Inside These Walls

by Rebecca Coleman

  She looks away, toward the yellowed grass of the yard. “So I was conceived in the Cathouse? During the standoff?”

  “No. It was just before all that happened, and—not in the Cathouse.” I’m not about to tell her about the bathroom at Champion’s—that detail, at least, she’s not likely to dredge up. “We loved each other, Annemarie. In so many ways, he was a good man. He was generous, sometimes to a fault, and mostly kind. He was imaginative and playful and protective. For so many years I demonized him in my mind, because if I say, look, Ricky Rowan was a sweet and compassionate man—well, either I sound delusional, or else you’d presume I’m even worse than he was, if I have the gall to think well of him.”

  Her eyes narrow with suspicion. “A minute ago you said his parents did a poor job with him.”

  I throw one hand in the air helplessly. “Well, the results speak for themselves. Those last few days were so horrible, and they overshadowed everything else. But if you force me back to what it was like before that, before everything went awry.” I sigh, so heavily that it feels like setting down a stone. “He had his flaws, many of them, and in retrospect there was always a seed of something ruthless in him. Yet the Ricky I knew—I loved him. And he was worth loving, then.”

  She nods, but it’s only the slightest bob of her head. “So if the two of you hadn’t killed those people, I would never have been conceived.”

  “Probably not, no.” She’s very quiet. “I know how that sounds. I like to believe that your birth was an act of grace. On God’s part, I mean. That there’s nothing so dark that a bit of light can’t break through it.”

  “I don’t believe you thought that at the time.”

  I can’t reply to that. I’ve already told her enough lies. This is how I see her birth now, it’s true. But with the dowel in my mouth, with the paperwork and pen at my bedside, it hardly seemed like the gift of a merciful God. If God had a hand in it, it felt like I had been called into his office to be beaten with nightsticks and brass knuckles by his underbosses. I’d never even asked to hold her.

  “My priest asked me to pray for my youngest victim,” I finally say. “I knew he meant the daughter of the Choi family. And I didn’t kill her, but I was there, so I had a part in her death. I’ve always prayed for her, ever since that very day. But when I think of my youngest victim, I think of you. I abdicated my responsibility. I failed you. And always, it seemed too presumptuous for me even to pray for your welfare, as if I were doing something productive or helpful, and risk that I might take some satisfaction in that. I don’t deserve any satisfaction about my role in your life. Whatever the penalty is, and I’ll bet it’s a whopper, I deserve every lash of it.”

  Tears are rolling out from the corners of her eyes now, streaking down her cheeks. She still won’t meet my gaze. “I don’t know what to think about the fact that I’m only alive because both of you killed people. I wish you hadn’t told me that.”

  My throat tightens as if she’s reached out and grabbed it with a phantom hand. I swallow, then force myself to speak. “Ricky and I would have had children together someday, under different circumstances. You were destined for the world. He made mistakes, and I did, and your fate was strong enough to supersede that.”

  At last she looks at me, but there’s a flat resentment I see in her eyes, not the openness and hope I’ve come to picture when I think of her. She rolls her shoulders back, and again her father is conjured before me in the limber and acrobatic ease of her muscles.

  “I’m going to go home now,” she says. “Thank you for finishing the story.”

  But that’s not the end, I think, and a collage of memories bursts to the forefront of my mind. Ricky screaming into the phone in the midst of the standoff, the note he left behind that I only just received, the death of my mother. All these things are part of the story too; they are all threads in the web that caught me here and kept me from being a mother to her. Still, she doesn’t give me the chance to speak. She only nods and then slips over to speak to the nearest guard, ensuring that I can’t pursue or dissuade her. As though she needs protection from my presence, my words.

  Chapter Ten

  In the hours after Annemarie leaves, I sit at the desk in my cell and scrawl down the rest the story for Karen Shepard, writing down every sentence with urgency and obsessive haste, as though she might change her mind and lose interest if I wait even until the next morning. All these years I have felt affronted by the way the world viewed Ricky, knowing none of them presented him as he really was. First his trial, and then the movie, put forth the idea of him as a Charles Manson figure, with the rest of us as his glassy-eyed hangers-on.—Or else as some sort of groundbreaking bohemian artist who experienced a fascinating mental breakdown. Now that Annemarie knows, I want there to exist one version of his story, just one in the world, that contains the truth. It isn’t a flattering tale, or one that will make her feel proud of him. But it’s the life he led, and she should have a way to know it plainly.

