Inside These Walls

by Rebecca Coleman

  “She can’t eat tomato products, and it’s spaghetti night. That’s the problem. They have to ask for plain spaghetti for her, no sauce, or she’ll get heartburn. And she forgets, so if they give it to her with sauce, she’ll eat it by accident.”

  “Calm down. You think you’re the only one who can handle Ms. Hernandez?” She offers me a wry smile as she locks the bars. “Put your feet up for a few. Write a letter to Mr. Pugh. Now you’ve got an interesting story to tell, right?”

  She makes her slow way down the cellblock, and I sit on Janny’s bed and sigh, touching my nose cautiously to see if it’s still bleeding. I’d never tell Emory Pugh about anything like this. He’s a simple man, but I don’t trust that he wouldn’t sell juicier information to the kind of people who might publish it. Any time I begin to think the public’s interest has died down, a letter like Karen Shepard’s pops up to remind me none of this will ever go away. I’m beyond caring what anyone out there thinks of me, but it’s a matter of self-ownership. There’s hardly anything in this world that’s mine, and so I hold close my truths, my secrets.

  When I was seven years old, my mother bought me the record album of Captain Kangaroo’s narration of The Nutcracker. It enchanted me to hear my own name coming from the hi-fi speakers because I had never known another Clara, and that Christmas season I lay on the braided rug for hours, listening to the story again and again. Look! Look! Through the keyhole! it began. Do you see what I see? The locked room Clara saw through the keyhole contained the wondrous Christmas tree, the toys and sugarplums, but also the evil Mouse Army and their ruthless king, the gingerbread men soon to be wounded in battle. Sometimes I feel like that room, closed off from all those piling up at the doorway and scrabbling for a glimpse. I am everything inside it. And though it is mostly tree and gift, light and candy, there is no story without the evil element. Without the heartless animal, it’s just a pretty dance.

  * * *

  When Father Soriano appears at my cell, his cassock broken by the gray bars like a Magritte painting, I am surprised. This is the hour of the day when many of the inmates attend Narcotics Anonymous meetings or anger management classes, including Janny, but I just stay in. I’m replying to the latest letter from Emory Pugh, who wrote that he went fishing and that the lake reminded him of my eyes. My eyes are brown, but the reality of who I am doesn’t really matter in this correspondence, so I only thank him. The second letter from Karen Shepard has already found a home in my trash can.

  The C.O. unlocks my cell, and I offer the priest my chair. The bed feels like a strange place to sit to receive a visiting clergyman, almost suggestive, but the only alternative is the toilet, so I try to perch on the mattress in a proper way. I can see my mother in my mind’s eye, pulling up the string.

  “Nice to see you at Mass this morning,” he says. He brushes a hand toward my magazine. “I see you get the Magnificat.”

  “Yes. I follow along with it every day.” I smile a little. “In another life I might have been a nun. I like the Litany of the Hours.”

  “You’ve got the dedication, that’s for sure.”

  “Just not the resumé.”

  He offers a confused smile, as if not sure whether he should laugh at that. To smooth it over I add, “I feel like one a lot of the time when I’m doing the Braille. Like a scribe from the Middle Ages. I could have sat in my little hut in total silence all day, translating from Aramaic or Greek. It sounds like a good life.”

  His nod is polite. There’s a pause, and then he says, “I noticed you haven’t taken the Eucharist for several weeks.”

  “I haven’t finished repenting.”

  “If I remember correctly, we discussed saying a daily rosary for one of your victims.”

  “My youngest victim.” I look at the mirror past his head, see my face reflected pale beside his dark shoulder. “I’m not sure who that is.”

  “I believe it was the nineteen-year-old daughter. Was it not?”

  I close my eyes, feel a line form between them. “So you meant Eun Hee specifically?”

  He opens the folder in his lap, flips through some of the lined yellow pages held in by a strip of metal. “It says in your file—”

  “I know what it says in my file. It’s hard to explain.”

  His face has clouded with a kind of suspicion. “Is there a reason you can’t pray for the one you believe to be the youngest?” he asks. “Or for more than one?” It’s not like you don’t have a variety of choices, I imagine he’s thinking. I wouldn’t blame him.

