Inside These Walls (12 page)

Q: You stated that it was Ms. Mattingly who drove back to the residence after you left the rectory.

A: Yeah, it was her car, and she drove. I sat next to her, and everyone else was in the back.

Q: What was her demeanor like?

A: Calm. They were counting the money back there, and she didn’t say anything to me or to them. We got back to the Cathouse, and the rest of us started scrubbing up at the kitchen sink, taking off our clothes and whatnot, and next thing I know I hear the shower come on upstairs.

Q: And that was Ms. Mattingly?

A: Yeah. She took this long, hot shower—it was hazy around the door from all the steam—and then she came downstairs wearing jeans and one of Ricky’s T-shirts. The shirt she had on was from Spectrum Supply. It had the logo on the front, the little brush and paint palette thing. Her hair was blow-dried.

Q: You’re telling us she shot two people and then went home and blow-dried her hair.

A: I suppose so, yeah. I mean, that’s what she did. Ricky and Chris were in the living room fighting over where to go. Ricky wanted to go to Mexico, but Chris said the cops would be expecting that and had some place in western Oregon he wanted to go to instead. Clara went into the kitchen and got the glass with the Smurfs on it that they used for smoking hash—like, they’d light it, turn the glass upside down on it, and let it fill up with smoke, and then stick bendy straws underneath to suck it out. She came in with it and asked Ricky if there was any hash left. He told her it was upstairs.

Q: Was that something she did often, smoking hashish?

A: No, but once in a while she’d join in. She turned on the radio—I remember it was Phil Collins type stuff, because I was like, oh, God, what is this shit... Sorry. Then she and Liz sat at the coffee table and got high, and they watched the guys argue. Clara had a cat on her lap, like always. I was watching at the windows for cops, pretty terrified. I definitely didn’t want to get stoned at that moment.

Q: Do you feel like there was any impediment to Ms. Mattingly leaving at any point, if she chose? Was there any threat to her?

A: No. No. I mean, Chris probably would have tried to stop her, but after a while she just went upstairs to the bedroom and she didn’t try to leave. And Ricky wouldn’t have stopped her. If Chris had tried to break bad with her, Ricky would have defended her. He let her do whatever she wanted, always.

Q: That’s interesting that you tell us that, because there have been suggestions that he was physically abusive or intimidating to her.

A: God, no. In fact, at dinner that evening he was joking about how she’d hit him in the mouth earlier and it still hurt. He touched her all the time, but it wasn’t violent, I can tell you that much. She ruled the roost.

Dear Ms. Mattingly,

I hope this letter finds you well. Thank you for your recent correspondence. I am enclosing a photocopy I think might be of interest to you. In my research, sifting through many old documents in the Rowan file, I came across this letter that is dated the day of Ricky Rowan’s death. The documentation indicates it accompanied his suicide note, but it’s not clear whether it was ever released. I am aware from previous cases I have researched that private letters are usually held for the addressee, and that if that individual can’t be located, the letters are simply overlooked. This makes me curious whether that was the case with this letter, since it is only through your comments and my recent study of the court transcripts that it is clear to me who
Kira
is. By the time Ricky died, the relevant people may not have been cognizant of that. In any event, it is enclosed. I look forward to our ongoing communications.

All best,

Karen Shepard

{CC: photocopy from Rowan file}

Kira,

“Fight them, fight them. Call the animals.”

(Ah, hell there’s no point is there.)

BAM. Here it is. November 16, 1982—that was the day I was dying to see the Columbia land at the end of its space mission. You packed up a picnic and we drove all the way down, five and a half hours. They chased us away from the perimeter of the air force base—remember? We had to park in the desert. The sun was setting, streaks of blue and shadow, and we ate peanut butter sandwiches sitting on the hood of my car. You wrapped that Indian blanket around your shoulders when it got cold. And then we saw the fighter jet come in real fast like a wasp, then the shuttle behind it—silhouettes, both of them—dark and beautiful in the yellow sunset sky. Ominous and fragile at the same time, zipping by, speeding. Spectacular. I had to do a little dance there for it—imagine a little Bob Marley, steel drummin’, feel-good music. You laughed at me, but I didn’t care then and I don’t care now. I forgive you, I forgive you. I never blamed you in the first place. Is there enough time in a life to say that as much as you really need to? Om mani padme hum, I forgive you, I forgive you.

