Inside These Walls (20 page)

I nod, my chin pressing into her forearm. I can feel the point of the glass blade against my skin.

“That’s your one warning.” She flicks the blade and a sharp razorlike pain slashes across my nerves. I try to cry out, but the sound is nothing more than a froggy gasp. All at once her arm loosens, and in a split second she’s five, eight, ten feet away, walking easily down the hallway, her hands empty.

I pull in a deep breath, then touch my throat and look down at my fingers. They’re red and glossy, but not drenched. It’s a nick, that’s all. I tug the shoulder of my blouse higher to stanch the blood, then continue down the hall. Without remark the C.O. slides my wrists into the cuffs and locks me into my place along the chain, to return to D-Block in an organized fashion.

Penelope is still asleep when I step back through the bars. She’s on her stomach with her limbs spread out sloppily as a child’s, a spare blue prison shirt draped across her eyes to shade them and she is snoring faintly. I wad up some toilet paper and press it to my neck, at last allowing my breathing to go ragged and my heart to race wildly. I press my back against the wall and slide down to sit on the floor, where the cold concrete feels comforting and certain, the cinderblock wonderfully unyielding.

* * *

In spite of myself I’m skittish all through the Monday that follows—shooting glances over my shoulder in the chow hall, bristling when the air-conditioning comes on and flutters my uniform blouse. I know they’re watching me and I need to project a self-possessed confidence, but my nerves are on edge. When yard time comes around I claim to be ill, giving up the chance to cuddle with Clementine, and in the quiet cell I take out the latest letter from Emory Pugh—the one in which he, wounded, accuses me of neglecting him, even floating the idea that I’m using him, without quite coming out and saying it. From time to time he does this—he has for two years now—and it’s a game I’ll usually play, sending along reassurances and friendly observations about my cat and the weather here in California. But now, merely reading over his words makes my throat feel tight and stirs up something oddly akin to resentment. I don’t want to answer this letter. Emory Pugh is only the latest in a string of men stretching back more than two decades—men who want to be close to me, claim association with me, draw some sort of thrill from even my most indifferent attentions. Men who watched the news or saw the movie and believe they know me, or like the idea of the little blonde holding a gun in her shaking hands, or believe I imagine them as my white knights waiting for me on the outside. I’m tired of responding to their misspelled little efforts, their flaccid attempts at gallantry, all in return for the mild entertainment they bring me. I’m not going to do it anymore.

I crumple the letter and drop it into the trash, then take out my half-finished tactile drawing of
Intérieur
. For this final draft I managed to bring back a piece of the workshop’s thick white paper, luxuriously cottony and soft to the touch, by sliding it under my uniform shirt and wearing it against my torso. Of course I’ve known all along why I wanted to recreate this particular drawing, using my own hands and my own hard-won skills, and send it out into the world. The image, even half-finished, takes my mind back to those winnowing moments, the last hour before the police arrived.

It was the disagreement between Chris and Ricky that did them in. Ricky wanted to drive south to Mexico, Chris north to Oregon. Chris changed his mind after the crimes at the rectory and decided the shorter drive would be the only safe choice. As they bickered on their way back to the Cathouse to grab their things, at first I was in disbelief. I got in the shower, the way I always did after Clinton’s worst assaults, hoping the water would make me feel purified in the wake of all that filth and restore me to some sense of being human. That didn’t work, so I got high—
very
high, as fast as I could. And then I went upstairs to hide.

Ricky came in and closed the door behind him, pressing his back against it in a stab at privacy. There were no functioning locks in the Cathouse; we’d been walked in on more than once. I was sitting on the floor by the dresser, my back resting against the wall, listening to the melancholy strains of the music from a pop station filtering up from downstairs—the Phil Collins song that Forrest later professed to hating. The two cats who liked Ricky best, Brundibar and Mischa, had taken up residence on our bed in the corner, stretching out their languid limbs in the nest of our bedspread. “Pack what you need and let’s get on the road. Chris can go wherever he wants. We’re going to Mexico.”

“You go,” I said. “I’m not running. I’ll get in more trouble if I run.”

