Sugar Run

by Mesha Maren

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

In 1989, Jodi McCarty is 17 years old when she's sentenced to life in prison. When she's released 18 years later, she finds herself at a Greyhound bus stop, reeling from the shock of unexpected freedom but determined to chart a better course for herself.

Not yet able to return to her lost home in the Appalachian Mountains, she heads south in search of someone she left behind, as a way of finally making amends. There, she meets and falls in love with Miranda, a troubled young mother living in a motel room with her children. Together they head toward what they hope will be a fresh start. But what do you do with your past — and with a town and a family that refuses to forget, or to change?

Set within the charged insularity of rural West Virginia, Mesha Maren's Sugar Run is a searing and gritty debut about making a break for another life, the use and treachery of makeshift families, and how, no matter the distance we think we've traveled from the mistakes we've made, too often we find ourselves standing in precisely the place we began.

Release date: October 8, 2019

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

In the yellow corridor they marched the women single file. Jodi, feeling the worry of the eight at her back, wondered what significance to attach to her position as first behind the sergeant. Not much at Jaxton was left to chance. Oldest, she thought, but that may not have been true; thirty-five was perhaps more of an average age. The rest of the women, all from other units, all nameless and unknown to her, did look more youthful, though. She glanced at the one behind her, reddish bangs combed high and a rose-print blouse tucked into blue jeans. Younger or cleaner or something.

“Stop,” the sergeant said, spreading out his arms as if the women might all run on past and taste freedom too soon. Beyond him, at the end of the hall, was a bolted door with a single fogged window in the center.

Perhaps, Jodi thought, release was like diving, or rising rather. You could die from that, she’d heard, coming up from the ocean floor altogether too fast. Something got in your blood.

“Six months,” a voice mumbled.

“Quiet” Sergeant called, nodding at the curly-haired guard stationed beside the bolted door.

An arc of warm light cut across the misted window and Jodi leaned toward it; the eight behind her were silent now.

The sergeant looked to the camera in the ceiling, gave a thumbs-up, and the door popped, then swung open to the crash of rain on concrete and the idling engine of a white van. The curly-haired guard lifted a black umbrella and he and the sergeant ran, splashing to the driver’s side, leaving Jodi with nothing but the open doorway.

That ground out there—that pen of fenced wet cement—had to have been the same place where she’d arrived at seventeen, shaking, spitting, fucked-up scared. All she could remember of her arrival, though, was walking those endless yellow halls and, before that, the hot chaos of a hotel room in Atlanta—the air heavy with iron-thick blood—the paramedics wheeling Paula’s body away, and Jodi stumbling, arms pinned back in silver cuffs, puking all across the parking lot.

The sergeant stepped away from the van. He signaled to Jodi and she felt the distance reel out between them. He looked so small, nothing but a white hand beckoning. Jodi took one step and stopped. She could feel the treacherous edges stretched across that open door. Eighteen years. She’d tried to stop counting but could not. More of her life had been lived inside than out.

“Go on,” the redhead behind her said.

Rain streamed down through the double bands of the van’s headlights, hitting the parking lot and mixing into the hiss and fog. And above the razor wire, barely visible, the soft swells of green mountains rose. Jodi stiffened. Noises bounced around the doorframe: pulses of words at her back, great waves of sound and under it, a laughter beginning. A rasping laughter—not quite her father’s but not her own.

“Go.”

A hand slapped her shoulder and Jodi broke free. She ran, soaked wet in two seconds flat. She ran and all she saw were those mountains. Eighteen years at Jaxton and she never knew she was living in the mountains. From the exercise yard she had seen only what was straight above, a sometimes gray, sometimes blue rectangular lid of sky. Mountains were a dream that had ended when the judge said life in prison. Mountains were far off, West Virginia, home.

In the van, she bent low and headed for the far-back seat. Her wet clothes steamed and her black braid dripped down her neck, forming a tributary that ran over the edge of the vinyl seat. The other women squeezed in, their voices climbing one on top of the other, as if freedom had expanded their lung capacity.

The van lurched, motor rising steadily as the wheels began to turn. Jodi held her plastic sack tightly in one hand, the other gripping the edge of her seat. She closed her eyes and felt the dizzy, sick-sway motion of the wheels, the heat of close bodies and their faint oniony smell of fresh sweat. Eighteen years since she’d moved this way, moved in any way other than on her own clumsy feet. She leaned her forehead against the window and an arm reached around her, red fingernails grasping the latch, and then the glass tilted open.

