Inside These Walls Page 19

  “How do you have room?”

  “Well, I have to keep it compact. But I enjoy it a lot. It probably looks ridiculous, but in my imagination it’s beautiful.”

  His eyes are bright with amusement. “Kelly did ballet for a long time. She quit when she was fifteen or so, when school got in the way too much. You can’t even imagine the number of recitals I’ve sat through.”

  “That sounds like heaven to me.”

  He replies with a hearty laugh. “Your idea of heaven and mine are pretty different, let’s say.”

  I grin back. It’s a quiet Saturday, and we have two whole hours before visiting time is over. After a while we take out the Scrabble board, and I beat him soundly, then go easy on him the second time. Only when the guards shout a five-minute warning do I realize how much I don’t want the morning to end. I wish moments like this weren’t so hopeless, so fraught by my understanding that there can never be more than this, but I must push past that type of thinking. There’s a world beyond these walls, and Annemarie is in it, and so I must keep reaching out in whatever ways I can. I am imprisoned here, not entombed. And I won’t believe that her goodbye is truly a goodbye. If the past few months have taught me anything, it’s this: people come back.

  * * *

  All through the long Saturday afternoon I’m very quiet, going over in my mind, again and again, the things Forrest told me about himself and the bits of information I shared with him in return. Those I offered to him are simple. Mint chocolate chip ice cream is my favorite. At least, I think that’s still true. I love watching Olympic figure skating. I have a cat here, sort of, named Clementine. If I could go anywhere? Hawaii. It feels indulgent, even dangerous, to say these true things about myself. In here nobody cares, and if they did, you’d wonder why they wanted to gain your trust. You lie, even about small things, to be safe.

  Penelope has a visit with her lawyer, then returns to our cell not long before chow hall. “Who was that guy I saw you with in the visiting room?” she asks, dropping a stack of papers onto her bed.

  I’m caught off-guard by the question. The room had been fairly full, and I hadn’t noticed her there. “His name is Forrest,” I tell her. “He’s someone I know from way back.”

  He was a minor character in the film they made, or so I read in People years ago, but she offers no sign of recognition. “Is he your boyfriend?” she asks.

  “No. Just a friend.”

  “It looked like he was flirting with you.”

  I laugh. “That wouldn’t be a very productive effort, would it?”

  “Are you really in here for life?”

  “Without parole. Yes.” Her gaze tenses sympathetically. “Who visited you?” I ask.

  “Steven. My brother.” She turns on the sink and splashes water on her face, which looks a bit pink around the eyes, as if she’s been crying again. The girl is a virtual factory for tears; she’s going to need to unlearn that, and quickly. “We argued. The doctors have all these decisions they want us to make about what kind of care our dad gets—feeding tubes, stuff like that—and he’s being a jerk about it. He keeps insisting our dad wouldn’t want extreme measures, and that’s bull. Our dad would be all about the extreme measures.”

  I remember that her parents are divorced and her father had a much younger fiancée, which was part of the scandal that came out, but I suppose the fiancée doesn’t have much ability to make medical decisions on his behalf. Penelope’s concern for him intrigues me. If she was an incest victim—as I have assumed her to be—I doubt she would be so determined to keep the man alive and breathing. And if she had ordered a hit on him, it seems she would be eager to prevent any chance of a miraculous recovery.

  “I had problems like that with my stepbrother,” I say, mostly so I won’t look as if I’m too deep in thought about her personal business. “When my mother had cancer, and I was in here, he tried to convince my stepfather not to do what the doctors suggested and just to ‘let her go peacefully.’ Because she was burning through his future inheritance, is why. I’m sure every morphine IV felt like a punch right in his wallet.”

  She winces and plunks down on the bed. “That’s sick.”

  “You don’t know the half of it.”

  Her laugh is low and rueful. “Likewise. Sounds like your stepbrother and my brother ought to get together for a drink.”

  Now she has me curious, but I resist the urge to press her further. This isn’t like with Janny, where we had sound reason to trust one another and, until the end, posed no risk to the other’s fate. Penelope is new here. She doesn’t know how tenuous trust can be, and that she should be very careful with whom she shares her business. But soon enough she’ll learn, and when she does, I don’t want her worrying that I know too much.