  Dear Ms. Shepard,

  The morning after the episode behind Spectrum Supply I went in to work as usual. You will likely consider this strange. Indeed, when I awoke that morning, the prior evening was the first thing that sprang to my mind. However, if you look to my family history it is not difficult to understand my behavior. For ten years I had been finding ways to sit around a dinner table with the man who was raping me. In the odd psychology I had developed thanks to this, I found it soothing and even empowering to deny things. To sit at Thanksgiving dinner with Clinton and think about what he had done could be an emotional disaster, but to deny that it was happening at all erased his power to upset me and ruin what normalcy I could maintain in my life. So to apply this way of thinking to the night at Spectrum was really as simple as strapping on a pair of ice skates and skating out into a new rink. The scenery may be unfamiliar for a little while, but you are competent to glide across the ice.

  Thus I behaved at work as though nothing were unusual, and every time I began to hear the news from a co-worker’s radio I got up and filed papers or paid a visit to the coffee machine or something of that nature. Then, around lunchtime, Susie called me again. I told her I was at work—personal calls were highly discouraged—and she insisted that I call her from a pay phone on my lunch hour. I could tell from her uneven voice that she was quite upset. Not long after that I took lunch, because this could not be avoided, and made a call to her from the phone outside the Wells Fargo on the corner. We had pay phones in the lobby downstairs, so it’s clear from my actions that I suspected this call was one I could not risk anyone in my office overhearing. On some level I knew that before I even picked up the phone.

  Once I had Susie on the phone, she started to cry. She told me she had been having intercourse with Clinton a few days earlier and he had called her by my name. Susie said she had suspected for some time that “there was something funny there,” as she put it, and was now begging me to tell her if her suspicions were correct. I remember looking up at the street then, at all the cars whizzing past and the old women pushing home bags of groceries in their squeaky metal shopping carts, and feeling both bewildered and resentful. I had gone out of my way to avoid having any involvement in Susie and Clinton’s relationship—I had broken a bottle over his head, for goodness sakes. If I said anything to her now, all that effort would be ruined, and their poor little son’s family would be broken because of me. It wasn’t fair for her to ask me to be part of that.

  “No,” I told her. “I have no idea why he would do that.” I told her maybe he was concerned over a family matter and so the signals in his mind had gotten jumbled.

  “Are you sure?” she asked, and I know she only wanted the reassurance, but of course then I had to deny it again. And once I had convinced her, she sounded overwhelmingly relieved. Then she grew apologetic. “I’m sorry I even asked you about something so disgusting,” she said, and laughed. “I’m embarrassed now.” I got off the phone quickly, because I suddenly knew I was going
to break down if I spoke to her any longer.

  I took the rest of my lunch hour and then went back to work, but I wasn’t doing well. For the first time in more than three years there, I left early and drove to get Ricky from work, as his car had two bare tires and he couldn’t afford to replace them. All of this would later be used against me as evidence that I had no remorse for the previous evening, that I had planned what would happen later at the Circle K, etc. Susie would say that I’d spoken with her, but neither of us cared to offer the factual details of that conversation.

  Because I was so early to pick up Ricky, I sat in the car in front of the Circle K for a long time, thinking about the events of the past day, and for that matter the past ten years. I had on a lot of eye makeup and I had to be careful to keep it intact, so I turned over my thoughts very carefully, as if dancing on an injured ankle. For the first time since the afternoon in the laundry room, I began feeling really angry at Clinton. How could he be so stupid as to utter my name to his wife? And how it disgusted me, to realize that even after all this time he was still thinking of me in that way. A fury was building up inside me—a desire, even a conviction, to confront him about what he had done. I wanted to show up on his doorstep and shout all my accusations at his face. As angry as I was, I didn’t care right then about how it would affect Susie and their son. I was just tired of lying about it, and of him getting away with it. I wanted him to face the reckoning for it.

