Inside These Walls

by Rebecca Coleman

  Then a crisis occurred. Clinton’s grades had dropped too much, and his East Coast school rescinded his acceptance. That meant he had to go to the local community college in the fall, and he would continue living at home. I thought very hard about what to do, and I worked out that I would ask my mother for a lock for my bedroom door because Clinton’s dog, a Golden Retriever, had learned to nudge my door open with her nose and it made me feel anxious while I was getting dressed. I was thirteen years old, and this seemed like a credible enough excuse at the time, although looking back, if I had ever used it I’m sure my mother would have immediately grown suspicious and everything would have blown up right then.

  But before I worked up the nerve to ask, there was another evening alone in the house with Clinton and again he ordered me to go to bed. This time, though, when he climbed into my bed, I elbowed him away, hard. He snapped at me, and with a level of courage I didn’t know I had, I turned around— for the first time admitting I wasn’t sleeping through all of this—and told him to get out and leave me alone.

  I should never have done that. It made him angry, and he shoved down my arms and rolled onto me, planting his forearm across my neck. He already had his pants down, and although I was struggling against him, I couldn’t scream. Eventually I stopped struggling, because I was beginning to black out due to lack of oxygen. Clinton started telling me I was a good girl, a good girl, as he completed the rape. It was a terrible, burning pain, and I was certain that he was tearing me apart, but by the next morning—regrettably, perhaps—there was no physical sign of what had occurred. He was always careful to ejaculate outside my body, and on later occasions usually came prepared with condoms. I wish I could see this as a mercy, that I was fortunate not to have become pregnant. But later, when he grew more worried that I would report him, he sometimes warned me that if I tried to accuse him there was no evidence to prove it. And I believed him.

  After that first incident I grew afraid to ask my mother for a lock on my door, because what had happened was so horrible that I was frightened of saying anything that might raise her suspicions. She was very protective of me, and I knew she would be devastated that, in this most egregious way, she had failed. I was also very concerned that she would think less of me if she knew I was no longer a virgin, because she was religious and it was something she had discussed with me many times in the few years prior. I rationalized that it couldn’t be undone, and so all I could do was try to contain the damage by not making it my mother’s calamity, as well.

  Since I could no longer pretend to be asleep, and Clinton was now escalating his behavior with me, I tried out a different technique. When I was very young I used to love a television program called My Living Doll, about a man who is given custody of a female android, named Rhoda, originally designed for the Air Force. She is utterly naive to human society, and must be taught how to display normal emotions. When Clinton came in I took to imagining I was a Rhoda-like machine, able to endure this because I was unaware that it was wrong, feeling empty of any emotion about it. Usually I would pretend that I had been shut off entirely, but when he forced me to do specific things—grabbing me by the back of my head, for example—I imagined that this was a mode, or a function I was performing, the way a washing machine can be switched to rinse or spin.

  However, as the abuse went on, I began for the first time to confess it to my priest. I didn’t merely confess to “sexual immorality” or “sins against the Sixth Commandment”—I was quite specific about what Clinton was doing, and I used his name. I was actively hoping Father George would intervene. In school they had taught us that nothing could break the Seal of Confession, even if a person confessed to a terrible crime, but I still thought what I told him would have an effect. Clinton still went to church with us, but not to confession, so obviously the priest would have to start denying him the Eucharist, which would have certainly gotten my mother and Garrison’s attention. Or perhaps Father George would go to Garrison and say, “You need to talk to your son,” without breaking my confidence. But each week he assigned me three Our Fathers in penance and forgave my sins, and that was the beginning and end of it. Clinton continued to take Communion, and my mother and Garrison remained oblivious.

  In the fall Clinton started college, and a sort of ebb and flow began with this whole situation. He would stop it sometimes for months, just long enough to make me believe he had outgrown it, and then start up again. I grew taller and stronger, but also more resigned, and—this is difficult to express in a way that makes sense to an outsider—it became a kind of normal. A human being is designed to get used to nearly anything. One afternoon, as I tried to lie very still and pretend I was shut off and that my body had no inhabitant, I felt strangely lightheaded and then, all at once, I was fully inside my body; it was as though a front door had blown open in a raging blizzard and the tempest rushed in, impossible to ignore or constrain. I cried out, and Clinton knew what that meant. I remember the look in Clinton’s eyes afterward, like a man who has just beaten the house at blackjack. I was a Catholic school girl, extremely sheltered from the worldly influences of society; I knew absolutely nothing about female sexual response, and I didn’t understand what had happened or where it had come from. I only knew that it was the profoundest shame of all, to have felt so good from something so filthy. From that point forward, though it went unspoken, he and I both knew I would never expose him for what he had done. No matter how I hated it and always would, I believed it was damning evidence against me that, every now and then, my nervous system would crash like a malfunctioning computer and produce a response that most people seek on purpose.

