Inside These Walls

by Rebecca Coleman

  I dance until I hear the thud of doors and the clank of chains, and know that the laundry workers are heading back now. Even as I sit down on Penelope’s bed and untie the ribbons, in my mind I am still dancing. Today is not like any other day I have ever lived. It’s an entirely new kind of day, when the surprise that arrives is not from the past but from the future. I am here to meet the person I will become, and welcome her, because she is good.

  * * *

  The pointe shoes offer a welcome distraction in the week that follows. Saturday is Annemarie’s wedding, and even though I can’t attend, I’m dreading the day’s arrival. More than anything else, anything in the world, I want her to reach out and reconnect with me. To forgive me for being such a disappointment, such a coward when my back was to the wall—and yet I can’t blame her even a little. I didn’t want to hurt her with the truth, no, but mostly it was pride. I didn’t want her to feel disappointed with me.

  On that Saturday Forrest arrives with a thin envelope of photos, just like Annemarie did many weeks earlier. But he apologizes for them right away. “Turns out they don’t let you bring much in,” he explains. “Not gifts, not food, not flowers. I don’t remember the rules being so strict way back when.”

  “They seem to change them every few weeks. They threw out all my cassette tapes a while ago. But they let in the package you sent me, which was a very nice surprise.” I smile at him. “Thank you.”

  His forehead creases up. “Yeah, I called and they said I had to fill out some special form. Did they fit?”

  “Yes. I love them. You have no idea. I really wanted pointe shoes. I never imagined I would get them.”

  Now he smiles. I try to put my finger on how to describe the element I like in that grin, and I’m surprised by the word that comes to me. Sexy. I can’t tell whether that’s a reasonable thought or if it’s simply been much too long since I saw a man who isn’t wearing a C.O. uniform.

  He goes to the vending machine and buys us two cans of soda. It’s been ages since I had a Coke. They used to sell them in the canteen, but don’t anymore. We sit at a table, and he sets down the envelope. “How’re things with the new cellmate?” he asks.

  “All right, I guess.” I crack open my can of soda carefully, as if I may have forgotten how to do it right. I lower my voice to expand on my comment. “I’m trying to get to know her without getting myself shanked by all the other women who want to get to know her.”

  “Maybe it’s better to leave her alone, then.”

  I shrug and drink from the can. The fizziness is like static on my tongue. I desperately want to tell him the truth, all the truth—that there’s some chance I might get out of here, which is an immeasurably important thing for him to know. But also how torn I feel about the moral conflict beneath it all. How much I loathe seeking her trust only so I can gain from it, even as that proves to me that I still have the will to fight for a better life. And I can’t say a word about any of it. Any chance of a rumor getting out is too high a risk.

  I brush a finger toward the envelope. “What did you bring pictures of?”

  “Oh, my house and kids and stuff.” He shakes them into his hand and flips through them with embarrassed haste. The house is a Spanish-style place with a red tile roof, the girls smiling, healthy brunettes who look like their father. There are several photos of a black and white cat, its eyes bright and pale in the camera’s flash. “That’s José. I thought you’d get a kick out of seeing him.”

  “He’s pretty. I don’t think I’ve ever met a cat named José.”

  “It’s short for José Cuervo, like the tequila.” He wraps both hands around his Coke can. “I picked him up from a box outside the grocery store not long after my wife left. Told myself it was better to get a kitten than a drinking problem. So he’s the bottle of tequila I never bought.”

  I grin. “Smart move.”

  “You said yours is named Clementine, right?”

  “Yes, but she’s not really mine. She’s a feral cat they keep around as a mouser. The rest of the inmates call her Frankfurter.”

  He nods and glances around to take stock of who may be listening. The room is crowded today, with only a couple of guards, both hovering near known gang members. “How do you do it?” he asks, and he drops his voice down very low. “Day after day.”

  “I don’t have a choice.”

  “But I knew you before this. You were a regular person. A sweet girl.” He tips his head, his gaze respectful but searching. “The way you were then—I would have thought you wouldn’t make it two years.”