  “Time for dinner,” I say, in a bright brusque tone that dismisses the conversation at hand, and as I pull my freshly-cut hair back into a rubber band I catch, in her expression, the shadow of disappointment.

  * * *

  Mass is held in the chapel, a reasonably large, high-ceilinged room at the far end of the main building. This prison was built in the 1950s, when people still went to church each week and everyone was assumed to be Christian, so the inward arch of the ceiling and rows of hard wooden pews give the room a special feeling, a place apart from the multipurpose look of the rest of the building. It has a single stained glass window—a bit uneven and amateurish, fitted into an existing window and made by prisoners in a shop class many years earlier. When I first arrived here there was still a cross attached to the wall behind the pulpit and five rows of pews. But then more and more of the women who arrived were Muslim—or became Muslim during their stay here—and so the cross was ripped out and the first two rows of pews removed to make a better space for prayer mats. I understand the need for this, but the room has had a shabbier feel to it ever since—from the rough brown marks near the ceiling where the cross had once hung, the gouges in the linoleum where the pews were removed, the awkward distance I must sit from the priest as he says the ancient phrases I long to hear. But regardless of these things, walking into the chapel offers a feeling of small liberation, as I make my way down the narrow hallway free of guards to exercise one of the few freedoms I still have.

  During the quiet moments, I pray for Annemarie. For Janny, and also for Forrest—willfully letting go of my lingering anger for what he did to me, opening my heart to the willingness to understand his confusion and fear and genuine belief that he was telling the truth. Because he’s right. In his shoes, I, too, would have offered up the truths as I saw them. Fear would have motivated me, but that overpowering desire to confess would have driven me as well. The instinctive desire to see a wrong righted is a complicated thing. It can drive us to assist in the bureaucratic pursuit of justice, and also to vigilante crime.

  I pray for every victim of our crimes, including Father George. I force myself to hold up each of their faces in my mind and attempt to feel, even in a dim and inadequate way, what I took from them. Afterward I stand in the Communion line and slowly approach Father Soriano. In front of me, the fine tendrils of Alexandra’s hair swing at the small of her back. When the priest offers her the wafer she cups her hands but stares straight ahead, her hard little chin jutting forward, jaw set firmly. We’re all a little proud around here.

  At the end of the service I follow my straggling fellow Catholics out of the chapel and into the hallway. The C.O. at the intersection with the main hall is calming a belligerent inmate who is copping an attitude, rolling her neck and straining forward though her wrists are shackled, and I slow my pace in hopes they’ll move her before my path crosses with hers. And then in a flash there’s an arm across my neck; my head is jerked back, and all I can see is the water-stained ceiling as I thrash against the dense body behind me. I try to suck in air, but the pressure is too hard against my windpipe. She wrestles me into the slight corner where the chapel wing joins the narrower hallway. Before my eyes she flashes a shiv—a shard of cle
ar glass ground to a knifelike point and wrapped in tape for a handle—and holds it to the side of my throat.

  “That new girl isn’t yours,” Alexandra’s voice hisses in my ear. “She’s for us. You don’t touch her. Don’t make friends with her. Don’t talk shit about one single person.”

  I nod, my chin pressing into her forearm. I can feel the point of the glass blade against my skin.

  “That’s your one warning.” She flicks the blade and a sharp razorlike pain slashes across my nerves. I try to cry out, but the sound is nothing more than a froggy gasp. All at once her arm loosens, and in a split second she’s five, eight, ten feet away, walking easily down the hallway, her hands empty.

  I pull in a deep breath, then touch my throat and look down at my fingers. They’re red and glossy, but not drenched. It’s a nick, that’s all. I tug the shoulder of my blouse higher to stanch the blood, then continue down the hall. Without remark the C.O. slides my wrists into the cuffs and locks me into my place along the chain, to return to D-Block in an organized fashion.

