Inside These Walls Page 14

  “It’s a wildflower after a forest fire,” he says. I say nothing in response. “Life sure loves to go on, no matter what you tell it to the contrary.”

  Between us the conversation goes quiet. The chatter of the other inmates, friendly and muted, drifts from the picnic tables. When Forrest speaks up again he says, “Well, I guess I can just disregard that phone call, then. I’m sorry I helped put you in jail for longer, though. There, I said it.”

  Indeed he has. My mother’s long training of me springs first to my mind—now, Clara, accept his apology—but, no. I can’t. “You didn’t just snitch,” I remind him. “You snitched and lied.”

  His voice is infused with a note of offense. “I didn’t lie.”

  “Yes, you did. You lied that you saw me shoot Mimi Choi. That’s impossible, because I didn’t do it.”

  He looks weary, and his head drops back a bit. “Listen, once all the testimony was in and accounted for, it did put things in a different light. It all happened so fast, and—”

  “It wasn’t just that. You lied about what my relationship with Ricky was like, and how much of the initiative I took that evening, and especially how close you were with all of us. We hardly knew you before that night.”

  “That’s not true. I hung out with you guys all the time.”

  “We hung out without you a lot more.”

  He utters a sharp laugh. “Then I was guilty of believing you folks liked me more than you did. I didn’t lie, Clara. I called it the way I saw it, and when I heard the other testimony, it did make me wonder if I saw it right. Not a day went by for the next two decades that I didn’t call into question something about what I saw and what I said about it. But I didn’t set out to lie. They wanted me to talk, my lawyer told me I had to, and all I could do was describe the way it looked through my eyes. What would you have done in my shoes, huh? Wouldn’t you have told them what you thought was true, whether or not you stood to gain from it?”

  I sigh through my nose and let my gaze wander back to the yard. The razor wire spirals across the top of the fence, gleaming silver beneath the hot sun.

  “Is there anything I can do for you?” he asks, and there’s a tenderness to his voice that’s unexpected. We’ve been through a war together, he and I. On opposite sides, yes, but having seen the same carnage, dragged ourselves through the same trenches. In a lonely world that counts for something.

  I think for a moment. “Sure,” I say. “Kiss me on the mouth.”

  He laughs. He looks at me to see if I’m serious.

  “I just want to remember what it feels like,” I explain. “It’s not really allowed, but if they ban you from visiting me again, so what. You weren’t coming back anyway.”

  He squints out at the barren yard with a tense smile. “Gee, Ricky’s girlfriend,” he says in a voice that’s only half-joking. “I feel like I should definitely say no to that.”

  “You owe me,” I tell him.

  I glance around for officers, and so does he. He takes two steps closer and slips a hand into my hair, and he touches his mouth, half-open, to mine. Oh, yes, I remember this thrill—the warmth and unhindered desire of a man’s kiss, the plea it makes, the naked sensuality. His hand tightens on the back of my head; his kiss grows deeper, and the gentle brush of his tongue sends a shock down through my belly. A moment later an officer barks at us, and we separate at once.

  “Don’t you dare start with that foolishness,” the corrections officer says. “Miss Mattingly. Don’t even try that.”

  I turn to Forrest, who has moved a courteous distance away. He offers me a respectful nod. “Well, see ya. Good luck, Clara.”

  “Thank you. Thanks for visiting.”

  He’s gone, and I’m left feeling drained of my anger and a little dizzy from arousal. I’m exhausted, and it’s not just from the sun, or even the emotional rush of the morning. It’s the pure effort of feeling new things, day after day, without a break. It’s so easy to sustain oneself as a machine, but as a human it takes energy far beyond my reserves.

  * * *

  That night I find myself lying wide awake in bed, listening to the distant echoes of guards’ footsteps in the hallway and the clanking of chains, and I think about Forrest’s kiss. Even though it happened only hours ago, in my memory it is the much younger Forrest pulling me against him, bringing his mouth to mine. I think about the quick darting of his tongue before the guard separated us, and the thrill that zigzagged through me. It warms me more than I could ever have imagined to learn that youthful passion lives on, even in someone my very same age, who once was young with me. It’s still out there for the taking.

