Inside These Walls (25 page)

I prop the two photos on my desk and look at them for a very long time. I try to memorize their lines, their tones, the way the light touches these people standing out in the open air so long ago. I look through the eyes of Gail, a girl I don’t even remember, and see how Ricky and I looked to the world back then. An ordinary couple, a boy and a girl. I wonder, if I have forgotten that afternoon of joy, how many others I have forgotten. And I look at my mother, or rather, through the eyes of ten-year-old Clara looking at her mother. For this my memory is perfectly sharp, perfectly accurate. She was as beautiful as I remember, and that afternoon every bit as lovely and pure.

And then the next morning, before I can grow any more attached to these pictures, I drop them into an envelope addressed to Annemarie. In it I include a note written on the back of the piece of cardstock I inscribed with a spiral the day I burned
Intérieur
. My letter to her is short, telling only the truth.
These are the people from whom you came. This is the history and the love, the sweep of time building to the moment when you emerged, crying and singular, into the world. Those images and pinpoints in time—I cherish them, but you are the one they truly belong to. Take them, and find joy in them. This is your birth story.

* * *

In the yellow hallway I plant one crutch against the concrete floor and rest the other against the railing that surrounds the stairwell, then balance cautiously on my good foot. After my first couple of weeks in Med Seg, Ms. Chandler came around with her library cart, greeted me with surprise, then promptly went to the cellblock captain and arranged for me to read to Janny for thirty minutes a day. Ever since I began my daily hikes down to Janny’s cell, the staff’s treatment of me has grown lenient in the extreme. They don’t even lock my door most of the time and allow me to walk the hallway whenever I like, even ignoring me when I pause at a particular support beam and watch, at a distance, the TV in the staff coffee lounge. In a single conversation, the librarian was able to achieve what my lawyer never could—a hint of special privilege for an obedient prisoner.

I lurch a few steps, being careful not to put too much pressure on the toes of my injured foot, then pause for a few moments before trying again. There’s no hurry. For all my fears about Janny’s quality of life here, she seems to have adjusted very well. They’ve given her an unflattering short haircut, but it’s easy for her to take care of on her own, and she does many tasks for herself now that I did for her for years. Maybe, she was better off without me, after all. Maybe I needed to take care of her more than she needed the care.

When I arrive at her cell I see she already has a guest. Father Soriano is perched on the narrow stool in a tenuous stance that stretches the edge of his cassock. Janny raises her head when I come in, that little worry line forming between her eyebrows. “Clara,” the priest says, his voice jovial. “I was just about to pay you a visit. Thought I would make my rounds first.”

“Aren’t you early?” I ask.

“By a couple of hours, yes.” He lays a clerical hand on Janny’s head, murmurs a blessing, then pats her cheek. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning, Ms. Hernandez.”

“I’ll come back after my confession,” I tell Janny, and crutch out of the room. But as soon as he closes and latches her door, I say, “You brought him, didn’t you.”

“Yes, he’s in the chapel. Or at least, that’s where he was when I left him.”

He rests his palm against my back as I start down the hallway. The chapel is around the corner, but when I reach my cell I stop and turn into it. Father Soriano looks at me in confusion as I sit on the bed and let my crutches fall beside me with a clatter.

“I can’t go.” My throat feels so tight that I’m not sure how I’m still breathing. “There’s no way I can walk in there.”

“I’ll be with you, Clara.”

I shake my head. My hands, resting on my thighs, are trembling. He steps into my cell and crouches down beside me, balancing in his creased black dress shoes. The weariness has gone from his deeply tanned face, and he only looks kind. It’s the focus of his dark eyes that cuts through my climbing panic. For the first time in the years I’ve known him, he has pulled away the invisible wall between us—the confessional screen, the communion rail—and looks at me the way I imagine Jesus looked upon a woman as he healed her.

“You asked for a brave thing,” he says. “You did it because you have a brave heart. Don’t let your mind trick you now into believing otherwise.”

He holds out his hand, and I let him pull me up to stand.

