Inside These Walls (5 page)

Clementine grows tired of me and pads out into the sun. I pull up my knees and rest my elbow against one, drawing my fingers through my bangs in an idle, comforting way. There was a time, in the midst of my years with Ricky, that I never could possibly have imagined it would end this way. Then, he was the good one, the protector, the one who had brought a particular Clara back from the dead. By the end of my trial he was only a figure in a funhouse mirror, and has been nothing else ever since.

The shape of her mouth, the set of her front teeth. The way her shoulders sloped, then straightened as she slapped the certificate against the glass.

Was this the legacy of us, then? From that desert of waste and loss, something beautiful and good? How was that possible?

* * *

After Mass on Sunday I attend a crochet class in the art therapy room. In the center of the table is a pyramid of skeins of donated yarn, some in colors I recognize as having been fashionable when I was a child. I’m assigned a crochet hook marked with a number, which the teacher records in a notebook before I can begin.

I’ve crocheted before—my mother taught me when I was in junior high—and it comes back to me more quickly than I’d expected. The teacher hands me an instruction booklet of patterns for dish towels, and I begin working on a more advanced one as my fellow students struggle to make a beginning chain. They’re loud and boisterous, but they leave me alone. I’ve taken a seat near the television bolted into the corner so I can keep an eye on the news as I work. I’m hoping for more information about Penelope Robbins, but I missed the first twenty minutes of the hour, and now the broadcast is focused on trivial celebrity news, sports, and reviews of movies I will never see. Still, I picture little Penelope languishing in her cell in the county jail, stoically terrified and possessing not a single coping skill for her new environment, the way I used to be. I’m sure she’s reading a lot of novels. Earnestly eating the canned vegetables they serve her, doing jumping jacks beside her bunk so she can keep her figure. Light and pretty and very nervous; a Bambi of the cellblock. It’s only a matter of time before she lets her guard down in the shower—disarmed by the delicious, steaming heat of the water—and finds herself railroaded face-first into the tile wall, someone’s thick fingers shoved in where they shouldn’t be, a giant hand on the side of her neck, a hissing whisper that she likes it. If she had reason to order a hit on her own father, perhaps she’s used to that kind of thing, but that won’t take away from the shock the first time it happens.

I work for a long time, in part because it keeps me away from my cell and the possibility of a visit from the priest. I didn’t take Communion this morning, and I don’t want to talk about it. At the end of an hour I have a nice yellow rectangle without a single flaw, as I’ve fixed each mistake along the way. It’s good work, and good work is satisfying.

Once back in my cell, I write a reply to Emory Pugh’s latest letter. And for the first time since my mother died, I ask someone for a favor. It feels strange and fills me with chagrin, but I don’t have much choice in the matter. Prison becomes a simple life if you don’t need anything outside it. But once you do, it’s hell. It’s what they intended.

* * *

“You hear that?” Janny asks. Her voice is low. We’re sitting on opposite sides of her bed, playing a game of Jenga her daughter sent her for Christmas five years ago. She’s remarkably good at it; to choose her next move, her sensitive fingers patter down the sides of the column without ever making it fall. She jerks her chin toward our cell’s farthest wall, and I listen, but hear nothing.

“What is it?”

“You can’t hear that? You’re getting deaf, old lady.”

I get up, cautiously so as not to upset the Jenga tower, and stand near the bars with an ear cocked to the left. Now I can hear it—the hum of our neighbor’s voice beneath the current of noise from her television, a one-sided conversation. She’s talking on a contraband cellphone. This particular neighbor is in for ten to fifteen for armed robbery, and while I can’t quite tell, it sounds like she’s arranging a surprise for the person who snitched on her.

“While you’re up, can you get me my Rolaids?” Janny asks.

I fetch the package and return to my spot on the bed. It goes without saying that neither of us will report on either the cellphone or our neighbor’s retaliation plans. During my first few months here I went to the guards for everything like that. I had no idea—or rather, the wrong idea—and I tried to understand prison by applying to it the rules of high school, where currying the favor of teachers was the best way to receive privileges and recommendations. I graduated third in my class, so I was eager to apply the skills that had served me so well a few years earlier. What I didn’t understand yet was that the guards were not looking for the fulfilling experience of helping young people reach their potential, and I couldn’t distinguish myself from my delinquent peers by demonstrating the great moral distance between myself and them. I was a murderer, and everyone knew it, and what the guards wanted was for me to stop turning myself into a cat toy to be batted around in the corridors. It made their workdays more tedious.

“Wish I had a phone like that,” Janny says. She lays a Jenga block on top of the tower with gentle precision. “I could call my daughter whenever I want. No more standing around waiting, then everybody yell at you if you talk too long.”