  My thoughts wander to the first attempts Ricky and I made at that kind of love, long ago in the first months we were together. He had kissed me the first night, there on the boardwalk, and every day after—but kissing was easy. Clinton didn’t kiss, so it was the one realm free of trauma, and I was very glad for it. But the rest posed a challenge, and even after we had decided we would sleep together—it was a serious conversation, though not a decision he needed time to mull over—we made four earnest attempts before we found success. The first few times, cuddled up in the sweet privacy of his attic room at his parents’ house, he did everything he could. At the dentist’s office I always overheard the lunchtime talk of the other girls—their complaints and giggly personal stories of pushy, selfish men—and knew that, in this way, Ricky was a rare gem. Yet no matter how patient his hands, or how relaxed the mood he set, as soon as he lowered his weight onto me and began to press his body into mine—I panicked.

  Then it was a rainy afternoon, and his parents were away for the whole weekend, and we were trying again. His bed was a twin pressed against the wall. On the opposite wall, the roof sloped to leave a low ceiling; in between, his two big bedroom windows looked out over his family’s wooded backyard. The lamp was off, but he had opened the shades to let in the late-afternoon light, and when he rose up on his knees to run his hands down my body the shifting clouds threw a palette of shadows across his chest, all different shades of gray. His hair had grown a bit too long and was falling into his eyes. He looked thoughtful. “You should get on top this time,” he said, and I laughed nervously. “I mean it,” he went on. “That way you can control everything. You won’t have to worry that I’ll force myself on you.”

  “I know you wouldn’t,” I said, a reply so quick it almost overlapped his. “But I can’t do that. I don’t know what to do.”

  “I’ll show you.” His hands were soft and so relaxing, their steady sweep and pressure lulling my mind into a trancelike state. He was so patient. I knew he was already sick and tired of having Clinton as the ghostly third party in his bed, and we had only barely begun to wrestle with that demon. For him to accommodate me I’d needed to give him an encyclopedic understanding of the abuse, and as humiliating as I found that, he was a tender custodian of my secrets. What he was suggesting now, at least, was something I had never done before. “I love it,” he said, for once conjuring his own past instead of mine. “I’d do it like that every time if I could.”

  He nudged me over and lay on his back, then held my hips as I moved my legs astride his body. Very gradually, I lowered myself onto him. The way the rain struck the windows reminded me of the ballet studio when I was a girl, and the sound and sight of it calmed me. When he was fully inside me he closed his eyes and let out a slow sigh through his teeth; his hands, always gentle, swirled on my thighs. The bliss I saw in his face wasn’t scary or threatening; it was a beautiful sight, and he was a beautiful man. Now he is my lover, I thought, and Clinton is the past. I’ve moved on. Of course that was simplistic, and I knew it even at that moment, but the meaning rang true. Clinton’s stranglehold over me had at last been broken by this. He was no longer the only man who had claimed me; not the only man who would find pleasure in my body; he hadn’t savaged my mind, or my body, or my reputation so thoroughly that I would never recover. Ricky opened his eyes and met my gaze. “Don’t cry,
” he said. “Does it hurt?”

  I shook my head.

  He laid his hands on my hips, began to rock me gently against him. “Let’s try to make it feel good. Go slow. Take your time.”

  “Oh. I don’t need that. You can just—do what feels good for you.”

  He grinned and shook his head. “It doesn’t work like that.”

  That’s the way he always was. I am surprised to find the memories still so potent, so true, when more than twenty years have passed since I last dared to call them forth at all. It is such an aching pain to remember him that way and realize that even on that afternoon, his life was in its twilight, he was already an old man, only five years left and the days slipping away like playing cards falling from a deck. He would shoot a man, he would father a child, he would twist his linen into a noose on the hot water pipe and end it all by stepping off his desk. In all of it he would take me with him. I had known, for a certain truth, that our love story was the only one my meager life had been afforded. But as I drift off to sleep on the memory of Forrest’s hand against my cheek, I wonder. Over his bleached bones, over the resilient spiral of his DNA that I see in the eyes of our daughter, could a second life blow in?

