After my divorce, I took a job teaching poetry to inmates in the Massachusetts prison system. By then, my daughter and I had moved into a large, creaky house in Cambridge with two other single moms and their children. Looking back, I can honestly say that life in that big house could seem as dark and dangerous as the rigors and uncertainties of life in prison.

THIS IS PART 7 of an EIGHT-PART STORY

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8

The other person who was beginning to make my life darker and more difficult was my housemate, Lina De Vries. For most of the year, save for the one time she stole drugs from me, we had functioned as best buds, running around Cambridge together, going to parties and dinners and restaurants and bars, Lina in her jaunty beret and me with my big sloppy smile and occasionally trenchant words. I had enjoyed her company. But now her behavior was changing, she wasn’t going out as much, was instead spending more and more time locked in her room. When I came home and knocked on her door, there would be silence, utter eerie silence. 

Of course, I’d know she was in there. Her daughter would be hanging around the kitchen, waiting for her mom to come out and feed her a snack. We’d ignore the obvious -- that something weird was going on with her mother. In the meanwhile, I was still teaching poetry and writing in the Massachusetts prison system, leaving the house each morning with the hope I could inspire or change someone, and returning at night exhausted.

I missed Lina’s company. But it seemed as if she had turned into someone else, a tortured, shaky individual hiding behind a locked bedroom door.

When I tried to persuade her to come out and join us for a meal, she’d act as if she hadn’t heard me. In fact, it wasn’t long before we’d stopped communicating with one another at all.

She wasn’t communicating much with her daughter, either. Instead she was very busy entertaining various men. In the late afternoons, I’d return home from work and there’d be music and a male voice emanating from her bedroom. That was fine I suppose, except the males were interchangeable and it seemed there was a different guy in there every afternoon or evening. Sometimes I’d come out of my room to pee late at night, and there’d be a total stranger hunkered on a kitchen stool in his tighty whities. He’d stare at me dully while I grabbed something from the fridge and made a run for it back to my room.

This began to happen more and more frequently, and I was unsure how to deal with it.

Cover Image: Volkan Olmez

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