“How old was she when you got here?” I ask. Her brow furrows at the question, and I know it’s a strange one. We each know what the other did, but etiquette dictates that information like this should be volunteered. It’s like talking about money in the outside world—prying is in poor taste.

“Six,” she says. “She’s nineteen now.”

I redo the calculation quickly in my mind. “She would have to be twenty-one.”

“No, she’s nineteen.”

“Janny, you’ve been here for fifteen years. If she was six when you came in, she’s twenty-one now.”

“I know how old my daughter is,” she scoffs. “You gonna take your turn, or not?”

I slide out a block from the center. It moves easily; time has rounded its edges, left the wood with a certain velvety slickness. My mind is filled with a jumble of questions I want to ask Janny—questions which, in eight years together, I have never thought or cared to ask.
Does she have memories of you from before? How did you build a bond with her, when you’ve been here almost all her life? Does she resent you for what you did? Forgive you? Do you have hope that it will be normal after you’re released?

Yet I can’t ask any of these. When Amber Jones asked her question in an ecstatic whisper—
didn’t you have his baby?
—it was nothing Janny hadn’t heard about me before. But from the beginning, I denied it was true. I’ve always brushed off the rumor as silly gossip. And I don’t know what to tell her now.

Or what to tell Annemarie. At the end of our visit, as she gathered her purse to leave, she said she would try to come back in a month or so. She lives in Riverside, which is only two hours away, but a four-hour round trip still requires planning.
You have three more weeks to pull it together
, I think. To figure out how to come across as an ordinary mother and have in place the right answers to all her questions.

I shouldn’t have unearthed those transcripts. They keep creeping back into my mind now, gnawing at me. I’ve guessed that when Annemarie went looking for her biological mother, she expected someone with a past—her birth certificate warned her she had been born in prison, after all—but surely not someone who hadn’t budged since then. And one whose name she already knew, no less. If she felt a morbid curiosity at first, it wouldn’t last long. I’m not the Hollywood actress she’s almost certainly seen performing a variation on my distant sins. I’m a liability, an embarrassment, and that is all.

What if she tracks down Clinton,
I think all of a sudden as I watch Janny prod at the Jenga tower with an inquisitive finger. What if she realizes I have no worthwhile information to offer her, and seeks out my stepbrother instead? It was Clinton who kept the house after my stepfather moved into a nursing home. After a lifetime of halfhearted employment and false starts, he finally achieved stability by being the last one standing. The thought of Annemarie knocking on his door, witnessing the façade of affluence, is sickening.

She needs to get her answers from you
, I think, and I drop my head into my hands, my hair blocking my view of the wobbly column of blocks. I don’t even know where to begin.

* * *

When
Afternoon Classics
comes on I stand at my makeshift barre and begin my barre work. The
plies
and
eleves
, the
battement tendus
and
rond de jambes,
all the steps I coaxed out of my memory and supplemented with a worn old book from the prison library. In a real class the music is based on what exercises the teacher plans for her students, but in my situation I must base my exercises on whatever happens to be on the radio. Yet I have learned to flow with it, and after a while the music tears open the fabric of this reality, the visual fact of it, and I walk through the wispy and ragged entrance it creates. Inside it, I’m in a rose-hued leotard and tights and a stiff round skirt. I recline in a chair like a sleeping swan. The room is familiar—the narrow bed with its loom-woven white coverlet, the wallpaper flocked with pink flowers, the map above the dresser, the open sewing box on a table at the center. And the man, faceless, standing in tense repose at the door.

I rise from the chair, dance away from him through the slanting shadows. My motions are nervous, mincing. They tell the story of a girl hastening to straighten the disorder, shirking away from the figure now stalking in the short space between the footboard and the far wall. He approaches, coming at me with feinting steps this way and that. Each time I hurry the opposite way, spinning in graceful disoriented circles, bumping the furniture. At last he takes two broad and powerful strides that force me to a rapid backward tiptoe, little
bourré
steps without the toe shoes, before I land gently, on my seat, on the bed.

I look up at him.

I know the dark hair, the pointy tips of his ears. I know the black waistcoat and stiff white collar. Where the face should be there is only emptiness, like staring into a dark pond, but I know who he is.
Find yourself in the painting,
my art professors used to say. The technique, the craftsmanship and style, all are important; but to fall in love with a work of art you must find in it what speaks to your soul, what you know to be true.

At the end, when I step out of the rip in the fabric and rest my hand on the steel bar again, taking my end pose in a cold room and a jumpsuit, I know with a fresh certainty that this is not a story for Annemarie. There has never been a single thing I can do for her, not to provide for her, not to protect her or nourish her—but at least I can give her a better story than this one. The truth is that she is good and worthy, and my part is only a matter of painting a picture in which she can see herself.
Something grand,
I think.
Something beautiful
.

