Inside These Walls (10 page)
“It’ll do the job,” Chris said.
I wasn’t surprised or concerned by this, as I saw Chris do it every day, but I was surprised when Ricky switched seats with Liz, taking the front passenger seat as she moved to the back, and asked Chris to pass him the coke. Though he used to do this occasionally—truthfully, we both had— he had stopped after he overdid it one night and had an episode in which his heart raced so badly he was afraid he would die. Because his sister had died suddenly of a heart-related issue, anything of that nature was especially frightening to him, and I hadn’t seen him use it since then. But now he sidled up to Chris, stuck the rolled-up twenty in his nose and snorted two lines up each nostril.
Chris laughed with delight. “You’re a fucking anteater, man,” he said, and Ricky rubbed his nose and replied, “Seize the day.”
I should have realized then that something wasn’t right, but Ricky could be impulsive, so I attributed it to that. We drove a short distance, then pulled into the worn, broken lot behind the strip mall where he used to work. All the access doors on that side were painted gray, and the buildings were just beige cinderblock, with Dumpsters and exposed metal pipes and a loading dock for the grocery store. Chris turned off the headlights but left the car running, and Ricky got out. I watched him walk up to the back of Spectrum Supply and let himself inside with a key. “What’s he doing?” I asked
“He’s picking up his last paycheck,” Chris said.
I knew that couldn’t be true because Ricky owed
them
money, not the other way around, and he had been working at the Circle K again for months by that point. But I stayed quiet because it wasn’t difficult to see that something bad was going on. I figured that if Ricky was taking more money from the register, he and I could argue about it later. I wasn’t going to fight with him in front of Chris, since Chris would take his side and my effort to talk sense into Ricky would be pointless. Yet I felt sorry for Jeff Owen just the same. He was a very decent man, fair to his employees and friendly with his regular customers, who were San Jose’s ragtag collection of local painters and sculptors. He was an inch or so shorter than Ricky, with an outdated mustache and a shy demeanor, and as a young man had been an artist, himself. He had opened Spectrum Supply as a way to subsidize his career in the arts, but over the years the balance had shifted as he became, as he put it, “married to this store.” He didn’t deserve to be robbed, not by Ricky or anyone else.
A long time passed, it seemed like, and I began to get worried about making it home before my mother started to suspect I was doing untoward things with Ricky. It was funny— he and I had been sleeping together for years by then and had learned to please each other with the efficiency of opening up a high-school locker, yet I was somehow convinced that my mother would remain oblivious to all of that as long as I was home by midnight. Midnight was the magical hour at which cheap girls did sleazy things, and I certainly wasn’t one of those, irrespective of the fact that I had sex with Ricky in a pool-hall bathroom only an hour before. So I began biting my nails and hoped that, in his empathetic way, he would sense that I wanted him to hurry.
Chris had left the car running and the radio on, with a Jimi Hendrix eight-track filling the conversational silence. At some point during
All Along the Watchtower
I did hear a noise that sounded like a shot. But it was not particularly jarring, because the sound was almost incidental amid the music, and could just as easily have been a car backfiring. You must remember, at that moment I thought Ricky was stealing from the register. I wasn’t listening for signs of violence, although it would be only minutes before my perception of that would change.
Soon after that Ricky came back out, and almost before he had the car door shut, Chris began driving. Their conversation seemed unremarkable, but then I heard a metallic click and looked over to see Ricky bent over in the front seat, unloading a handgun. Now, I knew Ricky knew how to shoot a gun. I did too, because once, a month or so before he punched Clinton, he had taken me to the shooting range and forced me to learn. The gun we used had been borrowed from Chris, and I had to assume it was the same one I was looking at now. But these circumstances were nothing like those, and I didn’t want to understand what I was seeing, so I said nothing. Since I had already determined Chris was lying about Ricky picking up his paycheck, and that Ricky was likely robbing an empty store, I chose to continue to believe the store had been empty. This would not be the last time I would find myself kneecapped by cognitive dissonance.
