Restraint
HEIDI DAVIDSON-DREXEL
Yesterday my sister was arrested for pouring a bucket of Legos from the second floor onto her downstairs neighbor. This was after weeks of them yelling back and forth at each other. My sister believes the neighbor is conspiring to torment her at the bidding of her dead ex-boyfriend. But it doesn’t matter what she believes, the laws of physics and of the State of Maine are pretty firm on the question of hurling Legos at people.
All of this happened on Friday afternoon, so they took her to the county jail to wait for her hearing, which will be on Monday. That’s a whole weekend with no one home to feed the cat.
My sister’s son, beloved nephew, recently removed from my sister’s care by Child Protective Services, adores the cat. He calls me on Saturday from my parents’ house, asking me, “Can a cat make it two days without food? Or what do you think, Auntie? Did Mom hide a key somewhere?”
“You’d know that better than I do, bub,” I say.
“Maybe I could climb up the porch legs and get in that way,” he ventures. This kid’s a problem-solver.
“To the second floor?” I ask.
“Yeah, it’s not that high.”
“You’re how tall? Four and a half feet?”
“Four feet nine. I’m a good climber.”
Even without considering the situation with the downstairs neighbor, breaking into a housing authority apartment building seems a poor choice. Ten years old or not.
“No, little bub. I’ll go over there and check on Captain Sharp Teeth. Don’t you worry.”
It’s about time I give my poor mom a break. She barely got through with us before little bub was in and out of there. Last thing she needs to worry about is the cat. Except, no one has a key to my sister’s apartment. So I call the jail to make sure I don’t waste a trip. I make sure to be very polite.
“Excuse me, sir. Am I allowed to pick stuff up from a prisoner?”
“Yup. The prisoner just has to sign off on it.” The officer even goes and asks her if she has her keys with her and if she will release them to me.
Yes and yes. It’s all coming together.
“And could I please ask about your hours?”
“There’s always someone at the jail. It’s open 24/7.”
Open in a matter of speaking. Briefly, I contemplate what it might be like to drive over in the middle of the night to pick up the keys, just for the sake of it. Like a 2 a.m. trip to L.L.Bean before Covid.
I call my girlfriend, Sam, because it’s an hour’s drive just to the jail, then another twenty minutes to my sister’s house after that, and I want company. We’ve only been dating five months and I’m not sure what the time frame is for bringing a girlfriend along on a family prison trip, but we’re lesbians, so at least I’m not asking her to move in. I like her a lot. Like, could be the real thing a lot. Best not to dance too long around the real stuff. The Oxford County Jail is a 72-hour holding cell facility in South Paris, a town known for its farmers union. I bill it as a road trip through some of the prettiest unsung parts of the state and she agrees to come.
“It’s called a correctional facility because the goal is to correct people, right?” I say to Sam once we’re settled in.
“Or to help people make their own corrections.” Sam bites down on a pretzel rod. I picked up road food and everything. It seems necessary to make it special, almost like a date.
“What does the correctional part actually look like? Classes? Behavior modification protocols?”
“Maybe where you learn to apologize or to exercise restraint,” she says. Her straight hair is back in a tiny ponytail because her hair is not that long. She has on jean shorts and an old green polo with splatters of paint on it and the sleeves cut off. They are not date clothes, but they are picking up a key from the jail clothes. “I’m guessing the only correcting that really happens is somewhere along the lines of breaking or forcing.”
“Why do you think it’s gotta be like that?”
She shakes her head. “Let’s reimagine the world. What would you change first?”
“I’d rewind the clock for my sister. Give her, and us, another chance.”
“Okay, sure. But on a larger scale. What would it be?”
“Ending hunger, I guess. And all the other parts of poverty. Make it possible for everyone worldwide to have a community. I’d start there. I’d make the big corporations disband and give all their money to the places they’ve exploited. The higher ups would each be required to volunteer their time until they have repaid the community the equivalent of what they took. It’d be a deterrent for future people getting too greedy.”