He cocked his head sharply and threw me an impatient expression. “You’re obviously high. Get up. Grab your stuff.” He reached to the floor and threw me the canvas tote I used to ferry things to and from my parents’ house, the one that said “Le Bag” on the side. It landed with a soft thump at the base of the chair, a few feet in front of me. “Come on.”

At the sudden sound Brundibar leaped up and darted across the floor, and I stopped him with one hand and lifted him as I stood, hiking him to my shoulder like a baby. He was a beautiful ash-colored tomcat, delicate in his bones, and he looked around with alert yellow eyes. I stroked him and clucked to him as if he was the one who needed comforting, settling into the chair that was turned at an awkward angle in the center of the room. Above the broken secondhand dresser hung an enormous piece of art Ricky had made—a maze done in India ink, filled with black-inked monsters and colorfully dressed, winsome-eyed children. The cool thing about the maze, he always pointed out to people, is that there’s no way out.

“Goddammit, Clara,” he said, his tone rough, and began shoving things into my bag himself. “Let’s
go
. We can’t stay here.”

“I’m not leaving my mother.”

“Your
mother?
What are you, seven years old?”

I snuggled Brundibar against my face and clicked my tongue at him. “Jesus Christ,” Ricky said. His voice had grown strident, and there was a growing note of panic to it. “Don’t make me leave without you.”

“Go ahead.”

“Clara.” He dropped the bag and came over to me, leaning down and planting his hands against my upper arms, but gently. His voice was calmer now, pleading a little. “Get in the car. All right? It’s just a drive. A road trip. We’ll go to Cancun, and it’ll be awesome. Remember when we drove to Spiral Jetty, huh? Remember how much fun that was?”

I started to cry anew, and he uttered a low grunt of frustration. “Fine,” he said. “I’m not leaving unless you do. We’ll
both
go to jail. Is that what you want?”

From the bottom of the stairs came Chris’s bellowing voice. “Dude, come
on
. We’re ready.”

He pressed his forehead against mine. “
Please,
Kira. Work with me.”

I buried my face in the cat’s fur, and Ricky pushed away from me with a defeated sigh. The bedroom door slammed, and I was alone. I was alone, and I stayed there, waiting. I didn’t leave until I heard the sirens drawing closer, and then I panicked and ran out into the hallway so they wouldn’t burst in and terrify me further.

I wanted the world to know that story. I wanted Annemarie to know it most of all. But now, having seen the heartbreak in her eyes at learning how she came to be, I don’t want to tell it that way anymore. She came to me searching for answers to the mystery of her origins, and I owe it to her to turn this tale of apocalypse into her creation myth.

Penelope’s cigarette lighter is buried deep in her canteen box. I flick it, touch it to the edge of the drawing, and the paper flares up at once. The flame eats its way up the image, across the slouching woman and her sewing box, to the man with his pointy-tipped ears, to the bed, the dresser, the map. At last only the upper corner is left, and I drop the last edge of burning paper into the toilet.

I brush my hands against my jumpsuit and drop the lighter in the pencil can. Then I take out a second sheet of cardstock and empty the graphite from my homemade mechanical pencil to create a sort of tortillion. Sitting at the desk, I begin to draw a broad spiral with the pressure of the softened wood and my fingers, just the outline for now, barely visible on the bright thick paper.

* * *

The other inmates are just beginning to come back from yard time when a C.O. appears at my cell, flipping open the slot and gesturing for me to thrust my hands through. As she cuffs me I ask, “What’s going on?”

“Appointment.”

“Appointment? For what?”

“Your disciplinary hearing.”

With a sense of dread, my mind flips through the possibilities of what it could be for: the forbidden cigarette, the smuggled paper, the confrontation after Mass the day before—in which I was the victim, of course, but sometimes witnesses tell a different tale. “I didn’t do anything,” I insist. “If you think I did, I’m supposed to get paperwork stating the complaint first, and an inmate advocate—”

She opens my bars. “Just come on.”

Bewildered, I walk just ahead of her to the office wing, where a C.O. gestures me into the disciplinary office. Half in a panic, I take a breath to speak up in defense of my rights, but before I can speak I see my attorney sitting in a chair with her legs crossed, one stylishly-clad foot swinging. I exhale in surprise. “Mona!”

