Inside These Walls

by Rebecca Coleman

  Ricky nodded to Mr. Choi, who nodded back but looked at him a moment too long, as though suspecting something was amiss. We scattered across the store like ordinary shoppers; I followed Forrest back toward the ice freezer. At first it looked as though the plan would not pan out. Several other customers milled around inside, and Forrest was beginning to look uneasy. But convenience stores have a way of emptying suddenly, and then there we all were, staggered around the place with snacks in our hands when the abrupt silence descended, because Ricky had a gun pointed in Mr. Choi’s face.

  Now, Ricky had worked at this store on and off for several years, and I knew Mr. Choi and his family on a friendly basis. I knew this wasn’t his first holdup, and the calm and smoothness in his motions—opening the register, unlocking the drawer into which they slid the large bills—lulled me into believing he somehow knew this would all end peacefully. His daughter, Eun Hee, was already in the back room, and now Chris was forcing Mimi, the mother back there with a knife. Liz stood at the front door, acting as a lookout, while Forrest milled around the store collecting snack foods and candy bars, heaping them in his arms. Even at the time I felt embarrassed by the sad desperation of this effort, knowing how disgusted and betrayed Mr. Choi must feel to be robbed by Ricky, how he must feel washed over with regret at ever having given him a second chance at his job. It was all unfolding very quickly—the last customer hadn’t left more than a minute ago. Ricky ordered Mr. Choi into the back room; the older man hesitated, his hands at the edge of the counter, and I saw a shadow of dread pass over his face. It struck me that Ricky must have jammed the silent alarm during his earlier shift, and Mr. Choi was just now realizing it. Another shout, a wave of the gun in his face, and he cooperated. They were all in the back now.

  “Kira,” Ricky called, and I stepped forward. He scrambled over the counter, then pressed the gun’s cold steel into my hand. “Keep them cool,” he told me, jerking his head toward the back room.

  I shook my head and awkwardly tried to hand it back. The words wouldn’t come to my throat, but I didn’t understand this. In my time with Ricky I had watched him use drugs, seen him pocket small items in stores, suspected him of skimming from the cash register; years ago, when we were in confirmation class together, I had twice observed him in touchy-feely sex games with some of the other boys from the class, and had not reported them to Father George. I was used to being a passive observer of Ricky’s aberrant behavior, but he had never asked me to participate against my will. Not until now.

  “Just keep them in there,” he said impatiently. When I didn’t move, he prodded me toward the room with a hand between my shoulder blades, then grasped the back of my head in his hand, pulling on my hair—exactly the way Clinton used to—and growled in a menacing whisper. “Do it.”

  I nodded. It had been a few years since I felt my insides go dead this way, but now it came over me like winter comes over a forest, as if all along it had only been gone for a season. I walked to the back room and stood in the doorway, the gun held close to my body, pointed in the general direction of the family. Chris slid behind the counter, and he and Ricky began shoving money and boxes of cigarettes into paper shopping bags. I didn’t look at the family, only at the gun. The human beings were blurred shapes, black-haired and red-shirted, in the middle distance. The gun was stark and gleaming, thoroughly detailed. Even now, in my memory, I see it that way. A backdrop of mild color beyond the quivering, shiny steel—all its lines and angles, its weight that seemed too small. During the trial, when I referred to this, the prosecutor and the jury took it to mean I had dehumanized Mimi Choi. In fairness, that is probably true. I didn’t want to think about the people there and so my mind, I suppose, twisted that image like a camera lens turning out of focus. But even then I believed Ricky had no intention of killing the family. This was all a way to intimidate them for the duration of the robbery; surely it was, because Ricky knew these people, and aside from his irritation at his rate of pay, we bore them no ill will.

  Liz snapped the door’s deadbolt into place. At the sound of it my gaze darted toward her, and I saw her standing there looking out the windowed doors, her hair a frizzy, wavy blonde mass. To my right I heard whimpering, and now snapped my head in the opposite direction; it was Eun Hee, her bottom lip pulled down like a tragedy mask, revealing little white teeth like a small prairie animal’s. Beside her sat Mimi. Her real name was Mi-yung, but despite speaking limited English she let all the neighborhood kids call her by her Americanized name. She had one hand in a firm grip around her daughter’s upper arm. Mimi’s face was impassive, as if she wasn’t here at all. The Chois also had a son, Tommy, who was a couple of years younger than myself and Ricky, but he was not there. I remember thinking that Ricky must have planned it this way, knowing the wiry, agile young man wouldn’t be here. None of us liked Tommy—he resented his father and whined constantly about his job—but he would have made this much more difficult, for sure.