  “Penance for Catholics is very specific,” I point out, gently chopping the air with my hands to draw the neat, invisible box this faith creates around my soul. “This many prayers, not one more, not one less. You must repent for every sin, or the penance doesn’t cover it. It isn’t a vague, generalized sort of forgiveness. So it bothers me if you don’t give me a specific name.”

  The droop at the corners of his eyes tells me I have worn his patience to a frayed edge. “Eun Hee, then,” he says. “Pray for her.”

  My sigh embodies both relief and, oddly, disappointment. “All right.”

  He nods, but there’s an uncertainty to it. He takes a breath, releases it. “The goal here is to make personal progress, Clara. Spiritual progress. I want to help, but I feel like there’s something you’re holding back,” he says.

  “Not at all,” I say. Now I will need to confess to a lie.

  * * *

  I pray for Eun Hee, and the following Sunday I stand in the Communion line once again and taste the dry wheat starch on my tongue. That afternoon I sit outside in the sunlight for a long time with Clementine on my lap, looking out over the steel frames of the high-voltage towers marching across the valley, the looping sweep of their cables. Between the irrigated fields the land is in its desert state. The green is so fragile. It looks as if it could be wiped away with the swipe of a finger, like moss on a stone.

  I think about asking Emory Pugh to send me a package of catnip. I’ve made cat toys for Clementine before—knitted mice, a feather tied to a piece of yarn—but I used to love watching the ecstasy of a young cat rolling in the grass under the spell of the stuff. I never ask him for anything, but for Clementine, perhaps I’ll make an exception.

  * * *

  On Monday morning, back at work in the Braille workshop, I’ve got a print of Picasso’s Guernica on the light box when the public address system crackles and I hear my number barked out on the list for visitors. At first I think, This is strange; I haven’t had a visitor in years. Usually visits are restricted to Saturdays, and those during the week are only for rare situations where the visitor has traveled a great distance or can’t often come. And then, in a flash of insight, I know who it is. It’s Karen Shepard, making good on her last letter’s breathless insistence to “meet in person” to “discuss those questions on which no one else could shed light” but me.

  “I’m sorry,” I say to Shirley, who is frowning up at the intercom, her curled white hair resting cloudlike against her shoulders. “I didn’t request any visitors.”

  “It’s all right, Clara. It must be somebody special. You go. Enjoy your visit.”

  I set down my pencil and try to conceal my irritation, lest the guards interpret it as hostility. My wrists shackled, I am led down the long hallway and then the stairs, to the yellow cinderblock room filled with booths. The second from the end is empty. I sit in the chair and face the visitor through the thick, smudged Plexiglas. The woman on the other side—blonde, young—looks at a guard uncertainly, then lifts the phone receiver and presses it to her ear. I do the same.

  “Clara Mattingly?” she asks.

  “Yes. I don’t do interviews.”

  “Well, this isn’t really a typical interview. I promise I’m not going to disclose anything you tell me.”

  I scowl. “Putting it in a book is disclosing it, don’t you think?”

  She regards me with an uneasy gaze. She has poor eyes for a journalist—too large and rabbi
ty looking, lacking in reserve. “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Listen, I’m not about to feed you information you can use to cobble together some biography of Ricky, whether or not you quote me on it. It’s a worthless project. And no, you can’t quote me on that, either.”

  She nestles the phone more tightly against her jaw. “I don’t think you understand,” she says. “You see, you’re my mother.”

  I stare.

  With her free hand, she grasps, drops, then grasps again at a sheaf of papers on the slim counter before her. “I have…I have all these papers. I just want to know some things. I just want—it’s nothing for a book. I had a miscarriage last year, and…well, it was the wrong time anyway, but before I get married…”

  She’s got the phone crammed against her shoulder, both hands now working through her file folders. Her fingers shake. Her mouth is moving so fast, but already I don’t like what I see. I don’t like this, I want to leave, and then she slaps a single rectangle of paper up against the window. It’s pink and patterned and it bears a seal.