She breathed in the cool wind, then turned to face a woman with strawberry lipstick and a tight blue blouse.

Jodi too had changed out of her own numbered jumpsuit but the clothes she wore held the same stink of institutional anonymity and came from the exact same place as that clown suit she’d worn for eighteen years. An XL gray sweatshirt and a pair of stiff unisex jeans held precariously around her hips with a red plastic belt. Her mother—that distant voice that reached out across the telephone wires once a year, curdled with rage and pity and touched over with a strained Christian sympathy—had promised to send clothes. What all do you need? Jodi’s mind had flooded with a wash of white noise and she’d been unable to pinpoint her pant size, much less a preferred style. The package didn’t arrive anyhow. Never sent, most likely, or perhaps not mailed in time. The decision for her release had come so abruptly, there’d been no real time to prepare.

“Hot in here,” the strawberry-lipped lady said, fanning her fingers in front of her face.

Jodi mopped the windowpane with her shirtsleeve, and golden spots of light bloomed in the wet air. At the front gates the van paused, the voices inside hushing. A rustle of rearranging feet. A muffled voice called out go ahead from the guard booth. And then they were moving. Jodi craned her neck to see the arch of the stone gate, stained black by rain, and the carved words, barely visible: whoso loveth discipline loveth knowledge.

Proverbs 12:1, she thought, surprised at her ability to recognize it. She had not studied the Bible at Jaxton, as some women had, but as a child her grandmother Effie had taken her to the Nazarene church most Sundays and she had coveted the sprawling, intangible poetry of Proverbs and Revelation. Whosoever brings ruin on their family shall inherit only wind.

The van coursed down through low hills of hickory and chinquapin, past sleepy trailers and whiteboard shacks, bald yards bright with discarded ornaments—a yellow tricycle, blue ball, tattered flag, and a Chevy Nova settling in to rust. Out of the rain-haze a cherry-colored car shot free and, behind it, a log truck piled with slabs of orange-hearted wood.

At a crossroads they turned left and the houses grew scarce, nothing out either side but a mountain creek, rain gorged and mud red, and groves of pitch pine, their gray trunks slick as silver against the dark ravines beyond.

“You going to Drina or Simpsonville?”

Jodi looked to the strawberry-lipped lady and shook her head.

“No, I’m done.”

“They ain’t putting you in a halfway house?”

“Lawyer said I did my time.” Jodi rubbed the slippery handle of her plastic sack between her thumb and forefinger. “Eighteen years.”

Eighteen years—those words had become an incantation that answered all questions, a measuring stick to hold up against any new or old experience. She herself had wondered at the lack of supervision but the lawyer had smiled and lifted his hands like the whole thing were some kind of a magic trick. Supervised release, he’d said, all excited, Hawaiian-print tie fluttering as he paced the room. He’d been disappointed, it seemed, in Jodi’s lack of emotion and tried to make up for it by bellowing on about how the organization that he worked for, something about justice for juveniles tried as adults, had come across her case and realized she could qualify for supervised early release. It seemed so unreal; Jodi didn’t truly believe it until they marched her down that exit hall. She had filed an appeal, citing her single incidence of violence and the fact that she was only seventeen when she went to prison, but that paperwork had been sent off years back and she’d stopped hoping a long time ago. Life in prison, she kept thinking, minimum sentencing in the state of Georgia. But the lawyer had a million words regarding her case: good-behavior time, nearly two decades of her sentence served, no previous record, and enough of the taxpayers’ money spent.

Bus ticket’s about all you’ll receive, he said. That and an order to report to your home district parole officer. And on the phone her mother had choked. Free? And then after a too-long pause, a jumble of syrupy Oh . . . wow . . . well, honey, that’s great. Are you coming home? Yes, Jodi had told her, soon, she just had to go down to southern Georgia to help a friend first. Friend? her mother said, her voice reaching too high. Free—home—friend, like those words belonged to some other language and had no place in conversation with Jodi. She’d wired the money, though, a loan of four hundred dollars borrowed from Jodi’s two younger brothers and her father’s disability check.

