Rebecca Coleman - Inside These Walls

It was then that I began visiting the art supply store almost weekly, because I had taken to creating charcoal drawings of the cats as they slept so sweetly in the beds I made for them while they healed. As I said in my previous letter, I knew Ricky Rowan from CCD classes and high school, and he had also worked at the Circle K where my friends and I often stopped for Slush Puppies after Junior Service Club meetings. I had always thought he was attractive, but I didn’t date. I know this sounds foolish now to an outsider, but through most of high school I genuinely believed I had a vocation, which is the Catholic term for believing I had been called by God to the celibate religious life. I gave that up when I decided to go to art school, but even during college I only went out on sporadic group dates, mainly because I felt terrified of that last hour of the date. According to my friends, nearly all dates followed a pattern. There was dinner or a movie, or both, and then the last hour was all physical, with the man always overeager and demanding. I had no stomach for that at all, so I avoided the whole enterprise.

What softened me toward Ricky, though, was that he was very gregarious and friendly. When I came into the store he always asked to see my drawings, and he appreciated my skill. Through asking me questions about the cats I drew, he learned of my work with the strays and openly admired it. Who doesn’t enjoy being admired? When he asked me out to dinner I couldn’t help but say yes. Respect was something I was unaccustomed to from men, and it was very disarming and appealing, the way he seemed to think so highly of me.

As to that first date, I don’t remember where we ate—I think I was too nervous to pay much attention to the food—only that we went to the beach afterward, at Santa Cruz. It was a spontaneous idea Ricky had, and although I agreed, I was full of anxiety because I was trying very hard to control that final hour and ensure I made it home untouched. He was an artist, as well. In high school he had painted a mural in a hallway and created a ceramic model of our school crest, which may still be on display in the entrance for all I know. So on the drive to the beach I began talking to him about a trip my mother and I took to Spiral Jetty, the earthwork Robert Smithson created in the Great Salt Lake at some point during my childhood. When I was around ten—four years after my father died and not long after she began dating Garrison Brand, my future stepfather—my mother took me on a trip to Bountiful, Utah to visit her sister. I think she wanted to spend some time with my aunt and ask her advice before things got too serious with Garrison.

But while we were there, she and I drove down to Salt Lake City and visited the Jetty, which was new then. We walked out onto the black rocks and followed them to the center, and it reminded me of the garden labyrinth behind Our Lady of Mercy, except made out of rock and silt instead of white gravel, and surrounded by reddish water instead of neatly trimmed hedges. At the time I thought it was a little strange and anticlimactic, and I wondered why anyone would build this rough, rocky pathway into a lake and say it was art. But the sky above it, I remember, was enormous, and shaded an otherworldly blue. I described every aspect of it to Ricky. There in his car, driving toward the beach, I almost felt like a hostage—as if I had to be sure to endear myself to him and make him feel a connection with me so he wouldn’t hurt me when I was vulnerable. He hadn’t done anything to make me feel that way, but it began to happen inside me naturally, I suppose as a type of learned response.

So I kept talking to Ricky about the Spiral Jetty and how it was like an ancient petroglyph recreated in modern times, and how Smithson had reversed the spiral to symbolize eternity. I talked about how hard I had to squint in the intense sunlight, because the desert sky was big and clear and the rays from the sun felt absolutely direct, and the way the wind whipped at my mother’s silky scarf so that it rippled like a flag. I was painting this picture for him, I suppose, so that he would be imagining me as a ten-year-old child with her mother, and when we arrived at the beach he wouldn’t have the heart to do anything unseemly to me.

But when I stopped to take a breath, he said, “It’s covered now.” I asked, “What’s covered?” and he said, “Spiral Jetty. The water level rose, and it’s been covered for a decade now. The whole thing’s underwater, like Atlantis.”

I stopped talking then. I had no idea this childhood landmark of mine had vanished, and I felt bewildered and sort of sad to realize it. Ricky looked over at me—he was still driving then—and I guess he saw the look on my face, because he said, “Hey, it’s still there, though. Eventually there’ll be a drought again and it’ll be visible, like before. I think that was part of the artist’s point.”

“When do you think that will be?” I asked.

“I don’t know. But everything goes in cycles, right? And probably when it turns up again it’ll be all covered in salt from the lake, like those crystals you can grow in a jar.”

I was trying to picture all of Spiral Jetty under the water, preserved and silent, like a shipwreck. And while I was doing that, Ricky pulled into a parking space and I felt anxious all over again because I had been off my guard as far as setting up some kind of advance protection from what he might do. But it turned out he was very much a gentleman for things like that. He didn’t touch me unless he was certain I wanted him to. Ricky could be very intuitive and empathetic, which you may not realize. I think that’s why he was so good with my cats, and why he could unapologetically and without hesitation attack my stepbrother at the front door of my home. Yet his strong feelings could be too much for him at times, and sometimes he would get overwhelmed and shut it all down, like a shopkeeper dropping the metal grate across his storefront at the end of a day. That way of his could feel bewildering, but it never occurred to me how insidious it would become. When he liberated himself from compassion he was a very dangerous kind of free.

Well, my pencil lead has run down to a stub, and my new mechanical pencils aren’t ready yet. I will write again when the wood has softened.

The lockdown wears on through the next day, with our meals delivered by cart and pushed through the slot into our cells. The night before, Sergeant Schmidt came by my cell during night count and told me Janny’s arm was broken and they took her to the hospital to have it set and put in a cast, but I haven’t heard any more news since then. My heart aches to think of how disoriented she must be, shuffling from one place to the next without any awareness of the space around her, fearful of the unfamiliar voices. I never spoke to her before the fight that blinded her, but she was skittish and anxious long before she lost her sight. Others may not realize this, because years in prison had hardened her by the time she was attacked, but I know it is her nature because she shot her husband to death while he was sleeping. She wasn’t angry, she told me; she was just done . Tired of the way he behaved when he was awake. They arrested her outside the Greyhound station, with a child on each side of her and a cardboard sign balanced on the baby stroller in the middle, begging for bus fare to Mexico City.

To pass the time I read the ski lodge romance, I work on Intérieur, and I dance to a melody in my head, moving to a Cyndi Lauper song I’ve been thinking about since the day they took my cassettes away. It’s called Time After Time, and it was one of the songs on my mix tape from Ricky. I hadn’t listened to it in a very long time, because it was far too evocative; at the time they put me in here the song was at the height of its popularity and seemed to blare from every radio every hour of the day. Back then—when I felt so confused and so bereft, insanely hopeful that one morning a C.O. would unlock my cage and explain there had been a mistake, that none of this had ever happened—it drove me half-mad to hear it all the time, as if all my secret feelings were being projected outward to the entire prison. After a while, people in the world grew tired of it, it fell off the music charts and I rarely heard it anymore. The effect, when I did, was much like opening the drawer in which my father, while living, had kept his undershirts. Long after he had died, but before Garrison Brand, I went looking for a comb and in my haphazard search pulled his drawer open. Suddenly the ghost of my father seemed conjured before me, and I sank to my knees from the shock of it, breathing in the intense and living smell of this man who didn’t exist any longer. I didn’t like that feeling, because even before I went to prison I liked things to be clear and orderly. It made me a good Catholic, because in Catholicism everything runs in neat, up-and-down lines.