  Then Ricky stepped out the door in his red and white uniform shirt and waved to me. He got in the car and slouched down low in the passenger seat beside me, groaning and rubbing his face with both hands, the way men do after a long and frustrating day at work. I needed to pick up Liz from the Del Monte cannery, so I began driving toward Auzerais Avenue, while Ricky unbuttoned his work shirt beside me. He tossed it in the back seat—he had on a white crewneck undershirt beneath it—and then he grabbed my right hand and tried to rub it against his crotch. I pulled away and told him to stop.

  “I need it,” he whined. At the beginning of our relationship Ricky had been very gentlemanly and deferential when it came to physical affection, but we had been together for several years at this point and he had relaxed quite a bit, to put it gently. I had gotten past most of my fear and inhibition, and except for a few remaining trigger points, functioned as a normal person in that way. Ordinarily what he had done would have been all right, but the insistence and abruptness that went along with it were very unwelcome in my current state. I started to cry a little, and he said, “Oh, hell, Clara. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not that,” I said, and then I began to argue with him. I didn’t say a word about the trip to Spectrum or the gun or what I had been pretending all day I wasn’t hearing on the news. I didn’t even tell him about my conversation with Susie. Instead I pulled into a vacant lot beside an abandoned dive bar, turned off the car, and began yelling at him—really yelling—about how he hadn’t taken me to the Chihuly exhibit at the Crocker Art Museum before it closed in September. It was a display of beautiful blown glass artwork; many times we had discussed making the drive to Sacramento to see it, but it hadn’t happened and now the exhibit was gone. I had been genuinely disappointed to miss it, but needless to say, Ricky was caught quite off-guard by my rage on the subject. After all, he had shot someone the day before. He was, at that moment, a fugitive from justice. Most likely he had spent the entire day breaking into a sweat every time a cop walked in to buy a cup of coffee, and unbeknownst to me he had only gone in to work that day because he had bigger plans for later. And now I was attacking him with my disappointment about glass art.

  I got out of the car and slammed the door. I yelled at him again through the open window, and then he got out too. The lot was sandy, with a couple of scraggly palm trees beyond the concrete and chain link, and a back seat from a van lay on its side not far from my car. On the wall of the adjacent building the word SOURCE was written in great graffitied bubble letters, rounded as balloons. Ricky walked halfway around the front of the car, asking me what my problem was. He tried to put his hands on my shoulders to calm me down, and I pushed him away, hard against his chest. We never fought like this. I think I wanted someone to see us and send the police. I wanted an easy way to force this situation to a head, to have him taken into custody without my being responsible or disloyal. But nobody came, and it was just the two of us standing there yelling at each other.

  The sun was beginning to set, and we were late now picking up Liz. A sudden silence fell between us. Ricky looked around and, seeing nobody, spoke to me in a calm voice. “Why don’t you come out and say what you’re really mad about?” I only stood there, breathing heavily through my nose, not answering. “Come on,” he said. And then he said something really nasty, something intended to provoke me. He smirked in a mean way. “Make it hurt,” he said.

  I’d never hit anyone in my life except for Clinton, but I slapped him across the face—backhanded him—hard enough that it made the tips of my fingers sting. That was the phrase I had often used in bed with him, in the beginning, when the wiring in my brain was still all wrong. He had never thrown those words back in my face this way. After I hit him I felt shocked at myself but also angry at him. “How’s that,” I said, like a statement. “You still haven’t answered,” he replied.

  “Tell me why I stay with you,” I said in a disgusted voice.

  “Because you have a soft heart for strays,” he said. I gave him a fed-up sigh that nearly spit in his face. He rubbed the side of his mouth where I’d hit him. “Thanks for letting me keep my balls.”

  Then we got back in the car, and I drove to the cannery, and we got Liz.

