Inside These Walls (13 page)

* * *

Through the reinforced window alongside the breakfast line I can see a flutter of activity over at the Intake door—lots of police cars, two dark extended vans, several cars from the Department of Corrections. Farther away there are news trucks, their twisted antennae and satellite dishes reaching up like beanstalks. I rest my hand on the windowsill and watch through the crosshatched wire, and am rewarded with a glimpse of a small figure in an orange jumpsuit and black bulletproof vest, her wrists shackled behind her back, being whisked through the double doors. Penelope Robbins has arrived. The Sacred Heart alumna is about to get her delousing and body cavity search, and I’ll bet she isn’t going to like it.

As breakfast ends I hear my name called down to the visiting room again, and I’m deeply pleased. It hasn’t been very long since Annemarie’s last visit, and she hadn’t even sent a letter to tell me she was coming. Without Janny I have felt especially lonely, and the company is most welcome. Today there are many people milling around the room, and they’ve opened up the patio in spite of the blazing heat outdoors. I look around, but I don’t see her. As the officer unshackles me I scan the room, feeling a frown line form between my eyebrows, but still, she isn’t here. And then, just as I’m standing there like a lonely child on the playground, a man rises from the bench along the wall and comes toward me.

He isn’t anyone I know—that much I can tell. He’s in his late forties, fifty perhaps, with soft eyes but a tight jaw that suggests he’s endured things. His silver hair is shaggy and layered, but thinned to a widow’s peak at the top, and he has the deep tan of a man who has spent a lifetime under the sun. As he approaches me I look him up and down—in his jeans and a button-down shirt that look like a carpenter’s best outfit—but I can’t make any connection. I wonder if he has me confused with someone else.

“Clara,” he says.

I stare back, but I just don’t know him.

His mouth pulls tight. “You’re still angry, aren’t you,” he says, and he nods in a resigned way. The glance he casts on me is chagrined, and all of a sudden, all at once—at the sight of his clear green eyes, up close—I throw my arms around his neck and press my body along the length of his, holding to him as if he can save me from the edge of a bridge. It’s Forrest. It’s Forrest Hayes, and I’m sobbing, and an officer is pulling me off of him, forcing me toward a seat.

“No more of that,” the officer commands, “or I terminate this visit. You got it?”

I nod and cry. I sit. This is the man who testified against me, the one who lied and snitched to save himself, and I know every bit of that, but I still can’t control the rush of strange, spontaneous fondness—of
love
—I feel at his presence. I press the front of my uniform blouse to my eyes to absorb the tears and try to get my breathing back to a more even pace. He sits down cautiously across from me.

“Sorry for upsetting you,” he says. “Or...whatever that is.”

I can’t even speak. I only nod again.

“I thought you were still mad at me,” he muses.
Oh, I am
, I think. I can’t meet his eyes, and so I watch his hands as they fumble for a casual posture, one flat but fidgety on the table, the other rubbing the side of his thumb beneath his mouth. He wears no wedding ring.

“So how’s it going?” he asks, and I finally lock eyes with him. He holds the gaze for a moment, then looks down uncomfortably. The degree to which he has aged is absolutely bewildering. The headful of gray hair, the tiredness around his eyes. He was a bone-skinny young man in a jean jacket covered in heavy metal band patches, a sharp-jawed kid with a rock-and-roll mullet. I can still see that kid in him now if I peer hard, but it’s a pure creative exercise. He did seven months in the county jail, that’s all. He handed out equal portions of his sentence to all his friends. Shared with the whole class, like teachers always demand you do with candy.

“Listen, Clara,” he says. “I came a long, long way to see you. I live in Phoenix now, and I took the day off work because I can’t call you here and I hate writing. But I’ve got to tell you about this.”

I raise my eyebrows in reply. Wipe my cheek with the heel of my hand.

“A woman called me a few days ago. She says she’s your daughter. Says you know about her. And she thinks I’m her father.”

