The upcoming visiting hours always radiated across the prison not unlike the rumbling of a still remote but approaching earthquake. The effects of those vibrations were nevertheless varied; the whole spectrum of emotions stirring inside one hermetic pressure cooker with barbed wire around it. The anticipation was as contagious as mass hysteria, with gaggles of inmates flocking to get their hair and faces done, and others -all of a sudden feeling self-conscious by comparison- struggling to find a last-minute spot. There was a palpable fear in wanting to look nice, even after going through auto body repair and paint shop. But there were plenty of other types of fear that were less superficial. Would their relatives come at all? Would they bring their children this time or deem it an insalubrious atmosphere for them? Would their children want to come – or even remember who they were? Would their visitors consciously or unconsciously make them feel increasingly dead to the world outside? Would they get caught during the transfer of some unauthorized item?
And then there was the other side: those who never got visitors and were periodically reminded that no one in the real world cared if they stayed inside forever. Those women went through the Kübler-Ross model like wildfire, where acceptance was passive-aggressive envy – and not always very passive. This was a pot that could boil impromptu despite being watched.
Piper was no stranger to some of those emotions, but she had a mission. Being focused in the midst of such uncertainty was decidedly peculiar. This was not the sort of chilly serenity she had displayed in the past, the layer of ice functioning as containment for her true distress, a protective coping strategy she had no doubt inherited from her family. This wasn't like the steely resolve without which she couldn't have left Alex in Paris or framed Maria for the illegal panty business. She didn't need to be devoid of feeling anymore in order to have clarity, and that was alleviating.
The problem with covering some jumbled mix of thoughts and feelings with something else -be it Solomonic determination, the voluntary blindness of a Stepford wife, or numbing doses of alcohol- was that you ended up carrying the weight of those things on your shoulders anyhow. Nothing got solved or eliminated; it just accumulated in the background and one became used to being a weightlifter.
She had dreamed of Alex again, but this time, not in the distorted pandemonium in the pool where Piper had to see her being taken away from her over and over through watery eyes. It also wasn't the Slasher movie scene of Alex wrapped in duct tape and plastic like a present for a serial killer, first screaming and then groaning in pain. Sometimes, Piper's rage was such that it materialized from her dream persona to her real body, and she woke up with her hands so tightly wrapped into fists -gripping nothingness- that afterwards her fingers bothered her all day long.
In this dream, rescued from some distant memory, Alex's glorious body was bathed in radiant droplets of water and sunshine. And Piper, with squinted eyes, barely knew where to look. She was seeing so much skin all at once that it overwhelmed her, for having sex in complete nakedness in prison was as rare as doing it horizontally. One could only get snippets of time and flashes of vision, if at all, but here there was no rush and there were no spies. Her back sunk on the welcoming white sand -trillions of shiny, minuscule rocks- as Alex's pale figure descended upon her, inundating the scope of her eyesight. The striking colors of her tattoos, made even brighter by being wet, jumped at Piper, and she couldn't help but smile at how excited and in awe she was at the same time. Then Alex smiled, first with her eyes, and then with her lips; the sweet, enamored smile of contentment. For what appeared to be a long time, Piper could see nothing else apart from that smile as her body was sucked into the sand little by little.
As soon as it had started to dawn on her that she was dreaming, however, it all started to gasify -everything but the squashy sensation constraining her body-, no matter how hard she feigned ignorance. Drained out of the dream, Piper became worried that she would open her eyes to find her bunkmate on top of her like that psycho Mazall had done at the detention center in Chicago. Luckily, that wasn't the case. There was no one there; it was just the beat down mattress insisting on swallowing her like quicksand.
Contrary to the general majority of women busying themselves with their appearance and/or inner turmoil, Piper was exclusively in waiting mode. She found Nicky at a mostly empty table, slouched over her tray and picking at her breakfast.
"How are you?" Piper smiled kindly at her scruffy friend, even though she wasn't looking at her and wouldn't notice.
"Hey, Chapman. Well..." she was concentrated on dissecting an Eggo with her plastic knife, deconstructing it into a pile of little squares. "What's supposed to be warm is cold, and what's supposed to be cold is hot. How do you figure they do it?"
It was fairly characteristic of Nicky to give off a jovial attitude in the face of dire circumstances. Nevertheless, this was better than detachment and doing a vanishing act for most of the day. It wasn't far-fetched to imagine that she was suffering, and covering it up by avoiding to hang out with those brought in from Litchfield in favor of autochthonous distractions. When Piper had started commenting on certain differences between this place and Litchfield, Nicky had simply rolled up the short sleeves of her new uniform and said, in a disregarding manner: "A prison is a prison is a prison."
