“I see her. Don’t gawk at her.”
“She’s just adorable. And I’m not gawking.”
“Yes, you are. And how would you like it if you saw somebody in chains and handcuffs staring at your child?”
I hadn’t thought about that. I look away.
“Looks like you got shanked,” the doctor says. He’s young, and I suppose he’s trying out his prison slang. The nurse is cleaning out the wound, which hurts more than anything else so far, but I’m trying not to react.
“I don’t usually get into fights,” I explain. My voice is tight from the pain of the cleaning. “I got into someone’s bad graces, I suppose.”
“Not your fault, huh,” he says in an ironic tone. I find this extremely irritating. It’s no challenge to read what he’s thinking— that I’m like every other inmate who believes she is always the victim, never responsible for her circumstances. He’s perhaps twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old, and he thinks he’s wise to the ways of people like me. I’ve been in there since he was in diapers.
“I didn’t say that,” I point out.
“We’ll get you stitched up and send you back,” he says. “Put you on an antibiotic to kill off whatever might have been on that thing. You know what it was made out of? It’s a good clean cut.”
“Razor blade stuck in a toothbrush,” the officer says.
“Clever.” The doctor pulls out a needle and the suture kit and goes to work on my arm. I try not to wince, and he says, “Tough girl.”
Through the gap in the curtain, the baby catches my eye again and this time points at me. I raise my free hand, the empty cuff dangling from my wrist, and wave back.
* * *
When Annemarie comes to see me again I smile right away at the sight of her, and offer a little wave. The more I see her, the more I’m filled with wonder at the way she looks. I’ve often heard women talk about the first time they held their newborns—how they marveled at the long delicate fingers and perfect hands, the clear perfection of blinking eyes, the froggy stretch of a leg. I never had any of that, but I understand it now as I stare at this adult before me. Even her mannerisms, from the anxious twitch of her shoulders to the way she raises her eyebrows before she sighs, were mine once, before I came to a place where the unrestrained notes of body language became an expensive liability. I wonder how that can be, and whether the muscles themselves contain the code for those movements somehow, passed along from mother to daughter with the rest of the womanly genes.
“Happy birthday,” I say, once she’s closer. I know the date now: July 9, 1985. Yesterday, while I waited in the clinic for fresh bandages on my arm, I rifled madly through my file the nurse had left on the table beside me. It was a quick and dirty search that only left time to read the barest details, but finding the date was enough of a victory. I try to hand her the little tissue-wrapped package I’ve prepared, but a C.O. intercepts it.
“No direct transfer,” he says. He looks from me to Annemarie. “I can open it and evaluate it.”
I nod, and he slips the pink crocheted hat out of the package, gives it a cursory examination, and hands it to Annemarie. “I made it for you,” I explain to her. And then boldly, with the same surge of nerve that it took to squeeze my milk carton with perfect aim, I say, “While I was pregnant with you.”
Her smile is slow and incredulous and beautiful. “And you kept it all this time. Wow. How did you know I would be a girl?”
“I just knew.”
She runs her hand along the fabric I’ve made, so neatly webbed, without one flaw. “Thank you. This is the most wonderful present. I’m going to cry.” She laughs, a quick, heartbreaking sound, and turns her glimmering eyes toward the ceiling. “Not here. I’ll save it for later.”
We sit at a table, and she gestures to my arm. “What happened?”
I feel a blush creeping into my cheeks. “Someone in the yard didn’t like it that the cat prefers me to her.”
The side of Annemarie’s mouth begins to lift in a disbelieving smile. “Are you serious? What did she do?”
“She cut me. I’m all right. The doctors stitched it up.” I set my face in a lighthearted expression. It’s bad enough that she must come to visit me here; I don’t want this experience to be more depressing for her than it needs to be. “You know it’s the first time I’ve been out of this building in twenty-four years? And you know what really got to me, while I was out and about?”
“Not being fenced in?”
