Rebecca Coleman - Inside These Walls

I throw one hand in the air helplessly. “Well, the results speak for themselves. Those last few days were so horrible, and they overshadowed everything else. But if you force me back to what it was like before that, before everything went awry.” I sigh, so heavily that it feels like setting down a stone. “He had his flaws, many of them, and in retrospect there was always a seed of something ruthless in him. Yet the Ricky I knew—I loved him. And he was worth loving, then.”

She nods, but it’s only the slightest bob of her head. “So if the two of you hadn’t killed those people, I would never have been conceived.”

“Probably not, no.” She’s very quiet. “I know how that sounds. I like to believe that your birth was an act of grace. On God’s part, I mean. That there’s nothing so dark that a bit of light can’t break through it.”

“I don’t believe you thought that at the time.”

I can’t reply to that. I’ve already told her enough lies. This is how I see her birth now, it’s true. But with the dowel in my mouth, with the paperwork and pen at my bedside, it hardly seemed like the gift of a merciful God. If God had a hand in it, it felt like I had been called into his office to be beaten with nightsticks and brass knuckles by his underbosses. I’d never even asked to hold her.

“My priest asked me to pray for my youngest victim,” I finally say. “I knew he meant the daughter of the Choi family. And I didn’t kill her, but I was there, so I had a part in her death. I’ve always prayed for her, ever since that very day. But when I think of my youngest victim, I think of you. I abdicated my responsibility. I failed you. And always, it seemed too presumptuous for me even to pray for your welfare, as if I were doing something productive or helpful, and risk that I might take some satisfaction in that. I don’t deserve any satisfaction about my role in your life. Whatever the penalty is, and I’ll bet it’s a whopper, I deserve every lash of it.”

Tears are rolling out from the corners of her eyes now, streaking down her cheeks. She still won’t meet my gaze. “I don’t know what to think about the fact that I’m only alive because both of you killed people. I wish you hadn’t told me that.”

My throat tightens as if she’s reached out and grabbed it with a phantom hand. I swallow, then force myself to speak. “Ricky and I would have had children together someday, under different circumstances. You were destined for the world. He made mistakes, and I did, and your fate was strong enough to supersede that.”

At last she looks at me, but there’s a flat resentment I see in her eyes, not the openness and hope I’ve come to picture when I think of her. She rolls her shoulders back, and again her father is conjured before me in the limber and acrobatic ease of her muscles.

“I’m going to go home now,” she says. “Thank you for finishing the story.”

But that’s not the end, I think, and a collage of memories bursts to the forefront of my mind. Ricky screaming into the phone in the midst of the standoff, the note he left behind that I only just received, the death of my mother. All these things are part of the story too; they are all threads in the web that caught me here and kept me from being a mother to her. Still, she doesn’t give me the chance to speak. She only nods and then slips over to speak to the nearest guard, ensuring that I can’t pursue or dissuade her. As though she needs protection from my presence, my words.

In the hours after Annemarie leaves, I sit at the desk in my cell and scrawl down the rest the story for Karen Shepard, writing down every sentence with urgency and obsessive haste, as though she might change her mind and lose interest if I wait even until the next morning. All these years I have felt affronted by the way the world viewed Ricky, knowing none of them presented him as he really was. First his trial, and then the movie, put forth the idea of him as a Charles Manson figure, with the rest of us as his glassy-eyed hangers-on.—Or else as some sort of groundbreaking bohemian artist who experienced a fascinating mental breakdown. Now that Annemarie knows, I want there to exist one version of his story, just one in the world, that contains the truth. It isn’t a flattering tale, or one that will make her feel proud of him. But it’s the life he led, and she should have a way to know it plainly.

Dear Ms. Shepard,

The morning after the episode behind Spectrum Supply I went in to work as usual. You will likely consider this strange. Indeed, when I awoke that morning, the prior evening was the first thing that sprang to my mind. However, if you look to my family history it is not difficult to understand my behavior. For ten years I had been finding ways to sit around a dinner table with the man who was raping me. In the odd psychology I had developed thanks to this, I found it soothing and even empowering to deny things. To sit at Thanksgiving dinner with Clinton and think about what he had done could be an emotional disaster, but to deny that it was happening at all erased his power to upset me and ruin what normalcy I could maintain in my life. So to apply this way of thinking to the night at Spectrum was really as simple as strapping on a pair of ice skates and skating out into a new rink. The scenery may be unfamiliar for a little while, but you are competent to glide across the ice.

Thus I behaved at work as though nothing were unusual, and every time I began to hear the news from a co-worker’s radio I got up and filed papers or paid a visit to the coffee machine or something of that nature. Then, around lunchtime, Susie called me again. I told her I was at work—personal calls were highly discouraged—and she insisted that I call her from a pay phone on my lunch hour. I could tell from her uneven voice that she was quite upset. Not long after that I took lunch, because this could not be avoided, and made a call to her from the phone outside the Wells Fargo on the corner. We had pay phones in the lobby downstairs, so it’s clear from my actions that I suspected this call was one I could not risk anyone in my office overhearing. On some level I knew that before I even picked up the phone.

Once I had Susie on the phone, she started to cry. She told me she had been having intercourse with Clinton a few days earlier and he had called her by my name. Susie said she had suspected for some time that “there was something funny there,” as she put it, and was now begging me to tell her if her suspicions were correct. I remember looking up at the street then, at all the cars whizzing past and the old women pushing home bags of groceries in their squeaky metal shopping carts, and feeling both bewildered and resentful. I had gone out of my way to avoid having any involvement in Susie and Clinton’s relationship—I had broken a bottle over his head, for goodness sakes. If I said anything to her now, all that effort would be ruined, and their poor little son’s family would be broken because of me. It wasn’t fair for her to ask me to be part of that.

“No,” I told her. “I have no idea why he would do that.” I told her maybe he was concerned over a family matter and so the signals in his mind had gotten jumbled.

“Are you sure?” she asked, and I know she only wanted the reassurance, but of course then I had to deny it again. And once I had convinced her, she sounded overwhelmingly relieved. Then she grew apologetic. “I’m sorry I even asked you about something so disgusting,” she said, and laughed. “I’m embarrassed now.” I got off the phone quickly, because I suddenly knew I was going to break down if I spoke to her any longer.

I took the rest of my lunch hour and then went back to work, but I wasn’t doing well. For the first time in more than three years there, I left early and drove to get Ricky from work, as his car had two bare tires and he couldn’t afford to replace them. All of this would later be used against me as evidence that I had no remorse for the previous evening, that I had planned what would happen later at the Circle K, etc. Susie would say that I’d spoken with her, but neither of us cared to offer the factual details of that conversation.