"Is your mom coming today?"
"My mother," Nicky pushed back a chunk of hair from her forehead. "is probably in a counselor's office, giving them hell."
"I didn't mean Red."
"Oh, I know," Nicky said, brightly – and sardonically. "I just hoped we could gracefully ignore my fucked up gene pool."
"Haven't you told her you're here?"
"Give it a rest, will you? Get it into your head that not everyone gives a shit about other people."
Piper chewed slowly, creating a pause. "What about Lorna?"
There was no real change in Nicky's bored and grumpy expression, but she slung a leg over the seat and got up, taking her tray with her. "You know what? I'm outta here."
The few women who were sitting there remained an attentive audience after Nicky huffily left, perhaps to reap some reaction on Piper's part, for other people's business was the main entertainment, akin to a soap opera; it offered much-needed drama without consequence. But Piper got up and strolled off without giving them anything, curious as they were about the Litchfield bunch that had come from a riot. Her mind was too busy to be preoccupied with how she unintentionally kept driving Nicky away with her eagerness and refusal to accept the situation. She might as well go queue up for the naked squat and cough routine before the line got unbearably long and the visiting area was full, for the rated capacity of this facility was much larger than Litchfield's.
One had to wonder if Alex would mock her for going off on another crusade, with some pointed remark about how she just couldn't help herself. Piper would often have imaginary arguments like that with the Alex that was stored in her brain because she found she missed the real ones. More than missed them, in fact; she had already determined a long time ago that those challenging discussions were good for her. However exasperating that give-and-take could be, particularly through the filter of Alex's sarcasm, Piper ultimately believed that it played a role in keeping her grounded. Not that Alex was always successful – she was able to admit that much. But she was convinced that what was driving her now was different, in that it wasn't an extraneous cause, but thoroughly braided with the personal. This was as much about Alex as it was about her, as well as about the unit that they had become.
This was the first weekend she was allowed to have visitors, as she'd pestered her assigned counselor to no avail. Being a new arrival, there was an adaptation process one was supposed to go through beforehand, as if she hadn't been in prison for a year. It was therefore the first time she was stepping foot in that room, and it was quite similar to Litchfield's. It looked like your basic high school cafeteria, complete with vending machines and diverse warning signs and notices – although, no doubt, of a more serious nature than "Please bus your tray" and "Help keep this lunchroom clean". The main difference was that this visiting area had a decal or mural of a forest taking up one of the walls, which she guessed was used as a backdrop for pictures.
As she was processed into the visiting area, Piper forced her body not to hurry, delegating the job to her eyeballs, which bounced across the room until they located the woman. Instead of sat at one of the tables, she was handing a bag of chips to another visitor, a woman of similar age. Piper paced towards her and only allowed herself some effusiveness in the hug, where it was allowed.
"Darling!" her mother exclaimed in an undertone, with the usual subdued gust of affectation that was reserved for any sort of emotion. "How are you?"
"I'm fine, mom."
They sat down at opposite sides, and Piper placed her elbows on the table and her hands before her mouth like a child praying before bedtime. She told her mother that she had been so scared during the last throes of the riot, but that she had come out of it okay, and how much she appreciated her presence there, that she had no idea. Carol shrugged it off, of course -without doing anything as vulgar as shrugging-, claiming that she was only doing what any decent mother should. And then, as expected, went off on a tangent to inform her that the dark green color of her uniform suited her much better than Litchfield's khaki.
At least she wasn't commenting on how haggard she looked, which was no little thing, considering. Piper's mental priorities had been elsewhere; specifically, on trying to make this visit happen and then waiting for it as patiently as she could. And, now that she was in it, her mind was racing in search of an opportunity to deliver the important news and the more crucial instructions.
"Mommy! Daddy!" someone called out, with unabashed joy.
Piper glanced over to the neighboring table, where Suzanne was hugging the older lady Carol had given that small bag of chips, and the man accompanying her.
"Now, now, Suzie." the woman was patting her gently on the back to calm her down, but sounded considerably choked up herself.
"Is that girl one of your prison-friends?"
"Um." Piper struggled both with what to say and how to say it, but chose to answer in the affirmative, judging by the thing they had gone through together inside the pool. This was one of the few times she had actually seen Suzanne since their arrival, for she had been placed in a different block together with Taystee and Black Cindy, so their schedules weren't always the same.
