Inside These Walls Page 6

  I slide the magazine back onto the rack as Janny emerges from the stacks. Clutched in her hands are several romance novels, which she likes me to read to her in the evening. She hands me the pile. “I have a good feeling about these. What do they look like?”

  I examine the covers. “Um, this one has a blonde woman and a dark-haired man kissing in front of a horse that’s rearing up. The next one has a bare-chested guy in a kilt. I guess it’s set in Scotland. And the last one is two people standing in front of a fireplace, cuddling. It’s called Snowbound Magic.”

  “Ooh, I want that one. Anything with snow in it, that sounds fun.”

  Her face is animated, eager. I take her elbow, and together we walk slowly to the front desk, where the librarian writes down our titles under each of our names. “I got one about snow,” Janny says to Ms. Chandler, our prison librarian. “Love in the snow. Gonna make me feel nice and cool when they turn off the A/C in the cellblock.”

  Ms. Chandler smiles. “Have you ever been skiing?” she asks. Janny says “No” at the same moment I say, “Six winters in a row.”

  “You never told me that,” Janny says, scolding, and something in her expression looks wounded. It’s such a small fact, but when you’re living with someone, especially someone who is a criminal, you want to know her well enough that nothing is a surprise. She’ll feel so betrayed if she finds out about Annemarie, I think, and I wish that idea wouldn’t twist in my gut quite so hard.

  * * *

  During Saturday visiting hours I’m collected from my cell quite unexpectedly and shackled for the walk downstairs. I expect to turn toward the booths, but Officer Kerns nudges me forward toward the contact visiting room—the larger one filled with tables, like a cafeteria.

  “Wait, where am I going?” I ask her. “I went to the booths last time.”

  “That’s because they hadn’t cleared you for contact visits again after your fight. You’re good now.” She walks me through the metal gate and unlocks my wrists. “There ya go. Have a nice visit.”

  And I’m here. The room contains about twenty other inmates scattered around at different tables with their family and friends, or taking pictures in a corner painted with a mural of a waterfall. I cast a baleful gaze across the wide space, and then a woman stands and raises her hand in a small wave. It’s Annemarie.

  I don’t move. I can’t. Am I supposed to shake her hand? Hug her? She doesn’t look very certain, either. She waves me over, and I slide in on the other side of the table, sitting at the attached bench. Stacked in front of her is a small pile of papers. She throws a nervous look in my direction. “I wasn’t sure what to do when they sent me to this room. They seem to change the rules constantly.” I nod, and she adds, “That must be hard to live with.”

  “You get used to it,” I say.

  She slides the papers across the table to me, and I realize they’re large photos, upside down. “I brought some pictures of me growing up,” she explains. “I figured we have to start somewhere, and you were probably wondering. So, here.”

  Oh, the guilt. I feel the stab of it in the soft place below my rib cage, and it keeps going, like a knife is digging around in there. In twenty-four years I hardly gave a moment’s thought to the subject. I’d surrendered her for adoption, and knew that people who adopted babies did so because they wanted one desperately. I took for granted that the infant was well off, but her fate was beyond my control in any case. With fumbling hands I flip over the photographic paper and see a picture of a toddler in front of a Christmas tree, a large green gift bow in her hands, smiling beside a Big Wheel tricycle.

  “I have really good parents,” she says. “My mom wanted a baby for years and could never have one. She always said I was her special blessing from God. So life’s been good to me, pretty much. My parents gave me everything they could, and that was a lot.”

  The other photographs are in the same vein—a school photo of a little girl with blond pigtails, a long-legged nine-year-old in a fancy black and white dress at a piano, and then a baby again, nearly bald and dressed in a cowgirl costume for Halloween. I feel the clutching inside my chest again, the way I felt when they told me about my mother. I try to relax, to soothe the tension, but in the end I shove the pictures back across the table and press my palms against my eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, her voice thin as porcelain. “I just wanted you to see I was fine.”

  “I’m glad. I’m truly glad.”

