“Well, yes.” I swing my foot in a slow circle as I consider how to phrase it. My white canvas sneaker, an off-brand version of the Keds I used to wear every summer, is a blindingly clean spot above the nicotine-yellow linoleum. “I’m beginning to hate prison.”
He offers an indulgent smile. “I’ve yet to meet an inmate who says she likes it.”
“I’d gotten to a point where I didn’t really mind anymore, though. Did you know they moved Janny out of my cell? Taking care of her was the one rewarding thing about being here, and it was very rewarding. It’s good to be needed. But now that’s gone.” I pause, let my gaze drift to the ceiling’s pocked acoustic tile. “And now that my daughter comes to visit, I find I can’t stand being in here. She’s getting married and I can’t go. It makes me very angry.”
He seems unsure of how to respond. Several priests ago I had confessed the sins that led to my pregnancy—it was very obvious by that point, and I cried, repented, was consoled and forgiven. But I haven’t mentioned it to any clergyperson since, because there has been no reason to. I’m sure the mention of my daughter catches him quite by surprise, but I don’t care. No doubt he’s heard stranger things.
“The best course is always to seek solace in the Lord,” he tells me. “Confess your burdens to him, and you’ll find them lifted.”
“That’s a pat answer, isn’t it?” He raises both of his bushy eyebrows and looks affronted, but I continue unfazed. “I told you what my stepbrother did to me. You know, I confessed my burdens about that to a priest every week for years, and neither he nor God ever intervened on my behalf. I keep showing up because I believe the church is larger than the sins of one man, and by that I mean Father George. It isn’t fair to blame him anymore, I know. I should have left it to God and not let my anger take over my conscience. That’s my own responsibility, and I know it. But I wouldn’t be here today if it hadn’t been for Clinton training me to hollow myself out and do what I was told. And it eats at me now that I’m in here and he’s out there living his la-de-dah life. If I had explained all of that in court, they might have had mercy on me and not put me away for life. But I didn’t, only so I could spare my mother the trauma of feeling that she’d failed me, and she’s been dead for almost twenty years now. I’m not sure who the hell I’m protecting anymore.”
He folds his hands in front of him and offers a show of mulling it over. “Sometimes, when we’re young, we make choices that we need to live with for a lifetime. And it’s regrettable—I can see that. But the challenge is learning to grow and flourish within the constraints. And you do that well, Ms. Mattingly.”
“Of course I do.” I lift my chin and stare at him, my lips pressed together hard as if working in tandem to suppress the next thought that my brain is churning into words. “But coping well is not necessarily anything to celebrate. You can learn to love a captor. To find excitement in the drama of a bad relationship. I used to enjoy it sometimes when my stepbrother raped me. Is that ‘flourishing,’ or is that demented?”
His eyebrows go up again, and this time they stay there. He bounces his templed hands against his mouth, pondering. “I’m sure you don’t mean that,” he demurs.
“I do mean it.” I can hear my voice winding tight. “For a while there, after it sank in that he was going to force me do it no matter what, I stopped fighting. He tried to force me to feel some kind of pleasure, I suppose because it made him feel more powerful, and sometimes it worked. You have no idea the guilt that comes along with that. How long it takes to unlearn.” I don’t shift my gaze, even though he’s looking uneasier by the moment. “It isn’t just me. What he did is something abusers do all the time. I used to ask Ricky to hurt me, because I only understood pleasure as an antidote to pain. He never would, of course. He wasn’t like that. I had to retrain all my nerves. But even now, I think about it sometimes, by myself. I try not to, but if I do?” I snap my fingers. “I’m done. Like that.”
He sits up straighter and folds his hands on the table. “All right. Thank you for your confession. Are you ready for your penance now?”
“That’s all right. It makes me uncomfortable, too.”
“One rosary,” he says. “Spend time in prayer. It’ll take your mind off what bothers you.”
