Inside These Walls

by Rebecca Coleman

  I rise from the chair, dance away from him through the slanting shadows. My motions are nervous, mincing. They tell the story of a girl hastening to straighten the disorder, shirking away from the figure now stalking in the short space between the footboard and the far wall. He approaches, coming at me with feinting steps this way and that. Each time I hurry the opposite way, spinning in graceful disoriented circles, bumping the furniture. At last he takes two broad and powerful strides that force me to a rapid backward tiptoe, little bourré steps without the toe shoes, before I land gently, on my seat, on the bed.

  I look up at him.

  I know the dark hair, the pointy tips of his ears. I know the black waistcoat and stiff white collar. Where the face should be there is only emptiness, like staring into a dark pond, but I know who he is. Find yourself in the painting, my art professors used to say. The technique, the craftsmanship and style, all are important; but to fall in love with a work of art you must find in it what speaks to your soul, what you know to be true.

  At the end, when I step out of the rip in the fabric and rest my hand on the steel bar again, taking my end pose in a cold room and a jumpsuit, I know with a fresh certainty that this is not a story for Annemarie. There has never been a single thing I can do for her, not to provide for her, not to protect her or nourish her—but at least I can give her a better story than this one. The truth is that she is good and worthy, and my part is only a matter of painting a picture in which she can see herself. Something grand, I think. Something beautiful.

  Chapter Three

  Ten days pass before I receive an answer from Emory Pugh, but he’s come through for me. The envelope is thick, and I eagerly unfold the four sheets of paper crammed into it. His letter is brief, as always.

  Dear Clara,

  Here are the pictures you asked for. I don’t have a copying macheine but I printed these out off the internet instead. I hope they are what you wanted. My printer does not do color. I think the one in front of your house is very pretty.

  He goes on talking about other things, but I skip the rest and go straight to the photos. So strange that Emory Pugh has the internet in his house. We aren’t allowed any access to it at all, and I still don’t really understand it.

  The first photo is Ricky’s mugshot. His thick brown hair is askew, and he’s grinning. There’s a sleepiness to his eyes, but they looked that way naturally—bedroom eyes singers used to call them, with a certain weight to his brow that always made him look like he had just woken up. This isn’t the kind of photo I wanted, but it’s still a bit of a shock to see his face—so familiar and also so young. I had known Ricky since I was nine years old; he grew older and I did, too, but at the same pace, matched to one another. Not anymore, though. Not anymore.

  The page beneath it must be the one Emory Pugh was referring to. A slim blonde girl is sitting on the steps in front of the Cathouse, her dress pulled down over her knees, feet bare. She’s looking into the middle distance with a thoughtful expression. It’s true, she’s very pretty, but this isn’t me. That’s definitely the Cathouse behind her, but this is Katie Rayburn, the actress who played me in the film, posing for some sort of publicity shot. My friend in North Carolina is confused, but I can’t blame him for it. She does look like me, at least enough for a casting director.

  And then, the one I was hoping for. He’s found it. It’s a shot of me and Ricky sitting in a booth at the Godfather’s Pizza in San Jose, about a year and a half before everything went wrong. Ricky has both arms thrown across the back of the booth, one disappearing behind my shoulders. We’re both smiling for the camera, and I’m caught in a half-turn, snuggling my body against Ricky’s side. He’s wearing one of his newsboy caps and a collared T-shirt, the one with the tiny alligator on the chest, which is tucked into his jeans. Ricky wasn’t a big guy, but in this pose—his body taking up most of the space in the photo’s frame, stretched out in the loose, authoritative way of men—it’s not difficult to remember his appeal. There was no threat to him, no machismo, only a careless sort of confidence and goodwill. He was just a boy in the neighborhood, and always the underdog. The one who detested sports, drew pictures during class and got jerked around by the jocks when they stopped by the Circle K to buy cigarettes after a game. Marlboro Reds box. No, I said Marlboro Lights box. Make that a soft pack. No, Camels. C’mon, faggot, what’s taking you so long?

