Rebecca Coleman - Inside These Walls

“I know you wouldn’t,” I said, a reply so quick it almost overlapped his. “But I can’t do that. I don’t know what to do.”

“I’ll show you.” His hands were soft and so relaxing, their steady sweep and pressure lulling my mind into a trancelike state. He was so patient. I knew he was already sick and tired of having Clinton as the ghostly third party in his bed, and we had only barely begun to wrestle with that demon. For him to accommodate me I’d needed to give him an encyclopedic understanding of the abuse, and as humiliating as I found that, he was a tender custodian of my secrets. What he was suggesting now, at least, was something I had never done before. “I love it,” he said, for once conjuring his own past instead of mine. “I’d do it like that every time if I could.”

He nudged me over and lay on his back, then held my hips as I moved my legs astride his body. Very gradually, I lowered myself onto him. The way the rain struck the windows reminded me of the ballet studio when I was a girl, and the sound and sight of it calmed me. When he was fully inside me he closed his eyes and let out a slow sigh through his teeth; his hands, always gentle, swirled on my thighs. The bliss I saw in his face wasn’t scary or threatening; it was a beautiful sight, and he was a beautiful man. Now he is my lover, I thought, and Clinton is the past. I’ve moved on . Of course that was simplistic, and I knew it even at that moment, but the meaning rang true. Clinton’s stranglehold over me had at last been broken by this. He was no longer the only man who had claimed me; not the only man who would find pleasure in my body; he hadn’t savaged my mind, or my body, or my reputation so thoroughly that I would never recover. Ricky opened his eyes and met my gaze. “Don’t cry,” he said. “Does it hurt?”

I shook my head.

He laid his hands on my hips, began to rock me gently against him. “Let’s try to make it feel good. Go slow. Take your time.”

“Oh. I don’t need that. You can just—do what feels good for you.”

He grinned and shook his head. “It doesn’t work like that.”

That’s the way he always was. I am surprised to find the memories still so potent, so true, when more than twenty years have passed since I last dared to call them forth at all. It is such an aching pain to remember him that way and realize that even on that afternoon, his life was in its twilight, he was already an old man, only five years left and the days slipping away like playing cards falling from a deck. He would shoot a man, he would father a child, he would twist his linen into a noose on the hot water pipe and end it all by stepping off his desk. In all of it he would take me with him. I had known, for a certain truth, that our love story was the only one my meager life had been afforded. But as I drift off to sleep on the memory of Forrest’s hand against my cheek, I wonder. Over his bleached bones, over the resilient spiral of his DNA that I see in the eyes of our daughter, could a second life blow in?

Minutes before yard time, Officer Parker stops at my cell and calls me to the bars. “You’re getting a new cellmate tomorrow,” he says. “Want to guess who it is?”

“But there are only two bunks.”

“Yes. They found a spot for Hernandez in Med Seg. You want to know who’s moving in?”

“What? No!” I wrap my hands around the bars and hear the panicked dismay in my voice, though begging has never done me any good, not once. “She doesn’t want to be in Med Seg. She hates it there. I take good care of her, much better than they do. One little incident and—I mean, I’ve been doing it for eight years .”

“Nobody’s blaming you, Mattingly. She’s vulnerable already because of her disabilities. She’s supposed to be in Med Seg anyway, but it’s been overcrowded and she was doing fine with you. But between her injury in the showers and her other health conditions, she needed to be moved back. It’s a liability to keep her in General Population.”

I press my forehead against the bars in exasperation. “Why is everything about liability? For God’s sake, her family is all Guatemalan immigrants. They’re not going to drag you into court.”

“Her children are American citizens,” he corrects me, his voice taking on a note of chastisement, “and in any case, so are you. If your medically unstable cellmate clubs you with her cast, don’t think Miss Mona Singer won’t slap us with a lawsuit before your goose egg even goes down.”

I sigh heavily.

“So somebody will be by this afternoon to collect her stuff, and tomorrow you get a new cellie. Heard of Penelope Robbins?”

Now I close my eyes. “Oh, God.”

“Sounds like a yes.”

“Isn’t she supposed to stay in Intake for a few weeks?”

He shrugs. “It’s four to a cell there right now, and her lawyer requested better security. We can put her in the Hole, or we can stick her with you, since you’ve got a vacancy and a good discipline record. So, lucky you.”

He taps the bars with finality and begins to leave. “Wait,” I say, and he stops. In a low voice I tell him, “The only reason the Latinas leave me alone is because I’ve been taking care of Janny. Before she moved in, it was open season on me. You know what’s going to happen to me if you take her away? Like I haven’t had enough problems the past month, getting my arm slashed open and everything else.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll go the extra mile to keep you safe.”

“How?”

He smiles in a way that’s meant to be reassuring, but offers no real reply. In a frustrated tone I continue. “Can I at least visit Janny? Read to her, work with her on her Braille, things like that? She’s going to be miserable. I know this doesn’t make sense to you, but she needs me.”

“I’ll check into it.”

He walks away, and I turn to look over the landscape of my cell. The lowest shelf is precisely ordered with all of Janny’s familiar things: her quilted bag, Jenga game, Braille folder, our current romance novel, her jar of Vaseline. She likes a packet and a half of hot cocoa in each cup, and they won’t know that. She will ask for Vanart shampoo and be angry when they tell her only Gizeh is available. Everything will feel wrong, everything disordered, and her tenuous sense of control will vanish. I want to cry for her, and the pulse of it catches in my throat, but I force the tears not to come. In just moments they’ll sound the buzzer for yard time, and I can’t go out there with a tear-blotched face. You know how to do this, Clara, I scold myself, and force my flat face on like an ill-fitting mask.

The heat in the yard makes the air shimmer like a mirage, casting the chain link in a haze that gives it the delicate glint of silver filigree. When Clementine comes trotting up to me I crouch down and feed her a saltine cracker from the package I’ve saved. Ever since my trip to the hospital it’s been harder to tolerate the food here. Every single time I step into the chow hall, with its smells of overcooked peppers and cheap meat and dirty dishwater, I remember the scent drifting from the In-N-Out Burger and every cell of my body craves that flavor like a drug.

I pick up Clementine and walk around the yard with her, letting the sun’s rays warm my scalp. I push away my thoughts of Janny and find them quickly replaced with thoughts of Forrest. I remember, vaguely, that he was a telephone lineman long ago, working in the cherry-pickers that lift workers to the top of the poles. Did he mention what he does now? I don’t think so, but the whole visit was so overwhelming that I can’t be sure. Clementine nestles in my arms, lifting her head and closing her eyes as I stroke her neck. Not for the first time, my gaze wanders to the top of the fence, with its whorls and twists of razor wire. Nobody ever gets out that way, but it doesn’t stop us from resting an analytical gaze upon it every now and then.