Free Love and Fury by Richard Hoffman Page B

older sister hangs back, twirling her hair around a finger. “Don’t you touch my child!” the mother says to me. Everywhere babies are wailing, and now because I am the only drama in the room, all eyes are on me. There’s no point in saying anything, so I mumble, “Sorry,” and go stand against the wall next to the locker. There are no empty chairs.
    An hour later, there are still many people ahead of me, and if I don’t get in by four thirty, I’ll have to wait until six. At last the guard calls Damion’s name, and I get in the short line next to the iron door.
    It took me a long time to finally visit Damion in prison. For one thing, I didn’t feel I could visit him without a certain disloyalty to my daughter. She was ambivalent, given the fraught relationship they had at the time, and she said she didn’t want to take D there because she felt that a prison was no place for a two-year-old. “But he remembers him, Dad. When we’re out someplace and he sees a black guy with dreads, he asks me, ‘Mommy? Is that my daddy?’”
    After her first visit I asked her how it went.
    â€œIt was good. It was good. D sat on his lap and the two of them were playing around and laughing.”
    â€œI mean how was it for you?”
    She teared up, resisted, then let loose. “I still feel it. In my heart. I still feel it!”
    â€œYou still love him.”
    She nodded as she blew her nose. And I knew that she knew how hard this would continue to be for a long time. After that, every Thursday evening she would take D with her and visit Damion in Concord.
    My own resistance I still don’t understand entirely. Even after my first visit, I made excuses. I made myself busy. The whole scene there is stressful for one thing, I told myself, and for another, sometimes I just don’t know what to talk about with him. I don’t really have an eventful life myself— mostly reading, writing, and teaching, none of which is of particular interest to him. It goes without saying that not too much is going on in his life. It’s a little bit like visiting someone at bedside when they’re in the hospital—it’s just awkward.
    But it is so much more complicated than that.
    Soon after Veronica became pregnant, Damion moved in with us. Robert was also home, living in his old bedroom, just beginning to sort out his problems, engage in treatment for alcoholism, and recover from several years of self-destructive behavior. We were a full and uncomfortable house, all of us trying to get along, share limited space, and keep conflict to a minimum. I used to get furious when the strong smell of microwave popcorn or some Jamaican beef patties or jerk chicken would waft up to our bedroom when I was trying to get to sleep. And groping my way half asleep to the bathroom to pee in the middle of the night, I’d sometimes find a large dreadlocked stranger sitting on the toilet. “Jesus, close the door!”
    â€œSorry.”
    But I was impressed with Damion’s solicitude and concern for Veronica’s comfort during her pregnancy, his willingness to run downstairs to the kitchen or out to the store. He rubbed her back, her legs. He soothed her anxieties. They seemed to me to be making a go of it.
    Damion was looking for work. Each morning he would leave the house a young father to be, and he’d come home in the afternoon having been reminded more than once that he was a felon on parole. Not only that, but hanging over him was a three-year-old charge that, with adequate representation, not a court-appointed attorney, likely would have been dismissed. The state had decided to pull out that old file and prosecute him. Who would hire him? And how would he prove he was changed after his time in prison?
    Around that time I went looking for a room to rent so I would have a place to write. I had a contract for a short-story collection, and I wanted to finish it. I