Now I blurt a breathless laugh.
“What?”

“So you don’t know about her. I suspected she was a con artist.”

I shake my head. “No, I mean, I do. But I didn’t suggest to her that you’re her father. I didn’t even imply it. I told her—she asked if her father was still alive, and I told her no.”

“Well, she didn’t sound too convinced, but she said she was going with a process-of-elimination thing and wanted me to do a cheek swab. You know, a genetic test. Obviously I know I don’t have a child with you, but—” He shrugs. “I don’t one-hundred-percent know I don’t have a child that age with somebody else. I thought maybe she’s trying to get me to take one where I’m convinced it’s wrong, but it’s really for a case where, for all I know, she could be right.”

“No, no. It’s nothing like that.” I rub my forehead wearily and then look up at him. The room is too close, too filled with tightly-packed inmates and their overeager relatives. “Do you mind if we go outside?” I ask.

We walk out onto the patio, where the visitors are more spread out and there’s a slight breeze that gathers beneath the awning. Away from all the listening ears, it’s easier to talk. “I had a baby not long before the trial,” I explain. “She found me a few months ago. She wants to know who her father is, and I wouldn’t say.”

Forrest grins. He looks truly delighted by this, like a proud father himself. “It has to be Ricky.”

“Of course it’s Ricky, but I don’t want to tell her that. I told her it wasn’t him, and when she pressed me I implied—or I
thought
I implied—that it was Jeff Owen. I said her father was an artist, that I shouldn’t have been involved with him, and that he was part of the whole sordid story. I don’t know how she’d get
you
out of that.”

He shrugs. “It would fit me, if you’d been involved with me.”

“You weren’t an artist.”

“Yes, I was. I played guitar in a metal band. I don’t care what your opinion of heavy metal is—it still counts.”

I respond to that with a snicker. “Also, you’re still alive.”

“Maybe she thought you were trying to throw her off the trail. Or that you were confused and had heard a rumor of my untimely demise.”

I lean against the support pillar, my hands behind my back, and look out at the sky. “I don’t know, Forrest. She’s a good person and I’m very fond of her. I don’t want her to be tormented by the truth, but it sounds like she’s being tormented by the lies just as badly. I guess she’s not leaving me with much choice but to straighten her out.”

“Now, that is
something,
” Forrest marvels, and I break my focus on the horizon to look at him once again. He’s squinting into the sun. “A baby of yours and Ricky’s. I had no idea you were pregnant when all of that was going down.”

“I don’t think I was. I think it happened because I got stuck at the Cathouse and my pills were back at home. Stop taking the Pill all of a sudden and—” I snap my fingers. “It’s out of your system in three or four days, but sperm can live for seven.”

He ponders that. “You know what would be funny, is if you got pregnant that night when you two barricaded the bathroom at Champion’s and made everybody hold it while—”

“There’s not one damn funny thing about it,” I say dryly, and Forrest bursts into a string of apologetic giggles. “It’s tragic, Forrest. It’s awful.”

“It’s a wildflower after a forest fire,” he says. I say nothing in response. “Life sure loves to go on, no matter what you tell it to the contrary.”

Between us the conversation goes quiet. The chatter of the other inmates, friendly and muted, drifts from the picnic tables. When Forrest speaks up again he says, “Well, I guess I can just disregard that phone call, then. I’m sorry I helped put you in jail for longer, though. There, I said it.”

Indeed he has. My mother’s long training of me springs first to my mind—
now, Clara, accept his apology
—but, no. I can’t. “You didn’t just snitch,” I remind him. “You snitched
and lied
.”

His voice is infused with a note of offense. “I didn’t lie.”

“Yes, you did. You lied that you saw me shoot Mimi Choi. That’s impossible, because I didn’t do it.”

He looks weary, and his head drops back a bit. “Listen, once all the testimony was in and accounted for, it did put things in a different light. It all happened so fast, and—”

“It wasn’t just that. You lied about what my relationship with Ricky was like, and how much of the initiative I took that evening, and especially how close you were with all of us. We hardly knew you before that night.”