“But you went back to Ricky the next day,” everybody said later, “even after you witnessed all of that.” Yes, I did. I can’t defend that, except to say that I couldn’t fully undo in sixteen hours the image of Ricky I had developed over fourteen years. Jeff Owen’s body had not been found yet, because it was a Monday and Spectrum was closed, so that made it easier to remain in denial. I believe I thought that, once I saw Ricky again, the night before would reveal itself to be a strangely vivid dream—a surreal journey, sex in an odd location, a sense of dread and a sharp lingering hint of violence that ends with the dreamer feeling tremendously relieved to have woken up. I’d had dreams with each of those components before, all tossed together in random configurations. You probably have, too. It’s very easy for someone on the outside to say that if the love of their life suddenly climbed back into the car and emptied a handgun without explanation, that they would immediately seek safety, call 911 and report everything they had seen to the responding officer. And that attitude— that series of accusatory questions as to why I returned to Ricky the next day—presupposes that I knew how all of this would end. Of course, if someone had sat down with me once I returned to my mother’s house and laid out all the information that was later presented to a jury, I would have seen it all through a different lens. I certainly don’t blame that jury for convicting me. I would have convicted me, too.
I hope that sheds a bit of light on Ricky’s circumstances leading up to his crimes. I will write more when I have time.
Yours truthfully,
Clara Mattingly
* * *
At the Braille workshop I finally finish
Guernica
and file it away in the drawer marked COMPLETED. Shirley was pleased with it. When she closed her eyes and ran her fingers over my work, her softly lined face glowed with a satisfied smile. The only tactile drawing left to do is
Spiral Jetty
, which is very straightforward. I believe there’s merit in trying to capture the symbolism and feeling of great visual artworks in a tactile format, but there’s no sense in pretending it’s possible with this one. The textbook publisher has chosen it because it represents an important movement in modern art. I understand the reasoning, but I’ve been to Spiral Jetty and nothing that matters about it could be captured on a sheet of thick paper. Not the manner by which Smithson built it, with heavy equipment and vigorous outdoor work, capturing the entire process on film as the spiral took shape; not the wind or sun, nor the pink water that welled between the swirls of rock; not the feeling of remoteness, having driven out to this tiny peninsula for the sake of walking in a circle while breathing in the bracing, salty air. Ironically, out of all the artworks in the textbook, it’s surely the most accessible to anyone who can’t see—and yet it’s the only one for which I can’t make a decent representation for the blind. But it’s been buried under water for thirty years, so I suppose my drawing is the closest any blind person will get to it.
I sit down at the computer to work on some transcription. When we divide up the work at the beginning of a project, I’m always assigned the sections of the book that deal with my drawings, so I know what to expect. I open the file and begin copying it into the Braille software.
The building of Smithson’s earthwork took six days. It is 15 feet wide, 1500 feet in length, and is composed entirely of natural materials, including basalt rock, earth, water and salt crystals. Water levels were unusually low at the time of the Jetty’s creation, but within a few years a rise to the pre-drought levels left the piece submerged. More recently, however, a drop in the level of the Great Salt Lake has revealed the structure and made it walkable once again. Visitors have enjoyed experiencing the rebirth of the Spiral Jetty, and its reemergence raises many questions about the proper curation of such an ephemeral piece.
I stop and reread what I have typed. Then I turn and look at Shirley, who is standing at the desk beside mine tearing open a package from a publisher. “Have you heard that Spiral Jetty is visible again?”
“Have I heard the
what?
”
“The earthwork in the Great Salt Lake. It’s been buried almost my whole life, and now this book is saying it’s back.”
She shrugs, bouncing her white hair. “I don’t know anything about it.”
I scroll through the file, but it says nothing further. The only image is one of the Jetty when it was first built in 1970. I hesitate, then fold my hands in my lap and look at her with what I hope is my most reasonable, woman-to-woman expression. “Can I just… Do you think I could look it up on the internet? For research?”
She shoots me a sly look. “Clara.
Really
.”
“You can watch me the whole time. I just would like to verify that this is true. I had always heard that it was lost underwater, and it matters, you know, whether I’m drawing a lost artwork or one that’s accessible.”
“Why?” she asks, and I don’t reply because I have no answer to that. “It doesn’t matter one way or another. We’re not the editors. We just transcribe whatever they say, and if they said they found the Hanging Gardens of Babylon in a mall in Fresno, well then, heck, you go ahead and write it in Braille.”
I rest my forehead against my hand and lean toward the screen, reading those lines again and again, trying to make sure I’m not imagining them.
Could it really be back?
