Inside These Walls (19 page)

When Forrest comes to visit again, I feel better prepared. I half-expected it, after seeing his donation to my canteen account, and in anticipation of visiting hours I allowed Penelope to style my hair in front of our small mirror, just in case. She cracked open a safety razor to extract the blade—a choice she’s going to regret when she realizes she needs to trade it in to get a new one—and trimmed her bangs, then mine, before shaping the hair that frames my face. I’m surprised by the way I look in the mirror; my hair has gotten long enough to sweep my shoulders, and after Penelope’s careful attention it actually looks pretty. “You’re lucky you’re blonde,” she told me, “it hides the gray really well,” and I decide a graceless compliment is better than none at all.

Forrest looks like he’s cleaned up a bit as well. His hair is less shaggy, his face is freshly shaved, and he’s wearing clean jeans and brown loafers instead of the work boots of last time. He holds out his arms, and I glance at the guard before hugging him rather stiffly. The scent of his body, even the quick trace of it, brings back the memory of his kiss in sudden, enveloping full color.

“How’s it going?” he asks. He looks nervous.

“Same as ever,” I say, then reconsider that. “Well, a little excitement. I got a new roommate.”

“That could be good or bad, I suppose.”

“Well, it’s both. I really miss my old one.” Talking to him, I feel more awkward than I anticipated.
Roommate
, for goodness’ sake—as if this is my college dormitory and I just welcomed a freshman English major from Pasadena. It’s as though I’m anxious for him to see me as the girl he knew from Ricky’s place, the dentist’s assistant who liked cats and pop music and eye makeup, current circumstances be damned. “Thank you for the canteen money,” I offer.

He nods and looks away. “I don’t miss jail.”

“I imagine you don’t.”

“Did you know Chris was killed by his cellie?”

I nod slowly. “A bad debt, is what I heard. That coke habit followed him inside.” I hesitate, then say, “I’d rather not talk about those people. Why don’t you tell me how you’ve been doing, instead.”

Bewilderment moves across his face. “What do you want to know?”

“Well, do you have a family? What do you do for a living?”

“I, uh...I have two daughters. I work for the phone company, putting in fiberoptic systems for commercial clients.” He pauses. “That’s about it.”

“Are you married?” He wears no ring, but that’s not necessarily an indicator.

He winces a bit. “That’s a complicated question.”

I reply with a low, knowing laugh, but I feel bitten by the answer.
Why are you visiting me, then
, I think. I’m not so desperate for companionship that I’ll welcome a man who kisses me while his wife waits at home. I like my own company just fine.

He leans forward on the bench, resting his forearms on his knees and rubbing his hands together. There’s a glower to his brow that wasn’t there when he was younger. “My wife left me about eight years ago. She ran off with this guy she met playing
EverQuest
. To Nova Scotia.”

I frown. “What’s
EverQuest?
”

“It’s an online video game—like Dungeons & Dragons as a computer game. She was some kind of fairy or elf or something, and she played
constantly
. Middle of the night. Christmas Day. You name it. You remember
War Games
? The movie?”

I sit up straighter and smile. “Yes! Where the boy hacks into the computer and starts a nuclear war, right? Ricky and I saw that—oh, the year before, I guess. I’d forgotten all about it. We loved that movie.”

“Yeah, well.” His gaze flicks over my face, then drops again. “The kid thinks it’s a game at first, but then finds out it’s real. That’s how it was with Shelly. I thought she was obsessed with the game, and it was dragging down my life really bad. Eating macaroni and cheese all the time, taking the girls to school every morning because she’d been up playing all night, just feeling
alone
. We hadn’t slept together in months. And then I come to find out she’s been communicating with this...troll. I mean, in the game, he was a troll. And we had unlimited long distance because I worked for the phone company, so I never noticed she was talking to Nova Scotia every goddamn day.” He glances at me. “Sorry.”

“Sounds like you’re still angry about it.”