At the Greyhound station in Dahlonega the van driver shooed Jodi and the redhead out into the parking lot. The rain had slowed to a thin, sifting mist.

Jodi tilted her head back and pivoted left, then right, trying to find east, but the yellow-gray dawn seemed to come from every direction. The redhead started toward the station where a flannel-shirted man hunched under the tin overhang, smoking a cigar. Jodi followed. She couldn’t think past this moment or else her mind washed all white again but the redhead seemed to have her feet set resolutely on a path pointed forward.

The station was warm, filled with the calls of departure times and TV chatter. Shelves of colored bottles lined the wall of the newsstand: the ribboned neck of Grand Marnier, stout-brown Jack, filigreed Wild Irish Rose, and below them, a spinning rack of sunglasses where, in the mirror, Jodi saw her own cavernous cheeks and pit-dark eyes. Got the worst of both sides, her grandmother Effie had loved to say. British teeth and Injun eyes.

“Can I get you something?” the newsstand man asked.

“Marlboros,” Jodi said. Cigarettes, at least, were something solid and not new. When her eyes went back to the bottle of Jack, the cashier set it down on the counter beside the cigarettes.

Out front the wind smelled green. Jodi lit a cigarette, nodded at the flannel-shirted man, and stared through the window to where the redhead stood at the ticket counter.

“Cold for July,” the flannel man said.

Jodi glanced back at him. He was small with age, bent deep in every joint.

“Where you headed?” he asked, his breath smelling of cherry Swisher Sweets.

“South,” Jodi said. “Chaunceloraine, Georgia.”

The man shook his head. “We weren’t meant to live in the low places. He tries to show us. Hurriken, flood, malarial fever.” The man pursed his lips and turned the corners down. “The Lord resides in the mountains,” he said, exhaling a funnel of pale smoke.

The Greyhound wound out of Dahlonega and down toward the piedmont, until the hills and ridges were nothing but bruise-blue humps beyond the yellow fields. Jodi had settled herself into the farthest-back seat. The bus was more than half-empty, just a mustached man with a pencil stuck behind his ear, a woman in striped pajama pants, a mother with four kids and a few other sleeping passengers. At Jaxton private space had come only by the inch, if at all. Silence came only in the middle of the night, and even that was often punctured by whispers or screams.

Jodi set her bag on the seat beside her and leaned back but even there, in the quiet of the Greyhound, the voices trailed after her, the roiling noise of the cafeteria. Last supper? Tressa had shouted the night before, tucking her hair behind one ear as she leaned across the table. Jodi had looked away and pressed the back of her spoon into her instant potatoes, flattening them out so that the watery gravy spilled into the creamed corn.

They weren’t supposed to know one another’s release dates but everybody always found out. And once you knew, you could see it, that palpable energy ringing out from a girl in her last week. Some of the women couldn’t bear it and they’d steal a girl’s date, slip something into her pocket or pay a cellmate to plant it, and next thing you knew she was being kept for another six to nine. The ones who played at husband and wife, they were all the time stealing one another’s dates.

“Where you headed to tomorrowx?” Tressa had asked, and Jodi had glanced up at her. Neither of them said the word aloud but it had floated around them, that slippery s of release.

“I’ve got a little something I’ve got to move out of here.” Tressa leaned in, lover close, lips on Jodi’s ear. Jodi had fucked her only once, and that two years before, but they both knew Jodi had wanted more.

“You’ll help me right?” Tressa said, and Jodi had smiled, shaking her head.

“No,” she said, and it had really hit her then, she was leaving. In twelve more hours it wouldn’t matter what shit favor Tressa needed or what retaliation she’d dream up later. Another world existed out there, another world that had kept on jumping and skipping and spinning for the past eighteen years.

The rain quit but the trees still glistened through the bus window and the clouds sat low enough to hold on to. Just past Dawsonville the bus skirted a lake, the water dark and high to the brim, and from there they raced on toward the shadowed spikes of a city.

The highway ducked straight into the downtown and Jodi watched the buildings emerge, rocket ships of glass and chrome stretching so tall she couldn’t see the tops. Streams of people rolled across the sidewalks, clutching newspapers, cardboard cups of coffee, and cell phones. Jodi had seen the new phones on TV over the years but out here they looked even more odd: oversize metallic insects gripped tight in every hand.