That broad, lonely trail I once walked with my mother, the one Ricky knew only as a lost Atlantis. Could it have returned, just the way he predicted it would? I try to picture all the rains that have fallen on that lake, all the days of blazing sun skimming the salt from its disappearing water, the passages of moon and sun like the never ending circular turns of a baby’s wind-up toy. Since the night Ricky and I stood on the beach, an eternity has passed. Tides have rolled in and out, dunes blown and shifted. Dogs have been born, chased tennis balls across the sand, been loved and grown old, died and become aching little memories. The Earth has changed, time marching on heartlessly, not caring that there is no one to cup a hand around the flame of Ricky’s life and bear witness to the whole of it.
I adjust my glasses and, in spite of everything, press on with the transcription—writing one letter, then the next, meaningless as runes.
It’s four days before Janny returns. She reappears on the other side of the bars with her arm in a sling and a distant, scowling expression on her face. “You’re back,” I say exultantly.
Officer Parker lets her in. Although it goes against procedure, they almost never cuffed Janny even before the injury, and now it would be complicated as well as essentially pointless. She steps into the cell and slides a hand to the side of the bed to orient herself. “I missed you,” I say.
“You got my Vaseline? You didn’t send it.”
“It didn’t fit in your cosmetic bag. Here.” I take it down from the shelf, but then see she can’t apply it to her own hands. “Let me do it for you. They didn’t have any at the clinic?”
“Not for me.”
I smooth a dollop of it onto her cast-free hand, massaging it into her short fingers and leathery knuckles. Her blank gaze is aimed at nothing in particular—a corner, a cinderblock—and for a few moments we stand in silence.
“Somebody there said the baby thing is true,” she says.
My heart thumps errantly, as if it is a door on which an angry person is knocking. “About me, you mean?”
“Yeah, about you. Who else you think, the Queen of England? They say she even come
visit
you.”
“Janny,” I say. I take another dollop of Vaseline and touch the fingers curling out from her cast, but she pulls back her hand and scowls at me. “Have you ever tried to forget something that made you feel sad?” I ask.
“Bad things I did,” she says. “Not my babies.”
“I never even held her. They took her away the minute she was born.”
“And that makes you deny her?”
I say nothing.
She presses me, her voice rising. “Makes you lie and say she never lived? Nine months she grow in your belly and you act like it’s nothing? You
ashamed
of her?”
“Of course I’m not ashamed of her,” I say sharply, matching her volume. “I’m ashamed of her father.”
“Bullshit. He do the same thing you do. You ashamed of
you
.”
She pushes past me and sits down on her bed. The glower of her expression frightens me— so unfocused, so filled with inward rage. I perch on the side of the desk, and in a quieter, more soothing tone say, “Janny, you killed Javier to protect yourself and your kids. They understand how bad he was to you, and that you wanted to get away and were afraid he would wake up and stop you. But my...my daughter can’t look at what I did and find a reason like that. If I was your mother, wouldn’t you
want
me not to claim you?”
“No,” she says. Her voice is dull and hoarse. “I’d want you to love me. So I’d know I wasn’t a monster’s child.”
My grip tightens against the edge of the desk. An ache settles into my gut. As I gaze at Janny, her expression shifts into one of naked grief, as though between us it is only she who understands what I have lost.
* * *
All of a sudden I realize it is July. I count the months on my fingers, once, then again, and I know I have it right. It’s the month of Annemarie’s birth. I don’t know the day, and I panic at the realization that it might have passed.
At my desk, in my cell, I sketch out a one-month calendar and plant the dates on it in pencil, trying to figure out when exactly it was. I remember being awakened from sleep by distant booms that sent a shock of fear down my spine, and sitting up in bed to listen, terrified of a riot or an escape that would cause us all to be punished.
“Happy Fourth of July,”
somebody had shouted, and only then did I realize the noises were fireworks in the nearby town. I was still pregnant then—of that I am sure. I went to trial on August fifth, and at that point my pregnancy was over, but I was still bleeding. It’s easy to recall watching Forrest testify against me as I sat meekly beside my lawyer at our table, feeling like my body was an hourglass shedding the last remnants of those terrible days. But I don’t remember the precise date.
I take out a sheet of plain paper and fold it in two. On one half, with it turned on its side the long way, I try to draw the sea. I sketch the curve of the shore, the foam of a wave reaching up the sand, the swoop of the Ferris wheel and Giant Dipper coaster in the distance. I draw the quarter moon and the summer constellations hanging above the ocean—Ursa Major, Leo and Virgo—though I know, to her, they will likely be no more than dots signifying the night sky. I blow gently on the image to shoo away the loose graphite, being careful not to smudge the blacks and grays.