* * *
Penelope Robbins arrives just before yard time. I hear the crackle of radio static and the clink of her ankle shackles as she and the guards make their way down the cellblock, and then she stands on the other side of the bars in her new blue jumpsuit, wearing a self-consciously hard expression belied by the bewilderment in her gaze. From the other cells inmates are shouting her name, making lewd suggestions and mocking her with faux-upscale invitations to tea and tennis. She’s trying to look unimpressed, and it’s pitiable how transparent her efforts are. Inside she’s screaming.
“My bunk is the top one,” I tell her. I’d wished for years that I could move back down to the bottom, where I slept for a long time prior to Janny, but in the past day I’ve grudgingly conceded that I need to keep the top one. Her level of guilt in her father’s shooting is still an open question, and so no matter how guileless she looks to the naked eye, I must remember that the top bunk makes it harder for her to kill me in my sleep.
“That’s fine,” she says as the guard unshackles her. “I like the bottom.”
Two other guards set down her possessions on the floor. Penelope has quite a few possessions for someone who has only been here for a couple of days. I see books, a television, a CD player with a tall stack of CDs, two pairs of sneakers, a plastic basket overflowing with personal care items. Someone must be lavishing money on her canteen account. She leaves the boxes on the floor and sits uneasily on the stool by the desk. In a moment the guards retreat, and I extend a hand. “I’m Clara.”
“Penelope.” In person the resemblance to Audrey Hepburn still bears out, though her dark hair is loose and wavy, and her posture and way of moving are more adolescent than ladylike.
“Did they tell you anything about me?” I ask.
She shakes her head, which is probably a lie. “Well, the bottom shelf is yours, and I’ve cleaned out some other nooks and crannies for you. I hope you’re neat. My last cellmate was blind, so I’m used to things being tidy for her sake.”
“I can be neat.” She curls her shoulders inward and wraps her arms around her waist. “I saw the movie about you.”
“Did you? I haven’t seen it.”
An eyebrow arches. “Really?”
“I was incarcerated when it came out. I’ve seen still photos from it over the years, and the trailer. Do I look anything like Katie Rayburn?”
“Kind of.”
“Well, that’s flattering. I understand I shot Mimi Choi in that movie.”
Penelope nods. She evaluates my expression. “Didn’t you, in real life?” she asks.
“No. Chris Brooks did.”
She frowns. “That’s not cool, then, that they pinned it on you.”
“Well, welcome to my life.”
It’s yard time, and in the past few minutes the cellblock has gone quiet, but I’m being kept in today because of this transition. Penelope looks out through the bars at the empty corridor, then reaches into her box of snacks and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. “Want one?”
They are contraband, and she obviously knows it. When I meet her eye she offers an apologetic shrug. “Don’t tell, all right? It’s not like I have any choice but to quit, anyway.”
“True,” I say. “All right, then. I’ll help you along.”
She lights hers and passes me the lighter. After my conviction I smoked for years, drawn to the habit by boredom and the desire to look like less of a goody two-shoes, following my rough start. Everyone did back then, before they changed the laws even for the guards. But I had quit long before that—more than a decade ago, after coming to the epiphany that being locked up was no excuse for setting lower standards for myself than I would have on the outside. I’d never go back to it as a ha
bit, but the indulgence is a pleasant one. Penelope eases back on the stool and smiles shyly at me. We’re breaking a rule together, and she likes that.
“Have they assigned you a job yet?” I ask her.
“Yeah, in the laundry.” She grimaces. “I start tomorrow. I must have made someone mad to get that assignment.”
“No, it’s a common one. I did it for a while when I was new.”
“Did you? Where do you work now?”
“In the Braille workshop. We create textbooks for the blind. There’s a whole training program for it. Depending on what level you want to get to, it can take several years.”
She taps ash into the toilet and grimaces. “I hope I won’t be here long enough for something like that. Hey, is it okay with you if we put up a sheet around this toilet, like a curtain? Because I really hate that part.”
“We’re not allowed.”
She looks skeptical. “They overlook stuff like that, right? I’m sure the guards don’t really want to watch people taking a crap. They’d probably appreciate it.”
“The guards don’t care. They watch people crap all day.”
