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  “My God, Alli, that man is still out there,” she said. “We need to press charges. We need to make sure he’s not doing this to someone else. We need to—”

  I stopped her. I knew how the law worked. “It’s my word against his, Mom,” I said, “and I’m an addict facing felony charges. Who’s going to believe me? There’s no evidence.”

  “But they can get evidence. If they get a warrant, they’ll find the drugs and all those cameras and—”

  “They can’t get a warrant on my word alone. You can’t just accuse someone of doing drugs or some other crime and obtain a warrant.”

  “But your testimony—”

  “My testimony?” I felt anger coursing through my body. Anger not at my mom but at the situation the dealer had put me in. “My testimony? Even if they could somehow obtain a warrant and recover the evidence, who would actually be on trial? Me, Mom. I’m a discredited witness.”

  “That man needs to be punished for what he’s done,” my mom said.

  “You’re too naïve, Mom. It doesn’t work that way. It’s about evidence and the law. Of all people, I know that best.”

  “I know, sweetie,” my mom said, backing off. “You’ve just been through so much.”

  My mom was my rock during this time. When I couldn’t stay sober for myself, I stayed sober for her. She held up well, she was strong. She had to be. She felt she was responsible for keeping me alive.

  My mom was a beautiful, amazing woman who deserved better. The life she lived belonged to another. She deserved a better husband, a better daughter, more loving parents. She deserved to wear better shoes. Yes, shoes. Everything she was, had, and could ever possibly be had been given away to friends and family. Her shoes were always worn and old. Never name-brand. She had carried me, and other friends and family, on her shoulders. I could see that in her shoes.

  I broke this woman, I hurt her so deeply, so painfully. She would never admit it, or even face the truth about my horrendous actions against her, but it’s the truth. I knew how she would die, and my sister agreed. My mother would die from a broken heart. My father cracked it, I shattered it, and my sister was forever trying to fix it. I knew one day that heart would stop, and when it did, I would lose all that was good in my life.

  I knew I couldn’t survive without my mother. My main motivation was to turn into the daughter she believed I was, to salvage the time I had left with her, to find a way to someday laugh with her and take care of her, emotionally and financially.

  One of the therapists I was seeing in Oahu called it “a fucking wonderment” that I had remained sober this long. I began to think it was my survival instinct—the instinct that made me a good cop, the instinct that got me out of that house—because I knew the only way to survive was to stay sober. If I used again, I would die.

  • • •

  In August, I decided to change my plea from not guilty to guilty. I had wanted to plead guilty right from the beginning, and now my lawyers agreed. I knew I couldn’t live through a trial, and I wanted to own up to what I had done, to make amends. After that, I waited for my sentencing date. Waited to see if I would go to prison. Waited to see if I could stay sober through all of it.

  And then finally the waiting was over. I had a sentencing date of October 29. We had to fly to Maui for it, and the night before we left, my mom and I made dinner and sat on the lanai, watching the sunset. I didn’t know if I would be coming back to this apartment. If I got probation, I would have to stay in Maui until the terms were worked out. If I was sentenced to time, I would be sent straight to jail.

  I stared down at the canal below, at the people who drifted by in the early evening. Even from this far up, I could easily identify the drug dealers who passed by below.

  I watched one man, a middle-aged white man, waiting for two tiny pretty Asian women to cross the street to him. They were agitated and fluttery, and he was loudly angry about something. He was dressed in black, with cheap chains dangling from his soft hips and a too-tight shirt open low. He was sleazy, a wannabe bad boy like he’d seen in MTV videos. I instantly hated him and worried for the girls. If I had a firearm, I would have taken aim at him from above.

  In my other life, my life as a cop, I could have done something to defuse the situation. But now I was helpless. I could only look down, see him for the power he had, and feel angry that the girls wouldn’t get away from him.

  But they needed him. They needed his drugs.

  He had them, and he knew it.