  “I figured you probably worried a lot. So you can put that to rest now.” She pats my elbow in a tentative way, and I fold my arms on the table before me. “I wanted to tell you that I appreciate what you did, and I think it was very brave. I can’t imagine how hard it must be to choose to give up your child so she can have a better chance in life. Thank you.”

  Don’t you see? I think, and inside I’m screaming in frustration. What choice did I ever have? What was I supposed to do, hand her over to Clinton and his wife? To the parents who raised Ricky Rowan? She would have been better off left on a stranger’s doorstep. And back in 1985, nobody asked a prisoner in her second trimester of pregnancy whether she’d prefer a trip to the women’s clinic downtown. She just endured, and signed her paperwork at the end of it, and got on with her life in a smaller jumpsuit. That was all.

  A silence nestles between us, awkward and ungainly. After a few moments Annemarie speaks. “I read that you went to art school in Wisconsin.”

  “I did. I’m not sure what I expected to do with that degree. I had visions of being a portrait artist, like the ones you see at Knott’s Berry Farm. Lucrative work, that.”

  She smiles. “So is that why you came back to California? To get work there?”

  “No, I just didn’t like Wisconsin.”

  She laughs, and I smile at her—a natural reaction, but one that feels unfamiliar to me now. “I missed California,” I say. “I really loved the beach. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen it now, but I know it hasn’t gone anywhere.”

  “Did you work as an artist when you came back?”

  “No, I had a student loan to pay, so I decided to be practical. I took an office job instead.” I push my bangs back from my eyes. “I worked for a licentious dentist.”

  She laughs again. “A licentious dentist?”

  “Yes, he was always making off-color jokes and patting his office staff on the rear. The turnover rate in the office was incredible. Patients were always getting double-billed because employees would quit and walk out without properly recording what they had done that day. I spent most of my days on the phone straightening things out. And getting my rear end squeezed.”

  Her eyes have squinted up in an incredulous way. “And you put up with that?”

  “Oh, it was 1982, 1983. And I was used to it. I know it sounds terrible now, but—” I shrug. “At the time it just seemed like something you tolerated for a steady paycheck.”

  She nods, but I can tell it doesn’t make sense to her. “So, you said you’re getting married,” I try. “How are the wedding plans going?”

  She bobs her head with deliberate enthusiasm—compensating for her earlier confusion, I suppose. “Really well. It’s only three months away. My mom is taking care of most of it. I mean…you know, my adoptive—”

  “It’s fine. She’s your mom.”

  Her smile is broad and relieved. “Yeah, she’s figuring out what style of monogram to put on the almond boxes and what flowers go where and all that stuff. She wants to do it, and that’s fine with me. Things have been crazy at work, so I don’t really have the time.”

  “What do you do? As a job, I mean?”

  “I’m a graphic designer for a kids’ stationery company. Like, for stickers and pencil cases and folders and things like that. I didn’t go to art school, though.” Her smile is tight, almost apologetic. “We just sent the fall designs to Production. If I see one more cartoon cupcake I’m going to puke.”

  I try to repress a laugh, but it comes out anyway. I
worry, between her eye-roll and my laugh, the inmates at the mural are going to think they’re being mocked. That wouldn’t end well for me, but I don’t want to break the flow of conversation by pointing that out to Annemarie.

  “Well, I’m trying to gather up some more information for you before your wedding,” I say. “I’ve been in touch with a few people who are helping me pull it together.”

  “That’s nice of you. We’re not planning to wait too long after the wedding to start working on kids, so I really appreciate your help with that.” She fidgets uneasily with the corners of her photographs. “If you want to give me my father’s family’s information, I can save you the trouble of tracking down that part.”

  I hesitate. “I’m not sure I have it.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  I answer that question honestly. “No.”

  She nods. I know what’s coming next. His name, tell me his name, my father’s name. I feel my body stiffen in anticipation of it. This is the question for which I still have not yet worked out an answer. The only thing certain about my response is that I will not tell her the truth.

  But instead she says, “They have Scrabble here.”

  I blink once. “What?”