Her expression is one of arch displeasure. She drags on her cigarette. She looks up at the wall above my desk, where I’ve tacked a pastel drawing of mine—a copy of a Degas painting of a ballet class, called Dance. “I used to take ballet,” she says.
“Me, too.”
“I quit once I got old enough that they didn’t let you wear a tutu to class anymore.”
“I danced from four to thirteen. It was my whole life when I was a child. I still practice now, fairly often, when I can get the right music for it.”
Amusement glosses over her face. “In here? Really?” I nod. “How do you do ballet in a cell?” she asks
“The same way you do everything else in a cell. You don’t let the environment convince you that you can’t. You live inside your head.”
She acknowledges that with a respectful nod and fidgets with her cigarette. I flick ash outside the bars. The gesture feels deliciously powerful. The evidence is right there that I’ve broken a rule, but I defy them to write me up for it. What are they going to do, send me to the Hole? They aren’t going to leave this confused little girl all alone while I sweat it out in solitary confinement, even though the idea of quiet and isolation doesn’t sound too bad to me right now. The thought of getting to know this new person makes me weary. I’ve always felt daunted by the complex dance of social relationships, and the events of the past few months have taxed my skills to their limit.
“Did you draw that yourself?” she asks. I nod. “You’re a good artist.”
“Thanks. Ricky was, too.”
“So that part was real, huh?”
“Yes, that part was real,” I say, and I smile.
“My favorite part of the movie was when they had sex in the car.”
I blurt a laugh. “Did we have sex in a car? I don’t remember that.”
She looks nervous at my reaction, but flicks ash into the toilet again and nods. “Coked-up sex. They snorted it at a club and then did it in the parking lot. It was pretty hot.”
“Well, I did use cocaine with him a few times, but all in the first year we were together. I understand that’s not as fashionable now as it was then. And we certainly never had sex in a car. What if the police had caught us? My mother would have killed me.”
She giggles. “But did you have coked-up sex—that’s the real question.”
I lower myself down to sit on the floor. “Oh, probably. They don’t make movies out of couples who only play mini-golf and go out for sushi, do they?”
Penelope looks much more relaxed now. She has a smile that lights her face, with teeth so white I imagine they must be bleached. “Sounds like you’ve got some good stories,” she says. “I can’t wait to hear them all.”
I shrug. As cellmates go it’s an unexpectedly strong start, but I’ll get to know her in my own time, not hers. I have plenty of that to spare.
* * *
Just as I am leaving Mass, the hallway intercom crackles and they call the numbers of those with visitors. I hear mine, and it’s a surprise—I had thought Annemarie would be too busy to come this week. But when I arrive in the visiting room she’s already there, stepping forward with a warm smile. “The patio is open,” she says. “We should get some sun.”
Outside the picnic tables are all taken up with women visiting with their young children, each child sitting on the lap of whoever is taking care of him or her during the incarceration, looking at their mothers with wary eyes and responding halfheartedly to attempts at patty-cake. Annemarie and I walk out to the edge of the concrete pad, where the shade of the awning is no longer good for much against the relentless desert sun. “I got your wedding invitation,” I say. “Thank you very much.”
She nods. “I know you can’t go, but I figured you might want it as a keepsake.”
“Yes, I’ll treasure it,” I tell her, but in truth, all the invitation has really done is cause me to feel a steady, glowing anger. Not at her—she’s being kind, and I know it—but at the fact that I can’t possibly go. It makes me think unpleasantly of the long-ago possibilities. Chris was knifed to death by his cellmate more than a decade ago; Liz was killed during the standoff. If only Ricky had handed either one of them the gun at the rectory. If only.
“I have some questions for you,” she says.
