Inside These Walls

by Rebecca Coleman

  We sit down in the small private office reserved for attorney visits. The acoustic tile of the ceiling is pocked and dusty, and the room has a cool, metallic smell—drafty windows and steel desks. “I had a surprise visitor yesterday,” I tell her. “The…the baby.”

  “What baby?”

  “I guess she’s twenty-three now.”

  Her eyebrows rise in fake recognition, but then it turns genuine. “Ahh. The one you surrendered to Social Services just before the trial. My, that was a long time ago, wasn’t it? It sure gets away from me.”

  I fidget with the ballpoint pen set on the table between us. “She wants a medical history, you know, for her own records. Of both me and her father. What I have is so limited, and I really have no way of getting her father’s information.”

  “Well, you could send his family a letter and ask. You could explain.”

  “Except that his parents have died, and none of them knew about her in the first place. I refused to declare a father for her when she was born.”

  Mona nods. Her eyes and mouth have shifted to a helpless, well-you-have-a-point expression that I don’t like.

  “I just can’t think of a way to even get my own family’s medical history for her. My father died when I was six, and with my mother gone, too, there’s nobody else to ask. Nobody in my extended family would want to hear from me. None of them has spoken to me since my conviction.”

  “Aren’t you still in touch with your stepbrother?”

  I feel my flat expression return. “I’ve never been in touch with my stepbrother.”

  “But I thought you two were close. Didn’t he speak in your defense at the trial?”

  “Yes, but we’re not close.”

  She presses her lips together tightly. “Hmm.”

  “I also wanted to know whether…whether it’s too late for a new trial.”

  Now she blurts a laugh. “A new trial? I don’t think so, Clara. Why would you think that’s called for?”

  “If there were extenuating circumstances that hadn’t come up during the discovery process.”

  “Such as?”

  “I’m just asking.”

  She shakes her head slowly. “I did everything I could to get you acquitted, and you’ve used up all your appeals. You were such a young woman at the time, so obviously scared and naive, but none of that made a difference to the jury in light of the evidence. Forrest Hayes testified against you, and what he saw was compelling. I can’t imagine what could come to light this many years later that would undermine his eyewitness testimony.”

  I look away and feel my expression go sour. “Some eyewitness. He lied and lied. He was only out to save his own neck.”

  “You know I don’t dispute that one bit, but the jury felt differently. As for your medical records, I think the best approach would be to provide your daughter with your stepfamily’s information and her father’s family’s information and leave it to her to ask them for it directly. Ricky was her father, correct?”

  I hesitate, resting my curled fingers lightly against my mouth. “I don’t want to discuss that with her.”

  She cocks an eyebrow. “She’s already found you. You think she won’t figure it out?”

  “I’d rather leave it an open question. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be adopted and go looking for your biological mother and find out it’s me. I can’t let her think both of her parents were evil. That would be devastating.” I rub the bridge of my nose between my thumb and forefinger. “My mother was so wonderful. It makes this so horribly embarrassing.”

  “You’re not evil, Clara,” Mona says in her measured, even voice, which is meant to be a gentle reminder that she’s my attorney, not my therapist. “You made some poor choices. And hiding the truth, even for noble reasons, always ends badly. My advice to you is, if she asks, tell her the truth.”

  I nod, but only to be polite. She gathers the straps of her bag and rises from her seat. “I’m sorry I can’t be of more help, but this is really beyond my reach. I wish you luck with it.”

  Luck. I don’t offer my hand for her to shake, and instead simply place my hands behind my back, awaiting the shackles.

  * * *

  Clementine struts across a picnic table, the top of her tail twitching. Some of the other inmates, a gang of cornrowed and heavyset women, call out to her. “Hey, Frankfurter. Tsk, tsk, tsk. Over here, Frankfurter.” But she leaps down and comes over to me instead, which could be dangerous later. Prisoners have fought over smaller things than the favoritism of a cat.