Here is what I don’t draw: the humid car. The figures on the beach, one upside-down, one with her toes sinking deep into the sand. The faraway screams from the coaster, the bursts of wind that whipped at skirts and hair, the taste of salt on the lips, the bright smudged starlight between the lines of Leo that meant galaxies and galaxies and galaxies.
In the end, it’s very simple. It’s only a drawing of the beach.
Happy birthday, Annemarie,
I write inside. I’m afraid to sign
Love
. I’m afraid to sign a name or a word, worried that each might mean too much or too little.
May a thousand wishes come true for you,
I write instead. I fold it into an envelope—it doesn’t fit quite right—and set it upright where my desk meets the wall. I run my smallest finger beneath my eye and then sweep it across my bottom lip like balm. It offers a peaceful feeling, this small return to the scene I’ve drawn, the taste of the sea. She began there, whether or not she knows it. And I wish she did. I wish she knew that one small thing.
* * *
Out in the yard, the sun bakes the pale soil like pottery. All the green has died within the bounds of the tall fence. In the farmlands beyond it the irrigated crops still grow, and sometimes I stand there with my fingers laced into the chain link and stare out at it like a child in a television commercial watching someone crack open a bottle of Coca-Cola.
I unfold the napkin from my pocket and take out a section of hot dog. Clementine has been lingering in the shade most of the time, often in inaccessible places, where I might see her but not be able to reach. I begin walking around the perimeter of the wall, clicking my tongue.
A woman sitting in a group at one of the picnic tables begins calling, too. “Frankfurter! Frankfurter!” she calls. “Here, kitty kitty!”
I ignore her, blocking the sunlight with my hand so I can peek up at the ledges of the windows beneath the overhanging roof. The grease of the hot dog is soaking through the napkin as it warms in my hand.
“Look at her trying to catch that cat,” she says, loudly enough that I know it’s for me to hear, not just her friends. She’s a big woman, with a crew cut left longish on the bottom and tattoos on both her forearms. I know her name: Martha. “You looking for some pussy, old lady? I got it right here for you.”
Her friends laugh. A glance, ever so small, confirms what I suspected from the sound of the laughter. The long-haired girl, Amber Jones, is seated at that table. As long as I’ve been here, I’d have to be as dumb as a post not to decipher this relationship. Whether Martha is wooing the other girl or already owns her, I’m not sure, but either way the alliance is a clear and dangerous one. Alexandra, the girl I see at Mass each week, is there, too. Every Sunday she shakes my hand during the Sign of Peace, and on the other six days she clusters with the group of women who most like to taunt me. On the outside this would hurt me deeply, but I know, in here, that’s just the way it is. I turn my search for Clementine toward the section of the yard closer to where the officers hold their posts near the occasional blast of air-conditioning from the swinging doors. I feel Martha’s gaze following me.
But before I can walk too far, she’s up, she’s coming at me, and I know that even though I’m no match for her I can only stand my ground. The sun flashes behind her head, making one of her small mean eyes vanish in its piercing gleam. Her fist rises, and when I raise my hands to protect myself I feel a burning, hair-thin slash across my arm, an unzipping of my skin. I cry out and grab my wounded limb, my fingers coated in the sticky ooze of my blood, and turn my side toward her. She stabs me again, this time in my bicep—a jab that only feels like an afterthought, because the pain from the first cut is searing. Two officers are dragging her away now, another running toward me, pulling on a pair of blue latex gloves. It’s a stinging like a hundred bees. The blood between my fingers makes my arm feel as though it’s melting away beneath my hand. The officer sets her palm against my back and guides me toward the building, and I stumble the way she directs me amidst all the shouting, through a tunnel made out of sunlight and shadows and noise.
* * *
The nurse is ready with a pressure bandage when I arrive; they must have radioed her. “You again,” she says. “You need to stop getting into trouble.”
I slump into the chair, and she brushes away my gripping hand with one of her gloved ones. She pats the wound with gauze. Her appraising glance moves up and down my arm, and the wound is longer than I expected, a good six- or seven-inch gash. “She got you good,” the nurse says.
“Can you numb it first?”
