Phone Calls From Prison

You have a collect call from an inmate at the New Hampshire Department of Corrections. This call may be monitored. To accept this call, press 1. To refuse this call, please hang up.

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Disc #3 – calls to SS

“Are you smoking?” my mother asked.

“No, my doctor would kill me,” he replied.

“I’ll kill you, too. Then I’ll be up for two murders but yours would be real, not attempted.”

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My mother made this call, and many others, between April 2001 and early 2002. There are twenty-two pages of notes, a call log, spread across my desk. An employee at the New Hampshire Public Defender’s office, probably an investigator or paralegal but possibly an attorney, typed these notes. Each page documents one disc of phone calls to one person; the discs are not in chronological order. The calls were summarized: sometimes specifically (“they talk about missing each other, crying…”), sometimes generally (“town gossip”). Sometimes the unidentified typist included dialogue (“Dad, I know what I’m doing at this point”). Refused calls were noted: “Not accepted.” Occasionally, this employee inserted his or her opinion into the notes (“BB is brutally honest”) or asked questions (BB is “Flash”?).

I read and reread this call log, looking for answers to questions it’s too late to ask. These pages connect together, forming a wire between us. I try to crawl through that wire, towards her, where I can hear her voice.

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Her friend, let’s call him SS (which is how he’s referred to in this phone log), was one of the three people she called regularly. SS, who lived in Larchmont, New York, had been financially subsidizing my mother for most of her adult life. She never told me the whole story but it seemed to be a mix of blackmail and friendship. In March 2002, the Sullivan County Attorney and a New Hampshire State Trooper interviewed SS via telephone. When asked to describe their relationship, SS said it was “very elicit [sic] at first” but he gave her money voluntarily. SS died ten years ago. Nearly everyone in this story is dead now, except for me.

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Disc #8 - calls to SS

“I’m definitely going to lose the car,” she said.

“Giving you that car was a mistake. You don’t know how to handle money,” SS said.

“The thing that pisses me off is that he is walking away. Everybody warned me that it was a mistake. They’re trying to get me for conspiracy to kill his wife, but he was going away for 7–15 for having sex with me, so this is what he’s doing to me.”

“What did you do? Uh, don’t tell me.”

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None of the calls were to me. My then-husband contacted the phone company and blocked incoming collect calls. My mother and I could only communicate by letter, which we occasionally did during this period of time. Her primary family support was her father, my grandfather (EH in the call log); he and my grandmother raised me. He was actually her stepfather, my step grandfather; the only father either of us had. He used to tell me that he loved my mother and me more than his real daughter and granddaughters. I have only one child so I can’t speak from experience but I don’t believe that parents love their children equally. Maybe love is divvied up based on who needs it more.

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Disc #11 - calls to EH

“I’m going to be indicted on conspiracy to murder and I don’t want you to be around to hear the gossip and I don’t want you to see the trial. Let me tell you something Dad, you really don’t want to be around for this. You don’t deserve having me put you through this either. You’ve been nothing but good to me and now I’ve really fucked up, you’d be better off disowning me. I don’t want to put you through this again.”

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I had forsaken my mother, cutting her out of my...