My heart was beating rapidly, cold sweat oozed down my sides. The last news I’d had of my brother had been from Katie, the previous week—Lionel is up for parole on Monday. We didn’t even know about it until now! Mom has been praying. Thought I’d better warn you, Vi’let.

“You Are Not Wanted”

AND THEN, WHEN I RETURNED HOME AUNT IRMA WAS ON THE phone.

I could not bear to overhear. Terrified of learning that my brother had been paroled.

He’d been in the facility at Marcy for five years by this time. Not quite as long as Hadrian Johnson had been dead.

Both of us: incarceration.

Yet Lionel was still young: twenty-two.

And I was still young: seventeen.

Upstairs in my room. Threw my textbooks onto my bed. Pressed my hands against my ears. For it seemed to me that Aunt Irma would call to me up the stairs Good news, Violet! Lionel has been paroled.

Katie had told me how hopeful the family was. Thousands of dollars had been spent on appeals without results but Daddy refused to give up—if there wasn’t the likelihood of a new trial or a commutation of sentence for Lionel there was the possibility of parole for “good behavior.” Lionel had been taking courses in the prison, he’d earned his high school equivalency diploma. He’d “kept out of trouble”—unlike his older brother Jerome Jr. who, it was said, was covered in lurid tattoos, a member of the Aryan Brotherhood whose prison sentence had been extended by another six years for participating in the near-fatal beating of another inmate.

In the facility at Marcy the Kerrigan brothers did not see each other. They’d been purposefully separated, in different parts of the prison. Jerome was considered the more dangerous, as Jerome was the older, the one believed to have committed the murder, and now a member of a white racist gang; Lionel had been (only) an accomplice.

Trying to think in hopeful terms: Lionel was not a murderer, Lionel was (possibly) reforming in prison. (Reformed? Re-formed? Was that the idea of a penitentiary? Was re-formation actually possible?)

Trying to reason that, if Lionel were released on parole, he would do anything in his power to avoid being sent back to prison.

He would not threaten his sister. He would not hurt his sister . . .

On the phone Katie had said, meaning to be encouraging—If Lionel gets out, he’s paroled back here. Back home. It would violate parole if he left South Niagara, I think. I mean, I think so. The lawyer was telling us. If, like, he tried to—well, you know—find you, in Port Oriskany.

Even if he tried to contact you, I think. Any kind of—threat. Or—whatever.

One of the terms of the parole would be he kept a distance from you. Didn’t try to contact you. Didn’t leave town.