“Who would want to take the CEOs though? I mean in these communities.”
“We’d be organized by opinion. Everyone would have a week to all get up and move. Each region of the US would be designated for particular qualities or belief systems and then you could just move to the place that was right for you.”
I put on my blinker, move onto the onramp for I95, and pull up to the tollbooth.
“The car in front of you paid your toll,” the tollbooth attendant says. Sam and I look at each other. An auspicious sign.
“Here take this and pay for the person behind us,” I grin, high on generosity.
The tollbooth attendant smiles curtly and I wonder how long this chain of dollar bills is. Maybe someone paid a toll ahead a week ago last Tuesday and people have been passing it on since then. I mean, you already have the dollar in your hand.
It’s just a few exits on the interstate until we get to the rural route. Then it’s like every town in western Maine. Canoe rental, pot shop, Family Dollar, pot shop, campground–trailer park combo, pot shop, tiny local air strip, pot shop. Some of the pot shops are fancy with post-and-beam entrances that make them look like REIs and others are tiny ventures that need a more diverse offering to get by: glass pipes, kratom, a few groceries. Just get a high school friend who was good at art class to paint the sign.
“Would you have correctional facilities in your utopia?” Sam asks me.
“Maybe there would have to be something,” I say. “But it would be nice and supportive and people would get a second chance.”
“Even people who did really awful things?”
“People wouldn’t do really awful things in my society because they’d have what they needed.”
“But what if someone still did something awful, even though they had everything they needed?”
“I don’t know. I guess we’d figure that out if it happened.”
“Sorry. Something about the mood out here. There really are a lot of trees. I mean, it’s mostly trees.”
“And pot shops.” I grab hold of her hand.
“But mostly it’s trees.”
I told Sam about the prison and that we had to feed the cat. I told her my sister had been struggling with various addictions for multiple decades. I didn’t tell her anymore than that. I never do. General details are really all you need. People know about opioids now. They know it’s an epidemic and that people are suffering. They know it causes people to do stuff they wouldn’t do otherwise. It’s best not to get into the details of what that stuff actually is. Generalizations tend to garner more sympathy.
I squeeze Sam’s hand and don’t tell her that this will probably take more than some behavioral correction. My sister believes her dead ex-boyfriend is tormenting her by putting men in the forest behind her house to sing terrifying songs to her and the neighbor is in on it. Last week she told me her ex came into her apartment one night and cut her hair while she slept. I asked her, “His ghost?”
“No,” she barked at me. “Obviously it’s not a ghost. I don’t know how he did it, but it happened. I’m not crazy.” She kept saying that last part.
There is a death certificate. But you never know. That guy barely spoke. He could have been a gentle soul or a psychotic criminal. They were together for four or five years and I barely got to know him. He was that quiet.
All that remains: he was from French-Canadians like us, he hated his last name because kids made fun of it when he was in school, he made pickled carrots without peeling them first so the skins separated and floated loose in the jar, and he liked to order sneakers off the internet. He died of an overdose in a room full of sneaker boxes. I don’t know which kind of overdose. What I do know is my sister crawled out of that relationship a different person. Whether he’s tormenting her by proxy, through haunting, or through permanent meth psychosis, maybe it doesn’t matter.
We come out of a long stretch of woods to a huge parking lot and a massive hotel-looking building: the Oxford Casino.
“The rural consolation prize,” Sam says. “Take away any means for making a living, give people a tiny bit of money, not enough to live off mind you, but enough to try to make it grow.
That’s how you make money off of a place you can’t make money off of anymore.”
“That and pot shops,” I add.
The casino sticks out so much it looks like someone put a sticker on a photograph. Down the road we pass the First Amendment Gift Shop. Sam insists we turn around and go in because this could be a once in a lifetime opportunity.
“I’m not sure we want to be the first and last gay people ever to visit this place.”
“If you’re for free speech, you’re probably okay with lesbians.”
“They might have gotten their amendments mixed up,” I say.