  Chapter Nine

  Minutes before yard time, Officer Parker stops at my cell and calls me to the bars. “You’re getting a new cellmate tomorrow,” he says. “Want to guess who it is?”

  “But there are only two bunks.”

  “Yes. They found a spot for Hernandez in Med Seg. You want to know who’s moving in?”

  “What? No!” I wrap my hands around the bars and hear the panicked dismay in my voice, though begging has never done me any good, not once. “She doesn’t want to be in Med Seg. She hates it there. I take good care of her, much better than they do. One little incident and—I mean, I’ve been doing it for eight years.”

  “Nobody’s blaming you, Mattingly. She’s vulnerable already because of her disabilities. She’s supposed to be in Med Seg anyway, but it’s been overcrowded and she was doing fine with you. But between her injury in the showers and her other health conditions, she needed to be moved back. It’s a liability to keep her in General Population.”

  I press my forehead against the bars in exasperation. “Why is everything about liability? For God’s sake, her family is all Guatemalan immigrants. They’re not going to drag you into court.”

  “Her children are American citizens,” he corrects me, his voice taking on a note of chastisement, “and in any case, so are you. If your medically unstable cellmate clubs you with her cast, don’t think Miss Mona Singer won’t slap us with a lawsuit before your goose egg even goes down.”

  I sigh heavily.

  “So somebody will be by this afternoon to collect her stuff, and tomorrow you get a new cellie. Heard of Penelope Robbins?”

  Now I close my eyes. “Oh, God.”

  “Sounds like a yes.”

  “Isn’t she supposed to stay in Intake for a few weeks?”

  He shrugs. “It’s four to a cell there right now, and her lawyer requested better security. We can put her in the Hole, or we can stick her with you, since you’ve got a vacancy and a good discipline record. So, lucky you.”

  He taps the bars with finality and begins to leave. “Wait,” I say, and he stops. In a low voice I tell him, “The only reason the Latinas leave me alone is because I’ve been taking care of Janny. Before she moved in, it was open season on me. You know what’s going to happen to me if you take her away? Like I haven’t had enough problems the past month, getting my arm slashed open and everything else.”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll go the extra mile to keep you safe.”

  “How?”

  He smiles in a way that’s meant to be reassuring, but offers no real reply. In a frustrated tone I continue. “Can I at least visit Janny? Read to her, work with her on her Braille, things like that? She’s going to be miserable. I know this doesn’t make sense to you, but she needs me.”

  “I’ll check into it.”

  He walks away, and I turn to look over the landscape of my cell. The lowest shelf is precisely ordered with all of Janny’s familiar things: her quilted bag, Jenga game, Braille folder, our current romance novel, her jar of Vaseline. She likes a packet and a half of hot cocoa in each cup, and they won’t know that. She will ask for Vanart shampoo and be angry when they tell her only Gizeh is available. Everything will feel wrong, everything disordered, and her tenuous sense of control will vanish. I want to cry for her, and the pulse of it catches in my throat, but I force the tears not to come. In just moments they’ll sound the buzzer for yard time, and I can’t go out there with a tear-blotched face. You know how to do this, Clara, I scold myself, and force my flat face on like an ill-fitting mask.

  * * *

  The heat in the yard makes the air shimmer like a mirage, casting the chain link in a haze that gives it the delicate glint of silver filigree. When Clementine comes trotting up to me I crouch down and feed her a saltine cracker from the package I’ve saved. Ever since my trip to the hospital it’s been harder to tolerate the food here. Every single time I step into the chow hall, with its smells of overcooked peppers and cheap meat and dirty dishwater, I remember the scent drifting from the In-N-Out Burger and every cell of my body craves that flavor like a drug.

