Tanya Dee Brooking

1. Tristan.

When I die, I won’t go to heaven.

But, my dear Iris, you

will finally be free.

Since my last desperate gasp for oxygen, I’ve been inundated with unpleasant sounds. Beeps, alarms, the ventilator’s mechanized deep breath, as if Darth Vader himself has moved in where my soul once resided. You may cast off the idea I ever had a soul. I wouldn’t disagree.

The iPad light penetrates my eyelids. The device emits the Chaplain’s mealy voice. Is he your idea, Iris? You always hoped I’d someday confess my sins. At least you didn’t harangue me, like my sister trying to lure me back to church, any church, to get closer to God. The very idea is preposterous. God doesn’t want me. I doubt the Devil wants me either.

I’ve lost track of time. There is no dawn or dusk or spring or autumn here. What I’d give to count the stars in the night, to taste the dew on your skin. But my memories are strangled in a dark tangle of visuals. You don’t want to see what I see. Thick inescapable webs, soiled corpses, another man’s arms slithering around you.

The tube hurts, Iris. Like my throat has been raped. Maybe my pain gives you pleasure. I like to think it doesn’t. But perhaps my suffering gives you some karmic satisfaction, after all the pain I’ve inflicted.

I’m still alive. When I’m not, will you miss me? Or do you wish modern medicine would cut me loose? I’m merely a vessel now.

Air in. Air out.

Oxygen in, carbon monoxide out.

Death in, life out.

I’ve been grateful for your visits all these years. Would you have come if not for our agreement? Regardless, you’ve evolved into a dutiful wife. Better late than never, as they say.

If I could recite one last poem to you, I’d choose Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines. You once told me Nedura would appreciate his words soliloquized in the timbre of my voice.

Love is so short, he wrote, forgetting is so long.

No, I don’t expect to extract renewed love for me from you. You’re done with that now.

I tried to do one good thing. Just one small act of atonement before the Reaper comes for me. But it was not meant to be.

At least when I go, I’ll carry with me the certainty that one person loved me at some time in my despicable life.

Everyone else hates me.

But not as much as I hate them.

2. Iris. 6 weeks earlier.

The Central Valley’s dusty heat follows Iris through the prison’s steel doors and metal detectors. She doesn’t care whether the temperature is due to climate change like that little Greta girl says, or if it’s a hot snap. Ninety-two degrees in January is insufferable.

Inside, bored chaos creates a different kind of heat, a thread of low voltage. Her arm-hairs salute.

She takes the clip-boarded pass dispensed by the uniformed grumbly guard. P. Williams, Iris knows without reading her badge. Just as she knows without glancing at P. Williams’ head, her spiky hair is dyed black like the emo kids back in Iris’s high school.

Every visit Iris completes a new pass, scribbling her current address and phone, her relationship to the inmate, along with his deets, then signs her name to match her updated driver’s license, Iris Fever Marleau.

P. Williams raises a brow at Iris’s name change, then indicates the hoodie tied around Iris’s waist. “Jacket on. Zipped.”

Iris conjures a mollifying expression, drags the sleeves over her bare arms, concealing her tats. She must cover up, but it’s not to hide the artwork. Bare cleavage is prohibited. “Form-fitting” attire is prohibited. Clothing shorter than two inches above the knee is prohibited. As if she’s attending a Catholic school. She zips her Juicy hoodie to her throat, clips the pass to her chest. From a plastic wall dispenser, she pumps hand-sanitizer into her palms and scrubs.

Next she endures a different guard’s attention. Iris has encountered T. Johnson before. Peanut breath, size one chinos, wiry limbs. Her face is wiry too, narrow with a sharp nose mapped by livid capillaries. T. Johnson’s eager eyes take stock of Iris’s body, then her wand follows. Armpits, waistband, buttocks, bra-strap. T. Johnson is vulgar with her wand, lifting each of Iris’s breasts, lingering, gliding it along her inner thighs as if she wished they were bare, pressing up into her crotch.

