Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3

After mercilessly slaughtering an allegedly helpless stuffed dinosaur until it is nothing but a few shreds of green and purple fabric, a frenzied mess of stuffing, a tangle of wires, and a smashed sound box, I feel much better and I’m able to get a few more hours of sleep.

After I’ve woken up, showered, and gotten dressed, I make my way—as Zeke had known I would—to visit my mother, relying on L.A.’s crappy public transportation system since I am currently Porsche-less. Whenever I do make one of these pre-assignment visits, I always feel guilty, because I feel like the prison guards should know me better than they do. If I were a better daughter, the guards and I would all be on a first name basis and they would wave at me all friendly-like whenever I came to visit, not even bothering to check my identification since they see me so frequently.

As it stands, however, they are practically strangers to me. I recognize some of their faces—the ones who have been around forever and do not fall into the turnover epidemic of the prison system—but they only barely recognize me. It’s just as well, though. I don’t need more people recognizing me than necessary—especially law enforcers.

Normally when I visit my mom at the prison, there are only the usual security guards on duty, and maybe a cop or two there on business. The parking lot is often fairly empty. But today is different. As soon as I arrive, I notice the parking lot is crammed with cop cars. The visitors’ entrance is a bustle of activity, also. Prison guards, administrators, and L.A.P.D. officers are going in and out, in and out, talking in hushed voices. It takes almost five minutes before I can get the attention of the guy at the check-in desk.

“I’m here to see Rebecca Killian, please,” I say, once I have finally secured his attention.

“Killian. Right. Sign here. And I’ll need to make a copy of your driver’s license,” he says, passing the clipboard under the glass to me. I notice he seems to be sweating—out of nervousness, I assume, as the AC in the visitors’ lobby keeps the room quite cool.

“Somethin’ going on here, today?” I ask, fishing for information, as I hand him my forged driver’s license.

“‘Fraid I’m not allowed to talk about it,” he says as he takes back the signed clipboard and my fake ID.

Figured as much, but it was worth a shot.

“Here you go,” he says, returning my ID to me along with a visitor’s identification badge. “Just through there—”

“Yeah, I know the drill,” I tell him, and head to the door he indicated.

The guard at the door scans my visitor I.D., and lets me into the next room, where I have to pass through the metal detector. There are more guards on duty today than normal, one of whom quickly pats me down after I’ve walked through the detector, even though the alarm didn’t sound—another out of routine extra precaution. The guard is a little over-attentive with his pat-down, but I resist the urge to knee him in his little boy’s place. The last thing I need today is to have to make a call to Zeke, asking him to bail me out of jail before my flight tomorrow.

Another guard then leads me back to the visitor’s waiting area. The wait is only a few minutes, but my guilt makes it feel so much longer. I sit in agitated silence and stare at the double-paned glass that, in a few moments, will be the only thing separating me from the woman who gave me life.

Finally, a guard brings my mother out and seats her on the other side of the glass. She looks good. Relatively speaking, of course. She’s thin, but not starved. Her skin is pale and starting to wrinkle. Her once completely dark brown hair is beginning to show the graying signs of age. And her green eyes—my eyes, the one noticeable trait I inherited from her as opposed to my father—are haunted by bags caused by over a decade spent in prison.

Despite all of these things, however, she looks good compared to how she looked in the ten years or so prior to her incarceration.

I have vague recollections of how she looked when I was a little girl. I remember her being happy and beautiful, but I honestly wonder if those memories were tampered with by the filter of childhood innocence. Sure, I’ve seen pictures of her from back then, and she was beautiful and always smiling, but even then her eyes told a different story, a story of regret and sadness. I know I played a big part in that regret, being the child she didn’t plan to have until years later.

Well, then she shouldn’t have gotten knocked up at Disneyland.

You see, my parents started dating in their senior year of high school, and they went to Grad Night Disneyland together. Dad got Mom pretty liquored up (and probably more than just liquor, I presume), and they ended up boinking on the It’s a Small World ride. Of course, Disneyland security saw what they were doing on the security cameras and shut the ride down, but by the time the guards were able to get to them, the deed was done and the seed was planted.

Yes, I was conceived in a setting of creepy puppet children singing the most obnoxiously catchy song ever written. My parents got off to the motherfucking Sherman brothers, goddammit. Whenever people ask me how I got so fucked up, I tell them this story. Usually, they will respond, “Well . . . that explains it,” to which I respond, “No, you don’t understand. The fact that I was conceived in It’s a Small World is not why I am so fucked up. The reason I am so fucked up is the fact that I know so many explicit details about my conception and that I was conceived in It’s a Small World.”

Of course, if I were to be perfectly honest, that actually has very little to do with why I’m so fucked up, but it’s a good enough excuse and it prevents me from having to go into the real reasons, so I stick to it.

