I’m working on a Braille transcription of a science textbook when word arrives that D-Block is locked down for a contraband search. This doesn’t worry me, because it happens fairly often and Janny and I don’t keep forbidden things in our cell. Periodically it turns out that some of my possessions have been declared contraband in the time after I acquired them, but it’s just another of the things over which I have no control.
When I’m returned to my cell I’m irritated by the disarray, and clearly I’m not the only one. My neighbor—the one with the secret cellphone—is muttering an endless string of curses, and Janny is tentatively feeling around on her shelves with that lost, baleful look on her face.
“I’ve got it, Janny,” I tell her. “Just sit down and relax. I’ll put everything back where it belongs.”
“They moved the bag with my Rolaids.”
“Yeah.” I pluck her quilted cosmetic bag from the top bunk, where it’s been tossed along with the spilled Jenga game and her Braille practice folder. “Here you go.”
“Oh, my heartburn.”
She sits on her bed and pops a tablet as I read over the handwritten inventory the C.O.s have thoughtfully left on my desk. The dozen sticks of graphite I’ve coaxed out of golf pencils have been seized as “weapon-making materials,” and my twelve music cassettes are gone now, too, under the general heading of “Disallowed.”
That is unexpected. I scramble to the shoebox and, finding it empty, rush back and wrap my hands around the bars of my cell. “Officer Kerns!” I shout.
She stalks over slowly. I hold up the inventory sheet and, with more distress in my voice than I mean to convey, ask her, “What was the problem with my tapes?”
“Not allowed anymore, unless they’re for a legal purpose with signed permission from your lawyer.”
“But I’ve had them since I came in. They’re more than twenty-five years old.”
She shrugs. “It’s the rules. The tape inside them’s a problem. They want you to have CDs now.”
“But I don’t have a CD player. Are all cassettes forbidden? Can’t we just have one or two? I just want my mix tape. Just that one. It’s important to me.”
She laughs, flashing a neat row of gleaming white teeth. “A mix tape, huh. Now there’s setting the Wayback Machine. They sell CD players at the canteen.”
I press my forehead against the bars in exasperation. “Yes, but if I buy one of those, I still won’t have the right tape.”
“CD.”
I close my eyes.
“Rules and Regs,” she says, and meanders past me. “That’s how it is.”
I turn and slide my back down the bars until I’m sitting on the floor, then crumple the inventory into a ball and toss it into my trash can.
“What’s the matter, Clara?” Janny asks, her voice fluttery, sensing dark things in my sudden silence. “What’s on the tape? You don’t hardly never listen to tapes anyhow.”
“A lot of songs I like. And Ricky saying ‘goddamn it.’”
She blurts a laugh. “Is that something special?”
“He gave it to me for Valentine’s Day. He picked out all the songs because they meant something, and we brought that tape with us on a road trip once. He wrote my nickname on it.” I sigh and let my gaze drift up to the ceiling, feeling the cold press of the bars against the back of my head. “Never mind.”
“Never mind for sure. You hate that man. You shoulda got rid of it right from the beginning. Hey, you think I want to hear Javier’s voice?” She scoffs at the notion, pulling her mouth into the disparaging scowl that conjures the dagger-eyed Janny Hernandez I remember from before her fight. “Like I’d ever want to hear that bastard cuss at me again. It ain’t healthy to want that. Maybe you ought to go to the Healthy Relationships class.”
“He wasn’t cussing at me. He was cussing because he got up to stop the record he was taping from and tripped over something.” I close my eyes. “But you’re right. It’s good that it’s gone. I don’t need to go back to that place.”
“No, you don’t,” she says emphatically. “Nosiree, you don’t.”
But I want to, just for a little while. When I was young I thought things were so difficult, with the strain of not knowing whether Ricky would grow up before my patience wore out, my fears about my mother’s health, my own hard secrets. I felt so frustrated, so bleak in my heart, and on the night everything came to a thin sharp point on which my whole future would turn, those obstacles looked like the sum of my life. Right now I want to sit for a moment in that younger Clara’s presence, look upon her in pity and wonder, and also in anger—that frail, foolish girl who gave up everything.