  “Check this out,” says one of the women. She’s a big girl with pale, ruddy skin and dishwater-blond cornrows, in here for assault with a deadly weapon. Facing the crowd at the table, she stands on tiptoe and raises her arms above her head, fingers touching, like a jewelry-box ballerina. Then she begins a lumbering, inelegant dance, leaping and twirling. The women on the benches are dying of laughter. Their hoots carry across the yard, piercing the air like bottle rockets.

  I ignore them. It’s times like this when I’m glad Janny is exempt from yard time. The heat and harsh rays of the sun are too much for her, so during this hour she goes instead to the little gym in Med Seg for a slow ride on the recumbent exercise bike. If she were out here I would feel anxious about the hostility from the white women, wonder how I can stop her from getting hurt if I’m attacked, since I know she would follow me like a shadow; but alone I can’t worry about it. Their goal is to set me on edge, and they won’t succeed.

  I have nothing for Clementine today, but she stalks around me anyway and accepts a scratch behind her ears. I sit in a shady spot with my back against the building, gazing out over a part of the yard that offers no view of the valley, only scrub and fencing. I’m trying to remember the birth. The pain—wave upon wave of it, and I, like a shipwreck survivor, clinging to a shattered board and treading weakly in the cold tide—that’s all I can remember. I run my tongue across my chipped canines, the broken ends long since rounded smooth. For months before I went into labor my stomach had borne marks like the raking of a giant claw, but not until it began did I realize those scars had only been a warning of what was to come. In my lifetime I had been held down, I had been raped by force, I had felt a man’s tensed arm like a crook around my throat, twinned with a menacing whisper. But I had never known what pain meant, not until that day. My concept of it had been laughable, like a child’s fancy.

  All those months I had assumed I was carrying a boy. Ricky’s son, a miniature he had planted there by the sheer hurricane force of his will—it seemed so obvious. After the night of the crimes we had retreated to the Cathouse, as the neighbors called it, and I had left my birth control pills in the back of my dresser drawer at home. So terrified was I that my mother would go through my things and discover them that I called my stepbrother from the kitchen phone—Clinton, of all people—and asked him to bury them in the garbage. I was far less afraid of pregnancy, an idea which seemed vague and remote then, than of my mother learning I wasn’t a virgin.

  I never thought for a moment that it would be a girl. A girl was a creature who belonged to her mother, and the infant I carried clearly did not belong to me. When it kicked, when it tumbled, these seemed only to be shadows of Ricky’s hold over me, and it was reasonable that he had found a way to remind me constantly of my bond to him, even in our separation. I couldn’t see him or speak to him, but he was too large a presence to really be gone. He had simply tunneled inward, and when it was all over and I was at last alone, it felt like the greatest of mercies. It was a red-faced shame to me that I had ever loved him, and as long as I had been exposed as a fool, I could at least nurse my wounds in solitude.

  Clementine grows tired of me and pads out into the sun. I pull up my knees and rest my elbow against one, drawing my fingers through my bangs in an idle, comforting way. There was a time, in the midst of my years with Ricky, that I never could possibly have imagined it would end this way. Then, he was the good one, the protector, the one
who had brought a particular Clara back from the dead. By the end of my trial he was only a figure in a funhouse mirror, and has been nothing else ever since.

  The shape of her mouth, the set of her front teeth. The way her shoulders sloped, then straightened as she slapped the certificate against the glass.

  Was this the legacy of us, then? From that desert of waste and loss, something beautiful and good? How was that possible?

  * * *

  After Mass on Sunday I attend a crochet class in the art therapy room. In the center of the table is a pyramid of skeins of donated yarn, some in colors I recognize as having been fashionable when I was a child. I’m assigned a crochet hook marked with a number, which the teacher records in a notebook before I can begin.