  “I’m tougher than I thought I was.”

  “Are they super-protective in here, when it’s women?”

  I answer with an abrupt chuckle. “No.” I scan the room myself, then lean in closer and pull the collar of my blue top aside to show the small gouge at my neck; I gesture to the fading red line down my arm, still showing the thinner pink marks of the stitches. “I have all kinds of interesting scars. Did you notice both of my canines are broken?”

  “I’m sorry.” A dullness washes over his gaze. “Clara. Bad things happened to me when I was in jail.”

  I nod. He locks eyes with me, infusing the look with deliberate meaning, but I’ve already guessed what he meant. “Some things I don’t ever talk about,” he continues.

  “I know.”

  “Most people wouldn’t understand.”

  “Well, I’m pretty sure I do. You might be surprised how well I understand.”

  He presses his lips together.

  “Tell me about your house,” I say.

  He takes a nervous sip of his soda, and I can see that he’s working to switch gears in his mind. “It’s nice. I worked hard for it. Got a patio I built and a hot tub out back, and a built-in barbecue. It’s got three bedrooms, and I don’t know what I’ll do with the extra ones once the girls move out for good. Not ready to think about that yet, anyway.”

  “Turn one into a room for the grandkids.”

  He cracks a smile. “I’m forty-eight. I’m too young to be thinking about grandkids.”

  “How did you get to be forty-eight,” I muse. “Forrest Hayes. I feel like my twenty-three-year-old self is having a very strange dream.”

  Again he tips his head, his longish hair falling aside to show an ear scarred by a small healed piercing. His golden-tanned skin makes the green of his eyes stand out like jewels in desert sand. He reaches across the table to touch my jaw with his strong warm fingers, and, rising up from his seat, he leans in and kisses me. His lips are soft, and I feel the heat of his exhaled breath against my mouth. Then he sits and glances around, just as I do, to see if any of the C.O.s have noticed.

  “There,” he says. “Weirdest dream ever.”

  “I’ll say.”

  “Ricky’s going to be mad,” he jokes.

  “Ricky’s dead,” I say.

  He meets my eye with a nervous gleam in his own, and then, his mouth twisting into a wicked grin, utters a low, delicious laugh. And I have to laugh, too. These things that are happening right now, it’s as if Time is standing on the other side of a wall, tossing us the materials to build a future. Now it’s up to me to make it possible. And I have to. We’ve had enough heartbreak, both of us.

  * * *

  The visit from Forrest enables me to push through the day. Through the two-o’clock mark, when I know the wedding is beginning, and the three o’clock mark, when I imagine they’re all bustling out of the church in a joyous, exuberant crowd. Guests congratulating the new couple in a shower of rice and good wishes, children running about in satin dresses and tiny creased suit pants, the chaos of a parking lot, the older folks smiling and walking slowly, holding hands, reminded of how it feels to be young. Around four, when the first dances must be taking place, I think about how Ricky would have looked in a tuxedo, grinning and swirling his daughter around the dance floor. For the first time I allow myself the indulgence of imagining him as a father. He would have been the fun type of dad, I’m
sure—lackadaisical about discipline and housework, never willing to be the bad guy. All horseplay and second bowls of ice cream and late summer evenings at free concerts in the park, dancing among the fireflies. He would have been a difficult partner with whom to raise a child. But he would have loved her. With all his wild heart, he would have loved her.

  I write Annemarie a short letter letting her know I’m thinking about her, praying for her, and wishing her well as her marriage begins. Every few days I’ve been sending these notes off to her, and if she wants me to stop it’s going to take a no-contact order to make me. I set it out on Monday morning to be collected by the mail staff, and I go to work.

  Our new project in the Braille workshop is a surprisingly compelling one. It’s a high school Biology textbook, complete with twenty-eight drawings of plants in cross-section, the life cycle of a frog, human cells, and other challenging things. I can hardly wait to delve into it. I was never very interested in science when I was in school, but the challenges of scientific illustration—capturing the essential truth, but beautifully—are a pure delight. The first couple of days consist of prep work. Transcribing the Table of Contents and copyright information, dividing up the chapters amongst ourselves, all seems to go by with exceptional slowness, and I spend all my idle time thinking about how I will approach my drawing of that human cell.