She cocks an eyebrow. “Numb it?”
“Before you stitch it.”
Her laugh is low and rumbly. “I can’t stitch
that
.”
I feel a pang of dread. I debate whether I have the nerve to do it myself, if she’s willing to offer me the supplies.
“She definitely needs a transport,” the nurse says, catching the eye of the officer who brought me in.
“All right. Bandage her up. I don’t want any blood getting on me.”
I don’t understand. They can’t be taking me to a real hospital, not for this. But when two more guards walk into the clinic and shackle my ankles, I realize they really are. My arm is bandaged, my wrists cuffed—the nurse won’t allow them to be latched to a chain around my waist, saying my arm needs to be kept above the level of my heart—and within minutes I’m in the back of a van that is driving away.
It’s that easy.
We’re driving right past those irrigated fields. Through intersections with stoplights in cases that are black instead of the yellow I remember. Past gas stations filled with tiny, rounded cars and pumps with digital numbers. A burger place appears at the side of the road with a curl of smoke puffing up through its roof, and the van’s ventilation system catches the scent and filters it back to me. It smells like
heaven,
like youth and nights on the boardwalk and everything good. I gasp at the potency of it and choke back a small cry, force myself to swallow, then try to breathe it in again. The officer beside me looks at me strangely, but says nothing.
We pass a high school with a team of tennis players chasing each other around on its courts. A little townhouse development with a child playing in a turtle-shaped sandbox in a backyard. A jogger—a woman in blue shorts and sneakers and a white elastic bra, and that’s all—running along the side of the road, her long ponytail swinging. She has no idea how free she is, how free.
We turn up the road to the hospital. I swallow, and I look to the C.O. “You know, I had a baby and they didn’t even take me to the hospital for
that
.”
She shoots me a cautious look. “How long ago was it?”
“Twenty-four years ago.”
“They’re more worried about liability now. Inmates suing ’em.”
Gauze is wrapped tightly around my arm, nearly saturated with blood. I’ve been shivved before, several times, but this is the worst of those. We pull up to the emergency doors, and as the officer up front opens the side door he says to me, “Don’t do anything stupid, now.”
* * *
It’s a fresh shame inside the emergency room, where everyone looks at me and steps aside when I walk in, chains rattling and clinking like the bells on a plague wagon. Everything is unfamiliar— so polished and sanitary— but there’s a baby resting against the shoulder of her mother, who is seated in a hallway chair, and I’m enchanted. It’s been years since I last saw a baby. She’s so plump and large-eyed, with a little shock of a pigtail at the top of her head, tied with a ribbon. I used to see babies in the visitors’ room sometimes, but only since Annemarie began coming have I had visitors again, and there have been no babies so far. I stare at her, and she smiles at me around the finger she is chewing.
I’m led to a curtained room, and a doctor follows us in right away. The officer unlatches my wrist cuffs so the nurse can unwind the gauze from my arm. “Do you see that cute little baby?” I ask.
“I see her. Don’t gawk at her.”
“She’s just adorable. And I’m not gawking.”
“Yes, you are. And how would you like it if you saw somebody in chains and handcuffs staring at your child?”
I hadn’t thought about that. I look away.
“Looks like you got shanked,” the doctor says. He’s young, and I suppose he’s trying out his prison slang. The nurse is cleaning out the wound, which hurts more than anything else so far, but I’m trying not to react.
“I don’t usually get into fights,” I explain. My voice is tight from the pain of the cleaning. “I got into someone’s bad graces, I suppose.”
“Not your fault, huh,” he says in an ironic tone. I find this extremely irritating. It’s no challenge to read what he’s thinking— that I’m like every other inmate who believes she is always the victim, never responsible for her circumstances. He’s perhaps twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old, and he thinks he’s wise to the ways of people like me. I’ve been in there since he was in diapers.
“I didn’t say that,” I point out.
“We’ll get you stitched up and send you back,” he says. “Put you on an antibiotic to kill off whatever might have been on that thing. You know what it was made out of? It’s a good clean cut.”
“Razor blade stuck in a toothbrush,” the officer says.
“Clever.” The doctor pulls out a needle and the suture kit and goes to work on my arm. I try not to wince, and he says, “Tough girl.”
Through the gap in the curtain, the baby catches my eye again and this time points at me. I raise my free hand, the empty cuff dangling from my wrist, and wave back.