  * * *

  My right hand has knotted into one great cramped claw. I massage it with my left, trying to ease the muscles out of their frozen state, but the ache goes deep down to the bone. The story of that night races through my head, and I want to spill it all onto the paper right now, every word, before shame and regret and the fear of legal repercussions stifle the telling. But I don’t have the means. It will have to wait. Still, my memories keep flowing.

  We drove to a little diner after we picked up Liz from the cannery. Felicia’s, it was called. They had a meal the men liked called the Five Spot, which was four cheeseburgers and an order of skinny, greasy fries for five dollars, which was enough for two people to share. Chris and Forrest were already there when we arrived. I could see them through a window on the diner’s chromed side, sitting at a booth under the warm light that filled the place at every hour. When I was a little girl my mother bought me a French picture book called La Boite à Soleil, “a box of sun”. On its cover a smiling blonde girl knelt holding up a narrow, open box. The story was about a girl who catches a firefly, but as my mother read me the incomprehensible French words in her lovely voice, I liked to imagine a more magical storyline in which the girl captures real sunlight in a wooden box and can peek in to see it at any time. Felicia’s Diner always made me think of that story, because of the cheery yellow light held in that narrow building, and normally it was one of my favorite places to have dinner with our friends. That night, though, I felt numb. I felt raped. Everything I had set up so nicely was decaying around me like rotting vegetation—my friendship with Susie, my romance with Ricky, and now even my happy memories of dinner at Felicia’s. I didn’t think about large-scale things like you’re going to send your stepbrother to jail or last night your boyfriend killed a man. Instead my mind latched onto upsetting but manageable portions of the crisis and gnawed on them like bones. I thought, Susie may never let me see my nephew again. She may never let my mother see her grandson. I thought, How could Ricky use those words to spite me, and felt bitter gall at how I could ever be tender and intimate with him again, knowing he had it in his heart to mock me with that phrase. The fact that our real concerns were much larger was beyond my ability to grasp.

  I sat at the end of a booth beside Ricky, with Liz across from me glancing over a menu with a pondering, purs
ed-mouth expression, but my mind was far away from this gathering, fluttering like a moth in too many directions. Make it hurt, I kept hearing in my mind—in my own voice, drenched in the shame and vulnerability of the way I had said it to him long ago. At the time I hadn’t realized how naked I was before him, revealing not only my skin but also the fact that some dark aroused corner of my mind was in bed with Clinton, some gargoyle-filled corridor that had learned to draw pleasure from it. It humiliated me then, but never more so than now, when this murderer would stand before me and remind me that he found my sexual tastes weird and repugnant. That there were some things that made even Ricky Rowan shiver and say no.

  The table conversation fell on my ears in bits and snatches. The men’s voices were low and furtive. We were heading back to the Circle K, there were plans for a robbery, but none of this had anything to do with me. In my mind I was already breaking up with Ricky, and the rest of them could go to hell as far as I was concerned. Food arrived. I sipped my orange soda, and I watched as if from a great distance as Chris and Forrest stuffed cheeseburgers into their mouths. Ricky eased back against the booth and draped his arm behind me, rubbing my back in a reassuring, proprietary way. I didn’t look at him even once.

  A little past eight-thirty we paid our tab and got ready to leave. Chris and Ricky stopped at the bathroom, and when they came out Ricky was rubbing his nose in the way I knew meant he and Chris had just gotten high again, but I didn’t care anymore. Back in the car, Ricky slid into the passenger seat beside me and the other three climbed into the back, Liz perched on Chris’s lap. “Tally-ho, to the store,” Ricky said, and only then did I process the fact that I would be driving all of them on this excursion. A mean little pearl formed inside me then, and I had the flash of an idea to drive them all there, drop them off, and then speed away, abandoning every one of them to their silly plan. And that’s what I intended to do, casting on Ricky a hard, perhaps even maniacal smile as I pulled into an empty space in front of the store. Out you go, I wanted to say to him, and my foot itched to floor the gas pedal. But Ricky reached over and cut the engine, then pocketed my keys. “Everybody’s going in,” he said, and when they all stood on the sidewalk and looked at me impatiently, I followed. As ridiculous as it sounds now, I was afraid of creating a scene.