Inside These Walls (3 page)

“I’m glad you didn’t go to the Hole for throwing milk on that white girl,” Janny says. “You go to the Hole, they gotta send me with you. And I don’t like it there.”

“They would have put you back in Med Seg. They wouldn’t punish you because of what I did.”

“
Please
don’t do stupid stuff like that, Clara. I got five years left here, and I don’t want no drama.”

I sit beside her on the bed. “I’m sorry.”

She smiles indulgently. Pats my hand with her sticky one. “You want to show me some more about that Braille? We got some time left before chow hall, right?”

“Fifteen minutes.”

I take out the pages I’ve typed up for her in the workshop—the names of her three children, her mother and Jesus, each on its own line. Secretly I doubt she’ll ever learn all the letters. We’ve been working on these same five words for more than a year but she’s making slow progress, and that brings her joy. And so it brings
me
joy, too.

* * *

A few days later, as I’m carrying Janny’s Styrofoam dinner tray to our table in the chow hall, the crackly-haired girl strides straight toward me and punches me in the face. Pain slashes across my cheekbones, fogs my vision. A joyous cheer rises up from her friends, and I take two large steps backward to allow the guards to step in, which they do, quickly. The blouse of my jumpsuit is speckled with blood, red on pale blue. The pain is throbbing, but not insurmountable. Someone in a gray uniform hands me a messy wad of paper napkins, and as soon as I press them to my nose they go crimson.

“That was for the Koreans,” somebody shouts, and a bunch of people laugh.

The girl and I are, once again, escorted down separate hallways—her in handcuffs to the disciplinary offices, me to the clinic. I stand in the doorway with my bloodied napkins, and the nurse says, “Oh, Ms. Mattingly. I haven’t seen you in a while.”

I’m jostled toward a chair. There are three green cots in a row. One is occupied by a woman lying with her arm around her stomach and a kidney-shaped dish beside her, which contains a film of vomit. The other two are empty, although one is surely intended for the heavily pregnant woman pacing by the cabinets. She stops and hunches over a little, eyes closed, bobbing slightly at the shoulders. Her nostrils flare. I wonder what they’ve drugged her with, and whether that’s a standard procedure now or something you can buy with canteen funds. A woman with finely styled hair, wearing a black Department of Social Services name badge, sits in a chair along that wall reading a paperback. I know her role. Spirit away the infant as soon as it emerges, replacing it with a stack of paperwork. The government’s official Rumpelstiltskin.

The nurse peels back the wad of napkins from my nose. “Janny Hernandez needs someone to get her dinner,” I say thickly. “Can you call somebody down?”

“I’m sure they’ve got it.”

“The spaghetti needs to be plain.”

“They’ll deal with it, Ms. Mattingly.” The nurse touches my nose with a tentative gloved finger. “My, my. Well, I don’t think she broke it. You didn’t fight back, did you?”

“No.”

“That’s a good girl.” I snap my head up to look at her with narrowed eyes, and the guard’s hand drops to my shoulder. A trickle of blood bursts from my nose again, pooling on my bottom lip, and I taste its copper.

“Easy now.” She hands me a wet-wipe and a thick rectangle of wound cotton. “You get yourself cleaned up, and then back you go.”

The C.O. walks me back to my cell. It’s the nice officer, Sergeant Schmidt, a thick-shouldered woman who wears her strawberry blond hair in a low bun. She has been here for a long time. “I’ll get an inmate to bring your dinner. Somebody’ll take care of Janny, don’t you worry.”

“She can’t eat tomato products, and it’s spaghetti night. That’s the problem. They have to ask for plain spaghetti for her, no sauce, or she’ll get heartburn. And she forgets, so if they give it to her with sauce, she’ll eat it by accident.”

“Calm
down
. You think you’re the only one who can handle Ms. Hernandez?” She offers me a wry smile as she locks the bars. “Put your feet up for a few. Write a letter to Mr. Pugh. Now you’ve got an interesting story to tell, right?”

She makes her slow way down the cellblock, and I sit on Janny’s bed and sigh, touching my nose cautiously to see if it’s still bleeding. I’d never tell Emory Pugh about anything like this. He’s a simple man, but I don’t trust that he wouldn’t sell juicier information to the kind of people who might publish it. Any time I begin to think the public’s interest has died down, a letter like Karen Shepard’s pops up to remind me none of this will ever go away. I’m beyond caring what anyone out there thinks of me, but it’s a matter of self-ownership. There’s hardly anything in this world that’s mine, and so I hold close my truths, my secrets.

