A Sin of Thought
Stephanie Couey
Each evening, when I get out of summer classes, the boy I’m in love with, a Jack Mormon from a rural neighboring town, waits for me on the bridge. He and I walk to the Jackson’s gas station, buy cartons of chardonnay, head to the Boise River, and strip to our underwear while it’s still light out. We float and drift in the shallow warm water until it’s black and speckled with gold from the campus lights.
Pruny and drunk, I tiptoe across the rocks, still hot from the sun. We find used condoms and an empty tub of potato salad from the kids who live under the bridge. In the distance, a man plays bongos.
We put on our clothes, and Aaron says wants to impregnate me “with little Mormon babies” so I can’t go anywhere. He stumbles a little, says he’s joking “but not really.” I freeze for a moment, before walking back to the shore, the sand sinking beneath my feet.
We watch ourselves in the cloudy thrift store mirror in his room, and after, he nestles onto my chest. The sunlight washes our bodies in gold, and goats bleat and maa outside. We smoke from a dirty glass pipe and Aaron says he wishes we met when we were fifteen. He says he wishes we were each other’s firsts and had waited until we were married so that we could be together in the Celestial Kingdom.
Neither of us are even allowed in the Latter-Day Saints Temple. We’re too defiled. For me, this is an unemotional truth, but for him, it is something to grieve.
My mom sees his headshot online and comments on how handsome he looks. She says she won’t tell my dad.
I fill out the paperwork to go see him, and two weeks after his arrest, I’m driving through overgrown cornfields to the Canyon County Correctional Facility.
I move through the lengthy security process, I am scanned and patted down by an unsmiling woman close to my age, her hair pulled back tight.
Four young women go through the same process along with me, two with small children in tow. There are two older men, maybe fathers. One holds his cowboy hat to his chest, speaks hushed Spanish with a male guard. There is one young man in a knee-length Tupac shirt, maybe a brother, a son.
Before entering the visitation room, we are firmly instructed to not touch the inmates. If we want to buy them something from the vending machine, we have to do it ourselves. We are allowed one quick hug at the beginning, and one at the end. We cannot touch each other’s hands.
They release us into a room filled with large desk tables and beige plastic chairs. We are told to sit where we like. A metal door opens and the inmates file in one by one.
Aaron sees me and smiles without restraint. When we hug, he wraps his arms entirely around my body. We hold each other for longer than our allowed five seconds, and a guard scolds us. We keep holding, and the guard barks again. We let go and Aaron says, “I wish I could kiss you right now.”
He is unshaven and has gained a noticeable amount of weight in just two weeks. We sit unnaturally across from one another, our hands not touching, our feet not touching. He tells me he’s on an antidepressant, an antipsychotic, and takes a sleeping pill before bed. He says it makes it all a lot easier. That he knows he’s fucked, but he’s able to deal.
“It’s also simpler in here in a way,” he says. “You know. Not even having the option.”
I say, “I didn’t know it was such a struggle,” and the words are tiny shards in my mouth.
When Aaron first comes to my summer dorm, he is abhorred by the dust on the windowsills. He says his mom used to clean offices, and this kind of thing just makes him crazy.
She died in a car crash just a year before we meet. His dad was driving and he and two of his siblings were in the car. It happened on highway 84 in Nampa, flanked by corn fields, on the part of the freeway that smells sharply sweet from the sugar beet mill.
He shattered his back, his sister sustained major injuries, and his older brother’s face, though still handsome, was never the same. His mother was ejected from the car.
In the hospital, Aaron was denied sufficient pain medication because of his addictions, and often, especially when we lie in bed, he twists in pain. Sometimes I wonder if his back will ever fully heal, or if the injury is so inextricable from his mother’s death that it won’t ever leave his body.
We have our first date at a coffee shop, and he tells me then. He says it like a question.
“My mom died?”
He looks like such a kid in his striped orange tee shirt, looking down at a glossy pastry. He strokes his coffee cup with large fingers and doesn’t look at me.