* * *
My deadline for the art book is creeping up on me, and the work is not going well. I can’t focus on Guernica right now. After I complete it, the only artwork left for me to draw is Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, which will be easy. But the Picasso mural seems to grow more complex and confusing each time I sit down with it, and my lines are all wrong. When I close my eyes and touch it as a blind person would, it feels like a jumble of random images with no cohesion, no context.
I order ten new golf pencils and set them to soak in a Gatorade bottle filled with water. They left me my mechanical pencil, at least—they didn’t notice the lead is loose inside it—and I spend my evenings working on Intérieur, first completing the sketch and the planning, then starting on the embossed version using a fresh sheet of paper. It’s very difficult and frustrating, because the paper available to me in my cell is not thick and cottony like what we have in the Braille workshop, but just thin, slick, ordinary stuff. I dampen a washcloth and pat the paper lightly with it first, letting it rest for a while, before gently running my emptied pencil along the underside to create the lines. Yet I can already tell this will just be a prototype. The results will be messy, and I desperately need better materials.
“I’ll help you,” Janny assures me as I scrub her hair in the shower one evening. “I’ll feel it and tell you when it’s right. You’ll do great. The ones you made of my kids, those are my treasures.”
Every year, while Janny’s kids were in school, I created tactile drawings of the school portraits her sister sent. “At least they let me have the high-quality paper for those,” I mutter.
“What are you making it for, if they don’t want it at work?”
“For the challenge. Because the painting speaks to me.” I work the shampoo through Janny’s curls, and she lets her head drop back to enjoy the scalp massage. “It’s based on a story about an orphan who is forced to marry one man, then has an affair with his friend. She and her lover murder her husband, but stage it to look like an accident. Then they get married—”
“You didn’t do nothing like that.”
“No, not the same crime, but that’s not the point. The two lovers share guilt. The painting shows them on their wedding night, in their bedroom, when—”
“Is it sexy?”
“No, it’s not sexy. Will you let me finish explaining?”
“Okay, okay,” she says, but before I can go on there’s a sudden commotion, a lot of screaming, and I’m jostled hard from behind, knocking both Janny and myself into the tiled wall. I grab for her but she goes down anyway, slipping and falling into the angled space where the wall meets the floor. It’s a fight between two of the Latina women, with a dozen others trying to pull them apart or else egg them on, and I kneel beneath the spray and throw out a protective arm to shield Janny from the chaos. Shouts echo off the tile, steam dissipates as the water shuts off, and the guards rush in, jerking the women by their bra straps—we all shower in our bras and underwear, for safety—and pulling them off each other by their hair. The woman who is first to be dragged away leaves a streak of blood on the wet yellow floor. “Lockdown!” yell the guards who are the last to arrive. “Lockdown!”
I take my eye off the crowd and look at Janny. She is shivering and pale, crying silently, her right arm cradled in her left hand. My shout resonates off the tile like the tones of a bell. “I need help!”
Sergeant Schmidt appears, and a wave of relief passes through me. Janny knows this officer’s voice, and doesn’t fear her the way she does the men. She assesses Janny and calls on her radio for a medical attendant. “Get your towel and wait by the wall, Mattingly,” she instructs me.
“Can I go with her to the clinic? Her English isn’t very good when she gets upset, and she’s going to be scared.”
“Do you speak Spanish?”
“Not really, but I speak…I speak Janny.”
She throws me an edgy smile. “That’s not going to do it. It’s probably just a sprain, anyway. Line up, please.”
I reach for my towel. “Could you come by later and tell me how she’s doing?”
“Mattingly, don’t be high-maintenance right now. Go.”
“I want her,” Janny cries. Her voice is a squeak, and her face is streaked with tears. “I want her.”
But I don’t have a choice. I wrap myself in the towel and line up in the corridor. I want to stand and argue, but in situations of chaos and crisis my instinct is still to follow the directions from the loudest voice. Today I hate myself for that as much as I did the night they brought me in.
