Inside These Walls Page 12
Q: And that was Ms. Mattingly?
A: Yeah. She took this long, hot shower—it was hazy around the door from all the steam—and then she came downstairs wearing jeans and one of Ricky’s T-shirts. The shirt she had on was from Spectrum Supply. It had the logo on the front, the little brush and paint palette thing. Her hair was blow-dried.
Q: You’re telling us she shot two people and then went home and blow-dried her hair.
A: I suppose so, yeah. I mean, that’s what she did. Ricky and Chris were in the living room fighting over where to go. Ricky wanted to go to Mexico, but Chris said the cops would be expecting that and had some place in western Oregon he wanted to go to instead. Clara went into the kitchen and got the glass with the Smurfs on it that they used for smoking hash—like, they’d light it, turn the glass upside down on it, and let it fill up with smoke, and then stick bendy straws underneath to suck it out. She came in with it and asked Ricky if there was any hash left. He told her it was upstairs.
Q: Was that something she did often, smoking hashish?
A: No, but once in a while she’d join in. She turned on the radio—I remember it was Phil Collins type stuff, because I was like, oh, God, what is this shit... Sorry. Then she and Liz sat at the coffee table and got high, and they watched the guys argue. Clara had a cat on her lap, like always. I was watching at the windows for cops, pretty terrified. I definitely didn’t want to get stoned at that moment.
Q: Do you feel like there was any impediment to Ms. Mattingly leaving at any point, if she chose? Was there any threat to her?
A: No. No. I mean, Chris probably would have tried to stop her, but after a while she just went upstairs to the bedroom and she didn’t try to leave. And Ricky wouldn’t have stopped her. If Chris had tried to break bad with her, Ricky would have defended her. He let her do whatever she wanted, always.
Q: That’s interesting that you tell us that, because there have been suggestions that he was physically abusive or intimidating to her.
A: God, no. In fact, at dinner that evening he was joking about how she’d hit him in the mouth earlier and it still hurt. He touched her all the time, but it wasn’t violent, I can tell you that much. She ruled the roost.
I know this stretch of testimony was particularly damning in terms of the sentence I received. A young, churchgoing woman with a spotless record is a pitiable case; but add in that she smokes hash, primps herself post-murder, and bosses around the kingpin, and all of the good work of my character witnesses is negated. It’s the Intérieur of Ricky and Clara, and it’s not especially flattering. I wish I had known Forrest well enough that I could understand why he painted it this way, but Forrest’s mind was a mystery to me. He looked so bland and unthreatening, but then, I guess they always do.
There’s a rustle in the bed, and Janny sits up. “Why you gotta be like this?” she demands, her voice jarringly loud and abrupt.
“I’m sorry. Was I too noisy?”
“You spying on me again? Is that what’s up?”
I frown, feeling a red flag of alarm pop up in my mind. I’m sure she could hear papers rustling, but I can’t imagine why she would assume they were hers. “Janny—no. These are my own court transcripts.”
“Like hell they are, you bitch.” She swings her legs over the side of the bed and starts shouting at me, her voice slurring as if she’s drunk. “Fucking puta. Who sent you here to spy on me—Javier? Some fucking zorra he found on the corner? Get over here so I can kick your ass!”
I back up toward the bars as she gets out of bed and starts toward me, the fingers of her non-casted hand tracing the bunk to orient herself. Her curly dark hair puffs out in snaky tendrils from the braid I made for her this morning, and her face is flushed. “Guard!” I shout, and at the sound of my voice she lunges for me, but staggers toward the right, as if the weight of her cast is throwing her off-balance. I go left, sliding my back along the bars. She stumbles into the corner of the desk and howls in pain.
Fast footsteps approach behind me, and my cell door clangs open. “Hernandez!” the guard yells, but he hesitates. Normally the order would be to get on the ground, but that’s not a logical order to give to a blind woman with a broken arm. “Hands on the wall,” he says instead, ad-libbing.
“Fuck you, motherfucker,” she shouts, and takes a swing at the air with her healthy arm.
