Saving Rain(21)

I wanted to ask her to let me know if she ever found the answer to her question. I wanted to beg her to never stop loving me despite it all because if she did, there wouldn’t be a single shred of love for me left in this entire world. I wanted to thank her for everything she’d ever done for me over the years, especially during the ones in which I had nobody else.

But I didn’t. Whether for a lack of time or courage, I didn’t know. Hell, maybe it was both.

Instead, I whispered, “I’m so sorry,” hoping she heard me. Hoping she knew I meant it.

“Let’s go, Mason,” the guard said, nudging me along.

So, without another word, without looking back, I went.





CHAPTER SIX


LETTERS TO RAIN



Age Twenty-Seven



This is the part where you probably expect me to say that prison was a slice of hell, served to me on a shit-stained platter. You probably expect a harrowing tale of endless fights, shower seduction, and enough misdemeanors to tack another fifteen years onto my sentence.

Am I right?

Well, I wouldn’t lie to you.

For those first five years, I actually hadn’t hated prison.

I didn’t love it; don’t get me wrong. It was far from a walk in the park. But for all intents and purposes, it was better than how I’d lived the first half of my life.

I had a guaranteed roof over my head and three meals a day.

I landed a janitorial job and started working shifts in the cafeteria, cooking and serving breakfast a couple of times a week.

After accepting the fate handed to me, I’d spent the first two years working toward taking the GED exam, and by the time I was twenty-four, I had passed with flying colors. And once I was done doing that, I spent three years taking some online college courses and got a bachelor’s degree in business. In my downtime—and there was a lot of it—I decided to finally take up something I hadn’t had much time for since I had been a kid—hobbies. I quickly found that when I wasn’t swiping shit from Mom, selling in The Pit, or working my ass to exhaustion, I could devour about four books a week. I genuinely enjoyed running and strength training. I had a knack for carpentry, and gardening was something I found a lot of pride in.

So, all things considered, I was doing okay. I wasn’t making enemies, and I was finding plenty of stuff to pass the time.

But, man, I was fucking lonely.

It was easy to be lonely in prison. And I wasn’t talking about finding someone to chat with during mealtimes or while working whatever job you were assigned to. No, that part was a piece of cake, and if we were talking about casual acquaintances, I had plenty of those, and all of them were just like me. Good-hearted guys who had ended up in shitty situations.

But what I was talking about was, when everyone else was having visitors or weekly phone conversations or receiving regular letters and packages in the mail, I had none. And that honestly blew my mind a little. To know that these guys—and I mean dudes convicted of worse crimes than me—had parents, wives, kids, and friends out there who loved them and cared for them after everything they’d done and I had no one. Not a single fucking person. And that sucked. A lot.

So, one day, out of desperation, I took up writing letters to the one person I could think of who I’d never wronged. The only person who I’d truly saved.

I wrote letters to a girl named Rain. A girl with the prettiest, softest brown hair I’d ever seen.

I knew, even when I’d started writing them, that it was stupid. I also knew I’d never send them and she’d never read them. But it was cathartic, in a way, to write to this person I’d built up around a girl I had known for all of fifteen minutes. And while I knew what had happened to me—up to this point in my life anyway—I often wondered what had happened to her after I dropped her off at her house.

She’d be twenty-four now.

Where had life taken her after that night? Had she heeded my warning to stay away from those assholes? Had she gotten the hell out of that town and run far away, just as I’d always dreamed of doing?

Every week, I filled my letters with those questions, my confessions, and the things that had been happening inside the prison walls. The initial struggles. The acceptance. The hard work I put into being the good, decent person I’d always insisted I was. They served as a diary of sorts, and it was better to get it all out and down on the paper than keep it locked inside. Then, I tucked them away beneath my mattress, for nobody to read, ready to face another week of loneliness.

Until, one week, five years into my incarceration, Mom showed up.

***

Mopping the bathroom floor was dirty, disgusting labor, and I was sure it was understandable when I said I didn’t care much for it. But it was quiet work—monotonous and relaxing—and it gave me a lot of time to think. To remember a life I’d once had and fantasize about the one I probably would never have at all.

I thought about Gramma and Grampa. How disappointed they might’ve been to see where I’d been living all these years and the things I’d done to put me there. But sometimes, I thought, You know what? Maybe they wouldn’t be all that disappointed after all. Maybe they’d even be proud of me. Not for the things I’d done—of course not—but for what I’d done since I had gotten there.

I thought about Billy’s mom and the grief and pain she lived with every day. The broken heart I’d single-handedly stuffed inside her aching chest. Every now and then, I considered the possibility that, Hey, maybe she doesn’t hate me as much today as she did yesterday, and that pipe dream filled me with the smallest amount of hope. But the reality was, I knew she wouldn’t ever care about me again. Not until the day I was also dead.