Visiting Hours

Chapter 6

The drive to Huntsville takes an hour and nineteen minutes if I leave at 5:30 and nobody wrecks on I-45, and I have made it two hundred and sixty times. I know which Buc-ee's has the cleanest bathrooms and the exact spot past Conroe where the pine trees close in and the radio fades to static. I know the billboard for the injury lawyer in the cowboy hat, the church sign that says HELL IS REAL in red letters six feet tall, and the abandoned fireworks stand that's been slowly falling down for as long as I've been making this drive.

I know to wear sleeves and skip the underwire, because the metal detector at the Walls Unit is older than I am. I know to leave my phone in the glove box and bring exactly twenty dollars in quarters in a clear plastic bag, because the vending machines are the only way I can buy him anything. And I know to leave my wedding ring on. It's the only jewelry they let me keep, and Jim looks at it first every single time, like he's checking that I'm still his. This morning, I almost took it off.

I didn't sleep Thursday night or Friday night. I lay on top of the covers with the brass key in my fist, staring at the water stain on my ceiling and running through every person in Houston who could possibly know my old name, and the answer kept coming back the same: nobody. Ellie Marsh stopped existing the summer after graduation, when I cut eight inches off my hair, moved into a studio in Montrose with a window unit that rattled like a dying animal, and started introducing myself the way my grandmother used to say it, slow and careful, all three syllables. El-o-ise. Like a woman who had never stood at a bonfire in her life, or heard a man screaming in the dark. Only my mother still calls me Ellie, and she lives forty minutes south and has never set foot inside Calloway Energy. So how did Lauren Pike know?

The key is zipped inside the lining of my purse, and the purse is locked in my trunk. I checked it four times before I left the apartment and twice more at the Buc-ee's in Madisonville, and I can still feel it back there the whole drive, like a second heartbeat.

The Walls Unit sits in the middle of downtown Huntsville, red brick and enormous, with the clock tower every tourist photographs and every family member learns to stop seeing. It's the oldest prison in Texas, and people think that's interesting enough to take selfies out front. I park in my usual spot under the same live oak and walk to the visitor entrance with my bag of quarters, my driver's license, and my heart in my throat. The line is short this morning: a grandmother in her church clothes, a young woman with a baby on her hip and a diaper bag they'll make her leave in the car, and a man in a Texans jersey staring straight ahead like he's waiting for a firing squad. We never talk to each other, but in a way we all know each other. We're the people who keep showing up.

The visiting room smells like floor wax, vending machine coffee, and the faint chemical sweetness of whatever they mop with. The plastic chairs are bolted to the floor, and the glass is thick and scratched and smudged with a thousand handprints nobody ever quite cleans away. I sit in booth seven, the way I always do. The first time I came here, I was twenty-two, and it was the only one open. Now it feels like if I sat anywhere else, he might not come. The door on the other side buzzes, and there he is.

Nine years have made Jim Calloway quieter. He's still tall and broad through the shoulders from the football he never got to play in college, but there's gray at his temples now, at twenty-seven, and he moves like a man who has learned that every room has a wall: unhurried, careful, never turning his back on anything.

Josh is eight years older, the firstborn, the one Franklin Calloway raised to take over the company from the time he could walk. Josh went to private school in Houston while Jim rode the bus to Alvin High, and spent his summers on offshore rigs and in boardrooms while Jim mowed lawns and threw passes in the backyard. Everyone in Alvin knew the plan. Josh would run Calloway Energy, and Jim would be the sweet one, the one who stayed. The only thing they really share is their mother's eyes, storm gray with that darker ring around the edge.

Jim used to joke about it. Josh got the company, he'd say, and I got the curfew. He said it at the Dairy Queen the first time he bought me a Blizzard, and he said it at prom. He said it the night of the party, laughing, with an arm around my waist, while Josh, home for the weekend and twenty-six and far too old to be there, held court by the tailgate of his black Tahoe with a beer in each hand.

That spring, Franklin Calloway was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, after forty years of Marlboro Reds smoked one after another on offshore rigs and in boardrooms and in the stands at every Alvin football game I ever went to. The doctors gave him a year, and he fought it for eight, but that May, the whole town knew he was racing to hand Josh the company before he died. There was a dinner planned at the River Oaks Country Club and a profile coming in the Chronicle, and my mother clipped the announcement and stuck it on our refrigerator, like the Calloways were royalty and we were lucky to live in their kingdom. Some nights, lying awake, I wonder what one scandal that spring would have cost them. One arrest, one ugly headline with the name Calloway in it, three weeks before the crown. Then I make myself stop wondering.

Jim doesn't make that joke anymore. He sits, picks up the phone, and looks at my ring, then at my face.

"Hey, Ellie."

"Hey, Jim."

This is the only place left in the world where I'm still her. The corner of his mouth lifts, which is as close as Jim gets to smiling now. It used to be his whole face. It used to be the first thing anybody noticed about him, how easily he laughed and how he lit up a room just by walking into it. Teachers loved him, coaches loved him, and my mother loved him so much she set a place for him at Sunday dinner whether he was coming or not.

Then, three days after Tessa died, he walked into the Alvin Police Department alone, still wearing the clothes from the party with mud on his boots, and said, I did it. No lawyer, no parents, just Jim signing a confession on a legal pad. He pleaded guilty and took twenty years, and he never once let them put me on the stand. I wrote him every week for four years before he'd agree to see me, and he sent most of the letters back unopened. The only one he answered said, Live your life, Ellie. Go to college. Get out of Alvin. Forget me. I didn't go to college, and I didn't forget him. I did get out of Alvin. That part, I managed.