  “This is my birth certificate,” she says. “The names are wrong, I know. Those are my adoptive parents. But if you recognize this—maybe this date or this place. It says, California State Women’s Prison at El Centro. And so I looked and looked—”

  “I know nothing about this,” I say.

  All five of her fingers fly out in an urgent stop motion, and the paper slips down to the table. I can see her face again, and her eyes have welled with tears. “No. I know. I’ve searched and searched. I’ve put up one query after another on these adoptee search sites. And this woman, she was a nurse here in the 1980s, she replied. She said, absolutely for sure, that it was you. I didn’t believe her at first, maybe for obvious—”

  “Good. You shouldn’t have.”

  “No, no. I don’t judge you, I don’t judge you. Please know that. I only want some medical information. Because after my miscarriage—it was pretty late for one—the doctor said, do you know of any genetic issues in your family, and I said I just don’t know. So that’s all I want. I’m not here to…to bother you.”

  Ricky’s mouth. Ricky’s jaw. The particular set of her front teeth, the narrow slope of her chin.

  She shoves the heel of her hand against her eye, smudges a streak of moisture toward her ear, tinted with tiny black flakes of mascara. There is a diamond on her ring finger, and the gold band is loose against her skin, sliding around with the motion of her hand. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “I know this is so inconsiderate of me. I just thought if I sent you a letter, you might not believe me. So I came and I brought everything.”

  I look to the guards, who stand on each side of the booths, hands folded at the front of their gray-and-black uniforms. Neither looks as if they are about to end this visit, as they sometimes do when emotions reach a fever pitch. I look at the girl again and feel myself swallow hard, by reflex, as if forcing down a stone.

  “That date looks a bit familiar,” I say. “What did you say your name was?”

  “Annemarie. It’s Annemarie Leska.”

  It’s like a roaring noise tearing upward through time, from the end that was always an end to a beginning that was never a beginning. What was torn from me has always been gone, the relief of a particular torment and nothing more. But a name, a name—she has a name. She can never again be a nothing, never again an end. What was sundered and undone shall be made whole. But that is not true, because I know I will be torn by this, not only once anymore, but again and again without amnesty.

  Chapter Two

  Annemarie leaves with the information she wanted. A summary of everything I can remember about my family’s medical history and the few details I can recall from my pregnancy with her. I’ve told her about my father’s early heart attack, my mother’s cancer, but it’s been so long since I dredged up any of that and my mind feels foggy about anything beyond those stark facts. And as for my pregnancy, there’s very little there, in the cubby of my memory where that time should be. I suppose it was the stress of the arrest, the incarceration, and all of the court business that caused me not to even realize for the first four months or so. And not long after the end of all that, there came the trial, so that was looming over me even then.

  After the hour’s visit I am led back to the Braille workshop. The print of Guernica is still on the light box, topped with my onionskin overlay. I sit on the stool and begin sketching again, continuing my outline of the woman on the far right whose arms are thrown toward the sky. As I draw I add in my little symbols about depth and texture, a code nobody else can read.

  What about my father’s side? Do you know anything about them?

  I’ll have to try to remember all that. I’ll work on it.

  Her eyes squinted up, as if anticipating a blow. Was it Ricky Rowan?

  No, no, no. Your father was a wonderful person, generous and very kind.

  I trace the small window high above the woman in the painting, the sharp angles of the flames leaping above and below her. I begin on the head of the spirit-woman drifting in through the window, her arm and hand holding the lamp, and I stop. I stop.

  “I’m not feeling well,” I say. I turn to the C.O. by the door and repeat myself. “I’m not feeling well.”

  “You need to go to the clinic?”

  No. “I think I just need to rest.”

  “You’re either sick or you’re not sick.”

  I turn back to the light box. I deepen some of my lines, then return to the arm, the lamp, the spirit woman with her mouth agape. I shape the doorways, boxes inside of boxes, each a fresh sharp angle.

  She said, absolutely for sure, that it was you. I didn’t believe her at first.

  But she believed her in the end, and so she came.

  Clara Mattingly?