There is a bell above the door that rings to announce our entrance. The room is a wide rectangle. On the right side are postcards and little figurines and joke gifts. Decades of gift trends are represented, from small ceramic white girls with giant foreheads and no mouths to lobster Beanie Babies to Dwight bobbleheads. To the left is the smoke shop, with glass pipes, legal drugs in the form of imported “herbal remedies,” and locally grown, dirt-cheap marijuana. All around Maine in towns like this, large investors have been buying up cheap single-family homes and converting them to grow houses. There’s no better growing medium for black mold than three thousand marijuana plants getting regular mistings in a room made of 1980s drywall. These guys smuggle in illegal fungicides to fight it, but their weed is still generally riddled with mold and whatever illegal chemicals they sprayed on it. Another potential culprit for the singing men in the woods behind my sister’s apartment.
In the back of the shop are the guns. “See I told you.” I elbow Sam. I knew there would be guns.
She’s busy checking out the vintage gift shop merch.
“I had one of these as a kid,” she says, holding one of those megalocephalic little girls. “Yeah, me too. I didn’t like it.”
“Me neither. She looks so freaky with those vacant eyes.” For a second it looks like Sam might just throw the thing on the floor. The store clerk is standing behind the gun case. He eyes us. Sam puts down the figurine and pats its head.
“Did you have guns in the house growing up?” she asks me.
“Yeah, my dad did. He shot a deer every fall and filled the freezer for the winter. We had BB guns, my sister and I.”
“We had guns too.”
“You did?” Sam grew up in Delaware, near the ocean. Guns are not something I imagine in a beach house.
“Yeah, my dad was kind of paranoid. He worried about break-ins. He and my mom both took shooting lessons. My brother is still into that kind of thing. Stand your ground and all that.”
“Jeez, I wouldn’t have guessed that.”
“I found the guns so terrifying. They didn’t start with it until I was eleven or so. The neighbor down the street got robbed by someone strung out on cocaine or something. Our neighbor tried to stop the guy and ended up getting beat within an inch of his life with a fireplace poker. Later that week, my dad came home with a handgun. A few weeks after that, he got one for my mom. When I was home alone, I used to go upstairs to the rack on the wall where they kept them and just stare. I was afraid that I would just go crazy and grab one of the guns and use it on myself or someone else. Looking at it reassured me. If it was still on the wall, it wasn’t in my hand, you know? Even to this day, if I’m too close to a cop, I worry I might just lose it and grab his gun from the holster. I kind of panic. It’s fucked up, I know. But you can’t always decide what you think.”
“No, you really can’t,” I say. I want to put my arm around her, but I know better in this store. Quiet, unassuming lesbians will likely be tolerated. Lesbians showing affection in public, not so much.
We look at the wall of greeting cards. Most of them show old women making jokes about weight and wine. By the register there’s a display of snacks. “Let’s just get a Little Debbie and get out of here,” I say to Sam under my breath.
I go over to the rack and pick out two Star Crunches then go to wait at the register. The clerk walks over. He’s an older guy wearing an American flag T-shirt tucked into a pair of old Wranglers. Vintage Wranglers and silly old figurines go for an arm and a leg in Portland. This guy could make a killing if only he could move his store forty miles east.
In the car, I hand Sam her Star Crunch. “These are the best. Have you had one?”
She shakes her head and takes a bite. “It’s like a Cocoa Krispies treat.”
“Exactly.” I savor my first bite, then put the car in gear and pull out of the parking lot. I put my arm around her and she leans into me. We are nearly there.
The Oxford County Jail is inside the sheriff’s office, next door to the courthouse.
Sam says she’ll wait in the car, which I think is the right call, given the number of cops and guns there will probably be in the prison. I get out and ring the doorbell with the camera. It could be any modern school building. I say who I am and why I am there. I wonder if they get people trying to exchange less innocent items, or if they even believe my story about feeding the cat. Maybe they think I want to get into my sister’s house and steal her drugs or meds or whatever. But probably there’s nothing they can do but deal with the crimes they know about.