“No, the smell of a hamburger.” This time her laugh is musical. Delighted. “It was called In-N-Out Burger. It was next to the road on the way to the hospital. For a moment I thought I was having a nervous breakdown at the smell of it. That or a religious experience.”
She nods. “I’ll go with the second choice there. In-N-Out burgers are pretty close to heaven.”
“My God. It’s messed with my mind. After so many years here the food just seems normal. But drive past that and it brings it all back. Now I can understand why people in here fake medical emergencies all the time to get out. Before I thought that was just silly and frustrating, but boy oh boy. It was worth every stitch.”
“Did you get stuck in the emergency room for hours and hours?”
“No, they took care of me right away.”
She looks amused. “The VIP treatment, huh? Most people spend the whole night waiting in triage.”
“I did see a lot of people waiting. There was one very cute baby just outside my curtain. She kept waving at me.”
Her lips tighten, and she looks down at the pink bonnet resting on the table. She strokes it with one finger. I feel a tensing in my stomach and know I’ve said something wrong. That I showed fondness for a baby, even though I surrendered her? Did I cause her to think about the baby she lost? I can’t tell, but I twist my fingers against each other and wait out her silence. It strikes me suddenly that she’s now the age I was when she was born—the age when everything ended for me, and began for her. But I’d never given any thought to having babies then. Perhaps I was a late bloomer, or else only a realist. I wanted Ricky to pull it together enough that we could plan a future, but I certainly wasn’t thinking about when to bring a child into the world while my beloved partner still hadn’t mastered concepts like paying for car insurance and producing a clean urine sample for an employer. Annemarie is years ahead of the twenty-four-year-old Clara— although an obnoxious little thought keeps worming its way into my mind. I might have been very much like her if my mother had never met Garrison Brand.
“I found a bit of that information you were looking for,” I say, and she looks up. “Your father had a sister with Turner Syndrome. I’m not sure what that is, but a…a person familiar with him mentioned that to me, when I asked. Other than that, there’s nothing very remarkable in the medical history. I’ll write it all down and mail it to you.”
She replies with a slow blink and unreadable expression. “Thank you. Will the names be on the information you send?”
I turn on my flat face. “I was just planning to list the relationships and the relevant information. I haven’t asked his family if they’re okay with me disclosing names and all that personal stuff, and it seems like it’s only right for me to ask first, you know, in case some of them are still living.”
Annemarie nods, but I can see she’s thinking hard about this, and that I’ve made her unhappy. “Do they know about me at all? That I even exist?”
“No.”
“Is my father still alive?”
I take a deep breath. “No.”
Her face falls a bit, but then she pushes her chin forward almost imperceptibly. “So it is Ricky, then.”
“I didn’t say that. You’re twenty-four years old, Annemarie. A lot of people have died in that time.”
“Clara,” she says, and hearing my first name spoken in her lovely voice makes me feel like a dog being swiped at with a rolled newspaper. “Couldn’t you offer me a hint, at least? Come on, let’s be real her
e. I researched everything I could find about you before I came here the first time. I know I asked you questions, but the truth is I already knew a lot. About your family, about your dad who died, the places where you lived, and the crime. I read all about the crime.”
“What you read isn’t necessarily what is true.”
“Maybe not, but it can’t be too far off. After all, here—”
“It can be farther off than you think.” My voice is sharper than I want it to be. I struggle to soften it, but a tightness still pulls beneath the quiet. “You’re an artist, Annemarie. You know how different something appears if you stare at it straight on instead of from the side. And everything you’ve seen or read about this is from a side angle, often an extreme one. Please don’t assume you have the true story.”
“Then why don’t you tell it?”
“I’m working on that. Why don’t you ask me what you want to know about him? Maybe I can at least provide you with some background.”
She folds her hands on the table in front of her, those brown eyes taking on a determined gleam that is new to me. Her nails are shiny, French-manicured. “You said my father wasn’t Ricky Rowan, but everyone testified that you were dating him at the time. If it wasn’t him, then who? The licentious dentist?”