  • • •

  I worried that Keawe’s wife might show up at my sentencing hearing. I also secretly hoped Keawe would be there.

  But on the day of my sentencing, no one at all was there. Just my mom and the lawyers and a couple of reporters.

  My lawyer argued that the PTSD, the addiction, and the lifelong loss of my shield should be taken into account when sentencing me—that, in effect, I was already being punished enough. I was hoping for probation only; the prosecutor was angling for five years in prison.

  I barely made it through my prepared statement, which was a heartfelt apology to my friends, my family, the MPD, and the county of Maui in general.

  “MPD gave me the opportunity to have an amazing career,” I told the judge, “and I provided far less than my best. The betrayal I have imposed upon them will forever haunt me. I know great shame. I am overcome with remorse, and a spoken apology seems frail compared to the gravity of my actions.”

  I had worked on that statement for days and meant every word of it. I only wished the people who needed to hear it had been there.

  The judge asked me what I thought my sentence should be.

  “Probation,” I answered. “I think jail is the wrong place for addicts.” From what I’d seen from my time in jail in Albuquerque, I knew how available drugs were. I was worried for myself in that environment. Worried for any addict.

  “And whom do you think jails are for, Miss Moore?” the judge said.

  “Violent offenders, Your Honor.”

  He looked at me thoughtfully for a moment. I had no idea what he was going to say. Then he started talking.

  “The defendant was a con artist,” he said. “She perpetrated a scam. She had a reason for her scam: she wanted drugs. She wanted to continue using drugs. She didn’t want to give up her job, didn’t want to ask for help from her family, who all appear quite willing and able to help.”

  As he talked about what he viewed as my calculated actions, my deceptions, I started to feel like I couldn’t breathe.

  He continued, “Miss Moore is such a convincing storyteller that the court can’t tell if today is a continuation of that scam. Which Allison Moore is before us in court today? The Allison Moore that worked vice undercover, that was able to arrest and investigate drug dealers, or the other Allison Moore? The court understands the difficulty that vice officers have in having to live a double life, but at some point you went over and never came back.”

  Then, most painfully, he referred to a letter Erin Doyle had written against me. He said, “Miss Moore fooled an entire police department, as Miss Doyle says. She had every single person fooled. Eighty-eight officers donated their leave and time. Miss Doyle wrote a very strong letter detailing all the opportunities Miss Moore had to come clean to the person who was her confidant.” I hadn’t read the letter, but it wasn’t hard to imagine how much Erin hated me. She had taken me in, taken care of me, and I had spit in her face.

  Then he read the entire list of people who demanded restitution from me and the amounts I owed them.

  I owed Officer Keawe Davis more than a thousand dollars.

  The judge sentenced me to one year in prison and five years probation, beginning immediately.

  I turned around, searching for my mom. She was right behind me, putting on a brave face, trying not to cry.

  I knew what she was thinking. How could she keep me safe and sober while I was in prison?

  28

  Moana grew up in the projects o
n Oahu. Exposed to narcotics from birth, she was raised to believe in three kinds of law enforcement: police officers, cops, and pigs. Police officers were the heroes that pulled you from a burning vehicle. Cops were the ones that responded to 911 calls. And pigs, which included the majority of law enforcement, were those that slapped you around, “taxed” you, and took your dope.

  “You never, ever talk to or run to any of the three,” she told me.

  Moana, a Samoan, was one of the girls in the Federal Detention Center on Oahu. Her sentencing date was coming up, and I was helping her write a letter to her judge.

  “I still can’t believe I’m talking to a cop,” she told me.

  At first, I had been worried about what the women in prison would think of me. Like Moana, many of them were raised to fear and hate the police, and even though I was an inmate just like them, no one could ever forget I was also a cop.

