Who Named the Knife Read online

  “But they changed the law.”

  “The prosecutor had no case against me without William.”

  “The DA wanted a conviction. His son was killed the same way.” We have been sitting with our food uneaten. We have been talking as if there is no count, no bell that will ring or lights that will flash. Now Maryann looks down at her food again and I wonder if she’s waiting for me to eat first, the way people wait for a hostess at a dinner party.

  “At times I think he may have set me up,” she says quietly, still not moving. “But then, why would he turn himself in? That night when he gave me the car keys and twenty dollars, my only thought was, this is my chance to get away! Then I only got a couple blocks when I got pulled over.”

  I’m about to bite down on the tortilla and beans, still vaguely warm. No crimes. Only the aftermath. And nothing acknowledged about her childhood. Added to which, the lights are flashing. The count. It takes place in the middle of visiting hours, another humiliation, since the women who have visitors are separated from them and have to line up outside for an hour or more. Visitors stay on the benches close to the vending machines. Talking to each other. Trying to keep children amused. Every inmate in every prison in California is being counted. On my first visit this happened while I was still in the waiting area and it made the waiting that much longer. There is no leaving, either. Once the count starts, doors are on lockdown. On this, my third visit, I have waited an hour and fifteen minutes to see Maryann. Finally I’m inside. We’ve been talking for less than thirty minutes and now the lights flick off and on.

  “I can’t stay.”

  Maryann stands up as if I’ve pushed her. “Mentally and emotionally I was completely under his influence,” she insists, while the narrow bench is between us and people around us are beginning to stir.

  “When did you find out about your mother?” I ask. “Who she really was?” I’m beginning to think that there is nothing to be won. Not any more.

  “I was fourteen or so.”

  “And that was exactly when you started getting wild.” We have not even opened our popcorn, but the food will have to be left uneaten. Without a visitor she will have to hurry back to her cell, since she can no longer be in the visiting room.

  She smiles. “Linda, I can’t say for sure what brought you back into my life at this point, but we have a unique bond, wouldn’t you say?” And while the prisoners begin to line up outside, she hugs me. “Linda … after so many strange turns, I can’t help thinking suspiciously. I instantly began wondering about the woman in the prosecutor’s office without even knowing what was said. I think she could have carried your comment about not being sure of my guilt back to the office. Your being a few minutes late could have just been very convenient to their wants. Most people wouldn’t think along those lines,” Maryann continues, glancing up at the clock, “but there were too many things in Hawaii that just didn’t add up until I found out about William’s plea bargain. Like, a good lawyer was removed as my counsel and replaced by Hioki.” She sighs. “I had him put in a motion to withdraw from my case, but the judge denied it. They were determined to convict me.”

  We are edging toward the door, stowing our trash. We pass the grandmothers and the mothers being visited. We pass the grandmothers and the mothers visiting. And the children. And the men. I glance at Maria and at the faces of two or three hundred other prisoners. Less than a month before, fourteen dehydrated Mexicans had died near Yuma. Another thirteen barely survived. They’d been wandering for a week in 114-degree heat after being dumped by the “coyotes” who brought them across the Rio Grande. To here.

  30

  I had no interest in writing to Maryann after that. My interest was all the other way. I wanted the moment of overlap to have meant something to her, but I knew it meant more to me.

  I had told her to call. She would have to do that collect.

  I transcribed some of the pages of the yellow notebook and sent them to her, even the page where I called her a sullen, brutal bitch. I said maybe together we could try to tell her story. She didn’t call. She read the pages and finally wrote back. She said she remembered the man who couldn’t be objective because he thought anyone who carried a gun must intend to use it. She said she remembered the blue muumuu, but not the white dress. Then she said that for seven months, in jail in Hawaii, they’d come into her cell every fifteen minutes all night long and shine a light in her eyes. “I learned on the plane going over that William made a bargain with the state, but I wasn’t about to kill myself. I’m not the type.” She said that her mother wasn’t there in the courtroom, that I was right about that.