I reply with a low laugh at the absurdity of that idea. “No, it was certainly not him.”
“Well, I don’t want to play a guessing game.”
I don’t want you to, either, I think, but I don’t say it aloud. I sit placidly before her, and after a moment I speak. “You know, I tried not to think about any of this for over twenty years. And since the day you walked in here, I haven’t had a moment’s peace in which to think about anything else.”
She tips her head. “Do you want me to apologize for that?”
“No, not at all. I’m thankful beyond words that you were brave enough to find me. I don’t even pretend I can imagine how difficult this must be for you. But this isn’t a trip to the beach for me, either, to revisit all these memories.” I let my gaze drift toward the people posing at the tacky little mural—a preteen girl and an older woman who might be her sister or mother. “You know, when I was a young girl, my stepbrother drowned some stray kittens that were born under our porch. And up until I was just a few months younger than you, my greatest regret in life was that I had coaxed that mama cat into nesting there. Anytime I thought about that it sent this sharp punch of guilt into my gut. Maybe that’s silly, but it’s how I felt. I spent years taking stray cats in to be neutered to try to soften that sense of guilt, and it was good work I did, but it didn’t change how I felt about those kittens.”
She stares at me without blinking. Those clear brown eyes— what else could she have had? It was the one certainty Ricky and I had to offer her.
“Now imagine how I feel about what I did later,” I say. “There’s no nice little neighborhood program I can start up that can compensate for the crimes I committed. Tommy Choi is still out there somewhere, the only one left of his family. I know what it feels like to lose your father. Your mother. To be robbed of your safety and comfort. I know it eats a hole in your soul that you try and try to fill but you never can. And if I hadn’t driven the group to the Circle K that night, that family might still be alive.”
Her brow furrows. “I thought you also shot one of them,” she says, hesitantly.
“No. I was convicted of one count of felony murder in that case. That only means I was part of a felony that resulted in a death, which made me legally liable. I did not kill Mimi Choi.” At the doubt in her expression, I add, “You can’t put stock in what Forrest Hayes claimed he saw. He was self-interested. No matter what you’ve read, no matter what you saw in that damned movie— on my mother’s name, I didn’t kill Mimi Choi.”
She nods tentatively. I can tell she wants to believe me and isn’t sure she can. “But on the first-degree murder count— the priest—you were guilty, too.”
“Yes, I was. I am. I made a terrible decision, and it cost me everything. Including you.” Her expression shifts, and I fold my hands on the table in front of me, matching her posture. “I can tell you this. Your father was an artist. I’m sad to say he’s part of this whole story, and that I never should have been involved with him. But he was a good person, Annemarie. I sure do wish things had worked out differently for both of us.”
She nods again, and I can see the gears in her head churning. I feel a pang at the misleading little trail I’ve cast through the woods, but anything is better than the assumption she brought in with her.
“I think I know who it is,” she says. “I really wish you would just come out with it,” she adds with a barely-restrained scowl.
“Give me time,” I implore her, but even as I say this I can feel the selfish undercurrent in my request. Keep coming back to see me, I think greedily. Let me treasure my hold on this thing you want so badly. Because once she knows the truth, and her story becomes not a mystery but a tragedy, this will all be over. And if I squander this second chance I know I won’t be able to bear it. I would want you to love me, Janny said. The universal yearning of every child for its mother. And that moment of truth is upon me now, because she can no longer be stolen away from me. She is mine to lose.
