The Escape Diaries Love and Life on the Lam
Juliet Rosetti
Loveswept, New York
The Escape Diaries is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. A Loveswept eBook Original Copyright Š 2012 by Patricia Kilday All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Loveswept, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. LOVESWEPT and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc. Cover illustration: Anne Keenan Higgins Cover design: Derek Walls eBook ISBN 978-0-345-53431-6 www.ReadLoveSwept.com
My mother-in-law sends me poisoned cookies. Occasionally she sends rat pellet pie or drain cleaner doughnuts, but mostly she sticks with the cookies. I can picture her in her big, cheery kitchen, wearing a frilly apron and humming as she mixes the ingredients: flour, sugar, eggs, butter, cyanide . . . Inmates haven’t been allowed food packages since crystal meth disguised as rock candy sneaked into the system and everyone’s teeth started falling out. But that doesn’t discourage my mother-in-law. She keeps cranking out the toxic treats, convinced that one day the strychnine snickerdoodles or the carbolic caramel bars will make their way to my digestive tract. Although I don’t get the goodies, the mailroom staff passes the packing cartons along to me. This is how they’re addressed: Mazie Maguire Murdering Scum Inmate #3490082 Wisconsin Correctional Institute 750 County Road K Taycheedah, Wisconsin 54935 Sometimes they’re addressed to Murdering Bitch, but Vanessa Vonnerjohn has standards for ladylike speech and usually restricts herself to Trash, Trollop, Jezebel, and the like. The lah-di-dah standards stretch only so far, however. Given the opportunity, my mother-in-law would claw my beating heart out of my chest and feed it to her dogs. Vanessa believes in Family, Church, and Vengeance, not necessarily in that order. I’m always Mazie Maguire on the care packages, never Mazie Vonnerjohn. Apparently I’d trashed my good standing in the family when I put a bullet through Kip Vonnerjohn Junior’s handsome head. My husband’s murder was captured on nanny cam. The police found the murder weapon, my blood-spattered nightgown, and a video of me committing the crime. All the physical evidence rolled up in a tidy package and tied up with a ribbon of motive: I’d killed my husband because he was going to leave me for his squash-playing, matched-set-
of-pearls–wearing, lockjawed, flat-assed, Junior League girlfriend. Arrested, tried, found guilty, sentenced to life in Taycheedah. I’d been terrified the day I arrived. I was small, scrawny, and street-dumb. I knew how to unjam a copier, tune a piano, and duct tape a sagging skirt hem, but I had no clue how to survive in a prison full of hard-as-nails women. I’d seen Chicks in Chains; I imagined tough girls in denims and barbed wire tattoos pinning me up against the bars and setting to work with a plunger handle. As it turned out, nobody pinned or plunger-handled me. In fact, I was treated like a celebrity. Taycheedah’s inmates had watched my trial the way people had once followed the OJ Simpson proceedings. To the crack dealers, meth chefs, paper hangers, and stickup artists on my cellblock, I was a star. I was right up there with Hilda Hoffacker, who’d sliced off her philandering boyfriend’s head with a chain saw. I got more fan mail than Annie May O’Reilly, who’d brained her battering spouse with a grain shovel and buried him in a pigpen. Two-thirds of the women in Taycheedah had been beaten or abused by males, so if a woman got a little of her own back—well, you go, girl. Forget the Slammer Babe movies. No frenzied rattling of cage bars—for one thing, there aren’t any bars, just bulletproof glass. Nobody looks like the hot babes in the reform school movies either, since inmates aren’t allowed to wear makeup and everyone resembles the before pictures in the magazine makeovers. Prison isn’t fun. No pizza, popcorn, or nail polish, and the toilet is right in the room with you. Whatever secrets you confide in a girlish giggle fest may end up being whispered in the warden’s ear in exchange for a dime off someone’s time. I’ve gotten the hang of prison life. I’ve learned how to use margarine for moisturizer. How to mend ripped denims with Elmer’s glue and pocket lint. How to survive Christmas by sleeping through it. I’ve become a model prisoner.
I’ve turned twenty-seven, twenty-eight, and twenty-nine in the can. Thirty is staring me in the face. I’ll go through menopause and Metamucil behind bars. I tell my counselor I’m resigned to spending my life in prison. But here’s the truth: I spend a lot of time pondering ways to break out of this place. And wondering what I’d do if I succeeded.
The Escape Diaries : A Guide to Breaking Out of Prison Escape tip #1: Be prepared.