  I went to see my own mother and attended my high-school reunion. Two weeks later, when I was back on the river, I got a message that Maryann had called and would call again. What would we talk about? I thought I could tell her about the reunion. I would turn it into a story, the way I used to turn my life into stories for my mother. It was the way I kept things on track in our house. It was the way I kept my mother happy. I’d tell Maryann I flew down to Topeka and settled in at my mother’s right away. I’d tell her that settling in involves taking my bag into the guest room, sniffing and poking at things, then sitting down with her at the dining-room table for a glass of iced tea and some cookies. At this point of the visit we are both shy, I’d say. Only this time my mother had not greeted me at the door. She had not gone into the kitchen for tea while I put my bags down. She was in bed when I arrived and I went to her room and she batted her hand in the dark air around her head. No book in her hand. No television or radio. No interest in me.

  The high-school reunion took place at a big new hotel on the fairgrounds. We had a Kansas City band and after two glasses of wine I got into the spirit. The boy I had a crush on all through junior high has a white moustache now. His mother had Alzheimer’s and he gave me the name of the place where she lived, but I wasn’t paying much attention. Those Topeka boys can dance. I learned with them and we do the same thing on the floor, unlike any other partners I’ve had. For one of those dancers, I once had a secret name. He married his high-school sweetheart after leaving a first wife, running away to Hawaii, sailing off to the South Pacific. For Maryann, I would make all this appealing.

  What do we make of ourselves and how much is circumstance? When I was eighteen I graduated from high school and left home for college. Never wrote to my friends. Burned the first bridge. What a potent year that first one away from home can be; it decides everything. Now I sat at the river’s edge, wondering how to tell Maryann the story. I’d tell her that one measures one’s changes at such times. “This is what it will be like for you,” I’d say. “Every step beyond the prison gate will be a contrast with yourself at eighteen.”

  But when the call finally came through, she didn’t ask about the reunion. She asked about my mother. She sounded worried.

  I said I couldn’t talk about it. I said something about going home, that it was hard. I had walked two blocks to see my old house, the one where I grew up. Crossed the park and stood there seeing my parents through the windows, young again, my father pounding the table, out of breath. I said, “I used to tell my mother stories. But I think she’s maybe past listening.” Late night and I am upstairs in my room. My father is back at the office although earlier he and my mother had highballs in the kitchen – he sitting on the yellow stepstool with the evening paper and she dancing between sink and fridge and stove. She had taken her bath, unpinned her hair, put on high heels. He would be home for an hour. For an hour, things would be sexually charged between them. Then it is night and she is downstairs watching television. She is downstairs and I am alone.

  “Want to hear the story of my second marriage?”

  “Is it good?”

  She said she and William were already divorced at the time of the trial in Hawaii, and when she came back to prison in California, Robert was a penpal. First he wrote, then he got approved as a visitor, then he proposed to her. It all happened in six months,
but, as Maryann puts it, why would any sane person want to marry someone in prison? She was working as a clerk for her counsellor and asked him about the proposal. Asked her parents too. Maybe her sentence would not go on forever. Maybe she would be out in a few years. Women were actually paroling in those days. Maybe the conviction in Hawaii would not have great consequence. Hioki’s appeal was in progress and she was feeling positive. If it now seems unreasonable to imagine sustaining a marriage under such a bizarre circumstance, I have to remember that she longed for a shred of the outside world in an otherwise shattered life, someone to care about her, to visit her, to look after her emotionally. “What do you have to lose?” the counsellor said.

  So, a year after the Hawaii case wrapped up, she married Robert in a small room in a corner of the administration building. Her parents were there – a second wedding to be witnessed. Robert’s brother and a sister came along and there were five or six inmates who were allowed in as guests.