He shakes his head. “I don’t care about her anymore. That was a long time ago. It’s my girls I feel bad for. They were ten and twelve. Girls that age need their mother. But she never looked back. I had to figure out a lot of things real fast.” He holds up both hands, drawing an imaginary doorway between us. “We have this linen closet. Well, I went to the drugstore and I bought every kind of pad, tampon, you name it, just about every type in the aisle, and I crammed it all into that closet. I told them, leave the empty boxes so I know what to buy. Made me a better father than I would have been otherwise, that much is true. The younger one’s going off to college, so I guess we made it through. The older one’s a junior at ASU.”

I smile. “What are their names?”

“Kelly and Lindsay. They’re sweet, tough girls. She doesn’t know how much she’s missing.” He attempts a reassuring smile, but its tension pulls at my heart. “Anyway, I never bothered to get an official divorce. I had better things to do with that money than pay lawyers. And not like I had any need to get remarried. With Kelly leaving, and me not running Dad’s Taxi to and from school play rehearsals anymore, I’m just now getting time to have hobbies again.”

“I do ballet.”

He catches my eye and grins. “I didn’t realize they offered that in prison.”

“They don’t. I do it on my own, in my cell. I have a radio. I don’t have slippers, so I stick moleskin to the bottom of a pair of socks. It works, sort of.”

“How do you have room?”

“Well, I have to keep it compact. But I enjoy it a lot. It probably looks ridiculous, but in my imagination it’s beautiful.”

His eyes are bright with amusement. “Kelly did ballet for a long time. She quit when she was fifteen or so, when school got in the way too much. You can’t even imagine the number of recitals I’ve sat through.”

“That sounds like heaven to me.”

He replies with a hearty laugh. “Your idea of heaven and mine are pretty different, let’s say.”

I grin back. It’s a quiet Saturday, and we have two whole hours before visiting time is over. After a while we take out the Scrabble board, and I beat him soundly, then go easy on him the second time. Only when the guards shout a five-minute warning do I realize how much I don’t want the morning to end. I wish moments like this weren’t so hopeless, so fraught by my understanding that there can never be more than this, but I must push past that type of thinking. There’s a world beyond these walls, and Annemarie is in it, and so I must keep reaching out in whatever ways I can. I am imprisoned here, not entombed. And I won’t believe that her goodbye is truly a goodbye. If the past few months have taught me anything, it’s this: people come back.

* * *

All through the long Saturday afternoon I’m very quiet, going over in my mind, again and again, the things Forrest told me about himself and the bits of information I shared with him in return. Those I offered to him are simple.
Mint chocolate chip ice cream is my favorite
. At least, I think that’s still true.
I love watching Olympic figure skating. I have a cat here, sort of, named Clementine. If I could go anywhere? Hawaii
. It feels indulgent, even dangerous, to say these true things about myself. In here nobody cares, and if they did, you’d wonder why they wanted to gain your trust. You lie, even about small things, to be safe.

Penelope has a visit with her lawyer, then returns to our cell not long before chow hall. “Who was that guy I saw you with in the visiting room?” she asks, dropping a stack of papers onto her bed.

I’m caught off-guard by the question. The room had been fairly full, and I hadn’t noticed her there. “His name is Forrest,” I tell her. “He’s someone I know from way back.”

He was a minor character in the film they made, or so I read in
People
years ago, but she offers no sign of recognition. “Is he your boyfriend?” she asks.

“No. Just a friend.”

“It looked like he was flirting with you.”

I laugh. “That wouldn’t be a very productive effort, would it?”

“Are you really in here for life?”

“Without parole. Yes.” Her gaze tenses sympathetically. “Who visited you?” I ask.

“Steven. My brother.” She turns on the sink and splashes water on her face, which looks a bit pink around the eyes, as if she’s been crying again. The girl is a virtual factory for tears; she’s going to need to unlearn that, and quickly. “We argued. The doctors have all these decisions they want us to make about what kind of care our dad gets—feeding tubes, stuff like that—and he’s being a jerk about it. He keeps insisting our dad wouldn’t want extreme measures, and that’s bull. Our dad would be all about the extreme measures.”

I remember that her parents are divorced and her father had a much younger fiancée, which was part of the scandal that came out, but I suppose the fiancée doesn’t have much ability to make medical decisions on his behalf. Penelope’s concern for him intrigues me. If she was an incest victim—as I have assumed her to be—I doubt she would be so determined to keep the man alive and breathing. And if she had ordered a hit on him, it seems she would be eager to prevent any chance of a miraculous recovery.

