Inside These Walls
There is only one day, and I live it over and over…
For Clara Mattingly, routine is the key to enduring the endless weeks, months and years of a life sentence in a women’s prison. The convicted murderer never looks back at who she once was—a shy young art student whose life took a sudden tragic turn. And she allows herself no hope for a better future. Survival is a day-to-day game. But when a surprise visitor shows up one day, Clara finds that in an instant everything has changed. Now she must account for the life she has led—its beauty as well as its brutality—and face the truth behind the terrible secret she has kept to herself all these years.
Critically acclaimed author Rebecca Coleman brings you the haunting story of a woman’s deepest passions, darkest regrets and her unforgettable and emotional journey toward redemption.
Rebecca Coleman
To Stephanie
My mother used to drive me to ballet lessons in her white Ford Torino, her delicate fingers light on the wheel, rolling slowly down the clean streets of San Jose as I sat beside her in my leotard and pink tights. Often the driver in front of us would glance in his mirror and slow down, mistaking us for a police car. “Come on, sport,” she would mutter under her breath, imitating my father, even long after he died. I found it comforting, the way she kept his presence alive in ephemeral but steady ways, and I felt as though he could still protect me. It was startling to discover that wasn’t true, but for a while it gave me comfort.
The lessons began when I was four, ended abruptly at age thirteen, and began again much later, when I was forty-three years old. At that age I practiced alone, without a mirror, without a real barre, because I had no choice—but the music was the same as ever, Beethoven and Brahms selections from
Afternoon Classics
on NPR. I am very, very good at going deep inside my mind and, even with my eyes open, imagining my surroundings as they should be rather than as they are. Sometimes, when I practice, I imagine myself as a six-year-old in the high-ceilinged studio with the long mirrored wall and the record player in one corner. Back then I was just Clara and my name meant nothing. I could even say the entire thing,
Clara Mattingly
, and no flicker of recognition or shock would pass through the gaze that rested on me. I remember how small and light my body felt then, a wonderful sealed machine, an egg. I remember the way the rain lashed the tall old windows, whipped the trees outside, but couldn’t touch the airy sanctuary filled with piano music and the warmth of a dozen energetic small bodies. Other times I let myself be older, even my own age, which is forty-seven; I imagine I am dancing with a partner, a strong and muscular man with capable, gentle hands and an empty space where his face should be.
In the four years since I began to practice again, I cherish what the work has done to my body. Though I don’t have pointe shoes, the muscles in my legs are strong and lean now. There is a dignity to the way my spine holds up my head and shoulders, which is very important, and when my feet rest against the earth, each toe feels like a separate soldier, ready to help me sprint in any direction. After everything my body has been through—chucked through the maze of my life, striking every wall and obstacle along the way—at last it feels like my own. It’s evidence I wear outwardly that a person can change, she can grow stronger and better, carry herself taller. Even if no one else cares, I do. I care every day.
The orange tabby cat slips through the skinny gap low down below the razor wire—a daily miracle. Her eyes lock with mine. I sink down to my haunches in the shadow of the guard tower and hold out the one-third slice of bologna I’ve saved in the pocket of my uniform, folded into a paper napkin. She pads straight toward me, leaving little dust-prints across the yard. When she reaches me she examines it, sniffing curiously like a connoisseur before nibbling. Only after she accepts it do I begin to pet her, one questioning pat first, then big, long, affectionate strokes down her back. “Oh, yes, what a girl, what a girl,” I say in my grandmother voice. She arches and purrs, and I am pleased. I never take anything I haven’t earned.
Her name is Clementine. I named her for the color of her fur, although I used to have a kitten by the same name who was gray and white, back before. The other prisoners call her Frankfurter, and I don’t know why. But I’ve long since stopped caring why they do what they do. They leave me alone because of who my cellmate is, and that’s all the truce I need.
The new guard is watching me. She is some distance off, in the haze of the midday heat, and her gaze is frank and bare. I know what she is thinking: that I don’t look the way she expected. Not like the actress who played me in the movie, and not even like my own old photographs. In all of those, the smeary newsprint ones from more than two decades ago, my hair is in a sort of blonde pixie cut, but with long, smooth bangs. It was 1984, after all, and back then you either wore it long and feathered at the sides or you cut it short if you wanted to be taken seriously at the office. Now I don’t really worry about how I’m perceived around the office, so I just tie it back into a ponytail and have them chop it above my shoulders when it gets too difficult to comb. And there are other differences, too. When those photos were taken, I didn’t need glasses yet. I hadn’t yet had a baby, so my hips were still those of a young girl. I was twenty-three, and though I wasn’t exactly a wide-eyed naif, expressions still tended to pop onto my face like some sort of cartoon character. You unlearn that after a while, here. You learn instead to keep it flat.
