Inside These Walls (2 page)

The cellblock is quiet when I return. Many of the inmates are receiving visitors downstairs, or, like Janny, at the Spanish mass that follows the English one. There is no breakfast on Sundays because of budget cuts—we wait instead for an early lunch—and my stomach mumbles in protest as I offer my handcuffed wrists to the corrections officer through the slot in my door. I take out a packet of peanut butter crackers from my canteen stash and nibble on them, slipping one of the six into my pocket for Clementine. And then I see, at the bottom of the thin cardboard canteen box, a small folded square of paper. A note. Or, as we call it here, a kite.

It must have been there since canteen delivery the previous Wednesday. I glance toward my window to check for C.O.s, then unfold the paper, smoothing it against my blanket.

I tear the note into small pieces, drop it into my toilet and flush. Then I shake the next peanut butter cracker from the cellophane and bite into it as I open up a velvety and creased paperback from the library. I don’t know who that girl is, but she’s sadly misguided. I don’t tell my story to anybody. And I don’t need anybody on my side. I’m in here on four counts of murder in various degrees, no possibility of parole. If that’s a story you want to be close to, then I don’t want to know you at all.

* * *

On Monday I spend the morning completing
Starry Night
, then do a little standard Braille transcription to round out the workday rather than start on my next drawing. In the afternoon I feed Clementine a torn bit of hamburger and sit awhile with her in my lap, soaking in the midafternoon sun. She is an orange coal, resting there on the thigh of my sky-blue jumpsuit, and even when sweat starts to pour down my temples I don’t move. I once read that a Buddhist monk cut off the sleeve of his shirt rather than wake the cat that was sleeping upon it. Well, I can’t do that here, but I can bake in the Valley heat. It’s the least I can do. After all the cats I lost, the ones who almost certainly met their fates in a kill shelter on a single memorable day for the staff, I can sweat a little for one. The irrigated fields beyond the wire stretch out like a patched green quilt, really beautiful. I would do each shade of green in a different texture with my tortillion. Dots and dashes, a crumple, waves. It would be poignant to check my work for errors, touching those fields I will never walk upon, only see.

At dinner an inmate I don’t know plunks down her tray across from mine as I am opening Janny’s milk for her. This is the table where we sit alone, every day, and nobody bothers us. I look up at the girl with my flat face, feeling a challenge rise up to reveal itself in my stare. It’s been a while, but I don’t mind.

“I’ve been trying to get your attention all week,” she says. Her voice is saucy, like she’s flirting with me.

I say nothing. Janny’s sightless brown eyes widen in alarm. “Clara, who is that?”

“A white girl.”

“Amber Jones,” she tells us. Her long, wispy brown hair nearly crackles with static electricity beside her round face. “I want to know about Ricky Rowan. I know he murdered people and all, but in the movie he was such a cool guy.”

“He wasn’t a cool guy. That was just a movie,” I say.

“But it was inspired by what really happened, right? And who he really
was
. He was an amazing artist. You know they sell his ceramics on eBay now? They go for
thousands
.”

I try to imagine what kind of demented individual would display Ricky’s ceramic tiles in their kitchens and entryways: large-eyed amphibians, otherworldly bugs, glazes bubbled at the edges as if melting away from acid.
Ricky Rowan made that
, they’d say proudly, to the disbelieving cackles of their friends, and then move on to whatever’s in the next frame. Nazi memorabilia, perhaps. Slave-auction posters and Charles Manson’s handwritten sheet music.

“Did you ever talk to him after he went to jail?”

“No.”

“Really? That’s so
sad
. It’s like Bonnie and Clyde.”

I peel apart the opening of my milk carton. “It was nothing like Bonnie and Clyde.”

“With the romance, I mean. The great doomed love.” She leans in conspiratorially. “Didn’t you have his baby?”

I squeeze the bottom of my carton and a thick splash of milk bursts up through the spout, catching her on the mouth and neck. She gasps and reels back, holding her arms away from her body.

“Sorry,” I say.

The guards rush over, and we are both cuffed and escorted from the room. I look back at Janny, whose head is moving in frantic bewilderment, and I feel a gut-punch of sincere regret for what I’ve done. “Janny,” I blurt to the guard in an urgent voice. “Help Janny.” But another inmate—a Latina—approaches her, and I relax. Even though no one else wants to be burdened with her day after day, they’ll treat her well for the hour.

The C.O. deposits me back at my cell. “Discipline hearing for you in the morning,” she tells me.

“I know,” I say, but I’m not concerned about it.

I pull on my special socks, the ones with moleskin attached to the bottoms, and turn on the radio. It’s too late for
Afternoon Classics,
but I can find one station, not too fuzzy, playing soft rock from the 1980s. I set my hand against the horizontal bar that cuts across the door to my cell, set my feet in fifth position and wait for the song to change. Now it’s Kate Bush, a song I know called
This Woman’s Work
. It came out after I arrived here, so it’s bittersweet but safe from the baggage of memory. I extend my arm and begin my
tendus,
my toes sweeping back and forward in time with the music, a comforting mechanical efficiency. The silence of the cellblock is nice. No shouting, no clanking, no radios competing with mine. With my eyes closed it almost feels like a real ballet studio, and I drink in the sweet illusion for as long as it lasts.

* * *

Ricky Rowan hung himself in his cell sometime in late 1986. He didn’t even make it two full years in prison. My feelings about him were still cloudy then, hadn’t yet settled into what they would become, but mostly, when I got the letter informing me, I wanted to die, too.

I didn’t, though.