“I had problems like that with my stepbrother,” I say, mostly so I won’t look as if I’m too deep in thought about her personal business. “When my mother had cancer, and I was in here, he tried to convince my stepfather not to do what the doctors suggested and just to ‘let her go peacefully.’ Because she was burning through his future inheritance, is why. I’m sure every morphine IV felt like a punch right in his wallet.”

She winces and plunks down on the bed. “That’s sick.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

Her laugh is low and rueful. “Likewise. Sounds like your stepbrother and my brother ought to get together for a drink.”

Now she has me curious, but I resist the urge to press her further. This isn’t like with Janny, where we had sound reason to trust one another and, until the end, posed no risk to the other’s fate. Penelope is new here. She doesn’t know how tenuous trust can be, and that she should be very careful with whom she shares her business. But soon enough she’ll learn, and when she does, I don’t want her worrying that I know too much.

“Time for dinner,” I say, in a bright brusque tone that dismisses the conversation at hand, and as I pull my freshly-cut hair back into a rubber band I catch, in her expression, the shadow of disappointment.

* * *

Mass is held in the chapel, a reasonably large, high-ceilinged room at the far end of the main building. This prison was built in the 1950s, when people still went to church each week and everyone was assumed to be Christian, so the inward arch of the ceiling and rows of hard wooden pews give the room a special feeling, a place apart from the multipurpose look of the rest of the building. It has a single stained glass window—a bit uneven and amateurish, fitted into an existing window and made by prisoners in a shop class many years earlier. When I first arrived here there was still a cross attached to the wall behind the pulpit and five rows of pews. But then more and more of the women who arrived were Muslim—or became Muslim during their stay here—and so the cross was ripped out and the first two rows of pews removed to make a better space for prayer mats. I understand the need for this, but the room has had a shabbier feel to it ever since—from the rough brown marks near the ceiling where the cross had once hung, the gouges in the linoleum where the pews were removed, the awkward distance I must sit from the priest as he says the ancient phrases I long to hear. But regardless of these things, walking into the chapel offers a feeling of small liberation, as I make my way down the narrow hallway free of guards to exercise one of the few freedoms I still have.

During the quiet moments, I pray for Annemarie. For Janny, and also for Forrest—willfully letting go of my lingering anger for what he did to me, opening my heart to the willingness to understand his confusion and fear and genuine belief that he was telling the truth. Because he’s right. In his shoes, I, too, would have offered up the truths as I saw them. Fear would have motivated me, but that overpowering desire to confess would have driven me as well. The instinctive desire to see a wrong righted is a complicated thing. It can drive us to assist in the bureaucratic pursuit of justice, and also to vigilante crime.

I pray for every victim of our crimes, including Father George. I force myself to hold up each of their faces in my mind and attempt to feel, even in a dim and inadequate way, what I took from them. Afterward I stand in the Communion line and slowly approach Father Soriano. In front of me, the fine tendrils of Alexandra’s hair swing at the small of her back. When the priest offers her the wafer she cups her hands but stares straight ahead, her hard little chin jutting forward, jaw set firmly. We’re all a little proud around here.

At the end of the service I follow my straggling fellow Catholics out of the chapel and into the hallway. The C.O. at the intersection with the main hall is calming a belligerent inmate who is copping an attitude, rolling her neck and straining forward though her wrists are shackled, and I slow my pace in hopes they’ll move her before my path crosses with hers. And then in a flash there’s an arm across my neck; my head is jerked back, and all I can see is the water-stained ceiling as I thrash against the dense body behind me. I try to suck in air, but the pressure is too hard against my windpipe. She wrestles me into the slight corner where the chapel wing joins the narrower hallway. Before my eyes she flashes a shiv—a shard of clear glass ground to a knifelike point and wrapped in tape for a handle—and holds it to the side of my throat.

“That new girl isn’t yours,” Alexandra’s voice hisses in my ear. “She’s for us. You don’t touch her. Don’t make friends with her. Don’t talk shit about
one single person
.”