Visitation

POV: Ricki

The worst part of visitation wasn't the glass between them. It was pretending the glass was the only thing.

The visitation room ran narrow and fluorescent, a row of booths divided by scratched plexiglass thick enough to distort faces slightly if you looked from the wrong angle, a phone receiver bolted to a cord too short to let anyone lean back comfortably. A guard stood at the far end, arms crossed, watching the room like a security monitor - present but disengaged. Ricki understood, sitting down across from the glass, that whatever happened in the next thirty minutes would happen with an audience, timed, observed, performed as much as felt.

Three weeks now since the postponement. Two since Doc had started writing the fever down as a running line item instead of a one-off anomaly. Ricki hadn't done the math on purpose, it had just accumulated the way everything accumulated in here, one flat, identical day pressed against the next until the only way to mark time at all was by what had gotten worse since the last time he'd checked.

Mama Liz was crying before she'd even fully settled into her seat, both hands pressed to her mouth like she could hold the sound in if she just pressed hard enough. She didn't stop the whole visit, not really, tears running steady down her face even as she smiled at him, even as she asked him small, ordinary questions about how he was sleeping, whether the food was terrible, whether he needed anything on his list.

Mama Jules sat beside her, spine straight, hands folded on the narrow shelf in front of the glass, and didn't cry at all. Ricki knew what that meant. He'd known Jules his whole life, knew that her stillness in a room was never the absence of feeling, only the deliberate containment of it, held tight behind a face that refused to give the room anything it could use against her.

"You look thin," Liz said, voice thick, wiping at her cheek with the back of one hand. "Are they feeding you? Tell me the truth."

"I'm eating, Mama."

"He's lying," Jules said, not unkindly, her eyes moving over him with the same clinical assessment she'd probably have given a garden bed that wasn't thriving the way it should. "You've lost weight since last time," she added, her gaze lingering a moment too long on the hollows under his cheekbones, cataloguing the change the way she'd have catalogued a wilting plant, looking for the cause before she'd let herself feel the fear.

Ricki didn't argue. There wasn't a version of this conversation where lying to them felt worth the energy, and there wasn't a version where telling them the truth felt survivable either. He sat in the space between the two, offering neither, and let them fill the silence with the small talk that felt, for a few minutes, almost like something normal.

He thought about telling them. The words sat right there behind his teeth more than once, the postponement, six weeks and counting, the classification that still refused to resolve itself, the fever that kept climbing no matter what Doc tried, the headaches, the ache in his hand that hadn't fully faded since the night his knuckles had dented the bunk frame. He thought about how it might feel to say it all out loud to Mama Liz and Mama Jules, who had never once, in eighteen years of raising him, flinched away from a hard truth.

He didn't say any of it.

"They give you anything decent to read in there?" Jules asked, reaching into the bag beside her, and pulled out a paperback, its cover worn soft at the corners from handling.

Ricki took it through the small pass-through slot at the bottom of the booth, and looked at the cover, a swirling pastel illustration of two people embracing on a cliffside at sunset, the kind of cover that promised a story about second chances and slow-burn romance and none of the things Ricki actually needed right now.

It was completely wrong for him. It always had been. Jules had never once picked out a book he'd actually read, some persistent, endearing blind spot in an otherwise sharp woman.

He held it like it might break.

"Thanks, Mama," he said, and meant it more than the book itself could have possibly earned, because it wasn't about the story at all. It was about the fact that she'd stood in a prison commissary bookstore, reading through an approved list built for men who'd stopped mattering to the world outside these walls, and picked something out anyway, because picking something out was the only kind of love this room let her hand across the glass.

"Two minutes," the guard called, flat, and Ricki's chest tightened at the sound of it, the way it always did, the specific cruelty of loving someone on a clock.

Liz pressed her palm flat to the glass on her side, and Ricki matched it on his, the plastic cool and unyielding under his fingers, close enough to see the shape of her hand through the barrier and not close enough to feel a single thing that mattered. This was as near as they'd get. This was the whole ceremony, performed for a guard who wasn't even watching closely anymore, and Ricki held his palm there until the guard called time and the moment dissolved the way it always did, too soon, incomplete.

"I love you," Liz said, voice cracking on the last word.

"Love you too, Mama."

Jules didn't say it out loud. She never did, not in this room, not with a guard standing close enough to catalogue the words. She just held his eyes a long moment, steady, unbroken, and Ricki understood it anyway, the way he always had, some things not needing the words at all.

They left first, guided out through the far door, and Ricki sat a moment longer before his own escort came to collect him, the visitation booth already emptying around him.

The scent hit him before he'd even fully stood up, sharp, clean, unmistakably specific, the exact laundry detergent his mothers had used his whole life, the one Liz bought in bulk from the same store every month because she liked how it smelled on the line after drying in the sun. It clung to the booth now, impossibly vivid, so strong he could have sworn one of them had left an actual piece of clothing behind rather than just the memory of a smell that should have faded the second they walked out the door.

It hadn't faded. If anything it seemed to sharpen the longer he stood there, and Ricki understood, with the same slow, unwelcome clarity that had been settling into him for weeks now, that his own senses were doing something no ordinary senses should be capable of, holding onto a scent long after the source of it had already gone, making the loss of them physical in a way grief usually only managed metaphorically.

He didn't know how long he stood there before the guard's hand found his shoulder and steered him back toward general holding.

The walk back took him past the administration desk, past a corkboard where a sign-up sheet for next week's visitation hung pinned at the corner, names scrawled down the page in a dozen different hands, some rushed, some careful, most of them meaning nothing to him at all.

One of them stopped him cold.

The handwriting was small, looping, unmistakable, a hand he'd have recognized anywhere, on any page, in any lifetime. Marisol's name, written in Marisol's own careful cursive, sitting there on a sheet of paper meant for strangers, a request to see him that he hadn't known was coming.

Ricki's breath caught hard in his chest, one sharp pull of air that didn't seem to go anywhere useful. His hand found the wall beside him without his permission, fingers spreading flat against the cool concrete like he needed something solid to keep the floor where it belonged.

He didn't know what he wanted more, to see her or to never have to explain to her what he'd become in here, and the not-knowing scared him worse than either answer would have on its own. Did she still think about the courtroom the way he did, her hand reaching for his over the rail, closing on nothing? Or had she already started building a version of her life that didn't leave room for a man serving a sentence that would outlast anyone's patience for waiting?

He didn't have an answer. He wasn't sure he was ready to find one either, and that uncertainty followed him the rest of the walk back, a question with no good side to land on.

The guard called his name twice before he finally moved.