Iris’s quads twitch, but she remains silent. These guards are in control of their peons. She’s witnessed their rough handling of mouthy visitors, ushering them back out the steel door, denying them their visits after they’d taken a day off work and burning fuel to drive who-knows-how-far.

Months ago, T. Johnson took an instant dislike to a visiting woman who barely spoke English. T. Johnson’s fist squeezed the wand as if she hoped the lady would commit some infraction, no matter how trivial, just so she could smack her with the hard polymer casing, bruise her hips and wrists before shoving her back out to the parking lot. Wearing scorn on her pale lips, she led the confused woman into another room. Behind the closed door, Iris imagined that power-abusing little bitch doing whatever she wanted to her subjugated victim.

So now Iris doesn’t flinch, enduring T. Johnson’s prods and pokes, reminding herself she’s lucky she’s never been strip-searched. Maybe she’s lucky she’s white. She wonders about the archaic ritual of the frisk; it’s not like she’ll be afforded bodily contact with her husband anyway.

She enters the drab waiting room, breathing shallow against the smell of B.O. and dryer sheets. Nine other visitors shift in ochre plastic chairs. Some clear throats, cough dryly, a few stomachs grumble. Iris reclines against the putty-colored wall, her splash of pink velvet feels scandalous in the stark space. Pressing knuckles into her aching hip, she reviews her plan to make her big ask. She knows she’s overthinking it, but can’t stop herself. Negotiations with Tristan never seem to go her way. Trepidation flushes through her: certainty he will again refuse her, mixed with mild hope he will finally comply with her wishes. Her bangs stick to her damp forehead. She longs to unzip her hoodie.

Minutes pass like days. Every step of every process in the justice system is drawn out as if to punish everyone caught in its net. Iris goes to fish her iPhone from the clear plastic baggie she’s allowed to bring in. But of course her phone is where she left it, stuffed in her bruised YSL bag in her Escalade. Before forcing herself to enter the prison, she’d lingered in the lot, sweating and scrolling through Craigslist apartment rentals. The half she could afford were dumps. The other half looked too good to be true. Scams, she assumed. One looked like a possibility. New Construction. Private entry. She popped off a quick inquiry before entering this pit. Dangling the baggie at her side, she hopes she receives a response by the time she departs.

Names are announced. Iris steps in line with the string of visitors. They’re marched single file to visitation. Hinges creak, iron clanks, juddering Iris’s nerves. Muscles cinch of their own will, attempting to shield her from the reverberations of shame, from the echoes of caged humans, from other wives and baby girls casting shade her way and on each other. She smooths her bangs, pushes strands behind her ears, keeps her eyes on the thick backside of the corrections officer leading the way.

Since 2011, when Tristan’s incarceration began, Iris has driven in from Paso Robles every week, an hour-forty-five each way, antagonizing her sciatica. With every other step on the concrete, pain zaps down to her ankle, sears across her foot, then shoots back up to her hip like a Roman candle.

This pain may have nothing to do with her drives to Corcoran, but it feels right to place blame here. Satisfying to attribute all things wrong with her life to this hellhole. And to Tristan. After all, he’s lured her here for four-hundred-and-fifty-eight consecutive Sundays.

As she’s ushered down the block-walled corridor, the unseen inmate population’s vibrating voices crescendo. This segment of the walk always agitates her. She must focus to shut out the guttural current. She needs this moment to collect her thoughts, realign her frame, ready a smile.

She and a couple other visitors are siphoned off the line, while the rest continue on. They will gather around concrete tables in a common room with their incarcerated loved ones, humming vending machines in a corner, maybe they’ll even get to hold hands for a moment before a guard tells them to knock it off.

She’s waved into the narrow room for non-contact visitation. It stinks of emptied candy wrappers and cement imbued with decades of despair. Iris slinks into a chair while the two other visitors position themselves three seats over: a licorice-thin woman entombed in a prairie dress; a slack-jawed teen, pale dreads piled on his head, his tie-dyed sweatshirt a riot in contrast to the miserable stuffy air. The boy reminds her of her brother at that sullen age. She crosses her legs, tight.