Another C.O. rushes into the cell, and I back into the corner. The two of them manage to get a cuff around Janny’s free wrist, and she kicks and flails as the second one works to cuff her ankles. The first turns and meets my eye. “When did this start? Was she drinking?”
“No. I’ve never seen her like this.”
Janny begins shouting in Spanish, but the only words I can pick out are the profanities. Other officers are just outside the cell now, and the two who have cuffed her wrestle her through the door and into a waist chain. Now that she isn’t threatening me directly anymore, I feel a swell of pity for her as she’s forced into chains like an animal. My cell door pulls shut, and I stand with my hands on the bars watching Janny struggle and twist away from them. “Take her to the Hole,” the sergeant orders, and as she’s pulled away suddenly a realization dawns on me.
“Don’t throw her in the Hole,” I shout. “She didn’t have dinner. She’s diabetic.”
“What?” one of the guards says.
“Take her to the clinic. Maybe it’s her blood sugar. She needs to eat.”
The guard with a hand on Janny’s cast says, “She needs a smack upside the head, is what she needs.”
“I think she’s drunk,” the sergeant says, but he looks uneasy. “All right, take her to the clinic first. We don’t want a lawsuit.”
“Can you come back and tell me how she is?” I call out, but they’re wrangling her toward the double doors amidst the howls and cheers of the other inmates. “Come back and tell me,” I shout, straining my voice to be heard over theirs, but I know it is lost in the clamor.
Chapter Eight
In the chow hall there’s a flurry of excitement. All day I’ve been hearing the distant audio from other inmates’ televisions. News reports that Penelope Robbins is being transferred here to await trial. Normally inmates don’t arrive at the prison until after their convictions, but in some cases, where there is exceptional notoriety—mine, for example—a county jail is deemed not secure or safe enough for the inmate. The reports don’t offer many details, but I suppose the daughter of a Congressman is a target at any facility. I wonder if I’ll catch a glimpse of her here.
There’s a festival air to the chow hall, a buzzing of anticipation at the arrival of this celebrity. Earlier, as I tried to read my way through a slow Friday afternoon and distract myself from worrying about Janny, I kept hearing my name in a tinny echo every few minutes. The newscasters were listing the famous inmates of the El Centro facility—the six merry murderesses, so to speak. Most of the others are in Administrative Segregation and I never see them. The majority of murderers are not as well-behaved as I am.
Today I sit alone. No one has returned to tell me how Janny is doing or where she is—privacy rules, I’m sure they’d tell me, but I think they like to control information simply for its own sake, too. During the workday I was desperate enough to quiz one of my coworkers, a woman I’ve seen getting special-diet meals in the chow hall, with questions about her symptoms. Now I feel reasonably sure Janny’s outburst was a blood sugar crisis, but still my heart is sick with worries about her—and Annemarie, as well.
I listen to the conversations around me, force myself to eat my hamburger, line up for roll call. Once we’re all back in our cells the mail delivery comes around. There’s a card from a church group that sends uplifting messages to women in prison, and I wonder how the woman who drew my name felt about her luck. There’s also an envelope with Karen Shepard’s return address in the corner. She corresponds with me from a P.O. box, which is amusing in its way. It’s not as though I’ll ever get out and track her down. Perhaps she’s w
orried that I could send people after her, arrange some kind of a hit or confrontation from prison. She’s a writer, so I suppose she has a good imagination.
The note from Karen is a short, rectangular slip of paper clipped to a larger photocopy. I unfold it and begin to read.
Dear Ms. Mattingly,
I hope this letter finds you well. Thank you for your recent correspondence. I am enclosing a photocopy I think might be of interest to you. In my research, sifting through many old documents in the Rowan file, I came across this letter that is dated the day of Ricky Rowan’s death. The documentation indicates it accompanied his suicide note, but it’s not clear whether it was ever released. I am aware from previous cases I have researched that private letters are usually held for the addressee, and that if that individual can’t be located, the letters are simply overlooked. This makes me curious whether that was the case with this letter, since it is only through your comments and my recent study of the court transcripts that it is clear to me who Kira is. By the time Ricky died, the relevant people may not have been cognizant of that. In any event, it is enclosed. I look forward to our ongoing communications.