Clementine finishes the bologna, and I rise up from my crouch, feeling it a little bit in my knees. The sun is harsh and direct. This is Imperial County, where California bumps up against Arizona and Mexico, creating a great flat expanse of land offered up to the sun like one of those mirrored tanning reflectors my mother used to bring with her to the pool. I didn’t grow up here. My family lived in San Jose, far to the north. But this is where I’ll be buried, over in the gated-off part of the yard with the aged felons and the suicides, the stillborn babies and all the unclaimed.
The buzzer sounds, and we form up to return to our cells for the hour until dinner. And then there’s a nice surprise. A letter. I know who it’s from without looking at the return address and slip it from the already-torn envelope.
Dear Clara,
Well I am a grandfather now. Doesn’t that make me feel old. Ha, ha. My daughter had her baby. They named him Keith Robert Davidson Jr. I went to see him and he is good.
On Friday I went to the dragway to see the race. Spencer Massey signed my program. It was a lot of fun and I promise I didn’t drink too much afterward, only two.
Well, I guess that’s all. How are things there? How is your job making books for the blind people? I saw a blind girl with a cane at Walmart and I wanted to ask if she has any of those books and tell her I know the lady what makes them. But I was afraid I would scare her just being a strange person talking to her out of nowhere what she can’t see. So I did not ask her.
All my love,
Emory Pugh Jr.
P.S. ONE DAY AT A TIME
I smile, fold the letter along its creases and slide it back into the envelope. His letter from last week is on my shelf; I replace it with this one and throw the earlier one into the garbage. This is how it is here, living in the sweep of a single turn of the earth, never letting the evidence mount that time passes. For those with a release date, all their existence is in counting down the days, the hundreds or thousands, between now and then. For me there is only one day, and I live it over and over and over.
* * *
I used to work on braille transcriptions of textbooks every day, but now I mostly do the tactile drawings, which are raised versions of the maps and diagrams. It’s very specialized work. At the Braille shop I line up my instruments on the desk: foil, leather punch, tracing wheel, paper tortillion and a canister of toothpicks. I’m fortunate that they trust me with these tools, given what I did. But I had already been in for eight years when I began the Braille training, and at first it was only with the typewriter. So I earned it over time.
One of the guards, Officer Kerns, sidles up near me. “Morning, ballerina girl,” she says. It’s more jeering than fond, and I’d rather if she just called me by my number. “How’s your friend Emory?”
“He’s getting along.” There’s no need for her to ask me. They read my mail and discuss it amongst themselves.
“Good old Southern men,” she says, and moves on.
I sit down on my stool and get to work on the drawing. I’m working on a college art history textbook, which is certainly the most lovely assignment I’ve had. The curriculum developer has selected ten paintings, representative of different periods and styles, to be recreated as tactile art. Shirley, the Braille program director, chose me for the task due to my meticulousness and high level of skill. Right now I am working on the foil mock-up of Van Gogh’s
Starry Night
, the seventh among the ten. I modify the textures according to color—the blues and yellows, the sea-green—to give a sense of variety, and try to preserve a sense of the brushstrokes, sweep and motion. To determine if I’m doing well, I occasionally close my eyes, clear my mind and then reach out to touch my work, trying to experience it as someone who has never seen anything in the world, least of all this painting. Over time I have gotten better and better at finding the mistakes. It’s a skill, learning to be blind. I believe I have gotten quite good at it.
I take up a toothpick and get to work on a small house in the foreground, hashing every other strip along the roof to indicate the lighter blue. My dream—I think about this often at night, while falling asleep or trying to—is to recreate Degas’
Int
é
rieur
as a tactile drawing. It’s a painting of a woman slouched in her chair with her back to a man, who stands at the closed bedroom door in an attitude of tensed agitation, his hands pushed deep into his pockets. The shoulder of the woman’s chemise has slipped down. The room is dim but for a single overbright lamp in the center, illuminating an opened sewing box and the bed’s coverlet, which might be stained with blood. I try to imagine the parts I would accentuate. The man’s dark shadow, taller than himself, against the door; the woman’s vulnerable shoulder and strangely blurred eyes; the obscured map hung above the dresser, its streets reduced to a smear, a tangle. It would be difficult to capture all of this in foil, but I may try, and include it with the proof of the art history textbook in case they would like to use it. I can imagine a thousand copies of my handiwork spread across the world, with a thousand readers running their light fingertips across its hills and valleys, absorbing the story. My name would not be on it, of course, but most of them have probably heard of Clara Mattingly. Perhaps my name and this image will find each other in their minds, and somehow, they’ll know.
* * *
Most days, as I put on my special dancing socks and warm up before
Afternoon Classics
comes on, I listen to the brief news broadcast on NPR. I don’t have a television, but like everyone else in this place I am fascinated by crime and follow the latest tales of others’ mistakes out there in the world. For weeks I have been following the arrest of a young woman named Penelope Robbins, whose father, state Congressman Edwin Robbins, was shot in the back as he teed off at the country club. I can’t quite picture Penelope, but details about her life abound on every news broadcast. Nineteen years old, educated at Sacred Heart Country Day School, a conservative family, a strained relationship with her father due to an interracial relationship. I wonder how she feels about that—the details of her private family traumas trotted out to the media, turned into fodder for the merciless drumbeat of news reporting. Her connection to the shooting is hazy, but she’s been charged with obstruction of justice.
