SAVING WHAT I COULD OF THE MONEY I’D EARNED OFF THE BOOKS to send to the family of Hadrian Johnson that would be, in the end, after months of housecleaning, nearly one thousand dollars.

No one in my life to ask me—But why? It will not bring him back, will it?

Rat, Waiting

IT WAS A TIME WHEN I’D BEGUN TO WAIT MORE EXPLICITLY.

With more clarity, apprehension: as the term of Lionel’s incarceration began to wind down.

For it seemed to me, I was serving Lionel’s sentence too.

Seven to thirteen years, and there’d been the expectation at the time of sentencing that of course Lionel would be paroled. Good behavior. No infractions of rules. Support of prison chaplain. High school equivalency diploma.

Yet, it did not happen. As the years passed, no parole.

Why, wasn’t clear. Decisions of the Mid-State Correctional Facility for Men at Marcy were classified. No explanation.

I’d given up writing to Lionel. No more cards, terse cheery sisterly notes flung into an abyss deep as the Grand Canyon.

Before I’d left Port Oriskany Ms. Herne had advised me to maintain contact with the parole board at Marcy. Just so that you are warned, Violet. If your family fails to tell you.

Hadn’t wanted to ask Aunt Irma if my parents blamed me for the fact that Lionel hadn’t been (yet) paroled.

(Tactlessly, not meaning to be cruel, Irma did reveal to me that my parents blamed me for my oldest brother’s death. Of course, this would make sense to them: Jerr wouldn’t have been incarcerated, wouldn’t have been killed by a guard in the prison, if the rat-sister had not sent him there.)

Jerr hadn’t even come up for parole. He’d been in trouble at Marcy from the start: targeted by the Aryan Nation as one of their own and grateful to be accepted in a prison facility with so many black prisoners. Lionel was serving his sentence differently, in a different area of the prison in which gangs were not so powerful. Yet each of Lionel’s requests for parole were turned down and it was looking as if Lionel would “max out”—serve his full, thirteen-year sentence.

I had nothing to do with the parole hearings. I wondered if relatives believed that I had and were spreading upsetting rumors. The parole board did not call me to speak to them on or against my brother’s behalf, and I did not volunteer.

My terror at what Lionel might do to me when he was released had not vanished nor even faded but floated in the shadows at the edge of my vision, I dared not turn my head too quickly and risk seeing it. Still, I would not interfere in his parole hearings.

Would not beg the parole board—Don’t let Lionel Kerrigan out! He will come to murder me.