All best,
Karen Shepard
{CC: photocopy from Rowan file}
Kira,
“Fight them, fight them. Call the animals.”
(Ah, hell there’s no point is there.)
BAM. Here it is. November 16, 1982—that was the day I was dying to see the Columbia land at the end of its space mission. You packed up a picnic and we drove all the way down, five and a half hours. They chased us away from the perimeter of the air force base—remember? We had to park in the desert. The sun was setting, streaks of blue and shadow, and we ate peanut butter sandwiches sitting on the hood of my car. You wrapped that Indian blanket around your shoulders when it got cold. And then we saw the fighter jet come in real fast like a wasp, then the shuttle behind it—silhouettes, both of them—dark and beautiful in the yellow sunset sky. Ominous and fragile at the same time, zipping by, speeding. Spectacular. I had to do a little dance there for it—imagine a little Bob Marley, steel drummin’, feel-good music. You laughed at me, but I didn’t care then and I don’t care now. I forgive you, I forgive you. I never blamed you in the first place. Is there enough time in a life to say that as much as you really need to? Om mani padme hum, I forgive you, I forgive you.
Funny thing—I always thought life was for the living, but now all I can do is hope there’s an afterplane, a parallel to this one where the souls go, and no God. I want to say, Kira, Kira, I’ll always be with you, but what living person can say that? “I’ll always be an angel watching over you.” Folly, I say! That’s the quandary, is that if there’s judgment then you know where I’ll be, and if there’s no judgment then I rot like the meat I am. The one sure thing now is, if life is for the living, I’m tapping out. I waste the air, turn food into shit, and even the trees can’t benefit from my CO2 output because there isn’t one motherloving tree in a hundred miles of here. It’s a zombie life and I’m going to stake it.
One last thing:
I love you, now and yesterday and tomorrow, beyond whatever’s next and deep down into the crazy time-physics we can’t even conceive now. Into the four-dimensional geometry of whatever’s there, where it’s a shape filled up with my love for you. And I know “I forgive you” isn’t the true mantra, but “forgive me, forgive me, forgive me.” Please forgive me, Kira. Forgive me for all the wrong I did you. Let me be a sky burial so the wind blowing over my bones can be like a prayer flag carrying that request to the terrible gods, so if there is a good place beyond all of this, I’ll have paid your passage with the only things I had left to give.
All of my love,
JEN
My legs won’t hold me. I grip the side of the bunk for balance as I let myself drop onto the bottom mattress. My body is shivering from head to toe. The mere sight of his handwriting—the neat slice of his black pen, trailing down on the long letters in the gentle curve of swords— both stuns me and pulls me in. And his words, they flood into my mind and find nowhere to go.
I am glad I didn’t realize he felt this way. I couldn’t have survived it, long ago, knowing that he did.
Tear it up, I think. Throw it out. Flush it. It’s all long gone.
But I can’t. I don’t have the heart. I want to be able to read his words again, over and over—his love and regret, the things that made him human and worth my heart. It shouldn’t matter one bit anymore, but instead it means everything.
* * *
Dear Ms. Shepard,
Thank you so very much for the letter from Ricky. I have tried to write you several replies and I can’t properly put together the words to express my gratitude. It truly means the world to me. I must say, your letter arrived at a delicate time. I have been struggling with an emotional situation involving a family member, and my cellmate is in poor health, which has left me burdened with an unusual amount of psychic distress. While Ricky Rowan may be the last person I should want to comfort me, his words are strangely welcome at the present moment.
In thanks for what you have shared with me, I feel moved to offer you a part of the story I haven’t previously spoken of to anyone. Please bear with me, as this is difficult to explain, but hopefully it will shed light on some of the more puzzling aspects of the chain of events, particularly my own crime. I realize your book is about Ricky, but perhaps this will help you understand the big picture.
