Part Three: The Cafeteria
It was a Wednesday.
Birthdays in prison fall on whatever day they fall on, indifferent to weekends or significance. Wednesday was cafeteria lunch, which meant the long room with the fluorescent lights and the metal tables and the particular acoustics of an enclosed space full of people who have not chosen each other’s company. The food was adequate and not more than adequate. The noise was continuous.
Daniel carried his tray to his usual table and sat down.
He was not someone who announced himself. Seven months had taught him the specific social geometry of the institution — who sat where, who spoke to whom, the invisible but fully understood lines of territory and association — and he had found, in his corner of it, a tolerable equilibrium. He was not popular. He was not threatened. He was a carpenter from a mid-sized city doing eighteen months for something he was not proud of, and he kept his head down and his letters to Claire, and he was managing.
He looked at his tray.
The food was the same food it always was. There was bread — a single dinner roll, the kind that is neither good nor bad but simply present. He looked at it, and he thought about the kitchen of his house, and Claire’s hands, and Noah’s face when cake appeared, and the specific song that Noah sang in the wrong key every year with the complete confidence of someone who has not yet understood that there is a right key, and the sensation in his chest was something he did not have adequate words for and would not have used them if he had.
He reached into his pocket.
He had been keeping the candle for three weeks.
It had come in a package from Claire — one of the permitted packages, inspected and approved — tucked inside a folded piece of paper that Noah had drawn on, a drawing that Daniel kept under his mattress because it was the only thing in his cell that was entirely his and entirely from home. The candle was a birthday candle, thin and small, white. Claire had included it with the drawing and a note that said simply: We’ll be thinking of you on Wednesday.
He had not been sure what to do with it. He had carried it in his pocket for three weeks, which was perhaps superstition or perhaps simply the reluctance to use it until the moment it was for.
He placed it in the bread.
He shielded it with his hand — not from the guards, who were at their stations across the room and whose sight lines he had mapped in seven months of paying attention — but from the general proximity of people, the specific privacy of doing something that mattered in a room that was not designed for things that mattered. He lit it with the small lighter he had traded for two weeks ago, not knowing what he would need it for and understanding now.
The flame came up. Small. Unwavering, surprisingly, in the still air of the cafeteria.
Daniel looked at it.
He was forty-one years old today. He had spent his thirty-fourth birthday on a job site in good weather, eating lunch with his crew, and his wife had brought cake to the site at noon and the crew had sung and Noah — who had been seven months old then, a fact that seemed now from an entirely different life — had been there in the carrier on Claire’s chest, asleep through the singing. He had spent his thirty-eighth birthday with Claire at a restaurant they could not quite afford and had gone to anyway, because she had said: we will always celebrate the things worth celebrating, even when the money isn’t right.
He closed his eyes.
He did not wish for freedom. He understood, precisely and without self-pity, that freedom was not the appropriate wish — he had given that up when he made his choice, and he would serve his time and he would come home, and wishing did not adjust the timeline of that process. He did not wish for the mistake to be unmade, though he would have given almost anything for that, because wishing and giving anything were different currencies and he only had access to one.
He wished to see them. Claire. Noah. Even for a few minutes. Even through glass. Even just to see Noah’s face and know that it was okay, that they were okay, that the five-year-old who asked unanswerable questions was being answered by someone and was continuing to grow.
He whispered it, barely audibly, into the small space between himself and the flame.
Lord. Just let me see them.
Then he took a breath and blew out the candle.