  Penelope is still asleep when I step back through the bars. She’s on her stomach with her limbs spread out sloppily as a child’s, a spare blue prison shirt draped across her eyes to shade them and she is snoring faintly. I wad up some toilet paper and press it to my neck, at last allowing my breathing to go ragged and my heart to race wildly. I press my back against the wall and slide down to sit on the floor, where the cold concrete feels comforting and certain, the cinderblock wonderfully unyielding.

  * * *

  In spite of myself I’m skittish all through the Monday that follows—shooting glances over my shoulder in the chow hall, bristling when the air-conditioning comes on and flutters my uniform blouse. I know they’re watching me and I need to project a self-possessed confidence, but my nerves are on edge. When yard time comes around I claim to be ill, giving up the chance to cuddle with Clementine, and in the quiet cell I take out the latest letter from Emory Pugh—the one in which he, wounded, accuses me of neglecting him, even floating the idea that I’m using him, without quite coming out and saying it. From time to time he does this—he has for two years now—and it’s a game I’ll usually play, sending along reassurances and friendly observations about my cat and the weather here in California. But now, merely reading over his words makes my throat feel tight and stirs up something oddly akin to resentment. I don’t want to answer this letter. Emory Pugh is only the latest in a string of men stretching back more than two decades—men who want to be close to me, claim association with me, draw some sort of thrill from even my most indifferent attentions. Men who watched the news or saw the movie and believe they know me, or like the idea of the little blonde holding a gun in her shaking hands, or believe I imagine them as my white knights waiting for me on the outside. I’m tired of responding to their misspelled little efforts, their flaccid attempts at gallantry, all in return for the mild entertainment they bring me. I’m not going to do it anymore.

  I crumple the letter and drop it into the trash, then take out my half-finished tactile drawing of Intérieur. For this final draft I managed to bring back a piece of the workshop’s thick white paper, luxuriously cottony and soft to the touch, by sliding it under my uniform shirt and wearing it against my torso. Of course I’ve known all along why I wanted to recreate this particular drawing, using my own hands and my own hard-won skills, and send it out into the world. The image, even half-finished, takes my mind back to those winnowing moments, the last hour before the police arrived.

  It was the disagreement between Chris and Ricky that did them in. Ricky wanted to drive south to Mexico, Chris north to Oregon. Chris changed his mind after the crimes at the rectory and decided the shorter drive would be the only safe choice. As they bickered on their way back to the Cathouse to grab their things, at first I was in disbelief. I got in the shower, the way I always did after Clinton’s worst assaults, hoping the water would make me feel purified in the wake of all that filth and restore me to some sense of being human. That didn’t work, so I got high—very high, as fast as I could. And then I went upstairs to hide.

  Ricky came in and closed the door behind him, pressing his back against it in a stab at privacy. There were no functioning locks in the Cathouse; we’d been walked in on more than once. I was sitting on the floor by the dresser, my back resting against the wall, listening to the melancholy strains of the music from a pop station filtering up from downstairs—the Phil Collins song that Forrest later professed to hating. The two cats who liked Ricky best, Brundibar and Mischa, had taken up residence on our bed in the corner, stretching out their languid limbs in the nest of our bedspread. “Pack what you need and let’s get on the road. Chris can go wherever he wants. We’re going to Mexico.”

  “You go,” I said. “I’m not running. I’ll get in more trouble if I run.”

  He cocked his head sharply and threw me an impatient expression. “You’re obviously high. Get up. Grab your stuff.” He reached to the floor and threw me the canvas tote I used to ferry things to and from my parents’ house, the one that said “Le Bag” on the side. It landed with a soft thump at the base of the chair, a few feet in front of me. “Come on.”

  At the sudden sound Brundibar leaped up and darted across the floor, and I stopped him with one hand and lifted him as I stood, hiking him to my shoulder like a baby. He was a beautiful ash-colored tomcat, delicate in his bones, and he looked around with alert yellow eyes. I stroked him and clucked to him as if he was the one who needed comforting, settling into the chair that was turned at an awkward angle in the center of the room. Above the broken secondhand dresser hung an enormous piece of art Ricky had made—a maze done in India ink, filled with black-inked monsters and colorfully dressed, winsome-eyed children. The cool thing about the maze, he always pointed out to people, is that there’s no way out.