  “Take ’em out, Kira,” Ricky shouted suddenly. At first disbelief rushed through me, and then, inside myself, I reacted to the monstrousness of this demand with the flat refusal it deserved. Something squeezed inside my chest, and I aimed the pistol at the boxes stacked above the sink and fired. Mimi screamed, and Ricky popped his head up above the hot dog warmer to look at the scene before us. He didn’t like what he saw; I know, because he threw me an urgent, irritated look. “Do this for me,” he said, his voice pleading, but the words a crude and hacking blade. I turned then—half a turn of my body, almost imperceptible—and pointed the gun at him. Yet as soon as the barrel was pointed at him I knew I couldn’t do it. This man was my lover, the one who stroked the nape of my neck in dark movie theaters, the one who scooped up my cats and nuzzled his nose against their feral little faces. This was the man turning cartwheels on the beach; he was the tender boyfriend who held my head against his solid bare chest and waited out the panic my stepbrother had beaten into me. I could never have shot him, but he didn’t know that. His face went pale, and one of his palms flew up in half-surrender.

  “I love you,” he said.

  I started to cry. The tears began to flow automatically, as if at the flip of a switch. I wanted to curl onto the floor into a tiny ball, to wrap my arms over my head and rock and wait until all of this was over. But then there came a rush from behind me, and Chris reached around me and tried to grab the gun from my hands. In the erupting chaos Mr. Choi stood and began to yell, urging his family up, shouting in a language I couldn’t understand. For a few seconds Chris and I struggled—I knew what he would do to the family, and didn’t want to hand over the gun. But he was much stronger, and he wrested it away. Without a moment’s hesitation he aimed and fired—five shots, one after the other, the sound of each one echoing in my skull with a deafening bang. Mr. Choi fell backward with shocking momentum, as if he had run full-force into an invisible door.

  The small room fell into a sudden, icy silence, but out in the store Ricky was shouting for us to leave. I stepped out of the room, staggered sideways into the milk refrigerator, and felt my forearm gripped by someone’s hand. It was Forrest, pulling me toward the exit door. “We need to get out of here,” he said in a voice like a grunt. I stumbled after him, clinging to the sleeve of his jean jacket.

  And then we were out in the cool clear night, in the stirred, starlit airIn the distance I could make out the dark and shadowed shapes of the mountains, and I felt the impulse to run toward them and not stop until all the breath was gone from me, until the wind had blown every shred of this terrible burden from my shoulders. But that was never to be.

  * * *

  When my hand recovered from the previous letter I wrote the next one to Karen, cribbing out the rest of what I remembered. I set them both aside to mail to her, then used my one remaining stamp to send a note to Annemarie apologizing for the way I revealed the news to her, all while trying to explain the frustration of wanting to protect her from the upsetting facts. Whether she will understand is some
thing I can’t predict, and what’s more, my gut is twisting with the growing sense that I should have been honest with her from the beginning. Still vivid are the memories of how quickly my own family abandoned me when I went to prison—how every aunt and uncle, every cousin, and even my stepfather recoiled from me as Forrest’s testimony about my relationship with Ricky came to light. And that was only the beginning, because as I live out my life inside these walls, the Clara Mattingly known to the world is nothing more than Ricky’s weak-willed sidekick. To distance myself from him at every opportunity has been ingrained in me to the level of instinct, and when Annemarie appeared, I couldn’t overcome that for the sake of simple, revolutionary honesty.

