Member-only story
THE NARRATIVE ARC
My Ex-Brother-in Law is Getting Out
Just when I let go of my rage and fear, his prison term is up
My stomach lurched before I had the envelope open. That envelope. The one that reminded my family and me of his rampant arson and his role in my sister’s death.
We thought we knew what was coming
We had talked about what this moment would be like. But it was from the perch of the safety that his federal imprisonment provided us. Now it is no longer an abstraction. He will be released to a halfway house within the month. Then a supervised work program. Then release.
Release. For whom?
The phone rings insistently. I don’t even have to look to know who it is. It is Carol, the sister who was most stalked and threatened by him. The one who lived alone. The one most terrified of him.
Probably because she saw up close and personal the cruel, frightening damage he could do. And the half assed-protection law enforcement could give until it was almost too late.
She has moved to a different state and retired from the job he knew. The children he threatened also live far away. And yet she has just found out how easy it is to get her phone number.
For the first few minutes of our call, I try to talk her down from the cascades of terror that spill over — sentence after sentence.
“What if…?”
I remind her that he’s off the booze and drugs. I remind her that he is twenty years older (twenty? Can it be?) and less able to pull all of the crap he did before. I remind her that we are probably the last people he ever wants to see.
But with each bit of reassurance, I notice the fact that it is hurting me more than it’s helping her. Because it raises all the doubts. It brings back all the loss. It knocks me down with the shock of the rollercoaster of crazy, cruelty and destruction he wrought upon us.
It reminds me that for a long time, you can live your easy life, until some idiot determines that you might have to die. And most currently, the trauma doesn’t magically end with the slamming of a prison cell for as long as the United…