Neither of us knows how to be in this moment. I resist uncrossing and recrossing my legs. I try not to breathe too loudly. I try to get my mind around him having a dead mother. How his lifelong physical injuries collide with immutable, searing, dumbfounding loss. How at the peak of pain, he was denied the medications that could bring relief. I try to force understanding, but in this moment of stillness in a sunny, warm coffee shop, I can’t.
I’m more in love than I’d ever been before. At twenty-one, I feel like that really means something.
Before I go home for Christmas, we have our own tiny, very Idaho holiday. I wear a white turtleneck flecked with little Christmas trees and candy red lipstick, and Aaron wears his dad’s green wool sweater. We buy a fake white mini tree from Fred Meyer and decorate it with ornaments we make ourselves out of old coffee cups and cardboard coasters, and pipe cleaner, glitter, and pom poms from the Dollar Store. I make Christmas Crack with Saltine crackers, brown sugar, butter, and melted bars of milk chocolate. It snows nonstop.
We open presents next to our glittering little tree and take pictures of ourselves kissing with an actual camera, smile lines punctuating our young faces. I give him a shirt from Urban Outfitters, which we consider fancy and expensive, and he gives me a baby-soft, mint green scarf from the boutique downtown that he’d bought with earnings from delivering Chinese food. More than anything, I’m over the moon that he spent a chunk of money on me that he could have spent on drugs. I know he thought about it.
He admits that he is always tempted to take all my Prozac that I keep next to bottles of calcium and multivitamins in my pantry. He sounds like he’s showing me the most loving gesture when he says, “but I know my baby needs her Fluoxetine.”
The first time it happens is the hardest. I drive to his house to spend the weekend together. We’re planning to go to a rodeo, to wince at cows being wrangled and celebrate the “real” Idaho. It’s hot in late summer, the overgrown grasses and blooms commingling in a lush, rural perfume.
The front door is open, and no one is home. The entryway echoes. His yellow lab Butter is gone, so I figure he’s taken her for a walk. I let myself in, settle into the couch, and read from a fiction anthology until the midday sun starts to dip. I study the floral feminine décor of the living room, the framed illustrations of horses, the doilies beneath crystal bowls of potpourri.
His mom must have decorated this room, and I wonder if she’s here with me. I wonder if she can see me loving her son, outside of marriage, in his room upstairs. I wonder if she would approve of me, if she approves of me now. And I wonder if she can see that while I love her son fully, I love him fearfully.
Aaron had recently shown me the “temple garments” that she and his dad wore on their wedding day. These modest white underclothes are encased in glass and framed but kept private. I feel a pinprick of shame at having seen this part of her and her marriage, these relics of intimacy. They carry a spiritual life I don’t understand and am not supposed to see.
I get up to pee, and Aaron’s dark urine is still in the toilet with the seat up. There is a partially eaten bowl of Lucky Charms on the kitchen counter, the gray pieces tripled in size, and my heart skips. He never leaves food uneaten.
I list through the possibilities: that maybe he ran into a dealer from forever ago that he owes money to. Or the waiter at the old-timey sandwich shop he used to do meth with. Or that he’d been arrested, but I couldn’t think of for what. He’s with me most of the time and has even stopped smoking weed. His mania episodes are more pronounced without pot and he’s smoking more cigarettes than ever, but each day he tells me how good he feels without drugs, how excited he is to wake up in the morning, how he’s relieved and proud to not have to hide anything from me anymore.
I call him, just twice, knowing he would pick up if he could. Eventually, the sun sets, and I think of calling his sister Clara, but I don’t want to say I’m scared or cause panic. She and her husband and children are probably just setting down to a nourishing family dinner – roasted meat, cheese-laden Funeral potatoes, glasses of milk and seltzer water.
I return to my car and see a book lying face-up in the street. It’s The Book of Mormon, a dark blue, softly bound book with gold lettering. “Another Testament of Jesus Christ,” it says.
I grab the Book and drive back to Boise, past the llama pastures we love, beneath a sliver of moon. When I get to my apartment with exceedingly thin walls and ceilings, one of my classmates who lives beneath me, Cory, loudly fucks his girlfriend.
