Rebecca Coleman: Inside These Walls

“I do. I have every day. That doesn’t make amends. Nothing can.”

He regards me with a plain, unblinking gaze. I scratch my shoulder.

“You could use a bit of a challenge, Clara,” he says. “You toe the line, on the inside and the outside. It’s a good time for you to think harder about how to reconcile some of those thorny issues from the past that you’ve set aside.”

“Well, as far as my victims go, I wrote a letter to Tommy Choi a year after I got here. I apologized for everything that happened, my role in it, all of it. I sent it to him through his lawyer. It came back unopened with a no-contact order stapled to it.”

“I’m sure the pain was very fresh.”

“I don’t doubt it, but I can’t do much to atone for the wrong I did. I don’t have money. Or a time machine.”

“No.” His little bow of a mouth twists to the side. “As your penance, say a rosary each day for just one of them. Focus on that individual.”

“Which one?” I ask.

He replies, “The youngest.”

At Mass the next morning, I don’t take Communion.

I can feel the priest watching me as the other prisoners line up in the aisle between the plastic chairs, their palms pressed together, and move forward at a solemn pace. One of them, Alexandra—a girl in her twenties who works in the food warehouse—cuts a glance at me as she returns to the seat two down from mine. Her mouth is closed tight with the willful, reverent tension of a communicant letting a host dissolve on her tongue. She was right behind me in the confession line yesterday, and I’m sure she’s wondering what I did between then and now.

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.

You are Clara Mattingly. The Cathouse Murders. I saw the movie. I want to know your REAL story. I dont think you did it like they said. I think Ricky Rowan did all of it. I wont write my name here but I will give you a signal in chow hall. come sit with me and tell me. I am ON YOUR SIDE. from YOUR FAN

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.