Funny thing—I always thought life was for the living, but now all I can do is hope there’s an afterplane, a parallel to this one where the souls go, and no God. I want to say, Kira, Kira, I’ll always be with you, but what living person can say that? “I’ll always be an angel watching over you.” Folly, I say! That’s the quandary, is that if there’s judgment then you know where I’ll be, and if there’s no judgment then I rot like the meat I am. The one sure thing now is, if life is for the living, I’m tapping out. I waste the air, turn food into shit, and even the trees can’t benefit from my CO2 output because there isn’t one motherloving tree in a hundred miles of here. It’s a zombie life and I’m going to stake it.

One last thing:

I love you, now and yesterday and tomorrow, beyond whatever’s next and deep down into the crazy time-physics we can’t even conceive now. Into the four-dimensional geometry of whatever’s there, where it’s a shape filled up with my love for you. And I know “I forgive you” isn’t the true mantra, but “forgive me, forgive me, forgive me.”
Please
forgive me, Kira. Forgive me for all the wrong I did you. Let me be a sky burial so the wind blowing over my bones can be like a prayer flag carrying that request to the terrible gods, so if there is a good place beyond all of this, I’ll have paid your passage with the only things I had left to give.

All of my love,

JEN

Dear Ms. Shepard,

Thank you so very much for the letter from Ricky. I have tried to write you several replies and I can’t properly put together the words to express my gratitude. It truly means the world to me. I must say, your letter arrived at a delicate time. I have been struggling with an emotional situation involving a family member, and my cellmate is in poor health, which has left me burdened with an unusual amount of psychic distress. While Ricky Rowan may be the last person I should want to comfort me, his words are strangely welcome at the present moment.

In thanks for what you have shared with me, I feel moved to offer you a part of the story I haven’t previously spoken of to anyone. Please bear with me, as this is difficult to explain, but hopefully it will shed light on some of the more puzzling aspects of the chain of events, particularly my own crime. I realize your book is about Ricky, but perhaps this will help you understand the big picture.

Garrison Brand, my stepfather, was a good man. He suffers from Alzheimer’s disease now and lives in a senior home, yet even after all these years he remains in my daily prayers. He married my mother in 1972, when I was eleven years old, and I believe she was very fortunate to find such a partner in life. He was a loving man and a thoughtful one, a good provider and one who, until the very end, honored his vow to be true to her in sickness and in health. I called him
Pop
. It was a compromise between calling him by his first name, which we all felt was disrespectful, and calling him
Dad,
which I felt was disloyal to my late father. But despite the friendly nickname he and I were never very close, probably because he and my mother married at the time I was becoming a young woman. That must be an intimidating thing for any stepfather. Girls of that age are best known for their volatility and drama, and while I was a well-behaved child, I wasn’t immune to either of those things.

Pop brought with him his son, Clinton, from his first marriage to a woman who was unfit to take custody of him for reasons that were never really shared with me. The family had moved to town about four years earlier, and the parents were divorced about a year after that. Mrs. Garrison was said to have “run off,” whatever that means. We knew them from our church. Clinton was fifteen at the time of the remarriage, and my impression of him was that he was bossy and blunt in his criticisms. At the time I assumed he was angry about his mother, because he was, in the language of the era, a male chauvinist pig. He was openly critical of my mother for not changing her surname to Brand. She kept my father’s name because she didn’t want me to feel isolated as the only Mattingly in the family. Clinton had a habit of ordering me around, especially when my mother and Pop were out of the house. He’d announce that I needed to make him a sandwich or tell me to go mow the lawn, which was his responsibility, and he would yell at me in a very hostile way if I was slow to obey. My mother wasn’t a yeller, so this behavior rattled me, but I assumed it was just the way of teenage boys. It didn’t help that Clinton and I looked physically similar—blond hair, slender builds, etc—so many people assumed we were true siblings and often referred to him as my brother, which elevated my perception of his authority.

A couple of years passed, and it was the spring of Clinton’s senior year of high school. He earned an acceptance to his first-choice university on the East Coast. Life with him around wasn’t terrible. Except for occasional things like the incident with the kittens, he was nothing more than a bossy and obnoxious stepbrother most of the time. But I was looking forward to a more relaxed household with him away at college. Clinton played lacrosse for his high school team, and our house was often filled with noisy players and some of Clinton’s many female hangers-on, because he was a blond, blue-eyed California boy and the target of much romantic intrigue. When his friends filled the house I spent most of my time shut away in my room reading and drawing, which, little did I know, would prove to be good preparation for my adult life.