  But my work week is interrupted by a visit on Wednesday from Karen Shepherd, whom I knew had applied for a private interview. Those are allowed, although they’re rare; most people’s crimes aren’t that interesting. Over the years I’ve gotten countless notifications about these attempts, and I’ve declined every one of them. But for this one I’ve said yes.

  The room they’ve assigned to her is the same one used by Father Soriano. As soon as I step in I’m surprised by the woman seated in the pleather desk chair. I had pictured a high-cheekboned, chain-smoking New Yorker, but the woman who greets me is round-faced and very plump, with short, thin blond hair as light as mine. Her suit jacket doesn’t quite pull all the way over her ample breasts, and there’s a certain boyishness to her face, not the dark femininity I had expected. I sit across from her and wait as my wrists are unshackled, my ankle cuffed to the chair leg.

  The door closes, and I turn my head to look behind me. We’re alone. I’m sure the C.O. is standing right outside the door, but I’m so unused to being left alone with anyone other than my priest or lawyer. I rub my wrists and look at her with a gaze that no doubt conveys the confusion I feel right now.

  “Ms. Mattingly,” she begins. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, after all this time.” She extends her hand, but I don’t take it. It’s so ingrained, not to touch people in authority. After a moment she drops it and tries a different approach. “So, do you mind if I ask you a few questions? Maybe pick up where we left off in your last letter?”

  I nod.

  My uncertain silence seems to be making her uneasy. “Happy birthday, by the way,” she says. “I hope someone sang to you, at least.”

  Again I’m puzzled, but then realize she’s correct—my birthday was two days ago. I’m forty-eight now. I haven’t celebrated my birthday since I arrived here, but suddenly I feel a pang of regret that I overlooked it. “Thank you,” I say, and then add rather randomly, “This is the room where I meet with my priest.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes. It’s the confession room. Maybe that will loosen my tongue.” I give her a little spasm of a smile. “I’m a bit nervous.”

  A small line forms between her eyebrows. “Is there anything I can do to make you more comfortable?”

  “No, no. Interviewing…I just think it’ll feel like answering questions in court. And obviously I’m not very good at that.”

  She responds to that with a quick smile. “Well, let’s get started and you can tell me if you’d like to stop. So. You wrote to me about the first two crimes—Jeff Owen’s murder and that of the Choi family. But you said nothing about Father George or what happened at the rectory. So I have some questions—”

  “Your book is about Ricky. I was off by myself during most of that, so I wasn’t a very good witness to what he was doing.”

  “I want to hear it from your perspective. It can corroborate or even discredit the accounts of the others. And I know you feel the other accounts haven’t always been accurate.”

  I run my tongue across the inside of my lip and fold my hands in front of me. I think back to the rectory. I remember the silver gleam of the car door slamming in the moonlight, the dark tangle of trees arching over the long, narrow flight of concrete stairs, the crunch of leaves beneath our feet as we climbed toward the building. The bright light in the front room that shone out and pushed back the darkness in a friendly way, which would have made the place look warm and welcoming if we had been there for any good purpose.

  “We got to the rectory around two in the morning. We’d all worn—” I feel my breath catch, and clear my throat. “We had cheap Halloween masks that Chris and Ricky stopped at the 24-hour pharmacy to buy. The type that are thin plastic and have a piece of elastic to hold them to your head. It was a gamble. Father George was the only one who really knew any of us. He’d recognize us no matter what, but Ricky thought we should have masks in case someone else came to the door. But it turned out to be Father George who came. The other two priests who were staying there were out.”

  “And Ricky wore some kind of Star Wars mask, correct?”

