Rebecca Coleman: Inside These Walls

“Yes. I follow along with it every day.” I smile a little. “In another life I might have been a nun. I like the Litany of the Hours.”

“You’ve got the dedication, that’s for sure.”

“Just not the resumé.”

He offers a confused smile, as if not sure whether he should laugh at that. To smooth it over I add, “I feel like one a lot of the time when I’m doing the Braille. Like a scribe from the Middle Ages. I could have sat in my little hut in total silence all day, translating from Aramaic or Greek. It sounds like a good life.”

His nod is polite. There’s a pause, and then he says, “I noticed you haven’t taken the Eucharist for several weeks.”

“I haven’t finished repenting.”

“If I remember correctly, we discussed saying a daily rosary for one of your victims.”

“My youngest victim.” I look at the mirror past his head, see my face reflected pale beside his dark shoulder. “I’m not sure who that is.”

“I believe it was the nineteen-year-old daughter. Was it not?”

I close my eyes, feel a line form between them. “So you meant Eun Hee specifically?”

He opens the folder in his lap, flips through some of the lined yellow pages held in by a strip of metal. “It says in your file—”

“I know what it says in my file. It’s hard to explain.”

His face has clouded with a kind of suspicion. “Is there a reason you can’t pray for the one you believe to be the youngest?” he asks. “Or for more than one?” It’s not like you don’t have a variety of choices, I imagine he’s thinking. I wouldn’t blame him.

“Penance for Catholics is very specific,” I point out, gently chopping the air with my hands to draw the neat, invisible box this faith creates around my soul. “This many prayers, not one more, not one less. You must repent for every sin, or the penance doesn’t cover it. It isn’t a vague, generalized sort of forgiveness. So it bothers me if you don’t give me a specific name.”

The droop at the corners of his eyes tells me I have worn his patience to a frayed edge. “Eun Hee, then,” he says. “Pray for her.”

My sigh embodies both relief and, oddly, disappointment. “All right.”

He nods, but there’s an uncertainty to it. He takes a breath, releases it. “The goal here is to make personal progress, Clara. Spiritual progress. I want to help, but I feel like there’s something you’re holding back,” he says.

“Not at all,” I say. Now I will need to confess to a lie.

I pray for Eun Hee, and the following Sunday I stand in the Communion line once again and taste the dry wheat starch on my tongue. That afternoon I sit outside in the sunlight for a long time with Clementine on my lap, looking out over the steel frames of the high-voltage towers marching across the valley, the looping sweep of their cables. Between the irrigated fields the land is in its desert state. The green is so fragile. It looks as if it could be wiped away with the swipe of a finger, like moss on a stone.

I think about asking Emory Pugh to send me a package of catnip. I’ve made cat toys for Clementine before—knitted mice, a feather tied to a piece of yarn—but I used to love watching the ecstasy of a young cat rolling in the grass under the spell of the stuff. I never ask him for anything, but for Clementine, perhaps I’ll make an exception.

On Monday morning, back at work in the Braille workshop, I’ve got a print of Picasso’s Guernica on the light box when the public address system crackles and I hear my number barked out on the list for visitors. At first I think, This is strange; I haven’t had a visitor in years . Usually visits are restricted to Saturdays, and those during the week are only for rare situations where the visitor has traveled a great distance or can’t often come. And then, in a flash of insight, I know who it is. It’s Karen Shepard, making good on her last letter’s breathless insistence to “meet in person” to “discuss those questions on which no one else could shed light” but me.

“I’m sorry,” I say to Shirley, who is frowning up at the intercom, her curled white hair resting cloudlike against her shoulders. “I didn’t request any visitors.”

“It’s all right, Clara. It must be somebody special. You go. Enjoy your visit.”

I set down my pencil and try to conceal my irritation, lest the guards interpret it as hostility. My wrists shackled, I am led down the long hallway and then the stairs, to the yellow cinderblock room filled with booths. The second from the end is empty. I sit in the chair and face the visitor through the thick, smudged Plexiglas. The woman on the other side—blonde, young—looks at a guard uncertainly, then lifts the phone receiver and presses it to her ear. I do the same.

“Clara Mattingly?” she asks.

“Yes. I don’t do interviews.”

“Well, this isn’t really a typical interview. I promise I’m not going to disclose anything you tell me.”

I scowl. “Putting it in a book is disclosing it, don’t you think?”

She regards me with an uneasy gaze. She has poor eyes for a journalist—too large and rabbity looking, lacking in reserve. “I wouldn’t do that.”

“Listen, I’m not about to feed you information you can use to cobble together some biography of Ricky, whether or not you quote me on it. It’s a worthless project. And no, you can’t quote me on that, either.”

She nestles the phone more tightly against her jaw. “I don’t think you understand,” she says. “You see, you’re my mother.”

I stare.

With her free hand, she grasps, drops, then grasps again at a sheaf of papers on the slim counter before her. “I have…I have all these papers. I just want to know some things. I just want—it’s nothing for a book. I had a miscarriage last year, and…well, it was the wrong time anyway, but before I get married…”

She’s got the phone crammed against her shoulder, both hands now working through her file folders. Her fingers shake. Her mouth is moving so fast, but already I don’t like what I see. I don’t like this, I want to leave, and then she slaps a single rectangle of paper up against the window. It’s pink and patterned and it bears a seal.

“This is my birth certificate,” she says. “The names are wrong, I know. Those are my adoptive parents. But if you recognize this—maybe this date or this place. It says, California State Women’s Prison at El Centro. And so I looked and looked—”

“I know nothing about this,” I say.

All five of her fingers fly out in an urgent stop motion, and the paper slips down to the table. I can see her face again, and her eyes have welled with tears. “No. I know . I’ve searched and searched. I’ve put up one query after another on these adoptee search sites. And this woman, she was a nurse here in the 1980s, she replied. She said, absolutely for sure, that it was you. I didn’t believe her at first, maybe for obvious—”

“Good. You shouldn’t have.”

“No, no. I don’t judge you, I don’t judge you. Please know that. I only want some medical information. Because after my miscarriage—it was pretty late for one—the doctor said, do you know of any genetic issues in your family, and I said I just don’t know. So that’s all I want. I’m not here to…to bother you.”

Ricky’s mouth. Ricky’s jaw. The particular set of her front teeth, the narrow slope of her chin.

She shoves the heel of her hand against her eye, smudges a streak of moisture toward her ear, tinted with tiny black flakes of mascara. There is a diamond on her ring finger, and the gold band is loose against her skin, sliding around with the motion of her hand. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “I know this is so inconsiderate of me. I just thought if I sent you a letter, you might not believe me. So I came and I brought everything.”