  “Scrabble. Are you any good at Scrabble?” She gestures to the space behind me, and when I pivot my head to look, I see a stack of board games piled up on a shelf below the copies of the Bible and Koran. “I’m pretty bad, but it beats playing checkers.”

  My reply is very serious. “I, too, hate checkers.”

  “Well then, let’s play.” She slides out from the side of the bench and retrieves the Scrabble box. “There are worse ways to spend an afternoon.”

  And she’s right, there are. I lose badly, but I don’t care. At the end of the hour, when the officer comes to collect me, Annemarie looks disappointed, and she puts her arms around my shoulders in a light, tentative hug. And I feel a little more of myself tear away with that, because it was so easy once I no longer loved anyone on the outside, and now I do.

  * * *

  Back in my cell, after Janny has been taken away for a medical appointment, I lie on my bed with my hands behind my head and daydream about how Annemarie’s childhood with me would have been different from hers with the Leskas. I would have put her in piano lessons, but probably not on the softball team she said she loved. She told me she grew up with a dog but not with cats because her father was allergic, and that made me feel sad. Ricky had loved our cats, especially Brundibar and Mischa, the gentle siblings he brought home from a box outside the grocery store. One of my calmest and most potent memories of him is the way, on stormy days, he sat on a battered easy chair on the back porch with his feet up on the overturned milk crates, watching the rain fall as he stroked our scaredy-cat Brundibar, who always curled up on his lap. Annemarie would have seen that, too, if things had gone differently. It would be one of her earliest memories.

  But that would never have been, I think. There would be no Annemarie if things had gone differently.

  I would have raised her Catholic, that much is sure. The parents who adopted her are Lutheran. With me there would have been a long christening gown, a First Holy Communion, a picture of the Blessed Virgin watching over her as she slept. I would have been like my own mother in that way, and Ricky would have tolerated it. Up until the end he kept his grudging, born-and-bred tolerance for the Catholic Church, probably just for my sake, but I always feared pushing him over the line into the hostile heresy I suspected he would readily embrace. Had I been completely honest with him about my encounters with the church, he would have lost his patience with it much sooner—but he also never would have put that gun in my hands at the rectory that night.

  I picture Father George’s face, the way his small eyes narrowed when I pushed up my mask, the way he scowled as if I were a familiar troublemaker. As if, once he recognized me, these circumstances fit fine with his impression of who I was. On his knees he was shorter than me, and that had made me feel all the more that this could not be borne.

  I shove the image from my mind and cover my eyes with both of my arms, breathing out a slow, heavy sigh. In the hallway there’s a familiar shuffling, and then the bars clang open. “Clara!” comes Janny’s voice. “You here, right? Hey, they say my blood sugar was real good today. I say, ‘Clara don’t let me eat the brown sugar no more. I tell her to put it on my canteen, she ignore me and say, ‘Oh, yeah, I did it.’” She laughs and feels around on my bed until she finds my calf, then pats it. “You awake? Let’s read the new book, okay? We got confession in an hour. Gotta read the sexy stuff real fast.”

  “I think I need some sleep right now.”

  “Okay. I wake you up for confession, then.”

  “Just let me sleep.”

  I roll over and pull my pillow over my head, blocking out the light, the sound of Janny’s voice, everything. Everything except the noise in my mind, and I know I must square my shoulders to bear that, because I don’t know why I ever thought I deserved peace.

  * * *

  For hours I lie still in bed, but not for a moment do I sleep. Around two o’clock in the morning I climb down silently from my bunk, being very cautious not to wake Janny, from whose bed rises the sound of wheezy, rhythmic breathing. It’s the song I sleep to every night. I take the shoebox from my shelf and go to sit by the bars, where the corridor’s security light is brightest. Inside are twelve cassette tapes, their clear plastic cases scratched and scraped. I run my fingers down the stack and slide out the one without a liner. I threw the liner away decades ago, leaving the tape loose in its case.