  “Goddammit, Clara,” he said, his tone rough, and began shoving things into my bag himself. “Let’s go. We can’t stay here.”

  “I’m not leaving my mother.”

  “Your mother? What are you, seven years old?”

  I snuggled Brundibar against my face and clicked my tongue at him. “Jesus Christ,” Ricky said. His voice had grown strident, and there was a growing note of panic to it. “Don’t make me leave without you.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Clara.” He dropped the bag and came over to me, leaning down and planting his hands against my upper arms, but gently. His voice was calmer now, pleading a little. “Get in the car. All right? It’s just a drive. A road trip. We’ll go to Cancun, and it’ll be awesome. Remember when we drove to Spiral Jetty, huh? Remember how much fun that was?”

  I started to cry anew, and he uttered a low grunt of frustration. “Fine,” he said. “I’m not leaving unless you do. We’ll both go to jail. Is that what you want?”

  From the bottom of the stairs came Chris’s bellowing voice. “Dude, come on. We’re ready.”

  He pressed his forehead against mine. “Please, Kira. Work with me.”

  I buried my face in the cat’s fur, and Ricky pushed away from me with a defeated sigh. The bedroom door slammed, and I was alone. I was alone, and I stayed there, waiting. I didn’t leave until I heard the sirens drawing closer, and then I panicked and ran out into the hallway so they wouldn’t burst in and terrify me further.

  I wanted the world to know that story. I wanted Annemarie to know it most of all. But now, having seen the heartbreak in her eyes at learning how she came to be, I don’t want to tell it that way anymore. She came to me searching for answers to the mystery of her origins, and I owe it to her to turn this tale of apocalypse into her creation myth.

  Penelope’s cigarette lighter is buried deep in her canteen box. I flick it, touch it to the edge of the drawing, and the paper flares up at once. The flame eats its way up the image, across the slouching woman and her sewing box, to the man with his pointy-tipped ears, to the bed, the dresser, the map. At last only the upper corner is left, and I drop t
he last edge of burning paper into the toilet.

  I brush my hands against my jumpsuit and drop the lighter in the pencil can. Then I take out a second sheet of cardstock and empty the graphite from my homemade mechanical pencil to create a sort of tortillion. Sitting at the desk, I begin to draw a broad spiral with the pressure of the softened wood and my fingers, just the outline for now, barely visible on the bright thick paper.

  * * *

  The other inmates are just beginning to come back from yard time when a C.O. appears at my cell, flipping open the slot and gesturing for me to thrust my hands through. As she cuffs me I ask, “What’s going on?”

  “Appointment.”

  “Appointment? For what?”

  “Your disciplinary hearing.”

  With a sense of dread, my mind flips through the possibilities of what it could be for: the forbidden cigarette, the smuggled paper, the confrontation after Mass the day before—in which I was the victim, of course, but sometimes witnesses tell a different tale. “I didn’t do anything,” I insist. “If you think I did, I’m supposed to get paperwork stating the complaint first, and an inmate advocate—”

  She opens my bars. “Just come on.”

  Bewildered, I walk just ahead of her to the office wing, where a C.O. gestures me into the disciplinary office. Half in a panic, I take a breath to speak up in defense of my rights, but before I can speak I see my attorney sitting in a chair with her legs crossed, one stylishly-clad foot swinging. I exhale in surprise. “Mona!”

  “Have a seat, Clara. Uncuff her, please.”

  I sit across from her and feel the shackles slide from my wrists. “They told me this was a disciplinary hearing.”

  “Yes. I didn’t want anyone to overhear that you were speaking to your lawyer.”

  In a few moments we’re alone. “How’ve you been?” she asks. “I hear you got a new cellmate.”

  “Yeah. Is there any chance you could convince them to put Janny back in with me? They haven’t even let me visit her, and it’s mutually advantageous for us to be together. If you want, I can write down my entire argument. I want to challenge the decision.”