Here it comes, I think. My nerves have been on edge ever since our last meeting, and the discovery that she sought out Forrest hasn’t soothed them one bit. All this time, all this thinking, and I still haven’t decided what I’m going to tell her. No more misleading her, I decided. But the thought of telling her the truth fills me with absolute dread. Ricky has family out there in the world—cousins like Dan, who cared enough to visit him in prison and cried when he came to read the suicide note to me. Ricky had disdained him as buttoned-up and painfully religious, but he was the type to be good to family on principle of the fact that they were family. I haven’t had enough time yet with Annemarie to believe we could push our bond out of the nest and expect it to fly. I certainly can’t compete with the fulfillment that a free, innocent extended family might offer her.
She leans back carefully against the stucco wall. “I was looking over some of the dates. You gave me up before the trial took place. Why didn’t you wait and see if you’d be convicted?”
“Because I knew I would be. I did it. I confessed to it as soon as I was arrested.”
“You pleaded not guilty.”
“Of course I did. Lawyers don’t want you to plead guilty, especially if you have extenuating circumstances, as I did. The prosecutors wouldn’t let me plea bargain, but it was possible that the confession would be thrown out or that I’d be convicted only of the lesser charges.”
“So why didn’t you put me in foster care while you waited to see?” At the sight of my perturbed expression, she adds, “I’m just trying to understand the circumstances around my birth, exactly. I know you have a stepbrother who—”
“I wasn’t about to place you with him,” I interrupt her. “He’s a very bad person. You would have been better off in a basket sent down the river.”
“But he spoke up for you during the trial.”
“He’s evil.” She shrinks back at the conviction in my voice. I want to tell her the truth about him, but I know that could make all of this ever so much worse. She’s already reached out to Forrest in a wild guess that he might be her father. If she learns what Clinton did to me, she might take one look at his photograph and draw easy parallels—his Norse-blond hair, his lanky stature—and go to him with the same question. “Don’t be fooled by what he said. He had his own reasons, and it wasn’t out of the kindness of his heart.”
“What about my father’s family?” She holds my gaze, steadily, but I can see the trembling small animal she is inside, and it’s breaking my heart in a slow and ragged way. “Why couldn’t they take me? Why didn’t you tell th
em about me so they could?”
“Because they’d done a poor enough job with their own child.”
“You said he was a good man. Generous and kind. Those were the words you used.” When I don’t reply, she bites down on her bottom lip. Though her hands are behind her back, I can see her shoulders shaking. “Chris Brooks wasn’t an artist, and it wasn’t Forrest Hayes or Jeff Owen. I know those things for sure.”
I can’t help my curiosity. “How?”
“Because neither of them had a sister. Only Ricky Rowan did. She died when she was ten.” She levels her amber-flecked gaze on me, but I can’t meet her eyes. “It was Ricky, wasn’t it? I know it was.”
“Of course it was Ricky.” I spit out the words like bitter husks, like coffee grounds. “Who else would it have been. I’d been with him for years.”
“You specifically told me it wasn’t.”
“I wanted to spare you from knowing. There. Yes. You came out of all of this. If I had one hope for you, it’s that you would never find that out.”
“Did he know about me?”
“No.”
“Do you think he would have—”
I cut her off before she can wander any further down that path. “Don’t ask me to put myself inside Ricky’s mind. If I could predict his thoughts, I never would have gone out with him that night. And you wouldn’t be here, either. So let’s just leave it there.”
Her delicate brows knit together. “What do you mean, I wouldn’t be here?”
Now I realize that, inevitably, I have said too much. I try to deflect. “Do you really want the nitty-gritty of your conception story?” I ask in a wry tone. “I don’t think you do.”
She shakes her head, slowly at first, then with a quick certainty. “Not if it was a rape or something like that, no.”
“No, no.” The mere suggestion jars me. Though I’ve long known I don’t owe Ricky a damn thing, a fierce and unexpected loyalty rises up in me at this prompting. This I do owe Ricky. I will not let his daughter believe, even for a moment, that she was conceived in violence. I try to back down to a more even tone of voice. “It was a domino effect—that’s all I meant. The crime, and then I got stuck in the Cathouse, and I’d left my birth control pills behind. Events spiraled out of control, and I didn’t see it coming. But Ricky wasn’t a rapist. Ricky was the opposite of a rapist.”
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