Already settled across the window from them: a mountainous bald inmate with a linebacker’s neck, a ham hand pressing a phone to his ear. Pained regret etches his mouth. Is he a father? Uncle? A lonely old friend? Or maybe a new friend? Iris has heard of convicts’ fans. They become friends, girlfriends, and sometimes wives, separated by years, bars, vile crimes, and voters’ determination to keep death row churning out corpses.

Between privacy dividers, Iris welcomes the solitude. She tugs an antibacterial wipe from her baggie. As she smears the phone, a blur of pale denim materializes across the scarred window. Tristan. Her broad-shouldered teddy bear with size fourteen feet; he’s now more blueberry than bear. Prison life has fattened him like a penned calf destined for a dinner plate.

His growing girth always surprises her. Unlike in movies, Tristan isn’t out in a yard shooting hoops or counting off bench presses. His exercise regimen is limited to push-ups on a concrete floor and pacing an eight-by-six box, twenty-three hours per day. Then there’s the prison diet of carbs, sugar, salt. Good, she thinks, keep eating, keep blimping out.

She longs to be repulsed by him. Still, she isn’t. Even after every crime he’s committed. Even after condemning her to notoriety as Wife of a Serial Killer. Not the kind of notoriety she’d previously pursued. She’d longed for fame. Not infamy.

Eyeing the C.O. hovering over Tristan’s shoulder, she bunches the wipe in her palm, its piercing smell close to her nose as she holds the damp phone to her head, pretending greasy ears and meth-destroyed mouths had never touched it before her. The cold plastic elicits a shiver, but her upturned lips remain frozen.

Tristan smiles warmly at her, the urge to wrap her in his arms evident in his big baby blues. They align fingerprints on either side of the grime-smeared plexiglass. Afterwards, Tristan kisses his fingertips. Iris keeps her cringe to herself.

“I like what you’ve done with your hair.” The phone gives his baritone a faraway tinniness.

Pinching a clump of new bangs, she fluffs them. “It’s boxed color. I didn’t expect it to turn out so purple.”

“I do miss my mini Pammy.”

He means it as a compliment, but being referred to as a low-rent Pam Anderson irks her. It has always irked her. But now it irks her more. Truth is, everything irks her now. The slow milk truck ahead of her on highway 41. The stench of cattle oozing through her aging SUV’s feeble air conditioner. The dye splashing on her p.j.’s when she colored her hair this supposed auburn.

And right now, her sciatica is irking her most of all. The nerve sizzles down her leg, twitching like a jury-rigged wire. She adjusts her butt on the hard seat.

“Sciatica bugging you?”

“Always.” She twists her spine, seeking a satisfying crack, but no relief comes. Nostalgia for her days of private pilates lodges like a pit in her throat.

“You should see a chiropractor.” He strokes his Vandyke, a poor camouflage for his broadening jowls. “Or get over your heebies about people touching you. Obviously you need a massage.”

She glares at him. Incarceration allows Tristan to feign innocence for the financial straits he’s left her in. “Yeah. I’ll get right on that.”

He ignores her tone, though he’s well aware of all she’s lost thanks to his lack of impulse control. Her impulse control isn’t all that much better, but at least it’s not deadly.

“Did you put any cash on my books?”

“I’ll transfer it when I get back to my phone.”

“How much?”

“I’ve only got eight bucks to spare this week.” It’s all she’ll part with. He has no way of confirming her personal account balance. But it’s no prize these days.

His eyes land on her gold band, dull and abandoned by the two-karat princess cut diamond ring she’d long ago hawked to help cover his legal expenses. Despite having an appointed public defender, every penny they had went to court fees, expert witnesses, transcripts, appeals, blahblahblah. He should’ve just pled guilty.

He looks miffed about the measly eight bucks, but arguing about money is futile at this point. Instead he reports on the latest book he’s reading. He’s obsessed with all the Wars. With men who have power, who want more power to wield over others, men who kill and have the right to do so. Men Tristan longs to be. He’d often claimed he was born six hundred years too late. He knows she doesn’t care to hear it. She hates his obvious joy over how she’s become his captive audience, even if only for one hour per week. This reversal of their earlier relationship dynamic gives him pleasure. All it gives her is a Rolaids addiction.

