Vengeance. Zachary Lazar

up the river from New Orleans in Ascension Parish, for her schedule was too busy to meet anywhere else.

      I took I-10 toward Baton Rouge, past the airport, the suburbs, the long stretch of Lake Pontchartrain, then the Atchafalaya Swamp with the bony gray trunks of bald cypresses piercing through the bright green tupelos. It was not an unpleasant drive, but it was long enough that Sonia often slept between her shifts at the house of a coworker friend. She was a lab technician for a petrochemical company, working twelve-hour stretches that for four weeks were in the daytime and for the next four weeks in the night. She’d been a bank teller for several years, she’d told me on the phone, but after Katrina that job had disappeared, so now she commuted to this lab almost two hours from home, occasionally supplementing the income she made there by cleaning houses back in New Orleans so she could buy Kendrick clothes and send him money for extra food from the commissary and also so she could afford to visit him. I got off the interstate and the industrial corridor began—fertilizers, reagents, vinyl, polyethylene. I thought of the brief, inadequate note I’d sent to Kendrick a few days before, one of a series of thank-you cards I’d written to the people I’d interviewed, placing them in little envelopes that I left unsealed so they could be screened by the prison administrators. Having stuffed these cards into a manila envelope, I sent them to the assistant warden, Cathy, asking her to please distribute them for me. She’d told me the administration wanted to keep “all interaction between [me] and the inmates under its supervision.” If I wanted to go back and do more interviews, then I couldn’t write letters—the administration would not “support pen pal relationships.”

      Dear Kendrick,

      Thank you for talking to me the other week. I hope we can follow up more sometime soon. You were one of the first people to give me his story and I will always be grateful for what you told me. In the meantime, I still like conch, even if you St. Lucians prefer to call it lambi.

      About two miles down Ashland Road, I came upon the main Shell plant, acres of depopulated furnaces, storage tanks, metal tubes, scaffolding, pipes—the illegible machinery of ethylene manufacturing—the vast sprawl of it reminiscent of Angola. (I learned later that like Angola it had been built on a former slave plantation.) I got lost somewhere on the river levee and had to check the map on my phone, then called Sonia for directions. There were a few cattle in the fields, most of the houses in ruins, the rest an agglomeration of trailers or plain wooden shacks. There was a church with three crosses in front made of rusted sheet metal attached to iron scaffolding, the sheet metal torn away in shreds. I eventually found Sonia’s friend’s house down another road, beyond a gas station and store, the Yousef Quick Stop. When she opened the door, she was dressed in a pale blue lab coat, and she kept talking with someone on her cell phone as she showed me in. The house had a purplish gray sectional sofa and a flat-screen TV that was turned up so loud I didn’t know how she could have been having a phone conversation over it. It gradually occurred to me that she was so accustomed to having the TV on that it didn’t register to her that it was actually on.

      “I told you Girl Ville, Girl Ville,” she said after she hung up.

      “You’re right, I know,” I said. “I didn’t understand.”

      She was saying “Carville,” not “Girl Ville”—Carville was the town we were in. I hadn’t been able to make out this simple statement over the phone because of her Saint Lucian accent. I looked at the living room, which had the sterility of a model home, or perhaps more aptly of some of the guest facilities I’d seen at Angola. Sonia had been washing some spare lab coats in the laundry off the kitchen and now, as she went to put them in the dryer, she asked if I wanted anything to drink but I told her no, I’d brought some mineral waters for us—they were in my bag, along with my notebook and pen and a copy of the book I was planning to give her, my book about my father. It was, of course, what had led me here, as I’d explained when we first talked on the phone, telling her the story of my connection to Deborah and how it had brought us together to the passion play at Angola. Sonia had remarked on the element of fate in all this, though I was still reluctant to look at it that way, to feel grandiose in that way. Like many people, she didn’t know what to say about my book when I presented it to her. We were back in the living room, sitting on the sofa, the mineral waters on the coffee table before us, and she held the book in her hands like a family album, as if trying to take in what it must mean to me. To suggest we might have something in common because of my father’s death felt slightly wrong to me, but I also felt I had to explain again why I was there. Tears had started to well at the edges of her eyes when I mentioned Kendrick, the tears distorted and accentuated by the fact that she was dressed for work in her boxy coat. I thought of her son, his “Weimaraner eyes,” as Deborah had called them, and I remembered something I’d written in the book Sonia was now holding: My father could be quiet. There was something he held in reserve, a mystery about him, even a romance, but there wasn’t crookedness, there wasn’t criminality. The connection I kept seeing between Kendrick and my father gave me an uncomfortable sense of distance from the moment I was in now, as if I were watching Sonia and myself on a screen, insufficiently attentive to the fact that in her mind her son was the victim of the most horrible injustice. She placed the book on the sofa beside her, then reached for a tissue from the box on the coffee table. I told her we didn’t have to do this if she didn’t want to, but she said no, she wanted to, and when I asked if she was sure, she recoiled slightly, as if a little indignant that I didn’t understand.

      “I invited you here,” she said. “Not many people ever asked me about this. I invited you because it’s good to talk.”

      She showed me a Polaroid of her and Kendrick taken at the prison on his last birthday, standing with their arms around each other before a painted backdrop of a waterfall surrounded by steep mountains with rounded crests like those in China. She looked completely different in the picture, dressed in a neat beige suit with pearl earrings, rings on her fingers, her hair and makeup freshly done. Kendrick, in a white T-shirt and jeans, peered into the camera with the solemn pride of a figure in a nineteenth-century daguerreotype. She told me a little about what their visits involved, saying that it wasn’t like in the movies—they sat at tables in chairs, not in those booths with phones separated by glass. They were able to hug each other, kiss each other, to interact like a normal mother and son. She even smiled slightly when she began to describe the food she could order for them—pizza, barbecue chicken, jambalaya, po’boys. When they ran out of things to say, she told me, which could happen because she often spent the whole day there, six or seven hours, there were TVs they could watch, and if people brought kids there were coloring books and even video games for them to play.

      “I’m coping,” she told me. “There’s times when I don’t have enough money to send, and I tell him I’m sorry, I know you need food, but it’s either food or I keep coming to visit. One or the other. It’s hard on him, I know. He lost some weight last time. I could see that he lost it.”

      We sat in silence for a while, then she asked me if my mother was still alive. This question always surprises me, though I’ve heard it many times. I said yes, and she asked another question people often do, was my mother okay?, and I told her yes, it was a long time ago. She had remarried, we had moved to another city, she and my stepfather were still together.

      “We talked about a lot of heavy things when I was writing my book,” I said. “I didn’t really remember my father, even though I should have—I was six when he died, old enough to have memories. But it was a blank spot for me, who he was, so I liked talking to my mother about it, even though it was hard for her. I maybe take things too seriously sometimes, to the point that it’s a little ridiculous. Maybe there’s something wrong with me, wanting to keep having conversations like that.”

      We looked at each other as if to acknowledge that what I’d just said was a little absurd, though this acknowledgment somehow also seemed to imply the opposite: that we understood each other enough now to be able to speak frankly. She told me then that a few days ago she’d learned that the kidney disease she’d had for several years had progressed to the point where she needed treatment. This was what she’d meant before when she’d said she was “coping,” that in fact she didn’t feel well most of the time. She hadn’t told Kendrick about this, and she asked me not to tell him either, though