I make tofu bacon I can’t touch and try to drown out their slaps and gasps with Season 2 of Weeds. But after a while, I turn down the volume and listen closer. I grip my phone tight.
Later, Cory plays guitar and wholesomely sings to her. It is too beautiful to be obnoxious, and I fall asleep aching.
He isn’t allowed a phone call to anyone for the first twenty-four hours, so I don’t hear from him until the next afternoon. I can hear the slump in his shoulders as he tells me he was taken in for driving his dad’s truck under the influence of alcohol and nicked prescription Xanax.
He tells me I won’t be able to visit for at least two weeks. He says I can write and adds cheerfully that he’s already written me a letter and has made me a drawing of his room. The lightness in his voice makes my ears hot. This is nothing, his voice says. This is nothing.
His letters always arrive at least three weeks after he writes them. Sometimes he draws his surroundings or his meals, and he writes about how he gets extra bread or desserts because he always trades his meat with someone. He talks about how he’s been reading more than ever, but it’s hard to score a good book. Sometimes he reads the dictionary and says that if you look at any word for long enough, it becomes an onomatopoeia. He never writes about his mom. Mostly, he writes about how much he misses me and all the things we can do together when he gets out. The “many yyammas we will pet.” He only vaguely alludes to the things he wants to do to me, as our correspondences will be read by the mailroom staff.
My first letter is sent back because there is a lipstick kiss next to my signature. Along with my vetoed letter is a yellow slip of paper with the rules of writing to inmates: “letters may not be decorated in any way”; “letters may not be sprayed with perfume”; “letters must be sent in a standard business envelope”; “sender’s name and address must be on both the envelope and the letter”; “inmate’s ID number must be on both the envelope and the letter.” I am reminded that anything I send will be inspected before it is delivered to the inmate. If I want to send a book, it must be a paperback. Aaron tells me the pens they are given are “bendy” to deter stabbings.
In the next letter, I include a photo of myself which Aaron, embarrassedly, tells me his bunkmate immediately stole. Pictures of women, I hadn’t realized, are particularly sought-after. I don’t send another.
He had already been in jail, but for a crime he committed before we met. Something about stealing firearms from someone’s open garage to sell for drug money. We both know if he weren’t white, he wouldn’t have been sentenced only to county. Neither would my brother, who had once set a Volkswagen on fire in the California desert. Their delinquencies remained somehow defendable, forgivable, surmountable.
I don’t press for details. I’m just glad when he shows up at my front door with his belongings in a plastic bag. I’m just glad when I see him feeling like a whole new man with a fresh pack of cigarettes and a new outlook on life.
We sleep together all day, in and out of sex. I cook us healthy vegetable-filled dinners, and we skip parties. We binge watch Weeds on DVD, and he gives me full body massages and groans along with me. He talks about how much he loves taking care of me.
We dream of moving into a trailer together, having children, staying in Idaho. I’d be a writer, and he would do manual farm labor, or maybe work in the oil fields. I’d make it big with my first novel and he would stay home, a proud, sun-kissed dad while I’m off on my book tours.
He never tells me that every day is a struggle. But when we try to watch Requiem for a Dream, he winces, looks like he’s going to be sick, and says we have to turn it off.
He says he didn’t “really” do heroin. It was mostly meth or anything to be found in a medicine cabinet. But scenes of heads thrown back, pupils dilating, and deep sonorous sighs set off an agonizing hunger in him. What I see in those shots is painful. But what he sees is unparalleled release.
I have to think of his addiction as different than my oldest brother’s, his cycle as different. C. would leave vomit on the family couch before stumbling out of the house and disappearing for days. He would yell sexist epithets my way if I ever suggested he needed to change, to seek help, to stop shitting all over his family. After my mom and I picked him up from the hospital after he had almost bled out from punching through his ex-girlfriend’s fish tank, high out of his mind, he only treated all of us worse than ever. He could spit vitriolic words like no one I’ve known before or since. And he could apologize when convenient with the command and charm of a prince, careful to not admit wrongdoing.
When Aaron gets out in early November, he holds my head to his chest and cries through apologies. He says the worst feeling is knowing that his actions, his lies, his addictions all bring me pain.