  Afterwards, Robert met Maryann in the visiting room and he stayed for the day. So did her parents. Two weeks later, he arrived for a seventy-two-hour conjugal visit in the Family Living Unit, otherwise known as the FLU. This was the honeymoon. For two years, he came every week and there were conjugal visits every two or three months. But what did she know about him? A bride in prison finds it difficult to ask questions about her new husband’s life. He was not like William, this new husband, but he’d done county jail time and he had a brother in prison. He was not unfamiliar with her life.

  When his mother died, he came to the prison to tell her. He’d been drinking and doing cocaine. By coming to the prison in that condition, he might have put Maryann under suspicion of bringing drugs inside. So she told him off. “Don’t forget, my mama just died!” Robert growled. “And don’t forget you’re my mama now.”

  “I told him I was nobody’s mama, I was his wife, and if he couldn’t get cleaned up, don’t bother coming to visit.”

  So he didn’t.

  Two years later he sent a money order. No word about where he’d been, or what he’d been doing. Then he arrived. With a question: When could he have a FLU visit? Shortly after that, he vanished along with her legal transcript and a box of her things. Maryann laughed when I said her story wasn’t funny. She said, “Next time you do the talking.” Her calls are limited to fifteen minutes. They are interrupted by a recorded voice telling us how much time we have left and reminding us that the call is being monitored like every other minute of her life.

  I say I will. I promise not to swear. I’ll try not to say anything that would reflect badly on her.

  31

  That summer, Maryann’s parole was denied for the eighth or ninth time. But this time was harder, this time hurt in a different way. Usually the board said she showed no signs of remorse, or she had no insight. They said she still had time to serve on her Hawaii sentence. They said why didn’t she just leave William, just walk out the door. But this time she was denied parole when one of the commissioners said he didn’t think there was enough time on earth to forgive her. Forgive: to pardon, to overlook, to remit a debt or offence. To be merciful.

  She wrote, “So that’s it for now. Even though I knew I wouldn’t be going anywhere just yet, there was still a small part of me that would have liked to have been found suitable just cuz. Cuz I am; even though no suitability finding means anything right now. And the fact that next year I will have been going to these hearings for 25 years really hit me later that day. Soon I’ll be 43. And I wonder when it will end. And what if I don’t win this writ in Hawaii … Everything just kind of came crashing in on me after the hearing. But I’m working on pulling myself out of it. I have to! I can’t let these people get the better of me now!”

  I have the transcript from one of her old hearings. It’s from July 1992, and the presiding commissioner was Maureen O’Connell, who had presided at William’s confessional hearing the year before. Maryann was represented by Deborah Fraser, who had been appointed by the state. Someone from the DA’s office was present to represent the State of California, and there were two other commissioners and a correctional officer in the room. The hearing took place at the prison.

  O’Connell starts with what she calls Maryann’s social history. “You are adopted. Your parents are in Arizona. Your adoptive parents are in Arizona. There’s no prior criminal history. You graduated from high school. You got a job in your dad’s firm. You met the crime partner, William Acker, got married to him, and then went on a three-week crime spree. There was a string of armed robberies here in California and then the murder. The incident in Hawaii occurred first. You never tried to get away from him?”

  MARYANN: Yes, I did try to get away. I left while he was sleeping and I got about two blocks away.

  O’CONNELL: So did he beat you after he found you gone?

  MARYANN: He just held the gun to me and threatened to kill me if I tried again.

  O’CONNELL: Well, you know, I don’t hold your ex-husband in much regard because he is one of God’s lowliest creatures, but it is unfortunate … it’s very strange to me. If I was held captive or felt I was a prisoner, I would do anything in my power to get away. You became involved with this guy who was a parolee. You knew that. Two years ago we talked about your parents and why you did all this.

  MARYANN: I’ve thought about it a lot since the last hearing and in the last fourteen years. I’ve thought about the whole thing a lot and I didn’t enjoy being involved in the crimes and I didn’t enjoy the intimidation and fear that I felt with him. And I’ve thought over and over again of trying to figure out maybe there was something different I could have done and I’m still thinking about that and I wish there had been something or I had been thinking more clearly at the time.