* * *

The sunlight streaming through the stained-glass window is low and pale, touching the opposite wall with faded shards of color. The pews are worn and nicked, like our old desks at Our Lady of Mercy. I see Clinton the moment I walk in. He’s sitting in the wooden chair just in front of the chancel, elbows on his knees and his legs loosely apart. He’s cracking his knuckles. He’s looking at the floor. I stop short, waiting out a feeling in my stomach like the last dregs of water being sucked down the drain. Then he looks up and, right away, he stands.

His hair is very thin on top now, the blond salted with gray and combed carefully to the side. He wears glasses, and his sharp jaw has softened its edges. His neck is not the lean pillar it used to be. I follow the line of his body down and find a different person entirely. He’s a little paunchy, broader and softer at the shoulders, dressed in a cream-colored shirt traced in a thin plaid and dark khaki pants. He looks ever so much like his father.

He swings his arms, letting the side of his fist bounce against his palm when they meet at the front; but then he stops himself, his hands writhing nervously against the sides of his pants. I can see he’s waiting for me to approach him, but I can’t. To walk up the aisle to this man waiting at the side for me, as if I’m a bride—no.

“Come over here,” I say.

He gives a single nod and starts down the aisle. Father Soriano stands just behind me, like a spotter in case I fall, but I feel steadier than I expected. At close range Clinton looks even older, and I remind myself he’s fifty-two. The last time I saw him he was twenty-eight, sitting on the witness stand in court, but I barely remember him then. In my mind’s eye he is always eighteen.

“Clara,” he says, with another nod of greeting.

He doesn’t extend his hand, and I don’t offer mine. I sit down at the edge of the last pew, and he takes a seat in the one across the aisle, which is no wider than a table—a distance just great enough that I can breathe. The priest takes my crutches and rests them against the back of the pew, then retreats to the doorway.

For a moment Clinton takes in my analytical gaze, my flat face, my silence. “Do you want to start, or should I?” he asks.

I raise an eyebrow. “Do you have something to say?”

“Of course I do.” He rubs his thighs. “First, the day you hit me on the head with that bottle, I wasn’t coming down there to do anything to you. I was just trying to reach the bottle of stain remover. I’d gotten jelly on my shirt, and it was the shirt I needed for an interview, and there was nothing on my mind except getting it out—”

“What?” My face contorts into a mask of disbelief. “
That’s
what you want to tell me? After all these years?”

“To clear the air, yes. I know you have this idea that I wanted to do something to you, and that’s why you overreacted so much, and it’s always bothered me because it isn’t true. I was with Susie then, for God’s sake. I wasn’t going to try anything.”

I sit up straight and choke on a humorless laugh. “Clinton, you never
tried
anything. You
did
whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted.
Trying
implies that I might have had a choice in the matter.”

He holds out both hands, palms toward the earth, in a placating gesture. “I’m not saying you’re wrong there. Just that wasn’t one of those times.”

“And while we’re at it, I should have
overreacted
like that about five years earlier.”

His hands drop to his knees. “Fair enough.”

That small admission surprises me into silence. He gnaws his bottom lip and looks toward the narthex. Rectangles of light gleam on his glasses—hard, shifting little points.

“I hate it that you see it this way,” he says. “I was hoping that wouldn’t be the case.”

A fresh surge of fury courses through me. “How did you think I would see it? As a game? Some kind of exciting affair? You
raped
me. When I was a
child
. And you did it a hundred times.”

“
I
know that,” he says loudly. “I was hoping
you
didn’t.”

“How the hell could I not know?”

“Because there are so many ways to think
around
these things!”

Again he holds his hands out, palms toward me this time, and takes a deep breath. “Let me start over again,” he says. “You want an apology, and believe it or not, I came all the way down here to deliver it to you. I guess you’ve been steaming about this for thirty-odd years, wondering why I didn’t have the stones to offer you one. Well, that’s the answer. How you viewed it—that’s not something I knew. I figured it probably wasn’t favorable. I’m not stupid, but I didn’t know that for a
fact
. And what if I said I’m sorry about what happened and you said, ‘What are you talking about?’ Because sometimes—not mostly, but sometimes—it was consensual.”