“Atlanta,” the driver hollered. “Fifteen minutes.”

Jodi stayed in her seat, knowing for certain if she got off she’d somehow manage to get left behind. She craved a cigarette but opened the bottle of Jack instead and let the scent burn up all her thoughts.

Three sips in, the door to the bathroom opened, letting loose the smell of cigarettes and a chemical reek. She could have sworn the bus had emptied out but there, right in front of her, was the mustached man. He smiled a false-sweet smile and ducked his head down under the luggage rack.

“Hey, honey.”

Jodi pulled the paper bag up around her bottle.

“Hey, now, hey.” The man hunkered beside her. “Hey, I ain’t like that. I ain’t gonna tell nobody.”

Jodi shrugged and held out the bottle to him. Men like this were always popping up right in that moment of pleasant silence. Always jumping at you, like the groundhogs Effie taught her to shoot back down into their holes.

“You’re going to Jacksonville?”

Jodi swallowed her sip of whiskey slowly. “Chaunceloraine.”

Every time she said the name it sounded stranger and she’d have figured she made the place up if the ticket man hadn’t nodded and printed it on her slip. The word itself was like something she’d bitten off, too big and complicated to chew. And her plan was nothing but a thin line connected by fuzzy memory dots, an invented constellation that only she could see. Paula’s parents’ address was gone, stoved up somewhere in her brain with the other memories she’d worked so hard to pack away. All that remained was the name of the town and Paula’s little brother, Ricky Dulett.

Past Atlanta the rain-choked rivers gave way to flooded fields. Raw clay banks, limp tobacco plants, and peach trees. The water was a skin pulled tight between long rows, dimpled now and then by a gust of wind. Through the tangled branches the orange fruit glimmered, and around the edges of the groves, men huddled under tarps and stared at the gray belly of clouds.

They stopped in Montrose and Soperton, Cobbtown and Canoochee, and each time the bus rolled onto an exit ramp Jodi’s gut pinched and she turned toward the window, searching for road signs, relieved only when she saw it was not her stop. She did not want the ride to end. Once the bus stopped there would be the street and all the new decisions that would come with it. She got the bottle back from the mustached man, took a long swallow, and quite suddenly those eyes—Ricky’s blue, blue eyes—hovered in the near distant space.

She knew he must have grown into a man’s body by now; still, the only thing she could picture was little Ricky in that wooden chair—hands and legs tied behind him with violet-colored rags. Been acting the devil again, Paula’s father, Dylan, hollers from the porch, his eyes blue too but sunk deeply into his liver-spotted face. I had to tie him up. You ain’t here, Paula, you don’t see how he blows. Paula cuts Ricky loose and peels his dirt-stained jeans away from the wounds. The lash marks swell red all up and down his legs and while Paula inspects him Ricky sings her a song—They told us the illusion, the illusion was life. Paula smiles. I’ve got my very own personal jukebox, she says, and Ricky blushes and ducks his head.

Out the bus window towering trees whipped by, waxy green leaves and wisps of gray moss, and over it all the bleached sky clarified into a seamless blue.

“Chaunceloraine,” the driver called, but nothing looked familiar to Jodi and the bus was picking up speed now, passing out of the downtown, past faded beauty shops, blinking tattoo parlors, men on the corners wearing too-big T-shirts, and women in butt-hugging spandex shorts —freddie’s fried chicken . . . we buy gold . . . rooms $29.99 and up . . . checks cashed now—and there, at the back of a sun-glittered parking lot, the red tents and gilded chintz of a carnival fair.

“Chaunceloraine,” the driver said again, and this time Jodi rose and climbed over the mustached man, who slept deeply, cheek resting on his shoulder.

“Luggage?” the driver asked, and Jodi shook her head, stumbling down the steps and out into a face full of sunlight.

The air was thick with the smells of fry oil, gasoline, and hot cement; the rush of tires; and bumping bass. Jodi let it all in, blinking up at a billboard that towered over the station roof, showing a row of blind-white teeth, pink cheeks, and soft, paternal eyes: a smile like mine might not be a world away. for happiness call 1-800-697-6453.