  Later that day the cart clatters through the cellblock with all our canteen boxes stacked onto it. “Canteen’s here,” I say, giving Penelope’s shoulder a shake through her blanket. Though it’s five in the evening she’s lying in bed with the covers pulled up to the top of her head, revealing only an inch or two of mussed hair. Her job starts a half-hour earlier than mine, and when I returned from the workshop she was already back and asleep in bed. She murmurs unhappily at my rousing her. I unpack the box delivered to me. I find moleskin for my socks, packets of aspirin for my increasingly achy joints, snacks, golf pencils and paper and, of course, a new book of stamps. But as I scan over my canteen receipt, I notice something strange. My account balance is much too high—by a hundred dollars at least.

  I frown and wonder at the mistake as I begin to unpack my order. But when I drop the box of golf pencils and it clatters against the floor, Penelope cowers and moans beneath the blanket.

  “Too loud,” she mumbles miserably.

  I look at her in surprise. “Do you have a headache?”

  She doesn’t reply. I move closer, and she peeks out above the sheet, squinting. In the shadows beneath the bunk I can see puffy discoloration around her eye. Obviously she’s been punched, and in spite of my hardened feelings it’s impossible not to feel a wave of sympathy for her. She lets out a muffled sob, and in an instant I’m sitting beside her, smoothing back her hair from her injured eye. “Aw, honey,” I whisper, and make a few shushing noises. “Looks like you had a bad day.”

  She’s sniveling, her face pressed into the pillow, making snotty gasping sounds. “My—head—hurts,” she cries.

  “Should I ask what happened?”

  “She hit me when I was folding uniforms. Big Mexican girl.” Her voice sounds baleful and despairing. I rub her back in circles, but she winces and shrugs off my hand. “Ouch.”

  “I’m sorry. Is your back hurt, too?”

  Penelope rolls over further and pulls up the back of her uniform shirt. From below her shoulder blade to the top of her left shoulder are four angry, dappled red streaks—the mark of someone’s fingernails. Somebody grabbed her, got a grip on her skin, and didn’t let go of her easilywhen she pulled away. The index finger broke the skin, and the rest are superficial but ugly. I wince sympathetically. “Did you go to the clinic?”

  “They gave me ointment.”

  “Did you put any on?”

  “No. I can’t reach back there.”

  I find the tube of ointment on the desk and squeeze a dollop onto my finger, then carefully apply it to her back. Gradually, as I rub it in, her muscles relax. Her skin is soft, though firmed by the elasticity of youth, and I think I can see the shadow of a bikini top in its changing tones. “You know, my last cellmate was in her fifties,” I tell her, keeping my voice low and soothing, “and the only moisturizer she would use was Vaseline. When she broke her arm I had to be the one to rub the Vaseline into her hands. Have you ever used it?”

  “Uh-huh. It’s sticky.”

  “Yeah, it feels a lot like this ointment. Wouldn’t be my choice as a hand lotion. At least you’re not asking me to coat you in it.”

  She offers a brittle, tentative smile. “Back home I have a whole shelf of ones from Bath and Body Works. Maybe I can ask my brother to bring one of them in.”

  “They won’t let you.”

  “It’s just lotion.”

  “They’re strict.”

  “Don’t they ease up after you’ve been here for a while?”

  “No.”

  She exhales a shaky sigh. “I was standing there folding shirts and the woman just lunged at me from behind. I didn’t do anything to her. I don’t even know who she is. She said I looked at her. What does that even mean?”

  I lay my hand on the back of her head comfortingly and stroke her hair. It’s very soft, not at all coarse like Janny’s, and I flash back to the afternoons sitting beside my mother as she rested in bed, during her first round of radiation therapy. Her hair was blond and similarly soft, like the fur of my oldest teddy bear. It’s the same motion here, the same quiet feeling.

  “Something like that happened to me when I had that job,” I tell her. “I wasn’t as new as you, though. I’d been here for a year. One of my coworkers was making comments about the dirty laundry, and I laughed. Another woman heard me and thought I was laughing at her. She shoved me into a wall. Kneed me in the stomach.”

  “Ow,” Penelope says.

  “It wasn’t that bad. You have to learn to keep your head down.” I pat the back of her head meaningfully. “Be aware of your expression. If anyone thinks you look cocky, they’ll be quick to wipe it off your face.”

  “I don’t want to be here. I don’t belong here.”

