Rebecca Coleman - Inside These Walls

We pass a high school with a team of tennis players chasing each other around on its courts. A little townhouse development with a child playing in a turtle-shaped sandbox in a backyard. A jogger—a woman in blue shorts and sneakers and a white elastic bra, and that’s all—running along the side of the road, her long ponytail swinging. She has no idea how free she is, how free.

We turn up the road to the hospital. I swallow, and I look to the C.O. “You know, I had a baby and they didn’t even take me to the hospital for that .”

She shoots me a cautious look. “How long ago was it?”

“Twenty-four years ago.”

“They’re more worried about liability now. Inmates suing ’em.”

Gauze is wrapped tightly around my arm, nearly saturated with blood. I’ve been shivved before, several times, but this is the worst of those. We pull up to the emergency doors, and as the officer up front opens the side door he says to me, “Don’t do anything stupid, now.”

It’s a fresh shame inside the emergency room, where everyone looks at me and steps aside when I walk in, chains rattling and clinking like the bells on a plague wagon. Everything is unfamiliar— so polished and sanitary— but there’s a baby resting against the shoulder of her mother, who is seated in a hallway chair, and I’m enchanted. It’s been years since I last saw a baby. She’s so plump and large-eyed, with a little shock of a pigtail at the top of her head, tied with a ribbon. I used to see babies in the visitors’ room sometimes, but only since Annemarie began coming have I had visitors again, and there have been no babies so far. I stare at her, and she smiles at me around the finger she is chewing.

I’m led to a curtained room, and a doctor follows us in right away. The officer unlatches my wrist cuffs so the nurse can unwind the gauze from my arm. “Do you see that cute little baby?” I ask.

“I see her. Don’t gawk at her.”

“She’s just adorable. And I’m not gawking.”

“Yes, you are. And how would you like it if you saw somebody in chains and handcuffs staring at your child?”

I hadn’t thought about that. I look away.

“Looks like you got shanked,” the doctor says. He’s young, and I suppose he’s trying out his prison slang. The nurse is cleaning out the wound, which hurts more than anything else so far, but I’m trying not to react.

“I don’t usually get into fights,” I explain. My voice is tight from the pain of the cleaning. “I got into someone’s bad graces, I suppose.”

“Not your fault, huh,” he says in an ironic tone. I find this extremely irritating. It’s no challenge to read what he’s thinking— that I’m like every other inmate who believes she is always the victim, never responsible for her circumstances. He’s perhaps twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old, and he thinks he’s wise to the ways of people like me. I’ve been in there since he was in diapers.

“I didn’t say that,” I point out.

“We’ll get you stitched up and send you back,” he says. “Put you on an antibiotic to kill off whatever might have been on that thing. You know what it was made out of? It’s a good clean cut.”

“Razor blade stuck in a toothbrush,” the officer says.

“Clever.” The doctor pulls out a needle and the suture kit and goes to work on my arm. I try not to wince, and he says, “Tough girl.”

Through the gap in the curtain, the baby catches my eye again and this time points at me. I raise my free hand, the empty cuff dangling from my wrist, and wave back.

When Annemarie comes to see me again I smile right away at the sight of her, and offer a little wave. The more I see her, the more I’m filled with wonder at the way she looks. I’ve often heard women talk about the first time they held their newborns—how they marveled at the long delicate fingers and perfect hands, the clear perfection of blinking eyes, the froggy stretch of a leg. I never had any of that, but I understand it now as I stare at this adult before me. Even her mannerisms, from the anxious twitch of her shoulders to the way she raises her eyebrows before she sighs, were mine once, before I came to a place where the unrestrained notes of body language became an expensive liability. I wonder how that can be, and whether the muscles themselves contain the code for those movements somehow, passed along from mother to daughter with the rest of the womanly genes.

“Happy birthday,” I say, once she’s closer. I know the date now: July 9, 1985. Yesterday, while I waited in the clinic for fresh bandages on my arm, I rifled madly through my file the nurse had left on the table beside me. It was a quick and dirty search that only left time to read the barest details, but finding the date was enough of a victory. I try to hand her the little tissue-wrapped package I’ve prepared, but a C.O. intercepts it.

“No direct transfer,” he says. He looks from me to Annemarie. “I can open it and evaluate it.”

I nod, and he slips the pink crocheted hat out of the package, gives it a cursory examination, and hands it to Annemarie. “I made it for you,” I explain to her. And then boldly, with the same surge of nerve that it took to squeeze my milk carton with perfect aim, I say, “While I was pregnant with you.”

Her smile is slow and incredulous and beautiful. “And you kept it all this time. Wow. How did you know I would be a girl?”

“I just knew.”

She runs her hand along the fabric I’ve made, so neatly webbed, without one flaw. “Thank you. This is the most wonderful present. I’m going to cry.” She laughs, a quick, heartbreaking sound, and turns her glimmering eyes toward the ceiling. “Not here. I’ll save it for later.”

We sit at a table, and she gestures to my arm. “What happened?”

I feel a blush creeping into my cheeks. “Someone in the yard didn’t like it that the cat prefers me to her.”

The side of Annemarie’s mouth begins to lift in a disbelieving smile. “Are you serious? What did she do?”

“She cut me. I’m all right. The doctors stitched it up.” I set my face in a lighthearted expression. It’s bad enough that she must come to visit me here; I don’t want this experience to be more depressing for her than it needs to be. “You know it’s the first time I’ve been out of this building in twenty-four years? And you know what really got to me, while I was out and about?”

“Not being fenced in?”

“No, the smell of a hamburger.” This time her laugh is musical. Delighted. “It was called In-N-Out Burger. It was next to the road on the way to the hospital. For a moment I thought I was having a nervous breakdown at the smell of it. That or a religious experience.”

She nods. “I’ll go with the second choice there. In-N-Out burgers are pretty close to heaven.”

“My God. It’s messed with my mind. After so many years here the food just seems normal. But drive past that and it brings it all back. Now I can understand why people in here fake medical emergencies all the time to get out. Before I thought that was just silly and frustrating, but boy oh boy. It was worth every stitch.”

“Did you get stuck in the emergency room for hours and hours?”

“No, they took care of me right away.”

She looks amused. “The VIP treatment, huh? Most people spend the whole night waiting in triage.”

“I did see a lot of people waiting. There was one very cute baby just outside my curtain. She kept waving at me.”

Her lips tighten, and she looks down at the pink bonnet resting on the table. She strokes it with one finger. I feel a tensing in my stomach and know I’ve said something wrong. That I showed fondness for a baby, even though I surrendered her? Did I cause her to think about the baby she lost? I can’t tell, but I twist my fingers against each other and wait out her silence. It strikes me suddenly that she’s now the age I was when she was born—the age when everything ended for me, and began for her. But I’d never given any thought to having babies then. Perhaps I was a late bloomer, or else only a realist. I wanted Ricky to pull it together enough that we could plan a future, but I certainly wasn’t thinking about when to bring a child into the world while my beloved partner still hadn’t mastered concepts like paying for car insurance and producing a clean urine sample for an employer. Annemarie is years ahead of the twenty-four-year-old Clara— although an obnoxious little thought keeps worming its way into my mind. I might have been very much like her if my mother had never met Garrison Brand .