  I’ve crocheted before—my mother taught me when I was in junior high—and it comes back to me more quickly than I’d expected. The teacher hands me an instruction booklet of patterns for dish towels, and I begin working on a more advanced one as my fellow students struggle to make a beginning chain. They’re loud and boisterous, but they leave me alone. I’ve taken a seat near the television bolted into the corner so I can keep an eye on the news as I work. I’m hoping for more information about Penelope Robbins, but I missed the first twenty minutes of the hour, and now the broadcast is focused on trivial celebrity news, sports, and reviews of movies I will never see. Still, I picture little Penelope languishing in her cell in the county jail, stoically terrified and possessing not a single coping skill for her new environment, the way I used to be. I’m sure she’s reading a lot of novels. Earnestly eating the canned vegetables they serve her, doing jumping jacks beside her bunk so she can keep her figure. Light and pretty and very nervous; a Bambi of the cellblock. It’s only a matter of time before she lets her guard down in the shower—disarmed by the delicious, steaming heat of the water—and finds herself railroaded face-first into the tile wall, someone’s thick fingers shoved in where they shouldn’t be, a giant hand on the side of her neck, a hissing whisper that she likes it. If she had reason to order a hit on her own father, perhaps she’s used to that kind of thing, but that won’t take away from the shock the first time it happens.

  I work for a long time, in part because it keeps me away from my cell and the possibility of a visit from the priest. I didn’t take Communion this morning, and I don’t want to talk about it. At the end of an hour I have a nice yellow rectangle without a single flaw, as I’ve fixed each mistake along the way. It’s good work, and good work is satisfying.

  Once back in my cell, I write a reply to Emory Pugh’s latest letter. And for the first time since my mother died, I ask someone for a favor. It feels strange and fills me with chagrin, but I don’t have much choice in the matter. Prison becomes a simple life if you don’t need anything outside it. But once you do, it’s hell. It’s what they intended.

  * * *

  “You hear that?” Janny asks. Her voice is low. We’re sitting on opposite sides of her bed, playing a game of Jenga her daughter sent her for Christmas five years ago. She’s remarkably good at it; to choose her next move, her sensitive fingers patter down the sides of the column without ever making it fall. She jerks her chin toward our cell’s farthest wall, and I listen, but hear nothing.

  “What is it?”

  “You can’t hear that? You’re getting deaf, old lady.”

  I get up, cautiously so as not to upset the Jenga tower, and stand near the bars with an ear cocked to the left. Now I can hear it—the hum of our neighbor’s voice beneath the current of noise from her television, a one-sided conversation. She’s talking on a contraband cellphone. This particular neighbor is in for ten to fifteen for armed robbery, and while I can’t quite tell, it sounds like she’s arranging a surprise for the person who snitched on her.

  “While you’re up, can you get me my Rolaids?” Janny asks.

  I fetch the package and return to my spot on the bed. It goes without saying that neither of us will report on either the cellphone or our neighbor’s retaliation plans. During my first few months here I went to the guards for everything like that. I had no idea—or rather, the wrong idea—and I tried to understand prison by applying to it the rules of high school, where currying the favor of teachers was the best way to receive privileges and recommendations. I graduated third in my class, so I was eager to apply the skills that had served me so well a few years earlier. What I didn’t understand yet was that the guards were not looking for the fulfilling experience of helping young people reach their potential, and I couldn’t distinguish myself from my delinquent peers by demonstrating the great moral distance between myself and them. I was a murderer, and everyone knew it, and what the guards wanted was for me to stop turning myself into a cat toy to be batted around in the corridors. It made their workdays more tedious.

  “Wish I had a phone like that,” Janny says. She lays a Jenga block on top of the tower with gentle precision. “I could call my daughter whenever I want. No more standing around waiting, then everybody yell at you if you talk too long.”

  “How old was she when you got here?” I ask. Her brow furrows at the question, and I know it’s a strange one. We each know what the other did, but etiquette dictates that information like this should be volunteered. It’s like talking about money in the outside world—prying is in poor taste.

  “Six,” she says. “She’s nineteen now.”

  I redo the calculation quickly in my mind. “She would have to be twenty-one.”

  “No, she’s nineteen.”

  “Janny, you’ve been here for fifteen years. If she was six when you came in, she’s twenty-one now.”

  “I know how old my daughter is,” she scoffs. “You gonna take your turn, or not?”