  The final time Clinton approached me he was already dating Susie, the woman he would soon marry. I was seventeen and headed to college myself soon. He had left me alone for a couple of months, although by now I was wiser than to think that meant it was over. A year before, I had installed a hook and eye on my bedroom door, and I kept closer track of my mother’s church schedule. That had slowed him down a bit. But he had taken it as a challenge, and so his assaults were less frequent yet much bolder and more aggressive when they occurred. Risks he never would have considered before were now fair game, and he was rough and punitive when he managed to pin me down. After so many years of my listless cooperation, he now felt I had become difficult about something that was his right.

  And so that last afternoon, when I heard him coming down the stairs while I was doing laundry, I thought about the fact that the house was empty, and I felt afraid. In the basement window my mother kept all sorts of pretty glass bottles she had collected from flea markets and vacations to Mexico. I grabbed a green ginger ale bottle in my right hand while shifting the laundry to the dryer with my left. When Clinton touched my hip I spun around and hit him on the side of the head with the bottle, which broke on impact and cut a deep gash across his scalp. He had to call an ambulance and tell them it had happened while he was working on his car, while I swept up the glass and rearranged the bottles in the window to hide the empty spot. But he never touched me again. And the most pathetic part was I was more concerned about Susie at that point than about myself. Susie was a nice girl, and I didn’t want any part in Clinton being sleazy to her.

  My celibate life began that day, and continued until a few months after I started dating Ricky almost five years later. Once I began seeing him I was surprised to discover I wanted to be close to him, and I was intrigued rather than panicked by the idea that he wanted me. I didn’t want my experiences with him to be tainted by Clinton’s abuse, and I was afraid he would think I was dirty and undesirable, so for a while I said nothing to him about that. But a secret that dark is impossible to hide. If you have never tried to nurture a normal adult relationship when you only associate sexual pleasure with violence followed by sickening guilt, you’ll have to take my word for it that it’s not easy. Yet Ricky was patient and understanding. He grasped that it would take work to reshuffle my associations and avoid my panic triggers. He always k
ept things bright and playful, and he was very loving.

  One evening—Ricky was still living at his parents’ house then— we had a particularly nice time together and made plans to get together again the following day. Clinton came over with Susie and their son to visit with our parents, and when Ricky pressed the doorbell and Clinton answered it, Ricky attacked him. Later Ricky explained it to me this way: “I had this one fantasy about killing your stepbrother, and another one about what you and I were doing last night. I was expecting you to answer the door, and when he showed up instead, I switched fantasies. It was like a reflex.”

  Needless to say, Clinton insisted our parents not call the police about that incident. I think it was clear to him then that Ricky knew what he had done, and bringing the police into it was certainly the last thing Clinton wanted.

  So perhaps it will make more sense now why Clinton was so eager to speak out against Ricky at the trial, and so quick to voice his suspicions that Ricky was capable of sexual violence. It’s my observation that a habitual liar is always the first to suspect others of dishonesty, and the public champions of morality often prove to be those with the dirtiest secrets. I’m sure that in Clinton’s defense of me, however, he believed he was settling a debt in a way that must have soothed his conscience. Clinton is a delusional individual, and one of my many regrets is that he managed to get rid of me so easily.

  Thank you again, ever so much, for the letters from Ricky, and I hope to be in touch with you again soon.

  Yours truthfully,

  Clara Mattingly

  * * *

  Through the reinforced window alongside the breakfast line I can see a flutter of activity over at the Intake door—lots of police cars, two dark extended vans, several cars from the Department of Corrections. Farther away there are news trucks, their twisted antennae and satellite dishes reaching up like beanstalks. I rest my hand on the windowsill and watch through the crosshatched wire, and am rewarded with a glimpse of a small figure in an orange jumpsuit and black bulletproof vest, her wrists shackled behind her back, being whisked through the double doors. Penelope Robbins has arrived. The Sacred Heart alumna is about to get her delousing and body cavity search, and I’ll bet she isn’t going to like it.

  As breakfast ends I hear my name called down to the visiting room again, and I’m deeply pleased. It hasn’t been very long since Annemarie’s last visit, and she hadn’t even sent a letter to tell me she was coming. Without Janny I have felt especially lonely, and the company is most welcome. Today there are many people milling around the room, and they’ve opened up the patio in spite of the blazing heat outdoors. I look around, but I don’t see her. As the officer unshackles me I scan the room, feeling a frown line form between my eyebrows, but still, she isn’t here. And then, just as I’m standing there like a lonely child on the playground, a man rises from the bench along the wall and comes toward me.

  He isn’t anyone I know—that much I can tell. He’s in his late forties, fifty perhaps, with soft eyes but a tight jaw that suggests he’s endured things. His silver hair is shaggy and layered, but thinned to a widow’s peak at the top, and he has the deep tan of a man who has spent a lifetime under the sun. As he approaches me I look him up and down—in his jeans and a button-down shirt that look like a carpenter’s best outfit—but I can’t make any connection. I wonder if he has me confused with someone else.

  “Clara,” he says.

  I stare back, but I just don’t know him.