  I smooth the picture against my desk, trying to rub the folds from the page. The fact that I want this picture and will not toss it into the trash has the feeling of a small defeat. I picture his messy, blanket-strewn bed at his parents’ house, his face nuzzled into my neck, moving in the same insistent, friendly way of a young cat reminding you he’s ready for his dinner. Like that, where I sit back and say Oh, all right, all right, but not with resentment, only fondness.

  * * *

  Father Soriano’s forehead wrinkles as I step into the office we use as a confessional. “And here you are,” he says. “I’ve been concerned about you.”

  “I have some things on my mind.”

  “Well, this is the place to discuss them.”

  I revert to the usual confessional patter, cross myself, list my sins. “I’ve committed acts of sexual impurity,” I tell him. “And perjury.”

  This time he doesn’t ask me how many times I’ve gratified myself. “Perjury?” he asks.

  “I lied under oath during my trial. Repeatedly.”

  He leans back in his chair and runs a hand down his chin. “Ah, Clara,” he says. “I think that’s beyond my scope. You need to talk to your lawyer.”

  “It wouldn’t do me any good. She already said it’s too late for a new trial. I just want to be absolved for it. It is a sin, after all.”

  He regards me with a long, unblinking stare. His eyes look tired and uncertain. “Well, you’ve been taking the Eucharist all this time knowing you hadn’t confessed to this. So why did you recently decide it was an issue?”

  “Because I did it for the right reason, and I was willing to accept the consequences. But the person I was protecting is gone, and now the decision I made affects somebody else, and so I realize my guilt matters.”

  He’s still running his thumb beneath his chin. His manner is ponderous, and I feel the tension gathering as he considers whether to ask me the question he’s thinking. The one they’re all thinking, every confessor I’ve had for the past twenty-four years, the one I know they’re dying to ask and don’t dare.

  At last he blurts it out. “Are you going to tell me it wasn’t you who shot that priest?”

  Though I was braced for the question, I still feel my teeth clench. In a flash I picture that moment. My mask pushed up, rage blowing through me like a fire tearing up the walls to reach the roof, the bang, the blood. There is no satisfaction in the memory, only emptiness. “No. I shot him.”

  He almost looks relieved. “Then what was your lie?”

  “That there were no extenuating circumstances. That I was entirely to blame.”

  “Well, who else do you feel was to blame?”

  I lace my cold fingers together and fold them in my lap. “Clinton.”

  Chapter Four

  My crocheting is getting better. During the Sunday class I’ve been making a little brown coat for Clementine, which is a silly project because I’d certainly never try to put her in it. I’ve given it a rounded collar and a flounce around the hem. It’s very stylish for a prison cat, needful of a matching cap and perhaps a flower to pin at its collar.

  “Can I feel it?” Janny asks when I describe it to her. She holds her hand out as if waiting for me to place it in her palm. At the moment I am combing her wet hair, which I have just helped her wash, starting with the tangles at the bottom.

  “Not until it’s finished. We’re not allowed to bring yarn back to our cells, which is too bad. I was thinking I could make a crochet hook with a golf pencil, you know? If I soaked it in water and rubbed it against the edge of my desk for a while to form a crook
.” I’ve made mechanical pencils with a similar method. They won’t let us have full-sized pencils, because they can be turned into shivs, so I’ve soaked the short golf pencils until they can be peeled apart and stripped of their lead. Then the lead can be coaxed out of a pencil otherwise left intact, and after the empty one has dried, the leads can be pushed through it just like a mechanical pencil. They’re very useful, perfect for sketching.

  “What kind of bad stuff do they think you’re gonna do with yarn?”

  “I don’t know. Hang yourself, I guess. Garrote someone.”

  “Ga-what?”

  “Come up behind them with a piece of yarn and strangle them.”

  Her face lights up with understanding. “Oh. Yeah, I guess you could do that. But they let you bring the little coat back when it’s done? Couldn’t you just chew off the knot and untangle the yarn and then boom, kill somebody?”