When I was seven years old, my mother bought me the record album of Captain Kangaroo’s narration of
The Nutcracker
. It enchanted me to hear my own name coming from the hi-fi speakers because I had never known another Clara, and that Christmas season I lay on the braided rug for hours, listening to the story again and again.
Look! Look! Through the keyhole!
it began.
Do you see what I see?
The locked room Clara saw through the keyhole contained the wondrous Christmas tree, the toys and sugarplums, but also the evil Mouse Army and their ruthless king, the gingerbread men soon to be wounded in battle. Sometimes I feel like that room, closed off from all those piling up at the doorway and scrabbling for a glimpse. I am everything inside it. And though it is mostly tree and gift, light and candy, there is no story without the evil element. Without the heartless animal, it’s just a pretty dance.

* * *

When Father Soriano appears at my cell, his cassock broken by the gray bars like a Magritte painting, I am surprised. This is the hour of the day when many of the inmates attend Narcotics Anonymous meetings or anger management classes, including Janny, but I just stay in. I’m replying to the latest letter from Emory Pugh, who wrote that he went fishing and that the lake reminded him of my eyes. My eyes are brown, but the reality of who I am doesn’t really matter in this correspondence, so I only thank him. The second letter from Karen Shepard has already found a home in my trash can.

The C.O. unlocks my cell, and I offer the priest my chair. The bed feels like a strange place to sit to receive a visiting clergyman, almost suggestive, but the only alternative is the toilet, so I try to perch on the mattress in a proper way. I can see my mother in my mind’s eye, pulling up the string.

“Nice to see you at Mass this morning,” he says. He brushes a hand toward my magazine. “I see you get the
Magnificat
.”

“Yes. I follow along with it every day.” I smile a little. “In another life I might have been a nun. I like the Litany of the Hours.”

“You’ve got the dedication, that’s for sure.”

“Just not the resumé.”

He offers a confused smile, as if not sure whether he should laugh at that. To smooth it over I add, “I feel like one a lot of the time when I’m doing the Braille. Like a scribe from the Middle Ages. I could have sat in my little hut in total silence all day, translating from Aramaic or Greek. It sounds like a good life.”

His nod is polite. There’s a pause, and then he says, “I noticed you haven’t taken the Eucharist for several weeks.”

“I haven’t finished repenting.”

“If I remember correctly, we discussed saying a daily rosary for one of your victims.”

“My youngest victim.” I look at the mirror past his head, see my face reflected pale beside his dark shoulder. “I’m not sure who that is.”

“I believe it was the nineteen-year-old daughter. Was it not?”

I close my eyes, feel a line form between them. “So you meant Eun Hee specifically?”

He opens the folder in his lap, flips through some of the lined yellow pages held in by a strip of metal. “It says in your file—”

“I know what it says in my file. It’s hard to explain.”

His face has clouded with a kind of suspicion. “Is there a reason you can’t pray for the one you believe to be the youngest?” he asks. “Or for more than one?”
It’s not like you don’t have a variety of choices,
I imagine he’s thinking. I wouldn’t blame him.

“Penance for Catholics is very specific,” I point out, gently chopping the air with my hands to draw the neat, invisible box this faith creates around my soul. “This many prayers, not one more, not one less. You must repent for every sin, or the penance doesn’t cover it. It isn’t a vague, generalized sort of forgiveness. So it bothers me if you don’t give me a specific name.”

The droop at the corners of his eyes tells me I have worn his patience to a frayed edge. “Eun Hee, then,” he says. “Pray for her.”

My sigh embodies both relief and, oddly, disappointment. “All right.”

He nods, but there’s an uncertainty to it. He takes a breath, releases it. “The goal here is to make personal progress, Clara. Spiritual progress. I want to help, but I feel like there’s something you’re holding back,” he says.

“Not at all,” I say. Now I will need to confess to a lie.

* * *

I pray for Eun Hee, and the following Sunday I stand in the Communion line once again and taste the dry wheat starch on my tongue. That afternoon I sit outside in the sunlight for a long time with Clementine on my lap, looking out over the steel frames of the high-voltage towers marching across the valley, the looping sweep of their cables. Between the irrigated fields the land is in its desert state. The green is so fragile. It looks as if it could be wiped away with the swipe of a finger, like moss on a stone.

