machine again.

“What’s up?” Jane asked.

He quickly turned back to face her.

“Why do you keep looking over there?”

“I don’t know, Ms. Ashland.” He started to fiddle with the key again. “But I think it would be easier to feel remorse properly and really take my punishment if I don’t go sick in the head. If I managed to think the right things. You see, she’s there all the time. With me.”

“Who is?”

“Your daughter.”

The Latino family was being told off; Jane heard the guard go on about hands being visible. When the guard turned his back to them, one of the teenage girls did something that made the whole family laugh quietly until the little boy burst out laughing too.

“What about Greg? My husband? Do you keep thinking about him?”

“I don’t know, Ms. Ashland. No, I don’t. Not as much, anyway. Sorry. I am sorry about that. You see, it’s like I see her all the time. She’s lying there.”

“Julie?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have a problem with saying her name?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I haven’t said it ever before. I feel bad about that, Ms. Ashland.”

“Can you stop saying Ms. Ashland in every fucking sentence?”

“Yes.” Tears were beginning to well up in his eyes.

“Don’t cry!” Jane said. She got up and stood with her hands on the table. The guard slowly looked their way.

“Sorry, Ms. Ashland.” Myers swallowed and clenched his jaw muscles and then looked the other way when he could no longer hold it back. Small sobs kept escaping.

“Stop it!” Jane hissed.

Shameful memories made her turn away. She remembered the times she had treated Julie like this and then forbidden her to cry. Like the midmorning playground session in Olin Park, when Julie had fallen from the monkey bars but Jane hadn’t seen it happen and thought the crying was just attention-seeking.

Oh god, these burning cheeks. How they triggered pangs of anger. She wanted to make him lick the ground. He was as stupid and innocent as a bull calf. She could make him do anything. And it struck Jane that the evil in her mind now exceeded whatever had been in his at the moment when he killed Julie.

“So, if I forgive you, you won’t hang yourself?”

Myers slumped in his seat, his reddened face sagging between his massive shoulders. As he began to speak to her his eyes rolled upward, but when his gaze surfaced it cracked and dissolved into thin air. It was similar to his courtroom behavior but not quite the same.

“There are these things inside my head that I don’t get… but I’m not really crazy. They say it’s because I can’t sleep. Like soldiers, they’ve found it out in research. But if you said you didn’t hate me then I could remember that every time I think about…”

“Julie?”

“Yes. Like, instead of. Because I think about her almost all the time. That’s why I’m training hard.”

Jane was approaching a boundary. She hadn’t uttered so many consecutive words for a long time. The visiting time must be almost over. She was going to check the time on her watch, but it was of course in a locker at the security gate, together with her wallet.

“Can you say it, Ms. Ashland?”

It came out at once: “I forgive you.”

Myers was picking at the key again.

“What’s the matter?” Jane asked.

“It didn’t sound as if you meant it.”

“I don’t mean anything I say, Scott.”

She had addressed him by his name. Why had she used his name?