One evening my mother and Pop were out at the church—they were on the committee that prepared the fellowship hall for the repasts after funerals—and I was reading on the sun porch while Clinton watched television. I heard him call my name, so I set down my book and went in. He looked at me from where he was lying on the sofa and said, “Go to your room and go to bed.” I asked him why, and he told me just to do it, which was typical of him. But it was around eight in the evening, so it wasn’t a ridiculous thing to demand on a school night. I went ahead and obeyed him, dressing in my nightgown and taking a book to bed with me.

It was only minutes after I had turned out my light when I heard my room door creak open. I pretended to be asleep, but I could hear his footsteps coming closer. At first I thought he was going to confront me about reading in bed, but that wasn’t his purpose at all. He sat on the side of my bed, and I probably don’t need to describe to you what came next. I kept my eyes shut tight and continued to act as if I were asleep, and he stopped just short of actual intercourse. The experience absolutely gutted me. I had my back to him so I didn’t even understand what he was doing—it was simply a humiliating thing for which I had no words.

For the next several months he continued that pattern—coming in whenever he had the chance and using me as a sort of lifeless masturbatory aid—and I didn’t say a word about it to a single soul. I had been warned about adults who try to “touch” children and that if this happened I must report it, but what Clinton did was not anything I could have described aloud. He was neither tentative nor gentle. When he came in, it felt as though I excused myself from my body and went somewhere else for a while. It was as if I knew a secret about what was happening to Clara, but that was somehow a step removed from such a thing happening to
me
. It was a necessary distinction to make. My mother had told me many times after she remarried that one of the worst aspects of my father’s death had been that I was being denied the experience of growing up in a real family. To upset and disappoint my mother was unthinkable, so I had to find a way to make this not exist. And I knew Clinton would be going away to school in a few months, and it would all be over.

Then a crisis occurred. Clinton’s grades had dropped too much, and his East Coast school rescinded his acceptance. That meant he had to go to the local community college in the fall, and he would continue living at home. I thought very hard about what to do, and I worked out that I would ask my mother for a lock for my bedroom door because Clinton’s dog, a Golden Retriever, had learned to nudge my door open with her nose and it made me feel anxious while I was getting dressed. I was thirteen years old, and this seemed like a credible enough excuse at the time, although looking back, if I had ever used it I’m sure my mother would have immediately grown suspicious and everything would have blown up right then.

But before I worked up the nerve to ask, there was another evening alone in the house with Clinton and again he ordered me to go to bed. This time, though, when he climbed into my bed, I elbowed him away, hard. He snapped at me, and with a level of courage I didn’t know I had, I turned around— for the first time admitting I wasn’t sleeping through all of this—and told him to get out and leave me alone.

I should never have done that. It made him angry, and he shoved down my arms and rolled onto me, planting his forearm across my neck. He already had his pants down, and although I was struggling against him, I couldn’t scream. Eventually I stopped struggling, because I was beginning to black out due to lack of oxygen. Clinton started telling me I was a good girl, a good girl, as he completed the rape. It was a terrible, burning pain, and I was certain that he was tearing me apart, but by the next morning—regrettably, perhaps—there was no physical sign of what had occurred. He was always careful to ejaculate outside my body, and on later occasions usually came prepared with condoms. I wish I could see this as a mercy, that I was fortunate not to have become pregnant. But later, when he grew more worried that I would report him, he sometimes warned me that if I tried to accuse him there was no evidence to prove it. And I believed him.

After that first incident I grew afraid to ask my mother for a lock on my door, because what had happened was so horrible that I was frightened of saying anything that might raise her suspicions. She was very protective of me, and I knew she would be devastated that, in this most egregious way, she had failed. I was also very concerned that she would think less of me if she knew I was no longer a virgin, because she was religious and it was something she had discussed with me many times in the few years prior. I rationalized that it couldn’t be undone, and so all I could do was try to contain the damage by not making it my mother’s calamity, as well.

Since I could no longer pretend to be asleep, and Clinton was now escalating his behavior with me, I tried out a different technique. When I was very young I used to love a television program called
My Living Doll,
about a man who is given custody of a female android, named Rhoda, originally designed for the Air Force. She is utterly naive to human society, and must be taught how to display normal emotions. When Clinton came in I took to imagining I was a Rhoda-like machine, able to endure this because I was unaware that it was wrong, feeling empty of any emotion about it. Usually I would pretend that I had been shut off entirely, but when he forced me to do specific things—grabbing me by the back of my head, for example—I imagined that this was a mode, or a function I was performing, the way a washing machine can be switched to rinse or spin.