“Have a seat, Clara. Uncuff her, please.”

I sit across from her and feel the shackles slide from my wrists. “They told me this was a disciplinary hearing.”

“Yes. I didn’t want anyone to overhear that you were speaking to your lawyer.”

In a few moments we’re alone. “How’ve you been?” she asks. “I hear you got a new cellmate.”

“Yeah. Is there any chance you could convince them to put Janny back in with me? They haven’t even let me visit her, and it’s mutually advantageous for us to be together. If you want, I can write down my entire argument. I want to challenge the decision.”

“Clara, don’t do that.”

I raise an eyebrow. I don’t know what’s going on here, but something in her manner looks tense. Pensive. This isn’t a health-and-welfare check, I can see that much.

“I happened to be in the building to meet with one of my other clients,” she begins, “and it was mentioned to me that Penelope Robbins has been placed in a cell with you. Are you at all familiar with her case?”

“Of course. I’ve been following the news.”

“Good. Then you must know she’s been charged with obstruction of justice, and you probably know the theory that she hired a hit man against her father, the Congressman.”

“Yes, but I don’t think she did that.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Comments she’s made. She’s too concerned about his health to have put him there on purpose.”

She murmurs thoughtfully. “So she’s opening up to you, is she?”

I grimace. “Not if I can help it. The last thing I want to do is get tangled up in her legal business. I have enough problems of my own at the moment.”

“Actually, Clara, I think it’s the first thing you want.”

My gaze turns puzzled, and Mona’s expression shifts to the woman-to-woman look I saw her use so many times before the jury. “The State of California really wants to solve this,” she says quietly. “If it so happens that she confides any details to you, then you’d do well to pass them along to me immediately.”

I feel my posture straightening, my shoulders squaring. Twenty-five-year-old Clara would have nodded adamantly at this suggestion, but the Clara of today recoils from it in disgust. “To snitch, you mean,” I say to her. “On my own cellmate. I would
never
.”

“Don’t speak so soon. If she confesses, of her own free will, it would come at great benefit to you. Now, if I were you, I wouldn’t directly try to
lead
her—”

I line up my words like bricks on wall. “I am
not
going to be a
snitch
.”

Mona sighs. “Oh, Clara,” she says wearily. “You really
are
a lifer now, aren’t you?”

The words set off a twinge in my heart, but I don’t say a word.

“Just a few weeks ago, you were asking me about a new trial,” she reminds me. “Because you had extenuating circumstances, you said. I have no idea what you were talking about, but you seemed quite interested in getting the hell out of here. And I can’t say I blame you. Would you care to share what those circumstances were?”

I swallow hard. I never speak of these things aloud. In a shaky voice I say, “I was raped by my stepbrother. For years. Father George knew about it, and he did nothing. And I could never understand why, because I trusted him, and my mother trusted him, and yet he did nothing.”

Her eyebrows knit together sympathetically. “This is the same stepbrother who testified for you during your trial?”

“Yes. It was all so sick and awful, and I didn’t want to destroy my mother by letting her find out about it. I figured it wouldn’t matter anyway since I had confessed. I knew it was possible it could make my sentence lighter, but that was a gamble, and for sure they’d ask me dozens of humiliating questions in front of the whole world. I couldn’t take the thought of having to defend myself, or my mother having to defend
her
self if all that got into the papers. I’d rather be in prison.”

“Questions like what?”

“Like why I let it go on for so long. How it could be rape when he usually used protection. I mean, this was Clinton Brand. All the girls wanted him. He was
always
sleeping with someone. And at the time, back in 1984—” I feel my expression darken. “Did you ever see that movie,
Sixteen Candles?
It was so big that summer. The whole idiotic film is about having sex with girls who are drunk and passed out, taking their underwear as a trophy, coercing them to sleep with you—everyone thought it was all so
funny
. Such wonderful comedy. That’s what it was like back then. If the jury had been asked to weigh what had happened between me and Clinton, they would have high-fived Clinton on the way out of the courtroom and sent me to the electric chair.”