* * *
After lights-out, I work on Intérieur by the tiny reading light in my cell. I can’t sleep. I’m too torn up inside over the things I said to Annemarie and the obsessive thought creeps into my mind that I must finish this project. On Friday, in the Braille workshop, I completed my drawing of Spiral Jetty. In the end it was simply done, and when I ran my fingers over the finished proof I felt a tightness in my throat that was almost painful. All through the workday I had mulled over what I would say to Annemarie if she came to visiting hours the next day—exactly how I would phrase my answers to her questions, using just the right words that would describe who Ricky had been while leading her to conclude I meant Jeff Owen. The exercise felt almost like a word puzzle, and the challenge of it engaged me all the way up until I took that quiet moment to sit and touch my finished work. Then, as my fingers swept over the spiral, I thought: this is how Annemarie must feel. As if she is being drawn along on a path that is anything but straight and clear, not a road through this particular way station on the journey to understand herself, but a curious and rocky trail that might very well lead nowhere.
It didn’t stop me from trying it anyway. At least the diversion will buy me time, I thought—precious, irreplaceable days of Scrabble games and sharing memories and simply gazing at her face before I have to come clean. But now that I’ve looked her in the eye and enticed her in that direction, shame and regret are gnawing at me like a pair of rats. It’s a good thing I can’t call her, because the urge to confess the truth is downright visceral. This is the feeling I remember from the police station the day I was arrested, when they sat me down in a small dim room and read me my rights again and even though I knew, even though I understood beyond question that my words could and would be used against me, my conscience could not help but stick its finger down its throat and force out the truth. Yes, I killed him. It felt so good to unburden myself from it that I sobbed with relief, but the sense of lightness it brought me was a false one. The handing off of heavy truths is a relay race, and you can’t expect that the baton will never come back to you.
All of my drawings for the art book are with Shirley now. On Friday she received the finished portfolio with a look that was, if I dare to say it, admiring. “I’ll put in a good word for you, Clara,” she said to me, and I told her I appreciated that. Early on, I had planned to include the Degas drawing with the others, just in case they thought well of its quality and wanted to include it, but ever since Annemarie began coming around I’ve changed my mind. I know it’s for her, but I’m not sure how to explain the gift in a way she will understand. For now I sit in my darkened cell and coax the paper into ridges and corrugations, tap in patterns and the hints of shadows, and postpone thinking about w
hat I will do with the finished product.
In the painting there’s a large mirror on the wall, right in the center, which reflects nothing comprehensible. I especially like that about it. It gives the feeling that these two figures—the tall man blocking the door and the slumped woman with her back to him—are absolutely alone and isolated. The world bears no record of what is happening here. It’s a dreadful scene, but the story it tells is a true one. So much of art tells the truth about what is going on in the artist’s mind, but in some cases its wisdom ends there. Ricky liked to work with clay—we had a kiln out back at the Cathouse that he and Chris had built of scavenged bricks and scrap metal—and he had a set of colored ink pens with which he drew on everything. His designs were lush and hungry and exaggerated: octopi, corpse flowers, multi-colored tree frogs with alarming wide eyes, voluptuous women in Bettie Page poses. With all of his thoughts traveling through a jungle like that one, it’s no wonder he made the decisions he did. But this Degas painting has none of that unnerving aesthetic or sense of personal reference. It’s almost like a photograph.
At last I set down my drawing and pull out the box of court transcripts from beneath the bed, keeping quiet in consideration for Janny. With her arm in the cast it’s been difficult for her to sleep, and this evening she didn’t go down to the chow hall for dinner because she said she was too tired and her arm ached too much. Now she’s lying quietly beneath the blanket, and I don’t want to disturb her, but there’s a section of Clinton’s testimony I want to look over again. Before I can locate it I come across another page of Forrest’s commentary—his examination by the prosecutor. I settle down onto my knees and read it.
Q: You stated that it was Ms. Mattingly who drove back to the residence after you left the rectory.
A: Yeah, it was her car, and she drove. I sat next to her, and everyone else was in the back.
Q: What was her demeanor like?
A: Calm. They were counting the money back there, and she didn’t say anything to me or to them. We got back to the Cathouse, and the rest of us started scrubbing up at the kitchen sink, taking off our clothes and whatnot, and next thing I know I hear the shower come on upstairs.
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