However, as the abuse went on, I began for the first time to confess it to my priest. I didn’t merely confess to “sexual immorality” or “sins against the Sixth Commandment”—I was quite specific about what Clinton was doing, and I used his name. I was actively hoping Father George would intervene. In school they had taught us that nothing could break the Seal of Confession, even if a person confessed to a terrible crime, but I still thought what I told him would have an effect. Clinton still went to church with us, but not to confession, so obviously the priest would have to start denying him the Eucharist, which would have certainly gotten my mother and Garrison’s attention. Or perhaps Father George would go to Garrison and say, “You need to talk to your son,” without breaking my confidence. But each week he assigned me three Our Fathers in penance and forgave my sins, and that was the beginning and end of it. Clinton continued to take Communion, and my mother and Garrison remained oblivious.

In the fall Clinton started college, and a sort of ebb and flow began with this whole situation. He would stop it sometimes for months, just long enough to make me believe he had outgrown it, and then start up again. I grew taller and stronger, but also more resigned, and—this is difficult to express in a way that makes sense to an outsider—it became a kind of normal. A human being is designed to get used to nearly anything. One afternoon, as I tried to lie very still and pretend I was shut off and that my body had no inhabitant, I felt strangely lightheaded and then, all at once, I was
fully
inside my body; it was as though a front door had blown open in a raging blizzard and the tempest rushed in, impossible to ignore or constrain. I cried out, and Clinton knew what that meant. I remember the look in Clinton’s eyes afterward, like a man who has just beaten the house at blackjack. I was a Catholic school girl, extremely sheltered from the worldly influences of society; I knew absolutely nothing about female sexual response, and I didn’t understand what had happened or where it had come from. I only knew that it was the profoundest shame of all, to have felt so good from something so filthy. From that point forward, though it went unspoken, he and I both knew I would never expose him for what he had done. No matter how I hated it and always would, I believed it was damning evidence against me that, every now and then, my nervous system would crash like a malfunctioning computer and produce a response that most people seek on purpose.

The final time Clinton approached me he was already dating Susie, the woman he would soon marry. I was seventeen and headed to college myself soon. He had left me alone for a couple of months, although by now I was wiser than to think that meant it was over. A year before, I had installed a hook and eye on my bedroom door, and I kept closer track of my mother’s church schedule. That had slowed him down a bit. But he had taken it as a challenge, and so his assaults were less frequent yet much bolder and more aggressive when they occurred. Risks he never would have considered before were now fair game, and he was rough and punitive when he managed to pin me down. After so many years of my listless cooperation, he now felt I had become difficult about something that was his right.

And so that last afternoon, when I heard him coming down the stairs while I was doing laundry, I thought about the fact that the house was empty, and I felt afraid. In the basement window my mother kept all sorts of pretty glass bottles she had collected from flea markets and vacations to Mexico. I grabbed a green ginger ale bottle in my right hand while shifting the laundry to the dryer with my left. When Clinton touched my hip I spun around and hit him on the side of the head with the bottle, which broke on impact and cut a deep gash across his scalp. He had to call an ambulance and tell them it had happened while he was working on his car, while I swept up the glass and rearranged the bottles in the window to hide the empty spot. But he never touched me again. And the most pathetic part was I was more concerned about Susie at that point than about myself. Susie was a nice girl, and I didn’t want any part in Clinton being sleazy to her.

My celibate life began that day, and continued until a few months after I started dating Ricky almost five years later. Once I began seeing him I was surprised to discover I wanted to be close to him, and I was intrigued rather than panicked by the idea that he wanted me. I didn’t want my experiences with him to be tainted by Clinton’s abuse, and I was afraid he would think I was dirty and undesirable, so for a while I said nothing to him about that. But a secret that dark is impossible to hide. If you have never tried to nurture a normal adult relationship when you only associate sexual pleasure with violence followed by sickening guilt, you’ll have to take my word for it that it’s not easy. Yet Ricky was patient and understanding. He grasped that it would take work to reshuffle my associations and avoid my panic triggers. He always kept things bright and playful, and he was very loving.