His cousin Dan came to visit me a couple of months later and read his suicide note to me through the telephone on the other side of the glass.
My beloved Clara
, it read,
there is no life apart from you, no reason to do or be, and every quiet moment is torture imagining what might have been
. He rambled on in that vein for a while, and then closed his letter with,
What was sundered and undone shall be whole—the two made one.
As Dan set down the letter he said, “I thought that last line was beautiful.”

“It’s from the movie
The Dark Crystal
,”
I told him. And that’s all it was, his entire letter a strung-together series of quotes cribbed from Madeleine L’Engle books, Bob Marley songs and fantasy movies.
Really, Ricky
, I thought dejectedly,
how could you let your last words be so unoriginal?

There have been three times in prison when I felt I couldn’t go on. The first was the end of my pregnancy, when I lay on the green cot in the small clinic and screamed and screamed, chipping both of my canine teeth by biting too hard against the dowel they gave me to shut me up. Then there was Ricky, and finally came the day I learned of the death of my mother, seven years into my sentence. I imagined her lying on her side in her floral-papered room beneath the gaze of my stepfather and the home-care nurse from the hospice, laboring through her last breaths and yearning for me to hold her hand. I knew she must have, because I was her dear girl, and she and I had been very close. The knowledge was like drowning, and I could hardly breathe or see; I gripped the sides of the narrow desk in my cell and gasped for air like a fish at the bottom of a boat. With her gone, the full force of my decisions hit me like a concussive blast, and I could see the bleak gray slate of the rest of my life that I had traded for the hope that she would find some peace to live by. When I tore apart my bedsheet and threaded it through the vent holes high in the wall above my toilet, it felt less like a suicide than a mercy killing. But I lacked skill, and after they cut me down the nurse informed me, with derision, that I’d succeeded only in bruising my trachea.

I know I will need to confess to the confrontation in the chow hall. I don’t like to let these unreckoned sins build up for too long, because doing so makes me feel distracted and fragmented. When I was a young teenager, my mother created a secret signal meant to look like a person pulling upward on a string, to remind me not to slouch. To see her signal caused me to automatically straighten my spine, as if God Himself was pulling the string from heaven. After confession I feel the same way: straightened, whole, self-contained. Without it I feel as though I’m constantly reaching for parts of myself that are rolling away, drifting far too close to the version of Clara who, in her stupor of thought, failed to recognize the chaos unfolding around her.

While Janny mumbles her rosary in Spanish I lay a folded undershirt on the floor beside her and kneel on it, resting my elbows against the bed, my forehead against my folded hands that hold my own rosary. I think about what Father Soriano asked me to do, about praying for my youngest victim.
By my definition, or by his?
I muse. It’s a knottier problem than it might appear. I have prayed for Eun Hee Choi every night since the first one— along with her father Jung-ho and her mother Mimi—so the penance should be easy. Yet his phrasing nags at my conscience, making me wonder if God has a different individual in mind.

I mull over it for a long time, until my knees ache and the cold of the tile has seeped through the shirt on the floor. And then, in the last minutes before the guards call us to the bars for night count, I whisper a hasty, nervous decade of Hail Maries for the other one. It makes me feel a little sick, but I do it. And afterward I feel anything but absolved.

* * *

As I expected, the discipline hearing exonerates me. I’m slapped on the wrist with a few routine restrictions on phone calls and visitors, but none of that matters to me. While I waited for my turn I managed to catch a few minutes of a television segment about the Robbins shooting, craning my neck a bit to watch the screen perched on a table in the office across the hall. The screen flashed a photo of the daughter’s boyfriend, a sturdy, cocoa-skinned young man with close-cropped hair and a football jersey draping his bulky shoulders. For the first time I got a glimpse of Penelope Robbins herself, who looks very different from what I expected. I had imagined a gloomy, recalcitrant young woman—the type with midnight-black hair and fingernails and a permanent glower. But Penelope is a beauty—a less refined, less polished little Audrey Hepburn of a girl, her bones as light as a pencil sketch and disappearing into the cavernous orange jumpsuit of the county jail. Sitting beside her lawyer at some hearing, her thick chestnut hair pulled back in a ponytail at the base of her neck, she looks like an ingénue playing the cleaning lady. Her story intrigues me more than ever now, and as I catch snippets of voiceover theorizing that she hired a hit man against her own father, I wish for the first time in years that I owned a television.

After the discipline hearing I squeeze in a few hours of work, and during cell time afterward I write back to Emory Pugh. I thank him for the canteen money and tell him about the large vole Clementine caught and brought to me as a gift. I ask him about his job at the furniture factory, and I try to describe
Starry Night
to him. Maybe he’ll look it up.

My mail consists of a religious magazine and a letter from an unfamiliar name. The addresses are handwritten, but the letter is typed.

I drop the letter into the trash. Janny hears the sound and asks, “You get another letter from Mr. Emory?”

“No. It’s from another person who wants to interview me. This one’s writing a book about Ricky.”

Her nose wrinkles in distaste. “That guy’s got enough attention. Tell that writer he should interview
me
. I got stories.”

“It’s a lady, and yes, you do. Somebody ought to tell your story.”

Janny nods. She’s sitting on the stool beside our desk, rubbing Vaseline into her hands. She has been here for fifteen years—first-degree murder was her charge—and although the canteen sells hand lotion now, she still uses the Vaseline that was the only offering when she first arrived. Every week I help her prepare her canteen order, and every week she requests the same things: Rolaids, sensitive toothpaste, hot cocoa,
chicharrones
and her Vaseline. A few years ago the canteen stopped carrying the type of shampoo she ordered—a Mexican import—because the State of California decided it contains a carcinogen. They offered a different Mexican shampoo in its place, but she always mixes up the names, maybe because she has never seen the bottle, maybe because of her memory problems. So once a month she says “Vanart” and once a month I check the Gizeh box.