  KIRA, reads the label in bold sharp pen. At one point there were two stars on either side of the name, but I pulled off the sticker from both edges, giving up when scraping its center began to damage my fingernails. I take my radio down from the desk and click the tape into its ancient cassette player, turning the volume down to its absolute lowest. Too much clicking will catch the attention of the guards, so I fast-forward most of the way through without checking my place, then hit Play in time to catch the fading strains of Bob Marley’s Three Little Birds. At the very end I hold the machine close to my ear, and there it is, that distant, two-word utterance. “Goddamn it.”

  I hit Rewind. Listen again. Goddamn it. Goddamn it.

  The technology is a scourge and a miracle.

  At one point I had half a dozen tapes with Ricky’s voice on them—his long, wandering introductions to songs he thought I should appreciate. All of those I threw away without an iota of regret. I kept this tape, I told myself, for the music. The ten songs, painstakingly curated, which I love independent of the fact that it was a gift for that final Valentine’s Day. Here he is, speaking from beyond, but only to utter a curse.

  You talk to her, I want to order him. Apologize. Claim her. Tell me what to say to her. I can’t do this on my own. I can’t even defend myself, let alone you.

  This is the truth. Annemarie will only be the daughter of two murderers if I say the words that will make that so. On the records of the state, and in the knowledge of the public, her father is a nameless, faceless man who could be anyone. In all the life that stretches out in front of me, I will never be able to give her anything more meaningful than that name. And once I say the true one, I can never take it back.

  I rub my fingers against my temples. It’s an agonizing question, and its answer, no matter what I choose, must be bolstered with true details that won’t undermine her chance at a healthy baby. The name I give her must be credible. Virtually untraceable. One onto which I can tack the authentic family medical history without raising suspicion. But I can’t think of any man I have known who would match that profile.

  Tell me a name, Ricky, I think. Help me figure out your fall guy.

  And then, miraculously, I do.

  * * *

  The letter from Karen Shepard arrives at the end of the week by second-day mail. They pass it through the slot in my cell, and I’m impressed by the siz
e of the envelope and the extra expense, even though it’s already torn open along the pull-tab. In it are several pages of death certificates—my father’s and mother’s, Ricky’s parents’, and something I had forgotten about—one for his sister, who had died the year before the family moved to San Jose. CAUSE OF DEATH, I read, and work to unscramble the tight handwriting on the line beneath: postductal coarctation of the aorta due to Turner Syndrome. When I rifle through my memories of his family, I remember Ricky mentioning she’d had a heart problem. I don’t remember anything about a syndrome.

  I breathe a slow, unhappy sigh. I’m going to need to tell Annemarie about this.

  Among the paperwork is a neatly formatted message from Ms. Shepard, promising more information as she is able to procure it, and reminding me in polite terms about our agreement that I will fork over my knowledge of Ricky in return for her trouble. Stapled to this sheet is a list of interview questions. There are only five, but they are pointed, and each will take a good amount of time. Well, I have that.

  I sit on my metal stool, lay out a sheet of lined paper and my best homemade mechanical pencil, and I begin to write.

  Dear Ms. Shepard,

  Thank you very much for the death certificates. They are quite helpful. I look forward to any additional information you can provide, and hope we can be equitable in offering each other help with our various projects.

  First, I would like to offer a bit of background on myself. I was born in San Jose and lived on Magellan Avenue until I was ten years old. My father, who was older than my mother by twelve years, had the foresight to take out a good life insurance policy at the time of my birth, and so my mother was able to stay in our modest house after his death and preserve some stability in my life. That was a blessing. Her job at the travel agency provided for my basic needs, and she lived frugally so that she could afford to support my interest in the arts. I took classes in ballet as well as watercolor painting and botanical drawing—really, whatever she could find on offer. My interest in the visual arts was bottomless, and she was proud of my early talent. The only thing I ever remember being denied was a kitten, because she said pets were too costly to support. All of that changed when she remarried and we moved to my stepfather’s house in Almaden Valley, when suddenly my fortunes improved economically and plummeted in every other way, but where your questions are concerned that is neither here nor there.