Rebecca Coleman - Inside These Walls

Hello,

It was lovely to see you the other day. I found out I can send a package but the rules are just—wow. No stickers, no stamps, books have to come straight from the vendor, etc. I hope this stuff gets through. You might not like chocolate or coffee, but personally I can’t imagine being stuck anywhere without them. I sent the beach postcard because you said you hadn’t seen the beach in a long time. A postcard is kind of a lame substitute, but it beats that mural on the visiting room wall, at any rate. Hope to have a chance to visit again soon.

I unpack each of the items and line them up on my little desk. She remembered everything I told her. About Clementine and my drawing and how I love the sea. It’s the sort of package I would have put together for my own mother, had my mother lived a terrible life.

The pink notepad has a message scribbled on the back. I bring it toward my face and look above my glasses to read it. This is one of the items I designed. Couldn’t send stickers or a poster, but wanted to show you. -A . Rounded little cupcakes dance along the border, festooned with sprinkles in between. It’s hard to tell how much creativity she was allowed in the design, but her handwriting is angular and stylized, consistent among the letters as if it’s a font she’s created. Her father’s was like that, too— not the same in its lines and loops, but holding a similar confident swagger, as if he knew it was beautiful and that it reflected on him. I wondered if she already knew Ricky had been an artist, and if it made her all the more suspicious that she was his.

But I have an answer for that. Maybe, if I phrase what I say just right, she will come to the conclusion on her own and not need for me to lie at all. If we’re both lucky she will hear what she hopes to hear, because I am certain she hopes not to hear Ricky’s name. I saw it in the wince in her expression when she first asked me. And I don’t want to see it again.

An entire day passes before I even remember the letter from Emory Pugh. A photo falls out of the envelope when I turn it sideways— an image of him standing in a white-paneled kitchen with his arm around the shoulders of a petite teenage girl, his mustache and goatee neatly trimmed, hair slicked back. He looks very serious, although the girl offers a tentative smile.

Dear Clara,

I’m hurt that I sent you the pictures you asked for and you still haven’t wrote back to me. I thought it was funny you asked for pictures of Ricky but I sent them anyway. Now I wonder if you’re still hung up on him.

I’m sending a photo of me and my daughter so you will have one of me as well as him to remind you who loves you now. Not saying anything bad against Ricky though he was convicted of murder but the fact is that he is no longer with us and I am right here and save all my love for you. You are very special in my life and I hope you don’t forget about me just because of distance separates us. In AA they say EXPECT MIRACLES and it’s true you never know.

I sit down right away and scribble off a letter in return. Emory Pugh, for all his guileless assurance that we belong together, is a good human being, and I don’t want to hurt his feelings.

Once the letter is written I turn my thoughts back to Annemarie. From the shelf above my books I take down a long rectangle of pink crochet, doubled over and sewn together on two sides. This is my completed project. Long thin braids of yarn trail from two corners. I make a fist and fit my creation around it, as if my hand is a newborn’s round little head. The strings of the bonnet fall evenly on each side of my wrist. It’s just about right.

I run a cupful of water into my coffee machine, put in a filter, and sprinkle on a little of the coffee Annemarie sent. Once it’s prepared, I press the crocheted hat down into the mug and leave it there for a few minutes. Then I take it out and rinse it a bit with some cold water, squeeze it over the sink, and lay it out on the shelf to dry.

The next morning, after they count us, I check my project and find it’s dried nicely. The coffee has muted the bright bubblegum color with a sepia tinge. I wrap it in a triple layer of Kleenex and tie it with an extra piece of yarn I’ve salvaged, set it on my shelf until she calls for me again, and then begin another letter.

Dear Ms. Shepard,

I apologize for the delay in answering your questions. Obviously I have the time to respond, but I have gone nearly twenty-five years thinking about all of this as little as possible, and I find it overwhelming to remember too much at once. It can easily take over my mind, and it becomes deeply depressing when I consider that my entire lifetime—the only one I will ever have—is defined so entirely by those few days when I was twenty-three years old. This leads to unproductive thinking, such as considering that I would be better off had I never met Ricky— but then I believe if I had never met Ricky I would probably be even more miserable free and out in the world than I am confined. I’m not sure how to reconcile that.

I might as well skip ahead to the month in which everything unraveled. Up until that point, there was nothing in my relationship with Ricky that would be worthy of including in a book. I worked for a dentist in San Jose, and after Ricky was fired from Spectrum he asked to get his old job back at the Circle K, which the franchise owner, Mr. Choi, was kind enough to allow. Ricky was irritated, however, because Mr. Choi had started him out at his original minimum-wage salary from when he’d begun working there at age 17 rather than the somewhat higher wage he was earning at the time he left. Ricky accepted that only because of the risk that prospective employers would call Jeff Owen, the owner of Spectrum Supply, and learn of his suspicions of Ricky’s theft. It seemed better to work for Mr. Choi again for a while and move up from there.

At some point during those in-between years, Ricky moved out of his parents’ house and into the ramshackle cottage that would become known as the Cathouse. Although it has been called a squatter’s den, he was, in fact, paying rent on the place. He shared it with his best friend, Chris Brooks, whose girlfriend Liz also lived there off and on, as their volatile relationship worked through its trials. You surely recognize these names as the other participants in the crime, along with Forrest, who stopped by the house once or twice a week. Chris worked as a flagger on a road construction crew, and he and Ricky both supplemented their income by doing odd jobs, including a little landscaping for Father George at Our Lady of Mercy, the church in which we had been raised. On weekends at the changing of the seasons you could often find Chris and Ricky hauling mulch and planting flowers, spraying the good Father’s precious rosebushes for aphids and other such work.

The house was not far from the dentist’s office, and so I took to using the place as my base camp for feeding strays and coaxing them into carriers so I could take them in for neutering. Over time we had quite a few cats hanging around— I’m not sure how many, but admittedly more than the neighbors would like. Long before the crisis they already referred to it as the Cathouse, and even amongst ourselves we sometimes called it that.

Sometime in July that year, Chris and Ricky got into a car accident on Stockton Avenue. They were on their way home from a bar in Ricky’s car, with Chris behind the wheel because he was the more sober of the two. Chris went through a red light and hit a woman in a Cadillac, and while the injuries were all minor, there was quite a bit of damage to the woman’s expensive car and Ricky had no insurance. She began sending threatening letters to him through her lawyer demanding that he pay the costs for her repairs and emergency room expenses. I found this almost as asinine as Ricky did, because Chris had really been the one responsible, and it must have been costing this woman at least as much to pay the lawyer as it would to just cover the repairs herself. She was an older woman, and I think she believed she was teaching a young person to take responsibility for his actions. She couldn’t have known where that would lead, but it’s difficult not to resent her role in it, even so. Ricky never cared the least bit about money. Truthfully, it was one of his flaws. I can’t imagine he would ever have committed the actions that followed had it not been for her threats of legal action.