It turned out that both their mothers had become friendly during the riot. Common suffering and cohabitation behind a police line could foster just as unlikely comradery as that which sprung between bars on the other side of the mirror as it were, Piper mused.
Carol was now praising this facility, which, taking into account that it was a maximum security prison, was a bit nicer than Litchfield, and a world apart from the detention center in Chicago. But that wasn't the issue now, Piper wanted to say, hearing the echo of Nicky's mantra in her mind: "A prison is a prison is a prison".
Apparently, there was a statue of a mother and a child at the entrance -the boy holding her hand, the mother waving, frozen in greeting-, which Piper hadn't seen, for it had been pitch-dark when they were bused in. That her mother had zoned in some stony, idyllic image of motherhood, taken in her stride the layer upon layer of fences crowned by loopy barbed wire and a watchtower full of heavily armed guards said something of her attitude. Perhaps there had been a switch, and Carol had reached acceptance. Proper acceptance, in lieu of it being a false, WASPy façade of political correctness where agitation was strongly frowned upon. And that tacit understanding between them was important too.
"Mom, we need to talk." The quality of the correctional facility was but a trifle. She would sleep in a hole in the ground; she would hunt for slow cockroaches again, smuggle them in her bra and train them to transport cigarettes for all she cared. "You have to do something for me. And I need to tell you something."
"I know, dear."
"You know that there's something I need to tell you?" she asked, slightly baffled.
Her mother straightened up in her seat and then leaned closer to her, which was a rarity. "No, honey, I know what it is you want to tell me. It's about Alex, isn't it?"
Growing more confused, Piper frowned, but pushed through it, with the urgency claiming the spotlight. "I don't know where she is, mom, you have to find her. Go on the Federal Bureau of Prisons website or whatever it's called. I don't know her ID number, but her name is Alex Vause. Alex Pearl Vause."
The careful utterance of her name, like a pirate polishing the coins in her treasure, took her back to the moment of her proposal – one of the most genuine instances of clarity of her entire life. And to the open-eyed resolve which led her from the phone call with Carol near Litchfield's main entrance to the restroom -where Piscatella had kidnapped them from a heavenly shower in hell- to retrieve Alex's glasses, through the riot's miasma, and back to the bunker. This was her treasure -this person-, this was her will to stay alive.
"I need her, mom." That much had been clear for quite some time. After all she had needed her enough to put her back in prison, and she could lie to herself -and she had lied to herself- about having non-selfish reasons for having done that. But now apart from her own need, there was that unflinching clarity about the two of them being together. And there was something else. "And I need to know that she's okay. I have a bad feeling, and I don't know if that's just because I miss her. You have to get through to her somehow. I don't think they'll allow me to write to her. We need to figure something out."
She pressed her fingers to her eyes, and it was like squeezing the tears out. She was getting worked up in a way she had refrained from doing the prior weeks, and she wasn't sure if her mother would tolerate that. Surprisingly, Carol laid her arm out with the palm of her hand turned upwards, crossing the table's invisible middle ground, and Piper immediately put her hand on top of hers, grasping it. The gesture was a far cry from the usual ways in which they interacted with each other, and she was so thankful for it that it almost tasked like relief. Comfort. Which was an alien emotion to link to a member of her family. Before that, she had only felt that with Alex, really, so this was bizarre, but definitely rewarding.
"Oh, honey, I don't want you to put yourself through such a turmoil. Of course you're worried about her well-being, but I'm sure that Alex is fine." There was a pause. "Isn't she a drug trafficker?"
Two steps forward, one step back. Piper sighed in frustration and detached her hand from her mother's, all of a sudden seeking physical distance, on par with the emotional one. Was she implying that Alex would feel right at home in prison?
"Mom, I'm serious. Besides, I'm a felon too, you know."
"What I mean to say is that she's probably quite a resilient person. I will certainly do everything in my power. Now listen to me. I know that Alex is fine – at least she was a few weeks ago."
"What?"
"I received a very strange phone call from your brother."
"What does Cal have to do with it?"
"Not Cal, dear. Danny."
"I'm sorry, what? Danny? Isn't he out there saving the world? Or at least in South America?"
"No, dear, he's back. You'd think he would come home and visit with his mother, but it seems that I have to learn about my children's lives in the most questionable ways."
