In This Rain by S. J. Rozan

duties to be near the lot when the bus pulled in. One by one the women would step down, blinking. They’d peer around, getting their bearings. At first he’d thought it was the sunlight disorienting them, but soon he realized it was far more. Clasping the children’s hands, the women would head for the trailer with, it seemed to Joe, more determination than desire; but they’d emerge softer, in a different rhythm. Lips reddened, hair brushed and braided, they’d chat with each other. Old hands took first-timers under their wings: a lot of kindness there. They shuffled inside, to the lines where, though he couldn’t see it, Joe knew they were searched (clothing, mouth, and handbag, even the babies’ diapers) and then to the gates that opened and slammed over and over, as each woman with her children stepped from the other world into the men’s.
    The men inside waited for the second Saturday; they called it family day. Aloud, no man expressed anything but indifference or a resigned indulgence. As though it were for the women and the kids; as though, inconvenient though it was, the men would let it go on. To admit to more would have been to show a weakness no one could afford. But you could tell: men who shaved only irregularly choosing that morning to demand a new razor; a shoving match in the breakfast line; envious eyes in the dayroom lifting from the droning TV to follow those men the COs came to fetch.
    Things were tough for a day or two after the second Saturday; the COs hated those shifts. It wasn’t just the loneliness that crashed down after the gates slammed and the bus drove away. It wasn’t only the uselessness that some men felt, to see the changes in their kids just once a month, or once every three, or only in photographs because the kids had stopped coming. It wasn’t the awakened and unsatisfied lust that hung in the air like a storm waiting to break. Family day cracked the illusion they lived by. They were their world, all actors on the same stage performing for no audience. Family day parted a curtain they’d agreed to call a wall. It showed them the other world, the one they’d once been part of, and then closed again, leaving them to try to believe their own lies instead of remember.
    Ann, of course, didn’t come on the bus. She’d drive up Friday night after work and stay at a bed-and-breakfast with a view of the river. She’d have a good dinner and sleep under down comforters and wheel the Boxster into the gravel lot on the stroke of eight. By her third visit the guards at the gate all knew who was coming and whom she was coming to see.
    At first, Joe, like the other men, looked forward to these days. Except for his lawyer, he had few visitors. He discouraged everyone who offered, the way his mother had refused to see anyone at the hospital when she was dying.
    He would have permitted Ellie, even after she divorced him, but Ellie wouldn’t come.
    She did only once, early on. Out of what? Guilt, worry, some understanding that when roots are so entangled a true separation is never clean, is always painful, could be impossible? Whatever her reasons, he’d been eager to see her. He was still new, then, still trying to live as though prison were just another place in the world. Ellie’s brave face that day, her determined smile, the half-second pause before she spoke each time— each time!— were the tools that smashed to rubble the delicate structure of lies he’d built.
    She hadn’t come back. There was no question of bringing Janet; Ellie said, “I’m sure you understand.” He wondered, if it had been Ellie where he was, he on the outside, would he have kept her daughter from her? But he did understand.
    Janet sent him letters sometimes, and cards on his birthday, and she wrote that she missed him and in the beginning she probably did. Because she was so young her letters were short, and because she was living somewhere new they were soon filled with people and places he didn’t know. His throat would tighten