“I think she did it her own self,” my cellmate, Janny, declares as she sits on her bed, allowing me to plait her dark hair into a neat French braid. “Like in a
telenovela
. Come out from the trees, raise the gun. Close-up camera, scary church music,
bang
.”
I laugh a little. “I don’t think you could get away with that on a golf course. All that open space, remember? Too obvious.”
“Maybe.” She runs her hand softly down her braid. “Is it straight?”
“I think so.” She stands and I examine my handiwork. Janny is fifty-four years old and her eyesight would probably be failing her at this point regardless of circumstance, but in any case she’s already blind. Ten years ago a fight in the yard ended badly for her, and she has been like this ever since. For a while they kept her in Medical Segregation, but eventually they got the idea to put her with me and free up her spot there. It was a good move for both of us. I take care of her, and the Latina women stopped trying to kill me at regular intervals.
“Looks good,” I tell her. “But there’s ketchup on your blouse.”
“Oh, no.”
“I’ll find you a clean one.”
I help her change, and soon the C.O. comes to collect us. Saturday evenings are always the same for me.
Afternoon Classics
, then dinner in the chow hall, followed by confession in the office wing. Janny goes ahead of me and always takes a long time. For a while, as I wait, I think about the Robbins shooting, and then my thoughts wander to the particularities of
Intérieur
—the sharp beard and ear tips on the man in the doorway
,
and how easy they would be to capture with a toothpick or tortillion, which is a soft-pointed stick of tightly rolled paper. The challenge is mainly in the light. I’m very unsure of how to convey illumination to a person who can’t sense light—and yet it is so important to the image. Her bared shoulder. His long left side disappearing into the shadow. Sometimes I am allowed to bring in Janny to test my drawings, but the fight that took her vision also left her a bit mentally slow, and when she praises my work I can’t always be sure she’s right.
At long last Janny comes out, wiping her eyes as always. Deep wrinkles score the sides of her face, and she has a long, noble nose and crisp cheekbones—an Aztec look. It makes her look particularly pitiful when she cries, as if only a very terrible thing could have brought her so low. She sits carefully in the chair beside me, fingering her rosary and murmuring in Spanish.
I pat her arm, then stand and step through the doorway. Father Soriano is a diminutive, olive-skinned man whose face calls to mind the boy from the
Karate Kid
movie, now several decades worse for wear. He has been here for five or six years, and I suspect he’s ready for a new assignment.
“Nice to see you, Clara,” he says. He makes the sign of the cross.
I sit in the chair across from him and cross myself. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been two weeks since my last confession.” I wait out a clamor in the hallway—an inmate shouting indignantly as she is hauled toward Administrative Segregation. “I’ve thought ill thoughts of other people, committed an act of sexual impurity and took money under false pretenses.”
He raises an eyebrow. “What false pretenses?”
“I let a man from North Carolina put twenty dollars into my canteen account. I didn’t ask him to, but I accepted it. He thinks he’s in love with me.”
The priest purses his lips in a considering way. “Did you promise him anything in return? Or falsely claim to return his love?”
“No.”
“Well, then, it sounds like it was a free-will gift.”
I shrug.
“What sexual impurity?” he continues.
“With myself. Once.”
“Is that everything?”
I nod.
He leans in, and I know what’s coming. I straighten up.
“What have you done to try to make amends to your victims?” he asks.
“I can’t do anything for them.”
“You could pray for their souls.”
“I do. I have every day. That doesn’t make amends. Nothing can.”
He regards me with a plain, unblinking gaze. I scratch my shoulder.
“You could use a bit of a challenge, Clara,” he says. “You toe the line, on the inside and the outside. It’s a good time for you to think harder about how to reconcile some of those thorny issues from the past that you’ve set aside.”
“Well, as far as my victims go, I wrote a letter to Tommy Choi a year after I got here. I apologized for everything that happened, my role in it, all of it. I sent it to him through his lawyer. It came back unopened with a no-contact order stapled to it.”
“I’m sure the pain was very fresh.”
“I don’t doubt it, but I can’t do much to atone for the wrong I did. I don’t have money. Or a time machine.”
“No.” His little bow of a mouth twists to the side. “As your penance, say a rosary each day for just one of them. Focus on that individual.”
“Which one?” I ask.
He replies, “The youngest.”
* * *
At Mass the next morning, I don’t take Communion.
I can feel the priest watching me as the other prisoners line up in the aisle between the plastic chairs, their palms pressed together, and move forward at a solemn pace. One of them, Alexandra—a girl in her twenties who works in the food warehouse—cuts a glance at me as she returns to the seat two down from mine. Her mouth is closed tight with the willful, reverent tension of a communicant letting a host dissolve on her tongue. She was right behind me in the confession line yesterday, and I’m sure she’s wondering what I did between then and now.