  As a former cop, a former vice cop, a haole female who not only broke the law but also hurt the people she loved in the most heinous way, I felt I should be getting my ass kicked in prison on a daily basis. I should have been in the hole because general population was too dangerous for me. I should have gotten no support from the guards or compassion from the staff. That was how prison should be for cops, a consequence of abusing the responsibility and trust given to them.

  But that’s not how it was for me. The girls accepted me and treated me well. I liked them. The majority of the women in the FDC were bright and articulate. It was easy for me to forget I was housed with some very seasoned manipulators, liars, and thieves. Even easier for me to forget that I was one of them.

  One of the first friends I made in the FDC was Bets, a tita from Maui, in for selling drugs and stabbing her husband. On my third day there, she sat down to eat breakfast with me.

  “You the Maui cop?” she asked. I could tell by her face she already knew that I was.

  I nodded. I figured we’d get into a fight and I’d be sent to solitary. She was masculine with a football player’s shoulders. She was going to destroy me.

  Instead, she laughed. “I was one of Patrick’s first informants on Molokai,” she said. “Way back when.”

  “Really?” I said. “So you know all the vice guys.”

  “I know ’em,” she said, and started rattling off names and details about a bunch of my old friends. She remembered a lot of them, even though she had already been in for eight years.

  “You know I’m in the cell above you in three Alpha, right?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t.”

  “You woke me up last night,” she said accusingly.

  “Oh,” I said. I had had a horrible flashback during the night and ran into my cell wall trying to get away from the dealer. “I’m sorry.”

  “I heard a big crash,” she said.

  “I ran into the wall.” I tried to be nonchalant. “Must have been a nightmare.”

  “And you ran into a wall?”

  “I guess I did.”

  “Well, why’d you do that?” she laughed. “I’m gonna call you ‘Wally.’ ”

  I laughed. If a nickname was all I got from her, things were going to be okay.

  “Why do you have your own cell anyway?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I said, though I knew. It was the PTSD, the flashbacks. They couldn’t put me in with another inmate if I was going to be hallucinating and crashing into walls in the middle of the night. Too dangerous for both of us.

  “Where they got you working?” Bets asked me.

  “The kitchen.”

  “Not bad, but they mix state and federal bodies there, and you gotta watch out for the state bodies.”

  “So far I like it,” I said, but she was right. The state prisons were full, so many of the state criminals got sent to the FDC. It could get touchy with the state girls. They tended to be the low-level criminals, the fighters.

  Things went fine for me in the kitchen for about a month. Then a new girl came in, a girl I had arrested for selling drugs a couple of years earlier in Lahaina. She recognized me immediately and came at me swinging. Luckily, the guard broke it up, and soon I had a new job as athletic director.

  Compared to Washington, prison was amazing. Almost empowering, which sounds insane. Since my sentencing, I had come to realize that I had survived Washington and achieved sobriety by choice, not by circumstance. After the magnitude of my actions, my addiction, and the circumstances that followed, I couldn’t believe I was still breathing. Some days I woke up unable to comprehend that I was in prison—prison!—but the fact that I even woke up was amazing.

  Nights were a different story. That was when the PTSD struck. I lived and breathed my nights, and sometimes they were unbearable. During the day I still had flashbacks where I was paralyzed by fear, but I couldn’t explain to the guard, “I can’t do this task because I’m hallucinating a drug dealer coming after me.” I had to function and live through them, and that seemed to make me stronger.

  Drugs were not an issue for me in prison. It is very difficult to smuggle contraband into federal prison. Cell phones and cigarettes, yes, but because the others looked at me as a narc, if there were drugs, I never knew about them.

  I did find myself wanting to use in prison, but not meth. I wanted drugs to help me sleep, to make me not feel or think, to numb me out. Something like heroin. It would have been a nightmare to be on tweaker time in a prison cell.

  After six months of incarceration, I was made head orderly of the unit, which meant I got paid the most next to the commissary girls. I ran the daily functions and maintenance of the unit, everything from roster assignments to the unit orderlies’ payroll.