Ten days pass before I receive an answer from Emory Pugh, but he’s come through for me. The envelope is thick, and I eagerly unfold the four sheets of paper crammed into it. His letter is brief, as always.

He goes on talking about other things, but I skip the rest and go straight to the photos. So strange that Emory Pugh has the internet in his house. We aren’t allowed any access to it at all, and I still don’t really understand it.

The first photo is Ricky’s mugshot. His thick brown hair is askew, and he’s grinning. There’s a sleepiness to his eyes, but they looked that way naturally—
bedroom eyes
singers used to call them, with a certain weight to his brow that always made him look like he had just woken up. This isn’t the kind of photo I wanted, but it’s still a bit of a shock to see his face—so familiar and also so young. I had known Ricky since I was nine years old; he grew older and I did, too, but at the same pace, matched to one another. Not anymore, though. Not anymore.

The page beneath it must be the one Emory Pugh was referring to. A slim blonde girl is sitting on the steps in front of the Cathouse, her dress pulled down over her knees, feet bare. She’s looking into the middle distance with a thoughtful expression. It’s true, she’s very pretty, but this isn’t me. That’s definitely the Cathouse behind her, but this is Katie Rayburn, the actress who played me in the film, posing for some sort of publicity shot. My friend in North Carolina is confused, but I can’t blame him for it. She does look like me, at least enough for a casting director.

And then, the one I was hoping for. He’s found it. It’s a shot of me and Ricky sitting in a booth at the Godfather’s Pizza in San Jose, about a year and a half before everything went wrong. Ricky has both arms thrown across the back of the booth, one disappearing behind my shoulders. We’re both smiling for the camera, and I’m caught in a half-turn, snuggling my body against Ricky’s side. He’s wearing one of his newsboy caps and a collared T-shirt, the one with the tiny alligator on the chest, which is tucked into his jeans. Ricky wasn’t a big guy, but in this pose—his body taking up most of the space in the photo’s frame, stretched out in the loose, authoritative way of men—it’s not difficult to remember his appeal. There was no threat to him, no machismo, only a careless sort of confidence and goodwill. He was just a boy in the neighborhood, and always the underdog. The one who detested sports, drew pictures during class and got jerked around by the jocks when they stopped by the Circle K to buy cigarettes after a game.
Marlboro Reds box. No, I said Marlboro Lights box. Make that a soft pack. No, Camels. C’mon, faggot, what’s taking you so long?

I smooth the picture against my desk, trying to rub the folds from the page. The fact that I want this picture and will not toss it into the trash has the feeling of a small defeat. I picture his messy, blanket-strewn bed at his parents’ house, his face nuzzled into my neck, moving in the same insistent, friendly way of a young cat reminding you he’s ready for his dinner. Like that, where I sit back and say
Oh, all right, all right,
but not with resentment, only fondness.

* * *

Father Soriano’s forehead wrinkles as I step into the office we use as a confessional. “And here you are,” he says. “I’ve been concerned about you.”

“I have some things on my mind.”

“Well, this is the place to discuss them.”

I revert to the usual confessional patter, cross myself, list my sins. “I’ve committed acts of sexual impurity,” I tell him. “And perjury.”

This time he doesn’t ask me how many times I’ve gratified myself. “Perjury?” he asks.

“I lied under oath during my trial. Repeatedly.”

He leans back in his chair and runs a hand down his chin. “Ah, Clara,” he says. “I think that’s beyond my scope. You need to talk to your lawyer.”

“It wouldn’t do me any good. She already said it’s too late for a new trial. I just want to be absolved for it. It
is
a sin, after all.”

He regards me with a long, unblinking stare. His eyes look tired and uncertain. “Well, you’ve been taking the Eucharist all this time knowing you hadn’t confessed to this. So why did you recently decide it was an issue?”

“Because I did it for the right reason, and I was willing to accept the consequences. But the person I was protecting is gone, and now the decision I made affects somebody else, and so I realize my guilt matters.”

He’s still running his thumb beneath his chin. His manner is ponderous, and I feel the tension gathering as he considers whether to ask me the question he’s thinking. The one they’re
all
thinking, every confessor I’ve had for the past twenty-four years, the one I know they’re dying to ask and don’t dare.

At last he blurts it out. “Are you going to tell me it wasn’t you who shot that priest?”

Though I was braced for the question, I still feel my teeth clench. In a flash I picture that moment. My mask pushed up, rage blowing through me like a fire tearing up the walls to reach the roof, the
bang
, the blood. There is no satisfaction in the memory, only emptiness. “No. I shot him.”

He almost looks relieved. “Then what was your lie?”

“That there were no extenuating circumstances. That I was entirely to blame.”

“Well, who else do you feel was to blame?”

I lace my cold fingers together and fold them in my lap. “Clinton.”