Jodi turned quickly from the smug pink-and-white face but the image of it and those words, happiness . . . a world away, stayed with her as she walked across the hot parking lot. She’d never trusted anyone with perfect teeth but until this moment she’d never really thought it through completely. All Effie’s teeth had rotted out by the time she was thirty and it hadn’t been until years later that she was able to afford a set of ill-fitting dentures. Jodi herself had never been to a dentist until she arrived at Jaxton, where they had filled thirteen cavities and yanked out two molars. And Paula’s teeth too had been constantly hurting; for all the money she’d liked to throw around, all she had to do was open her mouth and anyone could have seen where she came from.

The Rocklodge Motor Inn advertised air-conditioning but the nicotine-stained unit in Jodi’s room could muster only a slight lukewarm breeze. She propped open the windows, splashed cold water on her face, and added ice to her paper cup of bourbon. Unregulated, the hours already dripped like spit, and the cheap floral walls pulsed with indecision—you can do anything—no one’s watching, go out—don’t go out, you’ll fuck up—what’s your plan? Not since she was seventeen had she made any choice that sprang from her own free will entirely. At Jaxton she’d been preserved, safe from her own self. But now here it was, the weight of decision and consequence yoked about her neck again, making her lungs squeeze tight with each breath. She’d barely managed to order food at the Waffle House. The menu had overwhelmed her, and the waitress talked a string of jargon that made no sense.

At a Salvation Army down the street from the Waffle House, she’d found a pair of scissors and clothes that fit. After an hour of stunned uncertainty she settled on jeans, a navy-blue T-shirt, and a pair of work boots. In the rust-flecked mirror back in her motel room she’d inspected her face, wrinkle lines deep from her nose down to her jaw, cheekbones sharp under pale skin. She pulled her long braid out and snipped off eighteen years of growth, then trimmed the hair that was left level with her chin.

“What do you say?” she mouthed aloud.

Younger, she thought, staring down at the snake of a braid, coiled there in the plastic sink. But there was no one to confirm it, no babble of a cellmate’s voice to let in or drown out.

At Jaxton she’d had five cellies over the years and after the first she’d learned the distance necessary for survival. When a new one arrived she’d put her jail face on—a glassy, already-gone look that set the parameters straight. She’d known that all of them, every one, the cellies, the guards, the parishion­ers, the therapist, they’d all be gone before she would. Only a few girls, like Maritza, the little half Latina with scabbed arms and an overbite, had tried to break through. Her voice—just that morning—banged back and forth between their concrete walls. You’ll write me? she’d whined, reaching one hand toward Jodi. Yeah, yeah, Jodi’d said. No, you won’t, Maritza said. She’d refused to go to breakfast and refused her morning pills, was winding herself up tight, well on her way to a stay in the hole. You’ve got your own money now, Jodi had told her. I moved the last of my commissary funds over for you. Maritza had smashed her fist against the wall. I don’t want your money, she said. Kiss me. She leaned out from her mattress, face sweaty and red. Kiss me. You’ll never see me again. Tomorrow I’ll have somebody new in here, somebody that tries to cut me, somebody that fucks with my head.

Frances was the only one that Jodi had ever really let in. But Frances was different because Frances hadn’t wanted anything except to bully Jodi into loving herself a little more. Forty-three years old and serving a sentence for the heroin her daughter kept stored in her basement. Sure, yeah, you’ve heard of turning a blind eye, she said. Well, I’d carved my eyes all the way out. When the cops showed up the daughter was nowhere around but the dope and the cash were right there. It ain’t like I’m stupid, I knew what she was doing but I guess I never imagined . . . Forty-three and they’re going to reform me!

Frances had filled out the empty corners of Jodi’s days with her easy laughter and bright eyes and it was not until it had already started that Jodi had realized that they were dating. It was six years ago now that Frances was released but Jodi could still feel the way her heart had perked up and her body relaxed whenever she was in the room.

Wind rippled the motel room curtains, carrying with it shrieks from the carnival rides and the pitch and dip of a midway barker. Jodi brought over her bourbon and stretched across the bed. The air smelled of dust, cigarettes, and lemon-oil cleaning spray and through the open window she could hear strains of the merry-go-round jingle. The music that always reminded her of first sex, Jack Ambler in the parking lot of the West Virginia State Fair, and the hot vinyl of the pickup seat and the sun setting all glass gold across the railroad tracks.