  I nodded. “He had Han Solo, and Chris was Darth Vader. I can’t remember what Forrest and Liz had, because I don’t think they used theirs, but they were movie or TV characters. I was Strawberry Shortcake. I felt very numb. Like... like Rhoda the android. From the TV show.” I look down at the table. “In the car Ricky kissed me before we went in. Hard. Then we put on the masks and went to the door. Father George opened it a crack and frowned, and he started to close it, but then Chris shouldered it open. They grabbed him and taped his hands behind his back, and Ricky demanded to know where he kept his money. And Father George said, ’Richard Rowan Junior, I know that’s you. Shame on you,’ and told him to let him go. But then Chris put tape over his mouth, and Ricky just started tearing around the place, throwing things around and heading toward the back where the bedrooms were. He knew the layout from the times he had been there to do odd jobs. Liz and Forrest were outside, acting as lookouts. Chris jerked Father George down into a chair and started winding tape around it. And he—the priest—he sat there glaring at me, and I knew he knew who I was.”

  Karen adjusts the tape recorder. “Did you still go to church regularly?”

  “Not since I got back from art school, but he still knew me, and he knew Ricky and I were together. My mother talked to him every week. He was making me feel so uncomfortable that I told Chris I was going outside, but right then Ricky called for Chris, and Chris handed me the gun and went down the hallway. So then it was just us two. Me and Father George.”

  Karen nods.

  “It was very cold in there,” I go on. “That barn-like cold. Drafty. I had the gun at my side. I wasn’t pointing it at him. He kept staring at me with his face getting redder and redder, like he believed I was betraying him. It made me feel angry—” I take a deep breath and exhale it slowly. “Angry, because I began to think, ’So you feel betrayed, do you? Doesn’t feel so good, does it?’ I started remembering all those times on my knees in the confessional, telling him what Clinton was doing to me—by name, telling him, my stepbrother, Clinton—and how he never lifted a finger to help me. Never said a word to anyone. It filled me with so much rage. And still he had the nerve to sit there and look at me like I owed it to him to treat him more nicely. I thought, ’You asshole’—I really did, and I didn’t use that kind of language then—’You asshole, I could shoot you in the face right now and you would absolutely have it coming.’

  “So I pushed up my Strawberry Shortcake mask. I wanted him to see me, and look me in the eye, so he could see I was the one in charge now and I had
n’t forgotten about him abandoning me. I took a few steps closer to him, and he just kept staring and scowling. When I was as close as I dared to get, I said, ’I hope you’re sorry.’ And he didn’t nod or give any indication that way, and that made me nervous, because I had thought a man in his position would say anything to get out of it, and I really wanted to hear him apologize. I said, ‘I’m going to pull off that tape, and you’re going to say you’re sorry.’

  “So I did, and as soon as I ripped it off I said, ‘Tell me why you did nothing. Nothing.’ By then I’d worked myself up and was starting to cry. I didn’t want to be there, and I didn’t feel as strong as I wanted him to think I felt. But he just said, ‘I don’t have to answer to you. Does your mother know where you are?’ I held up the gun to his face and said, ‘Say you’re sorry. Say it. Say you’re sorry.’ It was like twisting down something in my gut, a machine I was winding tighter and tighter. He just glared at me, stared me down, and then it got so tight I couldn’t take it anymore and I fired. I shot him in the face.”

  Karen looks at me steadily. Except for the soft hiss of the air-conditioning, the room is silent. “How did you feel right after?”

  “I felt relief. And then, a second later, it felt like the most dreadful thing imaginable.”

  “Immediate regret, you mean?”

  “Not exactly regret. Dread. I knew I’d done something awful and couldn’t ever take it back, and I hadn’t really meant to do it. There was all this anger coursing through me, but all the way up until the last second I thought I was in control. I thought he had to apologize, because the alternative should obviously be terrifying to him. I let my emotions carry me along because I thought I knew how it would end. But I didn’t.”

  She nods and writes something on her yellow pad. Her pen scratches against the paper. After a moment she says, “Were you aware of what he had done to your stepbrother previously? You haven’t mentioned it.”

  I answer with a perplexed look. “What he had done? What do you mean?”