I think about asking Emory Pugh to send me a package of catnip. I’ve made cat toys for Clementine before—knitted mice, a feather tied to a piece of yarn—but I used to love watching the ecstasy of a young cat rolling in the grass under the spell of the stuff. I never ask him for anything, but for Clementine, perhaps I’ll make an exception.

* * *

On Monday morning, back at work in the Braille workshop, I’ve got a print of Picasso’s
Guernica
on the light box when the public address system crackles and I hear my number barked out on the list for visitors. At first I think,
This is strange; I haven’t had a visitor in years
. Usually visits are restricted to Saturdays, and those during the week are only for rare situations where the visitor has traveled a great distance or can’t often come. And then, in a flash of insight, I know who it is. It’s Karen Shepard, making good on her last letter’s breathless insistence to “meet in person” to “discuss those questions on which no one else could shed light” but me.

“I’m sorry,” I say to Shirley, who is frowning up at the intercom, her curled white hair resting cloudlike against her shoulders. “I didn’t request any visitors.”

“It’s all right, Clara. It must be somebody special. You go. Enjoy your visit.”

I set down my pencil and try to conceal my irritation, lest the guards interpret it as hostility. My wrists shackled, I am led down the long hallway and then the stairs, to the yellow cinderblock room filled with booths. The second from the end is empty. I sit in the chair and face the visitor through the thick, smudged Plexiglas. The woman on the other side—blonde, young—looks at a guard uncertainly, then lifts the phone receiver and presses it to her ear. I do the same.

“Clara Mattingly?” she asks.

“Yes. I don’t do interviews.”

“Well, this isn’t really a typical interview. I promise I’m not going to disclose anything you tell me.”

I scowl. “Putting it in a book is disclosing it, don’t you think?”

She regards me with an uneasy gaze. She has poor eyes for a journalist—too large and rabbity looking, lacking in reserve. “I wouldn’t do that.”

“Listen, I’m not about to feed you information you can use to cobble together some biography of Ricky, whether or not you quote me on it. It’s a worthless project. And no, you can’t quote me on
that,
either.”

She nestles the phone more tightly against her jaw. “I don’t think you understand,” she says. “You see, you’re my mother.”

I stare.

With her free hand, she grasps, drops, then grasps again at a sheaf of papers on the slim counter before her. “I have…I have all these papers. I just want to know some things. I just want—it’s nothing for a book. I had a miscarriage last year, and…well, it was the wrong time anyway, but before I get married…”

She’s got the phone crammed against her shoulder, both hands now working through her file folders. Her fingers shake. Her mouth is moving so fast, but already I don’t like what I see. I don’t like this, I want to leave, and then she slaps a single rectangle of paper up against the window. It’s pink and patterned and it bears a seal.

“This is my birth certificate,” she says. “The names are wrong, I know. Those are my adoptive parents. But if you recognize this—maybe this date or this place. It says, California State Women’s Prison at El Centro. And so I looked and looked—”

“I know nothing about this,” I say.

All five of her fingers fly out in an urgent
stop
motion, and the paper slips down to the table. I can see her face again, and her eyes have welled with tears. “No. I
know
. I’ve searched and searched. I’ve put up one query after another on these adoptee search sites. And this woman, she was a nurse here in the 1980s, she replied. She said, absolutely for sure, that it was you. I didn’t believe her at first, maybe for obvious—”

“Good. You shouldn’t have.”

“No, no. I don’t judge you, I don’t judge you. Please know that. I only want some medical information. Because after my miscarriage—it was pretty late for one—the doctor said, do you know of any genetic issues in your family, and I said I just don’t know. So that’s all I want. I’m not here to…to bother you.”

Ricky’s mouth. Ricky’s jaw. The particular set of her front teeth, the narrow slope of her chin.

She shoves the heel of her hand against her eye, smudges a streak of moisture toward her ear, tinted with tiny black flakes of mascara. There is a diamond on her ring finger, and the gold band is loose against her skin, sliding around with the motion of her hand. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “I know this is so inconsiderate of me. I just thought if I sent you a letter, you might not believe me. So I came and I brought everything.”