Garrison Brand, my stepfather, was a good man. He suffers from Alzheimer’s disease now and lives in a senior home, yet even after all these years he remains in my daily prayers. He married my mother in 1972, when I was eleven years old, and I believe she was very fortunate to find such a partner in life. He was a loving man and a thoughtful one, a good provider and one who, until the very end, honored his vow to be true to her in sickness and in health. I called him Pop. It was a compromise between calling him by his first name, which we all felt was disrespectful, and calling him Dad, which I felt was disloyal to my late father. But despite the friendly nickname he and I were never very close, probably because he and my mother married at the time I was becoming a young woman. That must be an intimidating thing for any stepfather. Girls of that age are best known for their volatility and drama, and while I was a well-behaved child, I wasn’t immune to either of those things.
Pop brought with him his son, Clinton, from his first marriage to a woman who was unfit to take custody of him for reasons that were never really shared with me. The family had moved to town about four years earlier, and the parents were divorced about a year after that. Mrs. Garrison was said to have “run off,” whatever that means. We knew them from our church. Clinton was fifteen at the time of the remarriage, and my impression of him was that he was bossy and blunt in his criticisms. At the time I assumed he was angry about his mother, because he was, in the language of the era, a male chauvinist pig. He was openly critical of my mother for not changing her surname to Brand. She kept my father’s name because she didn’t want me to feel isolated as the only Mattingly in the family. Clinton had a habit of ordering me around, especially when my mother and Pop were out of the house. He’d announce that I needed to make him a sandwich or tell me to go mow the lawn, which was his responsibility, and he would yell at me in a very hostile way if I was slow to obey. My mother wasn’t a yeller, so this behavior rattled me, but I assumed it was just the way of teenage boys. It didn’t help that Clinton and I looked physically similar—blond hair, slender builds, etc—so many people assumed we were true siblings and often referred to him as my brother, which elevated my perception of his authority.
A couple of years passed, and it was the spring of Clinton’s senior year of high school. He earned an acceptance to his first-choice university on the East Coast. Life with him around wasn’t terrible. Except for occasional things like the incident with the kittens, he was nothing more than a bossy and obnoxious stepbrother most of the time. But I was looking forward to
a more relaxed household with him away at college. Clinton played lacrosse for his high school team, and our house was often filled with noisy players and some of Clinton’s many female hangers-on, because he was a blond, blue-eyed California boy and the target of much romantic intrigue. When his friends filled the house I spent most of my time shut away in my room reading and drawing, which, little did I know, would prove to be good preparation for my adult life.
One evening my mother and Pop were out at the church—they were on the committee that prepared the fellowship hall for the repasts after funerals—and I was reading on the sun porch while Clinton watched television. I heard him call my name, so I set down my book and went in. He looked at me from where he was lying on the sofa and said, “Go to your room and go to bed.” I asked him why, and he told me just to do it, which was typical of him. But it was around eight in the evening, so it wasn’t a ridiculous thing to demand on a school night. I went ahead and obeyed him, dressing in my nightgown and taking a book to bed with me.
It was only minutes after I had turned out my light when I heard my room door creak open. I pretended to be asleep, but I could hear his footsteps coming closer. At first I thought he was going to confront me about reading in bed, but that wasn’t his purpose at all. He sat on the side of my bed, and I probably don’t need to describe to you what came next. I kept my eyes shut tight and continued to act as if I were asleep, and he stopped just short of actual intercourse. The experience absolutely gutted me. I had my back to him so I didn’t even understand what he was doing—it was simply a humiliating thing for which I had no words.
For the next several months he continued that pattern—coming in whenever he had the chance and using me as a sort of lifeless masturbatory aid—and I didn’t say a word about it to a single soul. I had been warned about adults who try to “touch” children and that if this happened I must report it, but what Clinton did was not anything I could have described aloud. He was neither tentative nor gentle. When he came in, it felt as though I excused myself from my body and went somewhere else for a while. It was as if I knew a secret about what was happening to Clara, but that was somehow a step removed from such a thing happening to me. It was a necessary distinction to make. My mother had told me many times after she remarried that one of the worst aspects of my father’s death had been that I was being denied the experience of growing up in a real family. To upset and disappoint my mother was unthinkable, so I had to find a way to make this not exist. And I knew Clinton would be going away to school in a few months, and it would all be over.