  “Nobody ever said the rules make sense.”

  Janny chuckles. “You got that right, chica.”

  That evening I lie on my bed in the dark of my cell, long after lights-out, and think about Annemarie’s visit. My wet hair is piled up above my head on the pillow, and I feel relaxed from the hot water and sense of cleanliness. I’m thinking about all the things I want to tell her about my childhood and my mother—all the really wonderful things we did during the in-between time when she had recovered from her grief over my father but hadn’t yet met my stepfather and remarried. I imagine telling her what I was like in high school, and hearing her exclaim that she was the same way, enjoyed the same things, suffered the same embarrassments. My mind has been slow to acknowledge it, but when I picture her face, I realize she looks like me. Around her jaw she is all Ricky, but the narrow line of her nose, the wide set of her eyes, and her coloring—that is all me.

  I want to tell her about the night Ricky drove us out to the beach at Santa Cruz, when the warmth of the air made the vinyl upholstery of his bench seat stick to the backs of my legs, and I noticed that his wrist above the stick shift bore a heavy silver watch that showed the wrong time. He was left-handed, he explained—I felt bemused that I had never noticed—and he didn’t care about the time, he just liked the watch’s weight and design. At the beach we walked out past the boardwalk, past all the tourists, to where the air was quiet and the sand was damp from the outgoing tide. He rolled up his pants to just below his knees and showed me how well he could do cartwheels. He’d walk on his hands a bit, then tuck and roll when he began to lose his balance, to make it look deliberate. I was laughing, and the cold, wet sand squeezed up between my toes, and every time he turned upside down I looked at his stomach and his navel and the down of dark hair against them, which seemed to say, Don’t forget, under here, I’m a man. There wasn’t any thought of What will he become? There wasn’t even one of Where is this going? That evening it was only the two of us on the beach, clowning and playing, secretly eager to kiss, and a little hungry.

  But I won’t tell her about that. I wish I could recreate these moments as tactile drawings, leaving his face a blank. I would include everything else—the watch, the rolled-up pants, the limber strength of his agile body—so she could run her hands across it and nod and say, Oh. But not the face, on which her fingers would recognize those sleepy eyes and twice-broken nose from so many photographs and cause her to say, Oh, no.

  * * *

  After work on Monday I line up at the bank of telephones to make a call. The wait is long, but at last I can punch in the number I’ve kept in my pocket all day. I hold my breath at the distant buzz of the dial tone.

  “Hello?”

  The first voice that responds is a machine’s. “This is a collect call from California State Women’s Prison at El Centro. Do you accept the charges?”

  “Yes.”

  I exhale at her answer.

  The static of the machine voice fades, and she says, “This is Karen Shepard speaking.”

  “Ms. Shepard, this is Clara Mattingly.”

  “Ms. Mattingly! I’m delighted to hear from you. I was afraid you weren’t going to answer. I would love to come down to interview you, at a time convenient for you, of course.”

  “Weekends are best. I’m not supposed to miss work.” I glance toward the officer watching me. “They have a lot of rules about visits, though. You have to have ID, and dress conservatively—”

  “Yes, I know. I investigated all of that when I decided to interview you. I’ll come by this Saturday. I have all my questions prepared.”

  “That’s fine,” I say, but I don’t like her presumptions. In almost twenty-five years I’ve never once given an interview, and I’m not sure what made this woman believe she would be the exception. I wouldn’t even grant one to Katie Rayburn, who seemed very sweet and told me she wanted to get to know my speech patterns and mannerisms so she could portray me sympathetically. Do it, Mona had advised me, and even then I wouldn’t. There was too much risk in believing I had some type of control when, in the end, I would have none.

  “I’d like to do this as a trade,” I say.

  “A trade?”

  “Yes. I need information about my family and Ricky Rowan’s. Medical history in particular, but also genealogy, if you can find it. What countries our ancestors came from. I never found out about my father, and I’m sure I don’t know Ricky’s.” It’s occurred to me that Annemarie will inevitably ask this, and I don’t want to have to lie. I have enough lies to keep track of without adding unimportant ones to the mix.