Outside, a car pulled up and a shuffle of feet walked past. Through the half-closed curtains Jodi watched a blonde woman in a blue bathing suit cross the parking lot and ease herself into the swimming pool. Her head disappeared under the water and Jodi turned from the window, searching for the TV remote. On the mattress beside her lay the contents of her plastic sack, an unabridged version of Les Misérables and a brand-new copy of Real Property Law and Practice, both gifts from Sonya, the frizzy-haired court-appointed therapist.

Every week Jodi had sat for an hour in that little box of an office, staring at Sonya’s bottle-thick glasses and oh-so-earnest face. Jodi told her it was all bullshit, those phrases Sonya taught her: “lack of familial models of self-control,” “imprinted patterns of retribution,” and “generational intersections of love and violence.” Sonya had just smiled patiently, though, and when Jodi told her she’d read the abridged prison-library copy of Les Mis, she’d brought her this huge full-volume hardback. Jodi hated it at first, the weight of those fifteen hundred pages killing all the pride she’d built up around conquering the shorter version, and she’d hated that smile that Sonya had gotten on her lips. Jodi could see her already, at some cocktail party with colleagues, sloshing her glass of white wine and telling them all about her brilliant hillbilly client. Sonya stank of privilege and Jodi knew without asking that her life had been just one long stretch of soft, buttered bread.

For a while Jodi only used the unabridged Les Mis to keep her feet still while she did sit-ups. Eventually she got caught up in the huge story, though, the little corners of comedy and god arguments. And then, when Sonya found out that Jodi was going to be released, she’d remembered Jodi’s talk of Effie’s mountain land, the tangle of bank loans and heirs, and she’d given her Real Property Law and Practice. The legal language ran all together, overstuffed and thick, but there was hope in the phrases of abators and freehold estates, and anyway, the idea of Effie’s land was more than just a need for a place to call home; it was connected to a time nested inside this time, like a grain of sand deep inside the coil of a snail shell. Even when she’d been there, on the farm with Effie alive, Jodi had been bending in her mind toward the memories of before, the time when her parents had lived there too. Maybe, she thought, she’d been like that since birth, filled up with a backward yearning.

Miranda had her bathing suit halfway on when the phone rang. Her stomach clenched and she turned to the blinking machine with the note taped to the side: Rocklodge Motor Inn—Front Desk Dial “0.” All Other Calls Yer Expense. She moved her eyes from the phone to the wall and the brightly colored clothing strewn across the unmade bed. The phone stopped. Miranda eyed it once more and then walked toward the bathroom, the blue one-piece swimsuit bunched around her hips, her tits naked in the musty light. She took a bottle off the shelf above the toilet, palmed it open, and set three capsules on the back of her tongue. She was breaking her “no more than one a day” rule but today would just have to be an exception. She’d already moved down from the Dexedrine-Vyvanse combo to just Adderall and that felt something like a victory.

The phone stayed silent, another small victory, and Miranda turned her attention back to her swimsuit, enjoying the feel of the material as it cupped her ass. Too tight, her mother would have said. Her body had been softer ever since the boys were born. It filled everything differently now but she liked it better that way. Her skin gave off a warm ripeness that seemed more fully hers than the taut teenage body that came before.

She’d loved being pregnant. The things that were normally out of balance had aligned themselves during those nine months, her mood swings steadied, and her great cosmic yearnings were traded in for simple, sweet-tooth cravings. She’d cared for herself in a way that she never had before. She’d taken vitamins and planned meals and slept deeply, waking to examine her own body with a gushing eagerness, as if she were the new thing being created.

But after Kaleb was born and grew big enough to be away from her for more than a few minutes, it had all returned: the trembling anxiety, the certainty of one day dripping into the next, and her life telescoping into a gray mist. It was only in pregnancy that things got simple again and she was nothing more than a collection of sensations. Cold now, warm later; hungry, then full; horny, sated. The pills, if she balanced them out right, did something similar but not the same.

There were places where her skin remembered, places where, by holding and growing her sons, her body had become dearer. The softness of her stomach and thighs and breasts. But now Lee had taken the boys away. Kaleb, Donnie, and Ross were gone, so far outside of her body that weeks passed when she didn’t even see them at all.

She grabbed a towel from the bathroom and stepped outside into the slap of sunlight. Walking the long way around to the pool, she avoid. . .