I tip my head, looking at him in utter disbelief. There’s something befuddled in his expression, as though he has truly puzzled over this. “It was
never
consensual,” I say.

“Well, sometimes it seemed like it was.”

“You imagined that. I never wanted it. Not once.” I brace my arm against the pew and lean toward him to be sure he doesn’t miss a thing I say. “You choked me, you scared me, you robbed me of ever feeling normal, and worst of all, you screwed up my mind. You don’t get to keep any of that, so don’t congratulate yourself, but for a long time there you screwed me up pretty good. And if you’ve carried around some idea in your head that I wanted it sometimes—well, allow me to relieve you of that notion. I knew that if I tried to say no, you would make my life an even worse hell. A person can’t consent if she has
no choice
.”

His mouth pulls into a tight, grim line, and I see his Adam’s apple move as he swallows. “Listen, I didn’t come here to give you a pile of excuses. Flat out, I shouldn’t have done it. I’m sorry. I’m embarrassed and I’m sorry. And I hate to say it, but you’re not the first woman to come to me years later and lay into me about something of this nature. At the time I had a different idea than I do now about how that type of interaction works. That’s all I’m going to say.”

His apology should wash over me like clear water, but I find it hardly matters. What feels good is to speak the truth of it to his face. To make him return in his mind to those moments and sit in them with me, drinking in the fact that he was unwanted. Yet I know I can’t make this unhappy reunion all about the rearrangement of that power. “You filed a claim in a sexual abuse lawsuit against the diocese,” I say.

A shadow of surprise crosses his face, but he says nothing.

“Was that a true claim or a false one? Just be honest. If it was false, I won’t report you.”

“How did you find out about that?”

“You’d be amazed at how many people are nosing around in our family’s past on a day-to-day basis. Ricky demanded to talk to you right before they burst in and arrested him, remember? They leave no stone unturned.”

Clinton nods and clears his throat. “Yeah. Well, it was a genuine claim. And in my defense—in my defense, Clara, please—I did everything I could as a witness for you because I didn’t want to see you put away for murdering that sorry old bastard. It’s a wonder nobody else got to him first.”

He rubs his hands together, and I notice his wedding ring is gone. That shouldn’t surprise me, but everything about the passage of time outside these walls always manages to, anyway. “I’m sorry that happened to you,” I say.

He looks up at me with a wince. “Christ, Clara, don’t say that.”

“Well, I am. Nobody should have to suffer that. Not even you.”

The light has fallen lower, throwing piercing beams across the pews toward the altar. It’s December, and even in the desert night is creeping earlier and earlier. Clinton looks up at me, a momentary glance that is brief and unguarded. “My father didn’t know, but my mother did. When I finally worked up the nerve to tell her, she freaked out about it, but next thing I knew she left anyway. These days I think they’d call her bipolar. I don’t know if they had a name for it then.
Crazy
. People like that were just crazy. Whatever it was, it sure didn’t do
me
any good. Can I tell you something?”

I consider that, because I can. “Yes.”

“During the whole lawsuit thing, most of us in the group went to these support group sessions. The guy who first contacted the lawyer works for this organization that runs them. I wasn’t going just because it would look good in court or anything like that. I was going because once somebody from school got in touch with me and pointed out the elephant in the room, which is that a whole bunch of us went through this shit, I started having a lot of feelings about it again. Victim feelings. Maybe the third time I went, we were going around the circle and that guy talked about how the experience drove him go to work for this organization because he wanted to do everything in his power to prevent another person going through what he’d been through. And I thought, wow. There are two kinds of people in this world, you know?”

“What do you mean?”

He tosses up a hand as if it’s obvious. “Well, that guy realized his life’s work was protecting children and serving victims. And mine was proving to myself that I was
not gay,
goddamn it. Because that sick fuck really had me worried about it for a minute there.”

I nod. Clinton looks restless, his gaze darting to the door and then to the window. “When did you get divorced?” I ask.