At the time, no one realizes that what he needs is emergency medical treatment for addiction. That he needs grief and trauma therapy for losing his mother, and for the physical and psychological injuries endured by his family. That he needs an unbreakable network of care upon having left the Church. Otherwise, relapse is inevitable.
He asks if I want to be his parole officer’s contact, “in case it’s easier that way,” knowing it will happen again.
I try to imagine what it’s like in the Temple, and I know I’ve got it all wrong.
But in my mind, I am deep inside in a tiled room, accompanied by women. They braid warm oil into my hair. They lower my body into a beautiful blue pool. They do not smile, but the way they touch my hands communicates love.
They are preparing me for marriage.
I step into my own white temple garments, warm and freshly pressed, and feel a thrill at the cloth on my skin.
I look up to the high, muraled ceiling and feel utmost contentment in God. In my husband. In the future before me.
He is taken in again the day before my birthday. I am reading on my snowy balcony when I get the automated phone call of a woman’s voice asking if I “accept a call from an inmate at Canyon County Correctional Facility.” Over time, the cycle becomes both less painful and less bearable.
He comes to almost like being in there, even though when I see him, his depression is palpable. He says it’s more confusing out there, without clear boundaries, without clear definitions of right and wrong, and where so much is just there for the taking.
It is an echo of the “friends meeting” we went to that he hated. We had gathered with other formerly LDS youths, ate artisanal olive bread, drank actual wine, and read passages of secular literature. A slight boy with bracelets all up his arms read aloud from Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine: “Right and wrong were shades of meaning, not sides of a coin.”
The last time I visit him there, it is the day of the last prison execution in the state of Idaho. The death by lethal injection is to take place at the maximum-security prison, a few miles down the road from Aaron in county.
As I drive through the now-familiar cornfields, I wonder if that man is still alive. I had Googled him the day before and slapped a hand to my mouth. The descriptions of his crimes made me unable to breathe.
As the country road rolls on, I think of Miguel, who I had met in an airport on the day of his release. He was flying to Colorado to see his now-grown children. He had been sentenced to fifteen years in federal for stealing a television set. His neck and forearms were covered in tattoos: a stunning Mexican Venus, roses and thorns, a realistic portrait of an older man. He wiped his eyes and told me about all the baptisms, Quinceañeras, and weddings he had missed. Wanting to lighten the mood, he gestured down to his sneakers, Nike Cortezes, and said, “this shit is still in style though – hah!”
Had Miguel been Aaron, he would have been sentenced to county. He would have been housed on the same road, but he might have been pushed through the broken system rather than kicked under it. It becomes more and more clear that none of this makes sense, for anyone.
When I pass the maximum-security prison, a massive white complex, my throat burns. I envision the murderer, so physically near, strapped to an examination table beneath fluorescent lights. Following two quiet injections, a ghost rises from his body and evaporates through the ceiling.
I am conditioned to cry, to crumble, to suffer quietly and politely.
Anger is a pain I am not used to. It is sharper and more urgent than despair. It is being pulled apart.
I see myself being drawn and quartered. My hands and feet are tethered to the legs of shining, muscular horses. Hot irons, timed all at once, sear the horses’ hindquarters and I am split into pieces.
At some point, I consult The Book of Mormon about anger, both not expecting and expecting to find guidance. The Book says that anger is a sin of thought. That it is a choice, a weakness, a selfish emotion, and that is most often destructive.
But my anger, I become certain, is protective.
I don’t blame Aaron for the ways he needs to cope. Rather, anger at something bigger than us, something tangled, something else, pulls my body away from his. It makes me unable to desire him, severing what I thought was an inseverable attachment.
It is anger that lets me recognize that the cycle, regardless of the love there, is something that, in all its familiarity, I can’t hold.
It is not clean or simple or without guilt or ache, but anger, in all its heat and wild pain, allows me to step away. It allows me to recognize that there is too much I can’t fix, and it halts me in my tracks when I try regardless.
Without anger, my own limits are kept mysterious and unknowable. Without it, they remain open to doubt and susceptible to sacrifice.