  I slide out a block from the center. It moves easily; time has rounded its edges, left the wood with a certain velvety slickness. My mind is filled with a jumble of questions I want to ask Janny—questions which, in eight years together, I have never thought or cared to ask. Does she have memories of you from before? How did you build a bond with her, when you’ve been here almost all her life? Does she resent you for what you did? Forgive you? Do you have hope that it will be normal after you’re released?

  Yet I can’t ask any of these. When Amber Jones asked her question in an ecstatic whisper—didn’t you have his baby? —it was nothing Janny hadn’t heard about me before. But from the beginning, I denied it was true. I’ve always brushed off the rumor as silly gossip. And I don’t know what to tell her now.

  Or what to tell Annemarie. At the end of our visit, as she gathered her purse to leave, she said she would try to come back in a month or so. She lives in Riverside, which is only two hours away, but a four-hour round trip still requires planning. You have three more weeks to pull it together, I think. To figure out how to come across as an ordinary mother and have in place the right answers to all her questions.

  Q: So what was your stepmother’s reaction when Ms. Mattingly didn’t come home that night?

  A: Panicked. She called the police around two in the morning, after she and my dad went by Ricky’s house and nobody was there. But the officer brushed her off and said this is an adult woman who doesn’t have to abide by a curfew.

  Q: Were you present when she called the police?

  A: No, I was at my apartment with my wife and son. Diane called me about 3 a.m. and told me Clara was missing, and about her whole conversation with the police. She wanted me to drive around and see if I could spot them. So I got in my car and went looking in any place that seemed like a possibility. I even drove past the rectory, because it’s on the way to the pool hall, and saw all the emergency lights spinning through the trees, but I didn’t make any connection. If I thought anything it was that maybe some priest had a heart attack.

  Q: And you received no contact from Ms. Mattingly in that time? No phone calls? No messages?

  A: Nope. Nope. It definitely had me nervous. I always thought Ricky was a bad character and worried about her safety when she
was with him. He had a short temper and a violent streak. I imagined all kinds of things could go wrong when she was with him, but I never imagined this.

  I shouldn’t have unearthed those transcripts. They keep creeping back into my mind now, gnawing at me. I’ve guessed that when Annemarie went looking for her biological mother, she expected someone with a past—her birth certificate warned her she had been born in prison, after all—but surely not someone who hadn’t budged since then. And one whose name she already knew, no less. If she felt a morbid curiosity at first, it wouldn’t last long. I’m not the Hollywood actress she’s almost certainly seen performing a variation on my distant sins. I’m a liability, an embarrassment, and that is all.

  What if she tracks down Clinton, I think all of a sudden as I watch Janny prod at the Jenga tower with an inquisitive finger. What if she realizes I have no worthwhile information to offer her, and seeks out my stepbrother instead? It was Clinton who kept the house after my stepfather moved into a nursing home. After a lifetime of halfhearted employment and false starts, he finally achieved stability by being the last one standing. The thought of Annemarie knocking on his door, witnessing the façade of affluence, is sickening.

  She needs to get her answers from you, I think, and I drop my head into my hands, my hair blocking my view of the wobbly column of blocks. I don’t even know where to begin.

  * * *

  When Afternoon Classics comes on I stand at my makeshift barre and begin my barre work. The plies and eleves, the battement tendus and rond de jambes, all the steps I coaxed out of my memory and supplemented with a worn old book from the prison library. In a real class the music is based on what exercises the teacher plans for her students, but in my situation I must base my exercises on whatever happens to be on the radio. Yet I have learned to flow with it, and after a while the music tears open the fabric of this reality, the visual fact of it, and I walk through the wispy and ragged entrance it creates. Inside it, I’m in a rose-hued leotard and tights and a stiff round skirt. I recline in a chair like a sleeping swan. The room is familiar—the narrow bed with its loom-woven white coverlet, the wallpaper flocked with pink flowers, the map above the dresser, the open sewing box on a table at the center. And the man, faceless, standing in tense repose at the door.