  There’s a long pause across the phone line. “I don’t generally exchange anything for interviews. I never want the accusation that I somehow paid for information.”

  “Ms. Shepard, unless I’m misunderstanding, your job is research. I’m only asking you to share information I’m sure you’ve already gathered in the course of your work on the biography.”

  She offers a small, one-note laugh. “I see. Well, I suppose I can pull that together.”

  “You’ll have to mail it to me. I can’t accept paperwork in the visiting room.” I’m running out of time, so I speak quickly. “Why don’t you include some of your interview questions in the same envelope, and I’ll mail you my replies. I can be more candid that way than I could speaking aloud with other inmates around. I’m sure you understand.”

  “Well, yes. All right. And if I have further questions, we can arrange a meeting.”

  I agree to this arrangement and set the phone back in its cradle. I wonder if I should have asked Mona about this, but it doesn’t matter now. A life sentence is a life sentence, and all I can do is work within it.

  * * *

  My normal library day is every other Wednesday, which under ordinary circumstances is perfectly sufficient, but with my growing interest in all stories about Penelope Robbins I have had a hard time waiting. I am glad to see that the latest issue of People is still available, with the Robbins case as one of the three stories showcased on the cover. I lift it from the rack and leaf through its pages.

  Looking over the photo spread in the center of the magazine—Penelope playing tennis at summer camp, posing in formalwear at her Prom, beaming beside her father at the Capitol building in Washington—it’s easy to remember girls like her. After my mother married Garrison Brand and we moved into his home, I attended school with girls just like her—wealthy and privileged, confident and athletic. Our Lady of Mercy catered to two groups. There were the middle-class children of members of the parish, who paid tuition at a discounted rate, and the children of the wealthy, whose parents lavished the school with donations and made sure their own offspring knew it. With my mother’s remarriage I moved from one tier to the other, but Garrison was not that kind of boor, and I was not that kind of princess. It made for a lonely four years.

  Still, Penelope and I have one thing in common—that nothing in our backgrounds would have led anyone to guess we’d wind up in big, big trouble with the law. Most of the people around me—not all, but most—landed here after years of substanc
e abuse, domestic violence, or desperation to pay the bills. Many scrabbled for a solid grip on adulthood after a childhood wrenched by neglect and failed to find a handhold. But there’s always something, I’ve found. People don’t stumble into felony charges like tripping off a curb while hailing a cab. Whether or not others can see it, whether or not the inmate will admit to it, there’s always a reason why that woman turned.

  The working theory about Penelope, I read, is that she hired the hit man to kill her father after a series of family arguments about her boyfriend—the dark-skinned young football player whose face I saw on the news. Her father, conservative and not known for his progressive views on race, forbade them from seeing each other. Being nineteen, she continued to see him anyway, and her father’s censure enraged her. Bank records show that she withdrew $20,000 from her trust fund account in the two weeks leading up to the shooting. Now her father lies on a respirator in a hospital in Sacramento, lingering in a vegetative state that may or may not be permanent, attended to by a fiancée not much older than his daughter. Penelope has hired a team of excellent lawyers, but even they couldn’t get her released on the obstruction of justice charge.

  I gaze down at the largest picture of her—a coy-looking portrait featuring powdered skin and red lipstick, appearing to have been taken with the camera at arm’s length and turned around. Photo: Facebook, the credit reads. My theory—and I’m eager to follow the case and discover whether it’s true—is a sordid one indeed, but I’d put money on it if I had any. Father’s documented attraction to much younger women: check. Irrational dislike for her boyfriend: check. Habit of making a public show of his morals: check. It’s always the ones like him, after all, who eventually get caught with some young male intern or sending photographs of themselves dressed in women’s underwear over the internet. It’s always the ones neediest for respect and accolades who harbor the darkest secrets. In short, I believe Penelope is an incest victim, and if I’m right it’s no wonder she hired a hit man to put him out of his misery. I could hardly blame her.