Rebecca Coleman - Inside These Walls

I nod.

My uncertain silence seems to be making her uneasy. “Happy birthday, by the way,” she says. “I hope someone sang to you, at least.”

Again I’m puzzled, but then realize she’s correct—my birthday was two days ago. I’m forty-eight now. I haven’t celebrated my birthday since I arrived here, but suddenly I feel a pang of regret that I overlooked it. “Thank you,” I say, and then add rather randomly, “This is the room where I meet with my priest.”

“Is it?”

“Yes. It’s the confession room. Maybe that will loosen my tongue.” I give her a little spasm of a smile. “I’m a bit nervous.”

A small line forms between her eyebrows. “Is there anything I can do to make you more comfortable?”

“No, no. Interviewing… I just think it’ll feel like answering questions in court. And obviously I’m not very good at that.”

She responds to that with a quick smile. “Well, let’s get started and you can tell me if you’d like to stop. So. You wrote to me about the first two crimes—Jeff Owen’s murder and that of the Choi family. But you said nothing about Father George or what happened at the rectory. So I have some questions—”

“Your book is about Ricky. I was off by myself during most of that, so I wasn’t a very good witness to what he was doing.”

“I want to hear it from your perspective. It can corroborate or even discredit the accounts of the others. And I know you feel the other accounts haven’t always been accurate.”

I run my tongue across the inside of my lip and fold my hands in front of me. I think back to the rectory. I remember the silver gleam of the car door slamming in the moonlight, the dark tangle of trees arching over the long, narrow flight of concrete stairs, the crunch of leaves beneath our feet as we climbed toward the building. The bright light in the front room that shone out and pushed back the darkness in a friendly way, which would have made the place look warm and welcoming if we had been there for any good purpose.

“We got to the rectory around two in the morning. We’d all worn—” I feel my breath catch, and clear my throat. “We had cheap Halloween masks that Chris and Ricky stopped at the 24-hour pharmacy to buy. The type that are thin plastic and have a piece of elastic to hold them to your head. It was a gamble. Father George was the only one who really knew any of us. He’d recognize us no matter what, but Ricky thought we should have masks in case someone else came to the door. But it turned out to be Father George who came. The other two priests who were staying there were out.”

“And Ricky wore some kind of Star Wars mask, correct?”

I nodded. “He had Han Solo, and Chris was Darth Vader. I can’t remember what Forrest and Liz had, because I don’t think they used theirs, but they were movie or TV characters. I was Strawberry Shortcake. I felt very numb. Like… like Rhoda the android. From the TV show.” I look down at the table. “In the car Ricky kissed me before we went in. Hard. Then we put on the masks and went to the door. Father George opened it a crack and frowned, and he started to close it, but then Chris shouldered it open. They grabbed him and taped his hands behind his back, and Ricky demanded to know where he kept his money. And Father George said, ’Richard Rowan Junior, I know that’s you. Shame on you,’ and told him to let him go. But then Chris put tape over his mouth, and Ricky just started tearing around the place, throwing things around and heading toward the back where the bedrooms were. He knew the layout from the times he had been there to do odd jobs. Liz and Forrest were outside, acting as lookouts. Chris jerked Father George down into a chair and started winding tape around it. And he—the priest—he sat there glaring at me, and I knew he knew who I was.”

Karen adjusts the tape recorder. “Did you still go to church regularly?”

“Not since I got back from art school, but he still knew me, and he knew Ricky and I were together. My mother talked to him every week. He was making me feel so uncomfortable that I told Chris I was going outside, but right then Ricky called for Chris, and Chris handed me the gun and went down the hallway. So then it was just us two. Me and Father George.”

Karen nods.

“It was very cold in there,” I go on. “That barn-like cold. Drafty. I had the gun at my side. I wasn’t pointing it at him. He kept staring at me with his face getting redder and redder, like he believed I was betraying him. It made me feel angry—” I take a deep breath and exhale it slowly. “Angry, because I began to think, ’So you feel betrayed, do you? Doesn’t feel so good, does it?’ I started remembering all those times on my knees in the confessional, telling him what Clinton was doing to me— by name , telling him, my stepbrother, Clinton —and how he never lifted a finger to help me. Never said a word to anyone. It filled me with so much rage. And still he had the nerve to sit there and look at me like I owed it to him to treat him more nicely. I thought, ’You asshole’—I really did, and I didn’t use that kind of language then—’You asshole, I could shoot you in the face right now and you would absolutely have it coming.’

“So I pushed up my Strawberry Shortcake mask. I wanted him to see me, and look me in the eye, so he could see I was the one in charge now and I hadn’t forgotten about him abandoning me. I took a few steps closer to him, and he just kept staring and scowling. When I was as close as I dared to get, I said, ’I hope you’re sorry.’ And he didn’t nod or give any indication that way, and that made me nervous, because I had thought a man in his position would say anything to get out of it, and I really wanted to hear him apologize. I said, ‘I’m going to pull off that tape, and you’re going to say you’re sorry.’

“So I did, and as soon as I ripped it off I said, ‘Tell me why you did nothing. Nothing .’ By then I’d worked myself up and was starting to cry. I didn’t want to be there, and I didn’t feel as strong as I wanted him to think I felt. But he just said, ‘I don’t have to answer to you. Does your mother know where you are?’ I held up the gun to his face and said, ‘Say you’re sorry. Say it. Say you’re sorry.’ It was like twisting down something in my gut, a machine I was winding tighter and tighter. He just glared at me, stared me down, and then it got so tight I couldn’t take it anymore and I fired. I shot him in the face.”

Karen looks at me steadily. Except for the soft hiss of the air-conditioning, the room is silent. “How did you feel right after?”

“I felt relief. And then, a second later, it felt like the most dreadful thing imaginable.”

“Immediate regret, you mean?”

“Not exactly regret. Dread . I knew I’d done something awful and couldn’t ever take it back, and I hadn’t really meant to do it. There was all this anger coursing through me, but all the way up until the last second I thought I was in control. I thought he had to apologize, because the alternative should obviously be terrifying to him. I let my emotions carry me along because I thought I knew how it would end. But I didn’t.”

She nods and writes something on her yellow pad. Her pen scratches against the paper. After a moment she says, “Were you aware of what he had done to your stepbrother previously? You haven’t mentioned it.”

I answer with a perplexed look. “What he had done? What do you mean?”

She sets down her pen and regards me with a plain journalistic gaze. “In 2006, the Diocese of San Jose settled with seventeen individuals who claimed abuse by four priests who had served at various churches in the area. Father George was one of the priests named in the suit. The records are not public, but I made a special request to review them. Clinton Brand was one of the claimants.”