Once I get through the door, I see a stairway and multiple doors. There are no signs. I try the doors and they are all locked, so I head up the stairs. I wonder, can they see me trying to find my way? Do they watch everyone like this, laughing at us newbies? Everything about the building, inside and out, feels made for anonymity. Like it’s design-less. Built to some specifications so general they can’t do anything but make you feel alone.
I go up one set of stairs, and I think of my sister, handcuffed, being led up these stairs just a day ago. Was her head up or down? Was she quiet or was she yelling, trying to plead her case to anyone who would listen?
That day we talked about the ghost, that’s what she said to me, even more times than she said that she wasn’t crazy. “I don’t know why no one believes me.”
When we were little, she and I loved our Barbie dolls. We’d play for hours. Because she was the older sister, she got to be the Sunsational Malibu Barbie, with the real bathing suit intact. Mine was a hand-me-down Skipper doll we had once given a funky asymmetrical haircut to. I took Skipper because I wanted my older sister to be happy more than I cared about being sunsational. One year at Christmas, someone gave us a disposable camera. We put the Barbies in the plastic pink corvette I had found at a school rummage sale and we made a photo documentary of the two dolls dying in different ways. The car crashed into a tree, and we covered the dolls in ketchup. Then a stuffed bear came alone and mauled them both as they tried to escape the wreck. The bear, mouth ringed in ketchup, finally retreated back into the woods, and just as the two dolls lay in the sand, trying to recover, Psycho Ken showed up.
We used the entire roll of film to capture the Barbies’ horrid demise. My sister hung the photo of the car wreck on her wall right between her Beastie Boys poster and the embroidered alphabet our mom made for her when she was an infant. In the background of the photo, you can see her hand holding the car at an awkward angle against the tree. Dangling from her wrist is a poorly made friendship bracelet I knotted for her at the rec center, which she wore until it fell off so many times, there wasn’t enough string left to tie it back together. Even then, she didn’t throw it away. She looped it over the tack that held the Barbie photo. It stayed up all through high school, when I used to sit on her bed and watch her and her cool friends do their hair and pluck their eyebrows. The photo and the bracelet are still there, even now, hanging on the wall in her old bedroom at my parent’s house—the room where her son now sleeps. Almost nothing has changed in that room. It’s like a shrine to the kid she once was. So often we don’t get a choice about what changes and what stays the same.
At the top of the long staircase, I go through the only unlocked door. It brings me to an entry way with a door on the opposite side. The walls are painted cinder blocks. Each wall is a different color and a different level of newness, like they only have the time to paint one wall at a time and they have to use whatever paint they have on hand. There are no chairs, no friendly posters. I look around to figure out what to do next when I hear a voice. It’s coming through a small rectangle cut into the wall to my right, about 5 × 7 inches wide.
“He’s asking her now,” the voice says to me. “I’m the guy you spoke to before. There will just be a paper you have to sign.”
I walk over to the square and peer in. Though I’m standing on the floor, I’m looking up at an officer in a brown uniform whose desk sits above the tiny window. The opening is big enough that he could reach through and pass things like keys or papers, but small enough and high enough up that it would be awkward for me to, for example, try to shoot him through it. Not design-less at all, this place has been very carefully planned.
“Okay, thank you,” I say.
“Can I see your ID?” I hand over my license and he checks it out, turning it in the light. “She’s got some mental health stuff going on, huh?” he says.
“Yeah, for years. Substance use too.” As soon as it’s out, I worry I shouldn’t have said that to this police officer. Will it make her case worse?
He just nods. “She’s been pretty upset. Earlier, we thought she got in a fight with someone, so we went in, but it was just her, yelling at the air.”
Tears come to my eyes, even though I do not want to cry here. “She refuses to get treatment. She thinks it’s all so real. It’s everyone else who’s the problem.” Why can’t I stop telling him stuff?