Actually I wasn’t prepared at all. I just wanted to go to bed. I was tired and cranky, sweat was puddling between my boobs, and my armpits smelled like sprouting onions. Deodorant cost one ninety-five at the prison canteen, well beyond the means of someone who earned ten cents an hour. Given a choice between M&Ms or Mennen, I’d pick the sweet and live with the stink. Repulsive, yes—but chocolate is what gets you through the day, and no one else smells any better. If I’d stuck to chocolate, things might have turned out differently. But I had a leftover cough drop from a bout with bronchitis, and when my cellmate, Tina Sanchez, developed a tickly throat, I gave her the cough drop. Just being a pal, right? Wrong. You’re supposed to return unused medications to the medical director. The staff tracks pharmaceuticals the way the CIA tracks yellow cake in the Middle East. A cellblock officer caught the menthol scent on Tina’s breath and wrote her up for taking a nonprescription drug. Since I was the one who’d dished out the illicit substance, I was written up, too. Along with a bunch of other drug offenders—aspirin pushers, AlkaSeltzer peddlers, and Midol dealers—Tina and I were sentenced to garden detail. Not exactly the Bataan death march in a suburban peas and petunias plot, but Taycheedah’s gardens are a whole different chunk of real estate. Looking out over them is like gazing at the Great Plains; you wouldn’t be surprised to see buffalo and buzzards
roaming around out there. The first days of September had been sunny and hot, and in the perverse way of growing things, every tomato on six acres had ripened on the same day. Ten thousand of the squishy red things, demanding to be handpicked before thunderstorms swept through and turned them into salsa. We picked. And picked. And picked some more. All morning, all afternoon, and into early evening. When it got to be five o’clock I thought we’d be dismissed for dinner. But no-o. You do the crime, you do the time: that was the warden’s motto. The kitchen staff sent out sandwiches and bottles of water and we ate sitting crosslegged in the dirt. Then we hauled ourselves to our feet and went back to work. My spine was an archipelago of ache, my skin felt scalded, and my teeth were filmed with bugs. The rank, catnippy odor of tomatoes clung to my clothes. I straightened and stretched at the end of my gazillionth row, rubbing my back and anxiously scanning the sky to the west, which had turned the pus-yellow of a fading bruise. The air was thick enough to stir with a spoon. Crickets chirped storm warnings. Lightning flickered in a raft of distant clouds. Lightning terrified me. I glanced uneasily at the officer on duty, hoping she’d let the tomatoes go to mush and order us back inside. She didn’t. She just yawned, leaning against a tree, staring glassily into space. Obviously, distant lightning wasn’t high on her list of concerns. “Did you know that lightning can strike as far as ten miles away?” I said to Tina, who was picking on the opposite side of my row. “So what?” Tina scoffed. “Your chances of getting hit by lightning are less than winning the Powerball.” “You’ve got it backward.” The heat was making me cranky. It was Tina’s fault I was on this gulag detail in the first place. “The odds against winning the Powerball are greater than your chances of being struck by lightning.”
“I ain’t never won the lottery and I ain’t never got hit by lightning neither, so that proves my point.” Tina’s logic made my brain hurt. I opened my mouth to explain her faulty reasoning, which would probably have resulted in Tina’s giving me a mashed tomato facial, but at that moment a siren began to wail. I nearly jumped out of my sweat-streaked skin. Dropping my tomatoes, I clapped my hands over my ears. “Is that the escape siren?” I asked. “No, you goober. That’s the tornado siren.” Tornado? My stomach did a roller-coaster dip. Tornadoes scared me even worse than lightning. What were you supposed to do? In grade school we’d had to practice tornado drills, crouching under our desks with our arms over our heads and our butts in the air. By the time the drill ended, our classroom smelled like a cauliflower factory. The guard snapped out of her heat-induced stupor, blew a whistle, and bellowed, “All right, everybody, form up in a line. We’re returning to the main unit. Inside, you will proceed to your designated—” A galloping wind drowned out her voice, bowled over the tomato plants, and hurled leaves through the air like green rain. The storm blitzed in faster than anyone could have expected. Thunder shook the ground and a zag of lightning split the sky. The mercury vapor lamps that lit the grounds exploded, plunging us into murky gloom. Disoriented, I grabbed onto Tina and we bumbled around, tripping over vines, squishing tomato guts underfoot, trying to catch our breaths against the scouring gale. The air sizzled with electricity and my hair stood on end. The wind worked itself into a tantrum and slammed us along, Tina’s long braid whipping against my face until she was whirled one way and I was hurled another. I smacked up against the wall of the greenhouse and stepped in a load of peat moss from an overturned wheelbarrow. Lightning flashed again, turning the world muddy purple. The purple goop spat
hail. Split pea hail at first, that sounded like the first faint pops of microwave popcorn, then fist-sized hail that smashed the greenhouse panes and sent shards of glass geysering into the air. A 747 revved for takeoff inside my skull. My ears popped, my hair tried to yank itself out by the follicles, and what felt like a dozen Dustbusters sucked at my clothes. Tree branches and gutter spouts hurtled through the air, outlined by strobes of lightning. Something enormous somersaulted toward me, growing bigger and bigger, blotting out the sky. I stared in disbelief. It was a house! An enormous house was about to smack down and squash me like the Wicked Witch of the East. When the rescue workers came around searching for bodies, they’d discover my feet sticking out from beneath the foundation. “She really needed a pedicure,” they would say.
I was five years old when I watched The Wizard of Oz for the first time. My parents were out and my older brothers, who were supposed to be babysitting me, had abandoned me. Alone in the house, I poured myself a glass of Kool-Aid, dribbled my way to the TV, and popped a tape into the VCR. I couldn’t read yet, but the video cover showed a girl in a blue dress, a scarecrow, a lion, and a shiny metal man. I plopped down on the sofa, my legs so short they stuck straight out over the edge of the cushions, and watched, entranced, as a girl named Dorothy balanced along a fence, singing a song about a rainbow. Then Almira Gulch appeared. Eyes like Raisinettes, chin like an ax blade, mouth like a rat trap. By the time she was pedaling her bike through the twister, cackling insanely and transforming into the Wicked Witch of the East, I was petrified, sobbing, and soaked. My mother came home, switched off the movie, changed my underpants, and put me to bed. I wasn’t allowed to watch The Wizard of Oz again until I was nine years old,
presumably old enough to separate fantasy from reality, but even then I had to squeeze my eyes shut when the winged monkeys flew out of the witch’s castle.
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