  I push it all away. I can do this. I’ve been doing it for a long time, and can keep it up a little longer. I hunch my shoulders above the light box and focus on nothing but the lines of the great wounded war horse at the center, its dark nostrils and dagger tongue stretching forward in an endless scream.

  * * *

  In the hour in my cell between yard time and dinner, while Janny is at Narcotics Anonymous and I would normally be dancing, I sit on my floor and tear through the boxes of documents and papers stored beneath the bed. I’m seeking any slip, any shred of connection to the young woman who met my eyes and uttered that phrase. You’re my mother. And there is nothing—not a photograph, not a medical record, certainly not a diary entry. I hoist the thick dot-matrix printout of trial transcripts from the bottom of the cardboard box and sit back against the cold cinderblock wall. The pages are held together by a rusting butterfly clip, and I flip through them, recognizing the testimony of Forrest Hayes—Ricky’s supposed friend, who was with us that memorable weekend.

  Q: And after Mr. Rowan opened the cash register, where was Ms. Mattingly?

  A: Still in the side room, like, near the doorway, to watch over the family. They were still all sitting on the floor in front of the big sink. She had her back to me, but she kept turning her head back and forth to look at Ricky. We were all real nervous by then, except Ricky and maybe Chris.

  Q: And Ms. Mattingly was armed.

  A: Yeah, she had the gun. After Ricky got the register key he told her to hold it.

  Q: Did she resist that, or seem uneasy about it?

  A: They sort of squabbled over it for a second, but then she took it.

  Q: And after he took all the money out of the register, then what happened?

  A: Then Ricky called out to her, “Take ’em out, Kira.”

  Q: Kira or Clara?

  A: I heard Kira. But he called her that a lot, because of The Dark Crystal, and how the Kira in the movie—the girl Gelfling—had the power to call the animals and all that. And Clara could catch all those stray cats. When he left her notes at the house he’d sign them ’Jen,’ after the boy Gelfling. But I guess he could have said either one.

  Q:
And what happened after he called out?

  A: Clara fired the gun once, and one of the women hostages, I don’t know which one, she screamed. Then Ricky said ’I love you’ to her—to Clara—and Chris came rushing over from down the aisle behind her and yanked the gun out of her hand. Next thing I knew, he was firing into the room where the family was—bam, bam, bam, bam. Just fired like crazy.

  Q: But they were sitting on the floor, correct? So did you see them get shot?

  A: No, but I sure saw them after.

  I let the sheaf of papers flop closed and press both hands against my eyes. The pressure in my throat, behind my nose, is immense. Even after all these years I can easily picture Forrest with his double armful of Fig Newtons packages and Pepsi bottles, his green-eyed gaze darting between Ricky and the door, Ricky and the door. The fuzz on his jaw was as soft as cat fur. He’d thought this was a normal little robbery. He had no idea what he was getting into with Ricky. The rest of us didn’t have that excuse.

  I set that packet of papers back in the box, but I catch a glimpse of the first page of the next packet—the defense testimony—and pick it up. My stepbrother’s is first.

  Q: So the night before the convenience store robbery, she was home? Was that unusual?

  A: No, she never stayed out overnight. Her mom—my stepmother—would have been really upset if she had. She was a strict Catholic.

  Q: And the younger Ms. Mattingly, the defendant, did she share her mother’s faith?

  A: Definitely. She was always really devout. Never missed Mass. She met Ricky in confirmation class, which I guess is kind of ironic. But he was always a troublemaker, and she wasn’t like that. She was a good girl.

  The buzzer sounds for dinner. I pile all my paperwork into the boxes and blot my eyes with toilet paper. They’re still tender underneath along the fading bruises from the fight in the chow hall. Maybe that will disguise the redness of fighting back these tears, which would be helpful. Never look weak. It’s the most important thing.

  * * *

  My lawyer, Mona Singer, has aged so noticeably since I last saw her that it’s difficult to control the surprise on my face as I shake her hand. “Clara,” she says. “I was surprised to hear from you.” Her voice comes out older, too. All the smoking is catching up with her.