  I was grateful for my job. All inmates wore the same color, but the girls called me the “boss.” When I politely told them, “I’m not the boss. I only take care of unit sanitation,” they responded, “Okay, boss.”

  How I got myself in this position in six months I had no idea. The head orderlies in the men’s units? They were the biggest badass drug dealers in Hawaii. They ran shit and had a massive amount of power even while incarcerated. I was so far from that.

  But I did fill a void in our unit. I made the girls laugh initially, and then I gained their trust by keeping my mouth shut and my ears open. They entrusted me with their letters to judges, their communications with lawyers.

  In prison, my thoughts turned to Keawe more than I would like to confess. I knew I could never contact him again, though I did think about it. I composed letters to him in my head all the time. Every song related to him, every conversation triggered a memory I had forgotten during my drug abuse. Despite all that, I regretted that we were ever together. It had been nearly two years since I’d seen him, but since the day I arrived at the dealer’s house for the last time, I felt as though time had stopped. My love for Keawe, my anger, regret, despair, and grief—all these emotions were fresh to me, and I clung to them because I knew Keawe would be the last man I could love. I hated men now, raged against them in my thoughts, plotted to kill them in my dreams.

  I wasn’t in touch with Keawe in prison, but he had friends who were prison guards, and once a guard came up to me and told me Keawe was worried about me. Did I need anything? he asked. Could he get me anything? I was so paranoid about being set up by the guards that I just walked away. Some guards were dirty, but others guards would just test you to see if you would accept contraband. I didn’t want to take that chance either way.

  In prison I felt safe enough to rage at Washington. I wanted to torture the dealer. I wanted to burn down that house. I found myself dreaming about how I would take my vengeance against the man.

  I also had a few using dreams. I almost welcomed them; they were a break from the nightmares and PTSD, though almost as traumatic. I always woke up terrified that I had relapsed, and for a brief moment I found solace in the fact that I was in prison in a controlled environment.

  Prison is a violent place, and loud and cold, but my responsibilities w
ere lined out for me there. It was easy to follow the rules. And in some ways, prison is cushy. We had pillows, TV, books, and a gym. There was MTV. Zumba classes. Email. You could have ramen noodles and coffee at the commissary. Yet when your cell door closed, you remembered what got you there.

  My body ached from sleeping on steel, but the structure and control kept me safe enough to confront my past. In my awakening, I felt I could not move forward in my life without telling my story. I needed to expel my past before I could construct some sort of future.

  29

  I served my full twelve months at the FDC and was released at the end of October.

  Keawe emailed me the day I got out. He wanted to meet me, but I ignored his email. My mom quit her job in New Mexico once again and flew to be with me in Oahu while I petitioned to serve my five years probation in New Mexico. The two of us stayed in a hotel room waiting for my parole to be transferred. I couldn’t wait to get out of the state of Hawaii.

  It was time to go home.

  I moved back to Albuquerque in early December, when everything in New Mexico was brown and scrubby and ugly. These dead winters were one of the main reasons I had fled to Maui in the first place, but now the lush and green island would never be my home again. I intended never to go back.

  I moved into Mimi’s back house with my mom and started working for the parents of one of my mom’s friends. As a convicted felon, I found it hard to get a regular job, so I was grateful for a full-time position with a couple in their eighties. I cooked their meals, did their shopping, and drove them to appointments and social engagements.

  Being a full-time caretaker taught me patience and forced me into public situations that I would have avoided if given a choice. I began to learn compassion. I learned to help someone else. I had fucked up so badly that all I wanted to do was help others.

  Once I was safely in New Mexico, I returned Keawe’s email. He emailed me back, but by then I had started seeing my therapist and opted to delete his email from my inbox before reading it. I also blocked his email address. After all the hurt our relationship caused, I couldn’t believe either of us was willing to be in contact. I needed to make it stop. He would remain, like my father, a man in my life who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, love me enough.