Rebecca Coleman - Inside These Walls

I brush my hands against my jumpsuit and drop the lighter in the pencil can. Then I take out a second sheet of cardstock and empty the graphite from my homemade mechanical pencil to create a sort of tortillion. Sitting at the desk, I begin to draw a broad spiral with the pressure of the softened wood and my fingers, just the outline for now, barely visible on the bright thick paper.

The other inmates are just beginning to come back from yard time when a C.O. appears at my cell, flipping open the slot and gesturing for me to thrust my hands through. As she cuffs me I ask, “What’s going on?”

“Appointment.”

“Appointment? For what?”

“Your disciplinary hearing.”

With a sense of dread, my mind flips through the possibilities of what it could be for: the forbidden cigarette, the smuggled paper, the confrontation after Mass the day before—in which I was the victim, of course, but sometimes witnesses tell a different tale. “I didn’t do anything,” I insist. “If you think I did, I’m supposed to get paperwork stating the complaint first, and an inmate advocate—”

She opens my bars. “Just come on.”

Bewildered, I walk just ahead of her to the office wing, where a C.O. gestures me into the disciplinary office. Half in a panic, I take a breath to speak up in defense of my rights, but before I can speak I see my attorney sitting in a chair with her legs crossed, one stylishly-clad foot swinging. I exhale in surprise. “Mona!”

“Have a seat, Clara. Uncuff her, please.”

I sit across from her and feel the shackles slide from my wrists. “They told me this was a disciplinary hearing.”

“Yes. I didn’t want anyone to overhear that you were speaking to your lawyer.”

In a few moments we’re alone. “How’ve you been?” she asks. “I hear you got a new cellmate.”

“Yeah. Is there any chance you could convince them to put Janny back in with me? They haven’t even let me visit her, and it’s mutually advantageous for us to be together. If you want, I can write down my entire argument. I want to challenge the decision.”

“Clara, don’t do that.”

I raise an eyebrow. I don’t know what’s going on here, but something in her manner looks tense. Pensive. This isn’t a health-and-welfare check, I can see that much.

“I happened to be in the building to meet with one of my other clients,” she begins, “and it was mentioned to me that Penelope Robbins has been placed in a cell with you. Are you at all familiar with her case?”

“Of course. I’ve been following the news.”

“Good. Then you must know she’s been charged with obstruction of justice, and you probably know the theory that she hired a hit man against her father, the Congressman.”

“Yes, but I don’t think she did that.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Comments she’s made. She’s too concerned about his health to have put him there on purpose.”

She murmurs thoughtfully. “So she’s opening up to you, is she?”

I grimace. “Not if I can help it. The last thing I want to do is get tangled up in her legal business. I have enough problems of my own at the moment.”

“Actually, Clara, I think it’s the first thing you want.”

My gaze turns puzzled, and Mona’s expression shifts to the woman-to-woman look I saw her use so many times before the jury. “The State of California really wants to solve this,” she says quietly. “If it so happens that she confides any details to you, then you’d do well to pass them along to me immediately.”

I feel my posture straightening, my shoulders squaring. Twenty-five-year-old Clara would have nodded adamantly at this suggestion, but the Clara of today recoils from it in disgust. “To snitch, you mean,” I say to her. “On my own cellmate. I would never .”

“Don’t speak so soon. If she confesses, of her own free will, it would come at great benefit to you. Now, if I were you, I wouldn’t directly try to lead her—”

I line up my words like bricks on wall. “I am not going to be a snitch .”

Mona sighs. “Oh, Clara,” she says wearily. “You really are a lifer now, aren’t you?”

The words set off a twinge in my heart, but I don’t say a word.

“Just a few weeks ago, you were asking me about a new trial,” she reminds me. “Because you had extenuating circumstances, you said. I have no idea what you were talking about, but you seemed quite interested in getting the hell out of here. And I can’t say I blame you. Would you care to share what those circumstances were?”

I swallow hard. I never speak of these things aloud. In a shaky voice I say, “I was raped by my stepbrother. For years. Father George knew about it, and he did nothing. And I could never understand why, because I trusted him, and my mother trusted him, and yet he did nothing.”

Her eyebrows knit together sympathetically. “This is the same stepbrother who testified for you during your trial?”

“Yes. It was all so sick and awful, and I didn’t want to destroy my mother by letting her find out about it. I figured it wouldn’t matter anyway since I had confessed. I knew it was possible it could make my sentence lighter, but that was a gamble, and for sure they’d ask me dozens of humiliating questions in front of the whole world. I couldn’t take the thought of having to defend myself, or my mother having to defend her self if all that got into the papers. I’d rather be in prison.”

“Questions like what?”

“Like why I let it go on for so long. How it could be rape when he usually used protection. I mean, this was Clinton Brand. All the girls wanted him. He was always sleeping with someone. And at the time, back in 1984—” I feel my expression darken. “Did you ever see that movie, Sixteen Candles? It was so big that summer. The whole idiotic film is about having sex with girls who are drunk and passed out, taking their underwear as a trophy, coercing them to sleep with you—everyone thought it was all so funny . Such wonderful comedy. That’s what it was like back then. If the jury had been asked to weigh what had happened between me and Clinton, they would have high-fived Clinton on the way out of the courtroom and sent me to the electric chair.”

Her mouth shifts into a wry scowl. “I wish you had told me, just the same. I might have been able to do something with it. But, Clara, listen to me now—and listen hard. You’ve already served nearly twenty-five years, which is well beyond the mandatory minimum. Given your disciplinary record, combined with the substantial evidence of your rehabilitation—if you produce information that can solve this case, I could submit a convincing argument for a change to your sentence. A significant change.”

My eyes narrow. “What kind of significant change?”

“I would petition for it to be reduced to time served. In similar cases, judges have been fairly agreeable. I think it could succeed.”

I shake my head in confusion. Nothing she is saying makes any sense to me. “I don’t understand. Doesn’t ‘time served’ mean I’d be done? Because believe me, they’re not going to let me walk out those doors.”

“They would if the court told them to.”

“But I have life without parole.”

“ Now you do, Clara. But how do you think Forrest Hayes got his sentence reduced from ten years to one? ‘Substantial assistance,’ that’s how. You can call it snitching if you like, but outside these bars, they call it freedom .”

I’m very quiet. I look down at the tile.

“I advise you to try this,” Mona tells me softly. “And get the information quickly, before someone else does. Don’t say a word about it to anyone. Not to your daughter, not to a friend, not to a single soul. Just to me, the day you find it out, and I’ll have you moved immediately.”