  I pick up Clementine and walk around the yard with her, letting the sun’s rays warm my scalp. I push away my thoughts of Janny and find them quickly replaced with thoughts of Forrest. I remember, vaguely, that he was a telephone lineman long ago, working in the cherry-pickers that lift workers to the top of the poles. Did he mention what he does now? I don’t think so, but the whole visit was so overwhelming that I can’t be sure. Clementine nestles in my arms, lifting her head and closing her eyes as I stroke her neck. Not for the first time, my gaze wanders to the top of the fence, with its whorls and twists of razor wire. Nobody ever gets out that way, but it doesn’t stop us from resting an analytical gaze upon it every now and then.

  I’ve never seriously considered a prison break. The closest I’ve come was when my mother died and I was denied my request to attend her funeral. Then, I was angry, and all sorts of possibilities marched through my mind, most involving self-injury serious enough to be taken to the hospital. In the end I had to face the fact that, even if I managed to escape, they would know just where to find me, and I would only succeed in disrupting the funeral of the person I loved most dearly. So I opted for the suicide attempt instead.

  Wisps of thoughts flutter through my mind, but I brush all of them away. At least in here Annemarie can visit me. On the outside I could never contact her, and if she’s anything like I was at that age, she would turn me in if I tried.

  When I get back to my cell, to be locked in for an hour until dinnertime, I find the mail delivery waiting for me. Emory Pugh’s latest letter is on the top of the stack—I feel a wave of distaste upon seeing my name in his handwriting—There’s a new statement from my canteen account, as well as a thick, gleaming white envelope. This one I open right away, and tug out an engraved card printed on paper that feels more like stiffened cloth. A smaller card flutters to the floor, followed by a scrap of onionskin. I hold the strange item up in front of me.

  Mr. and Mrs. Philip Leska request the honor of your presence at the marriage of their daughter

  Annemarie Faith Leska

  to

  Todd Andrew Dawson son of Michael and Lucy Dawson

  I set the card on my desk and watch the rest of the words blur on the page. It’s all so neat and formal, so authoritative and assured. The Leskas’ daughter is getting married. She is joining the Dawsons, uniting these two families in a happy rite of passage. I can imagine the celebration, the clinking of glasses and claps on the back, the dance with her father.

  It doesn’t say any of the other true things. That she was born a Rowan. For a few days, before they scrubbed my name from the paperwork, I suppose she was Baby Girl Mattingly. I picture the home of Ricky’s parents,
with its full bookshelves and Oriental rug, the bottles of wine on the rack, the tinted daguerrotype of great-grandparents on the wall at the top of the stairs. A perfectly respectable middle-class home, the refuge of two hardworking people. We had all failed in such spectacular style, that their grandchild had been passed from one set of hands to another, finally entrusted to a family who could meet the minimum standards set by the state.

  Annemarie Rowan, I try in my mind. But she never would have been that. By the time the egg that would become her emerged within my body, Ricky was already a doomed man. And I wouldn’t have named her Annemarie. I don’t know what I would have called her, though, because I never considered the question.

  * * *

  Saturday arrives, and by the time confession rolls around Penelope Robbins still hasn’t made her appearance. It’s just as well. Despite my voyeuristic curiosity about her crime, I’m not in any hurry to meet her. I step into Father Soriano’s office with a confident stride, sitting down in my usual chair and crossing my legs almost casually, as if in a moment someone will pour us coffee. We go through the normal call-and-response. He doesn’t bat an eye at my rather spectacular count of self-gratification episodes, nor at my confessions of vindictive thoughts and mild dishonesty. These sins are the buttered toast and orange juice of prison life, served up daily as part of the bland square meal of existence. We lie and we resent and we accept whatever small and furtive relief we can offer ourselves against the monolith of the state’s authority. I’m sure I bore him.

  I don’t confess the kiss with Forrest. There’s no sin in an unmarried woman kissing an unmarried man. Every day I row back to that memory, drag my fingertips through the water where I left it, but every day it slips deeper and deeper beneath the surface. Soon its electric thrill will be gone, and I’ll probably feel disgusted with myself then.

  “Is there anything else?” he asks.