  His mouth pulls tight. “You’re still angry, aren’t you,” he says, and he nods in a resigned way. The glance he casts on me is chagrined, and all of a sudden, all at once—at the sight of his clear green eyes, up close—I throw my arms around his neck and press my body along the length of his, holding to him as if he can save me from the edge of a bridge. It’s Forrest. It’s Forrest Hayes, and I’m sobbing, and an officer is pulling me off of him, forcing me toward a seat.

  “No more of that,” the officer commands, “or I terminate this visit. You got it?”

  I nod and cry. I sit. This is the man who testified against me, the one who lied and snitched to save himself, and I know every bit of that, but I still can’t control the rush of strange, spontaneous fondness—of love—I feel at his presence. I press the front of my uniform blouse to my eyes to absorb the tears and try to get my breathing back to a more even pace. He sits down cautiously across from me.

  “Sorry for upsetting you,” he says. “Or...whatever that is.”

  I can’t even speak. I only nod again.

  “I thought you were still mad at me,” he muses. Oh, I am, I think. I can’t meet his eyes, and so I watch his hands as they fumble for a casual posture, one flat but fidgety on the table, the other rubbing the side of his thumb beneath his mouth. He wears no wedding ring.

  “So how’s it going?” he asks, and I finally lock eyes with him. He holds the gaze for a moment, then looks down uncomfortably. The degree to which he has aged is absolutely bewildering. The headful of gray hair, the tiredness around his eyes. He was a bone-skinny young man in a jean jacket covered in heavy metal band patches, a sharp-jawed kid with a rock-and-roll mullet. I can still see that kid in him now if I peer hard, but it’s a pure creative exercise. He did seven months in the county jail, that’s all. He handed out equal portions of his sentence to all his friends. Shared with the whole class, like teachers always demand you do with candy.

  “Listen, Clara,” he says. “I came a long, long way to see you. I live in Phoenix now, and I took the day off work because I can’t call you here and I hate writing. But I’ve got to tell you about this.”

  I raise my eyebrows in reply. Wipe my cheek with the heel of my hand.

  “A woman called me a few days ago. She says she’s your daughter. Says you know about her. And she thinks I’m her father.”

  Now I blurt a breathless laugh. “What?”

  “So you don’t know about her. I suspected she was a con artist.”

  I shake my head. “No, I mean, I do. But I didn’t suggest to her that you’re her father. I didn’t even imply it. I told her—she asked if her father was still alive, and I told her no.”

  “Well, she didn’t sound too convinced, but she said she was going with a process-of-elimination thing and wanted me to do a cheek swab. You know, a genetic test. Obviously I know I don’t have a child with you, but—” He shrugs. “I don’t one-hundred-percent know I don’t have a child that age with somebody else. I thought maybe she’s trying to get me to take one where I’m convinced it’s wrong, but it’s really for a case where, for all I know, she could be right.”

  “No, no. It’s nothing like that.” I rub my forehead wearily and then look up at him. The room is too close, too filled with tightly-packed inmates and their overeager relatives. “Do you mind if we go outside?” I ask.

  We walk out onto the patio, where the visitors are more spread out and there’s a slight breeze that gathers beneath the awning. Away from all the listening ears, it’s easier to talk. “I had a baby not long before the trial,” I explain. “She found me a few months ago. She wants to know who her father is, and I wouldn’t say.”

  Forrest grins. He looks truly delighted by this, like a proud father himself. “It has to be Ricky.”

  “Of course it’s Ricky, but I don’t want to tell her that. I told her it wasn’t him, and when she pressed me I implied—or I thought I implied—that it was Jeff Owen. I said her father was an artist, that I shouldn’t have been involved with him, and that he was part of the whole sordid story. I don’t know how she’d get you out of that.”

  He shrugs. “It would fit me, if you’d been involved with me.”

  “You weren’t an artist.”

  “Yes, I was. I played guitar in a metal band. I don’t care what your opinion of heavy metal is—it still counts.”

  I respond to that with a snicker. “Also, you’re still alive.”

  “Maybe she thought you were trying to throw her off the trail. Or that yo
u were confused and had heard a rumor of my untimely demise.”

  I lean against the support pillar, my hands behind my back, and look out at the sky. “I don’t know, Forrest. She’s a good person and I’m very fond of her. I don’t want her to be tormented by the truth, but it sounds like she’s being tormented by the lies just as badly. I guess she’s not leaving me with much choice but to straighten her out.”

  “Now, that is something,” Forrest marvels, and I break my focus on the horizon to look at him once again. He’s squinting into the sun. “A baby of yours and Ricky’s. I had no idea you were pregnant when all of that was going down.”

  “I don’t think I was. I think it happened because I got stuck at the Cathouse and my pills were back at home. Stop taking the Pill all of a sudden and—” I snap my fingers. “It’s out of your system in three or four days, but sperm can live for seven.”

  He ponders that. “You know what would be funny, is if you got pregnant that night when you two barricaded the bathroom at Champion’s and made everybody hold it while—”

  “There’s not one damn funny thing about it,” I say dryly, and Forrest bursts into a string of apologetic giggles. “It’s tragic, Forrest. It’s awful.”