“That’s not true. I hung out with you guys all the time.”

“We hung out
without
you a lot more.”

He utters a sharp laugh. “Then I was guilty of believing you folks liked me more than you did. I didn’t lie, Clara. I called it the way I saw it, and when I heard the other testimony, it did make me wonder if I saw it right. Not a day went by for the next two decades that I didn’t call into question something about what I saw and what I said about it. But I didn’t set out to lie. They wanted me to talk, my lawyer told me I had to, and all I could do was describe the way it looked through my eyes. What would you have done in my shoes, huh? Wouldn’t you have told them what you thought was true, whether or not you stood to gain from it?”

I sigh through my nose and let my gaze wander back to the yard. The razor wire spirals across the top of the fence, gleaming silver beneath the hot sun.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” he asks, and there’s a tenderness to his voice that’s unexpected. We’ve been through a war together, he and I. On opposite sides, yes, but having seen the same carnage, dragged ourselves through the same trenches. In a lonely world that counts for something.

I think for a moment. “Sure,” I say. “Kiss me on the mouth.”

He laughs. He looks at me to see if I’m serious.

“I just want to remember what it feels like,” I explain. “It’s not really allowed, but if they ban you from visiting me again, so what. You weren’t coming back anyway.”

He squints out at the barren yard with a tense smile. “Gee, Ricky’s girlfriend,” he says in a voice that’s only half-joking. “I feel like I should definitely say no to that.”

“You owe me,” I tell him.

I glance around for officers, and so does he. He takes two steps closer and slips a hand into my hair, and he touches his mouth, half-open, to mine. Oh, yes, I remember this thrill—the warmth and unhindered desire of a man’s kiss, the plea it makes, the naked sensuality. His hand tightens on the back of my head; his kiss grows deeper, and the gentle brush of his tongue sends a shock down through my belly. A moment later an officer barks at us, and we separate at once.

“Don’t you
dare
start with that foolishness,” the corrections officer says. “Miss
Mattingly
. Don’t even try that.”

I turn to Forrest, who has moved a courteous distance away. He offers me a respectful nod. “Well, see ya. Good luck, Clara.”

“Thank you. Thanks for visiting.”

He’s gone, and I’m left feeling drained of my anger and a little dizzy from arousal. I’m exhausted, and it’s not just from the sun, or even the emotional rush of the morning. It’s the pure effort of feeling new things, day after day, without a break. It’s so easy to sustain oneself as a machine, but as a human it takes energy far beyond my reserves.

* * *

That night I find myself lying wide awake in bed, listening to the distant echoes of guards’ footsteps in the hallway and the clanking of chains, and I think about Forrest’s kiss. Even though it happened only hours ago, in my memory it is the much younger Forrest pulling me against him, bringing his mouth to mine. I think about the quick darting of his tongue before the guard separated us, and the thrill that zigzagged through me. It warms me more than I could ever have imagined to learn that youthful passion lives on, even in someone my very same age, who once was young with me. It’s still out there for the taking.

My thoughts wander to the first attempts Ricky and I made at that kind of love, long ago in the first months we were together. He had kissed me the first night, there on the boardwalk, and every day after—but kissing was easy. Clinton didn’t kiss, so it was the one realm free of trauma, and I was very glad for it. But the rest posed a challenge, and even after we had decided we would sleep together—it was a serious conversation, though not a decision he needed time to mull over—we made four earnest attempts before we found success. The first few times, cuddled up in the sweet privacy of his attic room at his parents’ house, he did everything he could. At the dentist’s office I always overheard the lunchtime talk of the other girls—their complaints and giggly personal stories of pushy, selfish men—and knew that, in this way, Ricky was a rare gem. Yet no matter how patient his hands, or how relaxed the mood he set, as soon as he lowered his weight onto me and began to press his body into mine—I panicked.