  “Well, maybe you won’t be convicted, and then you’ll go home. But in the meantime, try to do the things that make it easier on yourself. Eyes open, head down.”

  “Eyes open, head down,” she repeats.

  I give her a reassuring pat on the shoulder and return to unpacking my canteen supplies. In the box where I store my paper and pencils, my unopened canteen statement from last week is tucked into the side. I rarely open them because my paycheck is reliable and I can keep track of the numbers in my head with good accuracy, but this time I tear it open and look at my deposits. There it is, a hundred and ten dollars, put in just a few days ago. I scan the line to the Depositor column, and my heart stutters at the two printed words: Hayes, Forrest.

  “Oh, goodness,” I say aloud.

  Penelope sits up slowly. “What is it?”

  “Someone added money to my canteen account.”

  “Yeah, my mom did that for mine. She maxed it out.”

  She rubs her arm, gazing up with vague, groggy interest at her unopened box on the desk. I fold the statement carefully and slip it back into its envelope. Perhaps this is a goodwill gift on Forrest’s part, a way to say he’s sorry for the past twenty-five years of my life. If that’s what it is, I’ll take it. But I can’t help but wonder if it’s something more.

  I’d call him, but I don’t have his number. Write him, but I don’t have his address. I wish he had given me one or the other, but I didn’t ask. It never occurred to me that there would be a need.

  “I’m going to skip chow hall tonight,” Penelope says. “I have snacks and stuff now.”

  “You have to go. The last thing you want is for them to think you’re scared.”

  “But I am scared.”

  “Mind over matter,” I tell her, and then the sound of the dinner buzzer sends the cellblock into a clamor.

  * * *

  In the morning I coax Penelope out of bed, hand her a pair of fresh socks as she dresses sluggishly, take the brush from her and fix her hair while she stands before the mirror. The skin around her eye looks both smudged and inflamed, and her gaze is recalcitrant and woozy. I suspect she has a concussion, but as long as she’s able to stand upright they won’t do anything for that, anyway. As I let my hands drop to rest on her shoulders, I feel like she should have a hair bow to straighten or a Peter Pan collar to smooth. “Go back in there with your chin up,” I tell her.

  “You told me to keep my head down.”

  “I meant in spirit. If you hide in here all day, they’ll know you’re afraid. Don’t be afraid. Be indi
fferent.”

  “How can you be indifferent to being attacked?”

  Still standing behind her, I hold out my forearm for her viewing, turned so she can see the Frankenstein stitching still puffed and pink. “It’s a means to an end.”

  “That looks like it hurt.”

  “Well, we’re all in here because we hurt other people. I try to keep my own pain in perspective that way.”

  She hesitates. “I didn’t hurt anybody.”

  “Let’s hope you can convince the jury of that.”

  “I didn’t. Just between you and me, I didn’t.”

  “Okay, well, when you’re at work here, you don’t want to send the message that you’re not the least bit dangerous. All right? Save that for court.”

  I give her a meaningful look in the mirror, and she grins brokenly and says, “Bitch, I’m going to break your face if you look at me like that again.”

  “Atta girl.”

  The C.O. comes to collect her, and as the cell door clangs shut I sit on her bed and exhale a slow sigh through my nose. I sensed exactly what was going on —that urge to lay out the truth, unburden her soul, and know that she is heard. Until a person has felt nearly crushed beneath the weight of a secret, it’s almost impossible to understand how powerful is the urge to voice it. But I’ve been there, and I do. Yet my truth is I don’t want Penelope to confide in me. I don’t want to feel close to her, to comfort her or bond with her, because I want to save every little bit of that for my daughter. Ever since our last and most heated conversation I have felt helpless and full of anxiety, waiting for some small communication from her to signal whether we can keep moving forward. Surely she must have been prepared for me to be someone who makes mistakes, I think—but creating my own excuses doesn’t make me feel any less sick at heart. I’m bartering with God, always, in the back of my mind now. If I can hold my grandchild in my arms one day. Say its name. I want to start there, at the very place I failed with that child’s mother, and not allow my incarceration to excuse me from loving those people I have a right and an obligation to love. I want to live in the awe that resilient life presses forward in spite of the conspiring darkness. But at this moment, I just don’t know whether that’s true.