Harlan Webber—Room number 122

I spent most of my life in prison. I checked into the place a few days after my twenty-second birthday and wasn’t paroled until I was sixty-eight. My sentence was fifty years. I served forty-six of them before they let me out. And truth be told, I wish they never had.

The day I walked outta there was the scariest day of my life. I spent forty-six years having three square meals a day and living with absolute structure. Then I got out. For the next eight years, I was lucky if I managed to eat six meals in a whole week. Nobody would hire me once they found out about my conviction. I had no skills, no decent clothes, and no address. Plus, I was old. I wouldn’t have hired me either.

The Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility was my home. The real world was not.

There were days when I thought I should’ve done it again, just to get back inside, where life was predictable and I had friends. It was easy the first time, so I always figured the second time would’ve been easier still. Those young girls were always talking to each other, never paying attention to what was happening around them. I could’ve grabbed one of them on their way out of the community rec center and landed myself back in lock-up by dusk of the same day. Sometimes I’d sit on the curb across the street and watch them walking in and outta there, wearing outfits that showed off their little girl bodies in all the right ways. But I never could bring myself to do it again. Maybe it was my seventy-year-old pecker that stopped me, or maybe it was ’cause of the prison therapist. The reason why doesn’t matter; I let them be and just kept living under the Barkley Street overpass, begging for the occasional dollar and sleeping on a cardboard mat.

When I was seventy-six, I got run over. I was crossing the street, on my way to nowhere, when some drunk lady ran the red light and damn near killed me. I was in the hospital for a long time. Head injury, broken pelvis, internal bleeding. But I survived. As soon as I could, I called myself a lawyer and filed a personal injury case.

All the reading I did at the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility’s law library finally got me something besides a failed appeal. It got me a settlement.

Even after paying all my medical bills, I had enough money left to spend the rest of my life sleeping on a mattress, instead of on a cardboard mat. The only trouble was, the mattress I slept on wasn’t in a house or even in an apartment. It was in a nursing home.

After the accident, I couldn’t walk without a walker, and I couldn’t make my hands work right anymore. Buttoning my shirt and wiping my own ass became the two biggest challenges of my life. The head injury messed me up more than anything else. I knew I couldn’t take care of myself, so I had the social worker assigned to my case find me a nice place to live.

She did a good job when she picked Pine Manor. I started getting three squares again, and the scheduled structure of the place wasn’t that different from the penitentiary’s. I spent seven years at Pine Manor, playing checkers, reading the newspaper, yelling bingo!, and watching all the pretty little great-granddaughters who came to visit every Sunday afternoon.

I wasn’t an “inmate” anymore; I was a “resident.” And it was a damn good seven years.

I died when I was eighty-four. I got pneumonia and told the doctor I didn’t want any treatment for it. I told him to just let me alone. He did.

But she didn’t. She kept coming around. All the time. She never tried to give me any medicine or talk me into going to the hospital. She just sat with me and talked. A lot. I tried to shoo her away, but she wouldn’t have it. So, one day, when I’d had enough of her chit-chat, I told her about me. I told her what I’d done on a summer night sixty-two years ago. I gave her every detail, hoping she’d despise me like everyone else who knew what I’d done. I confessed my sins and told her the secrets I’d been holding in for all those years. I told her so she’d go away and let me die by myself.

But it didn’t work. In fact, she seemed to want to sit with me even more after that. Her talking stopped, though, and she’d just sit there, silent and stone-faced, probably thinking about how I deserved every second of the ugly death headed my way.

I hate to admit it, but eventually, her presence became more comforting than it was annoying. Sometimes she’d hold my hand while she was there, something no one had ever done in my whole life. Not even my mother. Or she’d comb my hair or give me a shave. But it wasn’t like she was doing it as part of her job. It was like she was doing it ’cause she cared.

There are lots of people in this world who would’ve enjoyed watching me suffer, but she wasn’t one of them. I ended up suffering way less than those two little girls did all those years ago. Some would say there was no justice in my death, that I deserved to suffer more, but maybe my accident was enough penance for what I’d done. Maybe the years of pain it caused were enough for God to call it even. I don’t know.

All I know is, at the end, when I left the world, she was there with me, silent and stone-faced and giving me the compassion I never deserved.