“I been working here twenty-eight years. I see it all the time. They get on their meds for a bit, but then the meds are working, so they don’t think they need ’em and they go off ’em. Or they refuse to take ’em at all. The space we got here used to be enough for the county. Not anymore. Now we have to send people to other counties for longer sentences. It’s expensive, but what’re you gonna do? We’ve got too many people and not enough beds.”
He goes over to the other wall and presses some kind of intercom. He talks in a low voice to someone on the other side.
I think about asking to see her. By the window, there is a list of requirements for visitors and I read it. There are a lot of rules I wouldn’t break, but still, I tell myself it would be too complicated. It would take too long. And poor Sam would be waiting in the car all that time. But the truth is, I don’t want to visit. I hate seeing my sister like this. These struggles come and they go. None of us knows what order or logic drives this. Every time the struggles go, we all pretend they never came in the first place. It’s not a good strategy, but what else are we going to do?
When I see her, no matter what state she’s in, some part of my brain always thinks that we’re going to just pick up where we left off a few decades ago. In my mind she is still there, still the sister I remember. It’s not until she speaks that I know which version of her I will actually be getting.
All of a sudden, I hear her voice through the intercom. When she’s in this state, it makes her voice different, deeper and more monotone. It’s probably just hoarse from yelling so much, but I can understand why people in the past might have thought a demon got in there somehow.
The sergeant clicks off the intercom and slides his chair back over to where I am. “It’s wicked hard on the families,” he says. “I see that all the time too.”
“She thinks people are out to get her. She lost custody of her son.” The tears come freely now. He doesn’t say anything or move to comfort me. He just lets me cry and he doesn’t seem to mind my tears.
The door at the end of the hallway opens and a younger officer comes into the waiting room.
“She won’t give them to you. She keeps saying she doesn’t want anyone in her house when she’s not there.”
“But I just wanted to feed the cat.” My voice goes high as I try hard not to sputter all over the empty room.
“I know, I told her about the cat. She says he’s got enough food. I’m really sorry.” The young cop’s face crinkles up nervously. He genuinely feels badly that I drove all the way here and he can’t convince her to change her mind. Maybe he thinks I’m going to yell at him. Throw chairs or something, except there are no chairs to throw. I get it together for his sake.
“It’s okay. It’s not you guys. I should’ve seen this coming. Thank you for your time. Really. I appreciate it.”
They nod at me and I turn and walk back to the thick door. The first officer presses the button to unlock it. I go back through all the doors and at every one he buzzes to unlock it just in time for me to go through.
In the parking lot, Sam is listening to the radio and has the air conditioning on high. “I started cooking in here,” she says. “And there was no good place to sit outside.” The parking lot is as bare as the waiting room.
“Of course,” I say, sliding into the driver’s seat. I stare at the steering wheel.
“We heading to her house now?” Sam asks.
“No,” I turn the engine over and start backing out.
Sam is quiet for a minute. “You gonna tell me why?”
“She wouldn’t give me the keys.”
“Not even for the cat’s sake?”
“Not even for the cat’s sake.”
“Well, what’re we gonna do?”
“What do you mean? Go home, I guess and hope that everything’s okay.”
“But you said your nephew loves the cat.”
“Right, but what are we gonna do? Break in?”
“I mean, maybe. I don’t know. Maybe she left a window open or something.”
“I’m not bringing you to break into my sister’s house. This is weird enough as it is. We hardly know each other.”
“Isn’t this how two people get to know each other?” I look over at her and she’s smiling at me. “We’ll go and just check things out. Maybe there’s an easy solution.”
At my sister’s building, I park in the dirt lot and we push past a plastic bike to walk in the building’s open front door. Her apartment is at the top of the first flight of stairs. There’s a pumpkin from last Halloween hanging there, faded to yellow. The door is locked.
Sam and I walk around the building. It’s mostly quiet, but I can hear voices inside the apartments. I can also hear Captain Sharp Teeth meowing loudly from a partially open window. A yellow plastic bucket filled with Legos is sitting at the edge of one of the first-floor patios.