She was obviously making a reference to her disclosing that her freewheeling, world-hopping days had in fact transpired in the context of a tempestuous romance with a woman who was a drug dealer, and that she had only confessed because she was going to prison. And Cal had indeed married Neri at their grandmother's funeral, of all occasions. And she had told her family that she had a girlfriend in prison -not even specifying that it was the same woman who had swept her away when she was twenty-three- as some childish, knee-jerk reaction to their uptightness, by reenacting the orgasm scene from 'When Harry Met Sally', which was so inappropriate that it earned her a slap from Carol, queen of the unflinching countenance. At least Danny, the golden son, was finally getting some disapproval.
"Mom, get back on track, I'm begging you."
"Well, your brother told me that he examined a woman with a fracture in her arm the night your prison riot ended."
"It wasn't my riot, mom. Although I did try to help to-" she shook her head. "Nevermind! Danny saw her?"
"He described her as a white woman with dark hair who wore glasses." Her mother was speaking as if she were trying to remember something that she had written down. Which she probably had. Slowly – too slowly, like the proverbial person in a theater who turturously peels of the wrapping of a caramel so as not to disturb everyone, but one ends up cringing with every crinkle. "Is that what she looks like? Well, I suppose it could be worse. Does she look like any of your grade-school teachers?"
"Mom, will you please stop psychoanalyzing me?"
Sidestepping her mother's relief about Alex not being the bull dyke stereotype she had conjured in her strait-laced brain, one had to at least question if she was being obtuse on purpose.
"She did say that her name was Alex. And she recognized Danny – or his name, and asked him to contact me."
In spite of everything, Piper realized that she was smiling, were it due to Alex's memory, her cleverness, or the simple fact of learning some much-needed news about her. The way the universe doggedly refused to split them completely apart, no matter how many factors conspired against them, played a part in her smile as well. It made her think about that night years ago when she drunk-dialed Alex and ended up leaving her a rambling voicemail she never even listened. Piper remembered using the dual purpose words "Shalom" and "Aloha", which she regarded as incredibly apt for them. No drastic farewell and no physical or temporal distance between them could ever aspire to be final.
"Apparently, she made some outlandish claims about you, Piper. She said she was his future sister-in-law? Do I really need to learn from your brother that this girl intends to marry you?"
Piper opened her eyes wide and bit her lower lip, partly because she was busted, and partly because this wasn't how she thought the announcement would happen.
"Jesus, Alex." she muttered under her breath, but then a curious grin of pride formed on her lips.
At first glance, it could be that Alex had thought she needed to say something impactful enough to get through to Danny to ensure that the ripple effect would reach Carol and then Piper herself. Still, knowing that she'd use the term "future sister-in-law" and hearing the word "marry" come out of her mother's mouth made her heart swell. With all her might, she hoped that Alex didn't doubt her anymore, that her developed sense of self-protection didn't tell her that she would fail her and leave her alone again, because that wasn't going to happen.
Quickly, for she felt that they were running out of time, Piper told her mother that she had been the one to propose after their conversation over the phone, that she had in fact replicated her father's grand gesture, bringing Alex her lost glasses and even handing her canned goods as a symbol. She was glad to get a glimpse of Carol's expression softening. However going-through-the-motions-esque her marriage had been for many years, it seemed that that memory would always be heart-stopping to her. This was her mother at her most human – that Piper could remember, of course, maybe since she was very little. The socialite barrier was down.
"You need to tell her that I'm okay, and that her family's okay too."
"Oh, honey, I'm sure her family will be able to visit her wherever she is."
"No, mom... She has no one outside. I mean us. Her friends. She acts like it doesn't matter to her, but I know she cares."
They were telling them to wrap it up, that visiting hour was over. Hugging her mother more tightly than when she'd first seen her, Piper repeated Alex's full name. It was important to communicate that this was more than just having someone "in there" to make her sentence more bearable.
"Well, my daughter's engaged… again," Carol said, raising her eyes to the ceiling. "That should count for something. There must be something we can do."
She and Alex had played the security blanket, temporary relief card in the past, for it was the safer option in the face of a future so distant and uncertain that it was invisible. They had been two lonely ships lost at sea that had decided to team up for the rough journey, and the ocean's eternal surface -which was all they could see at all four points of the compass- was the present. But not anymore. Piper knew that together and without doubting each other they could be strong enough to spot the land of a future. It didn't have to be the mouth-watering utopia of her dream, either. And, subsequently, build a life on the common ground between pain and beauty.