  O’CONNELL: Well, you know, I’ll state it again for the record. I don’t think you shot either person. But I think you’re still equally as culpable as he is in terms of needing to be punished and taking the lumps for all of the mistakes you made in judgment. My feelings about him are, he snitched everybody off in the State of California and God knows where else, and he left you hanging, holding the bag in Hawaii. But you had an opportunity to fix that and you didn’t. And so for the momentary lapse in judgment you are suffering greatly and the ones I feel sorry for are your parents, not your real parents, but your adoptive parents. Those are the ones I feel the most sorry for in this whole mess and of course the victim’s family. That’s just a total waste, the whole thing. Because clearly you had the correct upbringing, you were taught moral values. You were a churchgoing person. Even if you disagreed with the strictness of the Mormon religion, and your dad and all of that. I heard someone else tell me that not too long ago, and I said you mean to tell me you committed your crime because your father believed in God? Have you told them you’re sorry?

  MARYANN: Yes, I have. And they have asked me where they went wrong and I have told them over and over they didn’t go wrong anywhere. And I am sorry for what I’ve put them through and I know they’ve suffered a lot.

  O’CONNELL: More than you’ll probably ever know.

  MARYANN: Probably.

  At this point the discussion moves on to Maryann’s report card from the prison. She’s been discipline-free. She’s participated in psychotherapy groups and attended AA and NA groups. She is secretary to the Mexican American Association and has received a two-year college degree.

  A second commissioner discusses Maryann’s psychiatric report, which states that she has normal posture and gait, normal clothing, personal hygiene, mild to moderate defensiveness, and lack of insight. The second commissioner says, “What do you think Dr. Francis meant by that?”

  MARYANN: I’m not sure. I probably do tend to get defensive at times …

  COMMISSIONER: In terms of your being defensive … blaming … it appeared to me that your crime partner had a lot to do with the particular crime spree. And you could have left. You could have left in Hawaii and so forth. And you came across kind of like that.
But that’s my opinion. That’s how I saw it. It seemed like it was William Acker’s show and you were there for the ride, but you were kind of scared and so forth. I saw it that way. You don’t have to agree with that, but that’s how I saw it in terms of how the psychiatrist indicated.

  MARYANN: I guess. I’m not saying that I don’t accept responsibility. I know I am responsible to a degree for my actions.

  COMMISSIONER: You say to a degree. How much to a degree? The conclusion on that report is compulsive personality disorder with passive-aggressiveness and dependent features. It says you appear to be tightly emotionally bound to your parent-child relationship even at the age of thirty-two. It says you are not individuated from your parents. What did Dr. Francis mean by that?

  MARYANN: I’m not real sure other than my parents are very important to me.

  COMMISSIONER: Maybe you’re not an independent thinker. It says here the thrust of psychological development would be to begin addressing your feelings, your self-identity, and your relationship to other people. Dr. Francis says her efforts to get you to go in that direction were analogous to trying to get you to telephone Mars.

  The third commissioner discusses various parole plans Maryann has submitted. There is an invitation from her biological father and his wife. There are job offers. The third commissioner says, “Do you know what’s happened to your crime partner?”

  MARYANN: No I don’t. He’s in the witness protection program. They’re floating him around the United States.

  The person from the DA’s office makes a statement. She says that all of the crimes appear to have been carried out in a cruel, unfeeling, and calculated manner. She says a perfect example of that was the way the inmate and her crime partner used the last victim’s car in the commission of other crimes. She says there was nothing in the file to indicate that Maryann was trying to escape when the police picked her up in Cesario Arauza’s car and that, in fact, Maryann appeared to show no remorse at the time of her arrest. “So it is the people’s position that she is still a threat to the public safety if she’s granted release at this time.”