My mother did, however, gain one advantage from conceiving her child on that lame-ass ride. Sometimes when my father pushed her too far and she actually had enough guts to stand up for herself, she would snip back at him by insinuating the world isn’t the only thing that’s small in their relationship. On those rare occasions when she did stand up to him like that, she paid greatly for her cheek (usually on her cheek), but I think she believed it was worth it to see the look on his face.

Anyway, the point is my mother never intended to have a child so early in life, and because I came along she felt like she had to marry my father—who, as you have probably guessed by now, turned out to be something of a real jackass—no doubt, also partly because of the inconvenience of having a daughter at eighteen. Fortunately for us, daddy dearest wasn’t home often seeing as he worked as a truck driver, but when he was home he usually drank himself into a stupor. As you know, he beat my mother, so it was only natural that he beat me, too. When I was sixteen, my mother finally got fed up, killed him, and got herself sent to prison. I became a child of the state for the next two years, and that is all I’m going to divulge on this subject, thank you very much.

But prison has been good for her—or, at least, being away from my father has been good for her. Ironically, she had to become imprisoned to finally be free.

And it doesn’t hurt that she looks good in orange. Some prisoners don’t wear the orange jumpsuit well at all, but with my mom’s dark hair and green eyes, it actually compliments her.

We pick up our respective phone receivers, and I say: “Hi, mom.”

“Hi, sweetie. You look good.”

“Thanks, you too.”

“I haven’t seen you in a while. Been busy at work?”

“Yeah, they really work me to death down at the firm. I’m actually about to leave for an assignment in Minnesota.”

No, I have never told my mother what I do for a living, and I never will. It would break her heart. This is why Zeke knows he has me wrapped around his middle finger, because I will do anything to keep her from finding out the truth about who I have grown up to become. That includes submitting myself to his rules to keep myself under THEM’s diplomatic immunity. So, I’ve told her I work as an office assistant for a high-profile law firm that has offices in various parts of the country and often sends me out-of-state to the other branches for special assignments. It keeps her happy, believing I’m being a productive member of society, and it keeps me happy knowing she doesn’t know I get paid to kill mass numbers of people semi-discretely. It’s a mutually beneficial lie.

“It’s good that you’re keeping busy,” she says, in her almost-empty voice.

“Yeah. I guess.”

“How’s your social life, Sarah? Are you . . . seeing anyone?”

“You know I’m not relationship-compatible,” I say, somewhat more crossly than I probably should.

“I know, I’m sorry. What about friends?”

“Mom . . . ” I groan, rolling my eyes.

“I know, I know. I’m sorry. It’s not a crime for a mother to want her daughter to be happy, is it?”

“No. But it is, unfortunately, a crime for a mother to kill her daughter’s asshole of a father.”

I know I went too far. This last comment was unspeakably evil of me, and you don’t even understand half of the reason why.

Seeing the hurt and tears in my mother’s eyes breaks my façade of bitterness.

“I’m sorry,” I sigh wearily, “I didn’t mean to snap at you. I’m just under a lot of pressure at work. I don’t have a lot of room for a social life, I’m afraid.”

“It’s okay, honey. It’s just that . . . there should be more to life than work, you know?”

“Yeah, I know.”

“I’m glad you came to see me. I don’t really get any other visitors, you know.”

The Guilt Card. A hundred million times more effective than if she actually came out and said that I am a horrible daughter. It’s a small payback for my comment about my father, but it’s enough—in her eyes if not mine—to balance us out and return the conversation to an even playing field. No matter what she says, I know I will always be a worse daughter than she is a mother, but I let it go, because otherwise I’ll drive myself insane with guilt.

“Yeah, I know.”

“Will you come again when you’re back from Minnesota?”

“Sure, Mom.”

That is another lie. And she knows it. She knows it because this is the exact same conversation we have every single time I visit her, and every single time I make the same promise that will be broken as soon as I come home. I don’t know why she still bothers asking, and I don’t know why I still bother answering. I guess it’s just become part of the dance, and neither of us really wants to have to learn new steps.

“Well, I better get going,” I say, breaking the uncomfortable silence that follows the transparent lie. “I have a lot to do to get ready for my trip in the morning.”

“Take care of yourself. Will you, Sarah?”

“Somebody’s got to,” I respond nonchalantly. I wince when I realize from the look on her face that, once again, I have managed to hurt her by reminding her she can’t be a mother while she’s behind bars. At least this time the jab was actually unintentional, but I can tell it was just as hurtful as the intentional jab.

And the award for Worst Daughter in the Entire History of Mother-Daughter Relationships goes to . . .

“Goodbye, Mom. I’ll see you when I get back.”

“Goodbye, sweetie. I love you.”

“I love you, too, Mom.”

That, at least, is not a lie.

And then I quickly leave, because I can’t stand to watch my mother cry, as I know she is about to.