Rebecca Coleman - Inside These Walls

That weekend rolled around, and on Sunday I was about to leave for noon Mass when I received a call from Clinton’s wife, my sister-in-law, Susie. I told her I’d have to call her back. She sounded agitated but reluctantly agreed that it could wait until later that day. Ricky’s birthday was the next day—he was turning twenty-four—and we had a fun evening planned with Chris and Liz, so I knew I wouldn’t get around to returning her call until later, but I let it go.

That evening we all piled into Chris’s car—it was a ’79 Plymouth Horizon, which forced the backseat passengers to hunch over like potato bugs—and drove to Champion’s to play pool. Forrest met us there with some other friends from his band and Ricky had two or three beers, but it was just enough to put him in a fine mood. It had been weeks since I’d seen him so cheerful and relaxed, which caused me to feel more at ease, too, since he and I were so tied to each other that way. The bathroom at that place was a closet-like space at the end of the hallway, just one for the whole place. It was a dimly little, yellow-walled room. I wasn’t surprised when he followed me there, because he had been drinking and probably needed to relieve himself, but when I tried to come out and let him have a turn he pushed me back inside in a play-wrestling sort of way and locked the door behind us. Under normal circumstances I would have been less accommodating, but it was his birthday and he’d been in such a sour mood for weeks. I remember the room’s particular light, the shifting shadows and citronella glow, and the faint cloying floral of the air freshener. When he lifted me up and pulled my legs around his waist, I felt his affection and his strength, and those things always appealed to me. The whole time he had me against the wall other customers banged on the door and rattled at the knob and he kept laughing about it. When he finished he made more noise than usual, just for show, and I punched him on the shoulder and cursed at him for that, which made him laugh more.

Not long after that we parted ways with Forrest and got back in the Horizon. As soon as Chris climbed into the driver’s seat he pulled out his baggie of cocaine and began chopping a line with his credit card onto a cassette tape box. “That is much too small for that purpose,” Ricky observed in a jokingly prim tone. “That’s like coke for a tea party.”

“It’ll do the job,” Chris said.

I wasn’t surprised or concerned by this, as I saw Chris do it every day, but I was surprised when Ricky switched seats with Liz, taking the front passenger seat as she moved to the back, and asked Chris to pass him the coke. Though he used to do this occasionally—truthfully, we both had— he had stopped after he overdid it one night and had an episode in which his heart raced so badly he was afraid he would die. Because his sister had died suddenly of a heart-related issue, anything of that nature was especially frightening to him, and I hadn’t seen him use it since then. But now he sidled up to Chris, stuck the rolled-up twenty in his nose and snorted two lines up each nostril.

Chris laughed with delight. “You’re a fucking anteater, man,” he said, and Ricky rubbed his nose and replied, “Seize the day.”

I should have realized then that something wasn’t right, but Ricky could be impulsive, so I attributed it to that. We drove a short distance, then pulled into the worn, broken lot behind the strip mall where he used to work. All the access doors on that side were painted gray, and the buildings were just beige cinderblock, with Dumpsters and exposed metal pipes and a loading dock for the grocery store. Chris turned off the headlights but left the car running, and Ricky got out. I watched him walk up to the back of Spectrum Supply and let himself inside with a key. “What’s he doing?” I asked

“He’s picking up his last paycheck,” Chris said.

I knew that couldn’t be true because Ricky owed them money, not the other way around, and he had been working at the Circle K again for months by that point. But I stayed quiet because it wasn’t difficult to see that something bad was going on. I figured that if Ricky was taking more money from the register, he and I could argue about it later. I wasn’t going to fight with him in front of Chris, since Chris would take his side and my effort to talk sense into Ricky would be pointless. Yet I felt sorry for Jeff Owen just the same. He was a very decent man, fair to his employees and friendly with his regular customers, who were San Jose’s ragtag collection of local painters and sculptors. He was an inch or so shorter than Ricky, with an outdated mustache and a shy demeanor, and as a young man had been an artist, himself. He had opened Spectrum Supply as a way to subsidize his career in the arts, but over the years the balance had shifted as he became, as he put it, “married to this store.” He didn’t deserve to be robbed, not by Ricky or anyone else.

A long time passed, it seemed like, and I began to get worried about making it home before my mother started to suspect I was doing untoward things with Ricky. It was funny— he and I had been sleeping together for years by then and had learned to please each other with the efficiency of opening up a high-school locker, yet I was somehow convinced that my mother would remain oblivious to all of that as long as I was home by midnight. Midnight was the magical hour at which cheap girls did sleazy things, and I certainly wasn’t one of those, irrespective of the fact that I had sex with Ricky in a pool-hall bathroom only an hour before. So I began biting my nails and hoped that, in his empathetic way, he would sense that I wanted him to hurry.

Chris had left the car running and the radio on, with a Jimi Hendrix eight-track filling the conversational silence. At some point during All Along the Watchtower I did hear a noise that sounded like a shot. But it was not particularly jarring, because the sound was almost incidental amid the music, and could just as easily have been a car backfiring. You must remember, at that moment I thought Ricky was stealing from the register. I wasn’t listening for signs of violence, although it would be only minutes before my perception of that would change.

Soon after that Ricky came back out, and almost before he had the car door shut, Chris began driving. Their conversation seemed unremarkable, but then I heard a metallic click and looked over to see Ricky bent over in the front seat, unloading a handgun. Now, I knew Ricky knew how to shoot a gun. I did too, because once, a month or so before he punched Clinton, he had taken me to the shooting range and forced me to learn. The gun we used had been borrowed from Chris, and I had to assume it was the same one I was looking at now. But these circumstances were nothing like those, and I didn’t want to understand what I was seeing, so I said nothing. Since I had already determined Chris was lying about Ricky picking up his paycheck, and that Ricky was likely robbing an empty store, I chose to continue to believe the store had been empty. This would not be the last time I would find myself kneecapped by cognitive dissonance.

“But you went back to Ricky the next day,” everybody said later, “even after you witnessed all of that.” Yes, I did. I can’t defend that, except to say that I couldn’t fully undo in sixteen hours the image of Ricky I had developed over fourteen years. Jeff Owen’s body had not been found yet, because it was a Monday and Spectrum was closed, so that made it easier to remain in denial. I believe I thought that, once I saw Ricky again, the night before would reveal itself to be a strangely vivid dream—a surreal journey, sex in an odd location, a sense of dread and a sharp lingering hint of violence that ends with the dreamer feeling tremendously relieved to have woken up. I’d had dreams with each of those components before, all tossed together in random configurations. You probably have, too. It’s very easy for someone on the outside to say that if the love of their life suddenly climbed back into the car and emptied a handgun without explanation, that they would immediately seek safety, call 911 and report everything they had seen to the responding officer. And that attitude— that series of accusatory questions as to why I returned to Ricky the next day—presupposes that I knew how all of this would end. Of course, if someone had sat down with me once I returned to my mother’s house and laid out all the information that was later presented to a jury, I would have seen it all through a different lens. I certainly don’t blame that jury for convicting me. I would have convicted me, too.