A Little Relief

I started to get worried at 7:36 pm.

He always calls at 7:30. Always. I haven’t quite figured out his “schedule” in there. The only constant is he will call at 7:30 pm, sometime between dinner and medline and the last lock-in of the night. I was in the kitchen – destroying it, as a matter of fact – when I realized it was after the regular call time. After seeing this morning’s news report about the first positive Covid-19 case in Shawshank‘s facility, I feel the panic begin to rise. I force myself to calm down and continue baking BossRPh‘s farewell cake. If there’s a problem, they will call me, I tell myself.

The phone rang a little after 8pm. He started with an apology for being late. “Shit’s going crazy,” he told me. I told him how I’d only heard about the positive case in the morning, but the news didn’t give much information other than the barest snippet, namely that there was one case and the patient was isolated after discovery. “Wanna know when I found out?” he asked. “Yesterday morning, on NPR.” They were already on lockdown at that point. He asked one of the COs for more information, but wasn’t told anything. It wasn’t until a few hours later that they were actually told what was going on. As it stands,

• everyone in his unit is under at least 16 days of quarantine
• the positive patient was housed in the unit (let’s call it X1) next to the one he’s housed in (call it X2); several detainees from X1 had recently been moved over to X2 within the last couple of days and have since returned to X1.
• tomorrow’s court is still on the schedule, since he wouldn’t be leaving the building anyway
• they’re no longer allowed to allowed to roam freely; instead, they’re split up so not everyone is in the common areas at the same time, with each floor of the unit alternating being under lockdown for the day.
• April 30th is inmate picture day, he doesn’t know if there will be a class photo

Since the only time he’d be able to call tomorrow would be during my shift, we’ve agreed that unless something major happens with court, Shawshank won’t call me until our regularly scheduled Friday night call. Should something happen, BossRPh would let me hide in the back room to talk. It’s her last night anyway, and she’s beyond caring at this point.