She wonders when their power flipped. Was it when she was cast on Housewives? He’d resisted, feebly then loudly. But no one could stop her from putting her face in front of a camera. The camera loved her. Almost as much as Tristan did.

Was it after he made his first kill? Or his third and final?

Nowadays she doubts she ever had any power at all. He’d just let her think she controlled their fate. What a fool she’d been.

All these thoughts, she can’t let show on her face. She hunches over, elbows on the table, picking a pinky hangnail with her thumb until it bleeds. She sucks it, antiseptic-tinged rust on her tastebuds.

He’s pontificating again, comparing Pol Pot to Hồ Chí Minh to Nixon. She nods, asks prodding “then what’s?” along the way. It’s her job to fake interest in their discussions, to pretend everything is normal. As if anything would ever be normal again.

Her mind drifts to her search for another new home.

Then to her longing to regain her short-lived fame without alerting the haters and doxers, which is, of course, impossible.

Then, as he continues to drone on, she focuses on her real goal: to start a new events space like Grapes & Cakes, the successful venue she’d run with Tristan. But in a new city where she’s not known. Unfortunately, this dream depends entirely on outside financing. Her credit is in the tank. She has to have money to get money, which would be laughable if it didn’t decimate all her options. This is the hamster wheel that goes round and round in her head at three in the morning when she should be sleeping through her pathetic existence.

“So,” she tests him, “you know how I want to start up another venue?”

“Mmm, yeah.” His tone conveys disinterest.

“So, I pitched a small business investment group. They seem interested.” Measuring his responses, she keeps her excitement tempered.

“Oh?” he asks, level. “Surely there are strings.”

He’s not wrong. Their interest rates border on usury. And, they’ll only fund her new business if she divorces Tristan. The investors simply will not be attached, even tenuously, to a convicted murderer. And who can blame them? If she held the purse strings, she’d say “thanks but no thanks,” too.

“Well, yes, perhaps.” Sweat trickles down her cleavage. She wishes she could unzip her hoodie. The stuffy room makes her throat chalky. “It’s possible, probable, yeah. We may need to amend our agreement.”

He’d unilaterally drafted their Pact. She shouldn’t have agreed so readily, should have obtained legal advice. What a sucker she’d been. So gaslit. She thinks that’s the proper term. Wishing she could google gaslit, she glares at her plastic baggie with no phone in it.

“What provision, specifically, are you requesting we amend?”

She notes how he says request. She’s better now at reading his subtext. Too late now, though. She’d signed that damn agreement.

“The divorce part—”

“No.” He cuts her off, his tone casual, confident.

“We can leave in the visitation and all the other provisions.”

“Why would I agree to that?”

“Why wouldn’t you?”

“We may as well have signed our pact in blood, Iris. That’s how much it means to me.” He stabs his chest with a thick thumb. “Now I’m questioning your veracity. Is that what you want?” He leans back, arms crossed. “Me doubting your commitment?”

“I’ll still visit, though,” she says, small.

They fall into familiar uneasy silence. The prairie-dress lady murmurs into her phone, lulling and encrypted. Iris watches the boy with horror as he sticks a pinky in his ear, digs around and then examines whatever treasure he’s pulled out before smearing it under his chair. She gags silently, grateful her useless ovaries will never risk producing another male monster.

Tristan reins in her wandering attention with a change of subject. “My last letter to you was returned to sender.”

“I … moved.”

“Again?”

“Yes, Tristan.” Her back fillings smash together. “Again.”

He exhales, thick shoulders stooping. “They found you.”

“Some a-hole spray-painted the apartment parking lot.” Killer wife. Killer life. She should make a t-shirt.

“When were you gonna tell me that?”

“I’m telling you now,” she snaps. “I’m in a freakin Motel 6, Tristan. That’s where I’ve landed this time.”