Rebecca Coleman - Inside These Walls

When I arrive at her cell I see she already has a guest. Father Soriano is perched on the narrow stool in a tenuous stance that stretches the edge of his cassock. Janny raises her head when I come in, that little worry line forming between her eyebrows. “Clara,” the priest says, his voice jovial. “I was just about to pay you a visit. Thought I would make my rounds first.”

“Aren’t you early?” I ask.

“By a couple of hours, yes.” He lays a clerical hand on Janny’s head, murmurs a blessing, then pats her cheek. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning, Ms. Hernandez.”

“I’ll come back after my confession,” I tell Janny, and crutch out of the room. But as soon as he closes and latches her door, I say, “You brought him, didn’t you.”

“Yes, he’s in the chapel. Or at least, that’s where he was when I left him.”

He rests his palm against my back as I start down the hallway. The chapel is around the corner, but when I reach my cell I stop and turn into it. Father Soriano looks at me in confusion as I sit on the bed and let my crutches fall beside me with a clatter.

“I can’t go.” My throat feels so tight that I’m not sure how I’m still breathing. “There’s no way I can walk in there.”

“I’ll be with you, Clara.”

I shake my head. My hands, resting on my thighs, are trembling. He steps into my cell and crouches down beside me, balancing in his creased black dress shoes. The weariness has gone from his deeply tanned face, and he only looks kind. It’s the focus of his dark eyes that cuts through my climbing panic. For the first time in the years I’ve known him, he has pulled away the invisible wall between us—the confessional screen, the communion rail—and looks at me the way I imagine Jesus looked upon a woman as he healed her.

“You asked for a brave thing,” he says. “You did it because you have a brave heart. Don’t let your mind trick you now into believing otherwise.”

He holds out his hand, and I let him pull me up to stand.

The sunlight streaming through the stained-glass window is low and pale, touching the opposite wall with faded shards of color. The pews are worn and nicked, like our old desks at Our Lady of Mercy. I see Clinton the moment I walk in. He’s sitting in the wooden chair just in front of the chancel, elbows on his knees and his legs loosely apart. He’s cracking his knuckles. He’s looking at the floor. I stop short, waiting out a feeling in my stomach like the last dregs of water being sucked down the drain. Then he looks up and, right away, he stands.

His hair is very thin on top now, the blond salted with gray and combed carefully to the side. He wears glasses, and his sharp jaw has softened its edges. His neck is not the lean pillar it used to be. I follow the line of his body down and find a different person entirely. He’s a little paunchy, broader and softer at the shoulders, dressed in a cream-colored shirt traced in a thin plaid and dark khaki pants. He looks ever so much like his father.

He swings his arms, letting the side of his fist bounce against his palm when they meet at the front; but then he stops himself, his hands writhing nervously against the sides of his pants. I can see he’s waiting for me to approach him, but I can’t. To walk up the aisle to this man waiting at the side for me, as if I’m a bride—no.

“Come over here,” I say.

He gives a single nod and starts down the aisle. Father Soriano stands just behind me, like a spotter in case I fall, but I feel steadier than I expected. At close range Clinton looks even older, and I remind myself he’s fifty-two. The last time I saw him he was twenty-eight, sitting on the witness stand in court, but I barely remember him then. In my mind’s eye he is always eighteen.

“Clara,” he says, with another nod of greeting.

He doesn’t extend his hand, and I don’t offer mine. I sit down at the edge of the last pew, and he takes a seat in the one across the aisle, which is no wider than a table—a distance just great enough that I can breathe. The priest takes my crutches and rests them against the back of the pew, then retreats to the doorway.

For a moment Clinton takes in my analytical gaze, my flat face, my silence. “Do you want to start, or should I?” he asks.

I raise an eyebrow. “Do you have something to say?”

“Of course I do.” He rubs his thighs. “First, the day you hit me on the head with that bottle, I wasn’t coming down there to do anything to you. I was just trying to reach the bottle of stain remover. I’d gotten jelly on my shirt, and it was the shirt I needed for an interview, and there was nothing on my mind except getting it out—”

“What?” My face contorts into a mask of disbelief. “ That’s what you want to tell me? After all these years?”

“To clear the air, yes. I know you have this idea that I wanted to do something to you, and that’s why you overreacted so much, and it’s always bothered me because it isn’t true. I was with Susie then, for God’s sake. I wasn’t going to try anything.”

I sit up straight and choke on a humorless laugh. “Clinton, you never tried anything. You did whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted. Trying implies that I might have had a choice in the matter.”

He holds out both hands, palms toward the earth, in a placating gesture. “I’m not saying you’re wrong there. Just that wasn’t one of those times.”

“And while we’re at it, I should have overreacted like that about five years earlier.”

His hands drop to his knees. “Fair enough.”

That small admission surprises me into silence. He gnaws his bottom lip and looks toward the narthex. Rectangles of light gleam on his glasses—hard, shifting little points.

“I hate it that you see it this way,” he says. “I was hoping that wouldn’t be the case.”

A fresh surge of fury courses through me. “How did you think I would see it? As a game? Some kind of exciting affair? You raped me. When I was a child . And you did it a hundred times.”

“ I know that,” he says loudly. “I was hoping you didn’t.”

“How the hell could I not know?”

“Because there are so many ways to think around these things!”

Again he holds his hands out, palms toward me this time, and takes a deep breath. “Let me start over again,” he says. “You want an apology, and believe it or not, I came all the way down here to deliver it to you. I guess you’ve been steaming about this for thirty-odd years, wondering why I didn’t have the stones to offer you one. Well, that’s the answer. How you viewed it—that’s not something I knew. I figured it probably wasn’t favorable. I’m not stupid, but I didn’t know that for a fact . And what if I said I’m sorry about what happened and you said, ‘What are you talking about?’ Because sometimes—not mostly, but sometimes—it was consensual.”

I tip my head, looking at him in utter disbelief. There’s something befuddled in his expression, as though he has truly puzzled over this. “It was never consensual,” I say.

“Well, sometimes it seemed like it was.”

“You imagined that. I never wanted it. Not once.” I brace my arm against the pew and lean toward him to be sure he doesn’t miss a thing I say. “You choked me, you scared me, you robbed me of ever feeling normal, and worst of all, you screwed up my mind. You don’t get to keep any of that, so don’t congratulate yourself, but for a long time there you screwed me up pretty good. And if you’ve carried around some idea in your head that I wanted it sometimes—well, allow me to relieve you of that notion. I knew that if I tried to say no, you would make my life an even worse hell. A person can’t consent if she has no choice .”