I look around at the rest of the apartments, trying to gauge how likely people are to call the police if I try to climb in the open window. One guy is sitting on his balcony a few floors up, but he sees me eyeing the windows and looks away.
Sam says, “If anyone says anything to us, we’ll just tell them we are trying to feed the cat. We can use the picnic table to get up there.”
“I’m not sure that’s enough of a reason.” The only thing I know about this building is that the neighbor probably has the local police on speed dial. But fine. I’m going to do it. “Go wait in the car. If someone’s gonna get in trouble for this, it’ll be me.”
Sam looks at me. “First, I’ll help you move the picnic table.”
We each get a side and heave it over so it’s under the open window.
“Please now. Come on. Go.”
She shakes her head at me. “You need a boost.”
The guy is looking at me again. I yell up to him. “We gotta feed the cat!”
He waves his hand at me, like go ahead, and moves his chair so it’s facing the other direction.
I can reach the bottom of the screen and I gently wiggle it loose until the entire thing leans back into my hands. I let it drop on the lawn. Sam picks it up and leans it against the building. I have to get on my toes to get even my elbows up on the windowsill. Sam crawls under me and I use her back like a step stool. The metal edge of the window digs into my arms as I use my feet to push my body weight up the wall. Finally, I get enough of my top half far enough over the window’s edge that I overcome gravity and fall into the kitchen. I hear Sam cheer from below.
The cat tiptoes silently over and sniffs me while I lay curled on the linoleum, waiting for my arms to regain feeling.
“Hey, Captain,” I say, giving him a little pet. Papers are piled on every surface, receipts, bills: the castoffs of capitalism. I wonder if someday this kind of shit will be in museums to represent what life was like for early-twenty-first-century Americans. I find a bag of cat food, thick-walled and rolled at the top so no cat would have a chance at getting at the contents. I open it and leave it wide, just in case. Then I pile Captain Sharp Teeth’s dish high. I refill the water and wander to the bathroom to scoop the litter.
My sister’s dab rig and an old peanut butter jar with a thick layer of THC resin at the bottom sit on the bathroom counter. Next to that is another jar with the waxy stuff. I knock all of it into the trash onto a wad of tampons. I empty the cat litter into the same trash, covering everything. I know this stuff is expensive. And I know she can just go out and get some more as soon as she’s home. But I can’t leave it be. I scratch Captain behind the ears and then shut and lock the window. I go out the front door and lock it behind me.
Sam is sitting on the car’s hood. “I put the picnic table back. Let’s get out of here.”
On the ride home, we pass by the First Amendment Gift Shop again. I squeeze Sam’s hand one more time, just so she knows I didn’t forget. I’m feeling a little uneasy because the day has moved in the direction of awful specificity, in spite of my best efforts.
“These pot shops feel an awful lot like the pill mills,” she says. “I mean, obviously a different caliber, but still. You make something widely available, maybe a little bit addictive, and of course people are gonna overdo it. Meanwhile, someone far away is planning for a fabulous retirement.” She pauses. “You doing okay?”
“You know, the cop was really nice to me. I was worried it would be intimidating or scary or something, but he made me feel like this was pretty normal.”
“It probably is for him,” she says. Maybe she can tell that what she said doesn’t make me feel better. Sure it’s common, but the way it hurts still belongs to me. I can see her thinking and when she speaks, her voice is quiet. She’s not certain whether she’s going to make it better or worse. In truth, she can’t really do either, but it means a lot that she’s aiming for better. “It makes a difference when someone could be an asshole, but isn’t,” she says.
“Yeah, it’s true. We could all use a whole lot more of that.”
HEIDI DAVIDSON-DREXEL is a public school teacher, parent, and writer. In her writing she explores ordinary human struggles, with a special focus on the ways people adapt and adjust to keep themselves going. Her short stories and essays have appeared in various publications and she is hard at work on her first novel. She lives with her wife and kids in Portland, Maine.