* * *
Dear Ms. Shepard,
As my cellblock is on lockdown, I am taking advantage of this time to answer the additional questions in your letter. I hope you received my first letter. Our mailroom here is unreliable and the content of our correspondence is often censored, so I am numbering my letters (that is the purpose of the 2 at the top of this one). That way you will know if any are missed.
I hope you understand that I have never before agreed to an interview. The fact that I am doing so now is extraordinary and speaks to the changing circumstances in which I find myself.
To pick up where I left off in my previous message, while I was away at art school in Wisconsin, my stepbrother Clinton married, moved to a nearby suburb, and had a child. This created an ideal situation for me upon my return, because with Clinton out of the way I felt comfortable setting out food for the stray cats I often saw wandering around our neighborhood. I had often done this when I was much younger, but then one of them gave birth to kittens underneath our porch and had created a little nesting area which she wouldn’t vacate. Clinton trapped the mother and then drowned each of her kittens in a bucket, and when I became hysterical at learning what he had done, he claimed the neighborhood had enough stray cats already and he was saving them from a life of misery. I was about twelve then—Clinton would have been sixteen—and after that I stopped feeding them out of fear for their safety. But once I came back from Wisconsin I managed to convince a local vet to spay and neuter the strays I brought in, free of charge, as a service to the community. So I began feeding the cats again, and once they became docile with me I’d take them in for their surgery, care for them while they recovered, and then release them. I didn’t have room in the house, after all, and my mother’s health was already beginning to decline.
It was then that I began visiting the art supply store almost weekly, because I had taken to creating charcoal drawings of the cats as they slept so sweetly in the beds I made for them while they healed. As I said in my previous letter, I knew Ricky Rowan from CCD classes and high school, and he had also worked at the Circle K where my friends and I often stopped for Slush Puppies after Junior Service Club meetings. I had always thought he was attractive, but I didn’t date. I know this sounds foolish now to an outsider, but through most of high school I genuinely believed I had a vocation, which is the Catholic term for believing I had been called by God to the celibate religious life. I gave that up when I decided to go to art school, but even during college I only went out on sporadic group dates, mainly because I felt terrified of that last hour of the date. According to my friends, nearly all dates followed a pattern. There was dinner or a movie, or both, and then the last hour was all physical, with the man always overeager and demanding. I had no stomach for that at all, so I avoided the whole enterprise.
What softened me toward Ricky, though, was that he was very gregarious and friendly. When I came into the store he always asked to see my drawings, and he appreciated my skill. Through asking me questions about the cats I drew, he learned of my work with the strays and openly admired it. Who doesn’t enjoy being admired? When he asked me out to dinner I couldn’t help but say yes. Respect was something I was unaccustomed to from men, and it was very disarming and appealing, the way he seemed to think so highly of me.
As to that first date, I don’t remember where we ate—I think I was too nervous to pay much attention to the food—only that we went to the beach afterward, at Santa Cruz. It was a spontaneous idea Ricky had, and although I agreed, I was full of anxiety because I was trying very hard to control that final hour and ensure I made it home untouched. He was an artist, as well. In high school he had painted a mural in a hallway and created a ceramic model of our school crest, which may still be on display in the entrance for all I know. So on the drive to the beach I began talking to him about a trip my mother and I took to Spiral Jetty, the earthwork Robert Smithson created in the Great Salt Lake at some point during my childhood. When I was around ten—four years after my father died and not long after she began dating Garrison Brand, my future stepfather—my mother took me on a trip to Bountiful, Utah to visit her sister. I think she wanted to spend some time with my aunt and ask her advice before things got too serious with Garrison.
But while we were there, she and I drove down to Salt Lake City and visited the Jetty, which was new then. We walked out onto the black rocks and followed them to the center, and it reminded me of the garden labyrinth behind Our Lady of Mercy, except made out of rock and silt instead of white gravel, and surrounded by reddish water instead of neatly trimmed hedges. At the time I thought it was a little strange and anticlimactic, and I wondered why anyone would build this rough, rocky pathway into a lake and say it was art. But the sky above it, I remember, was enormous, and shaded an otherworldly blue. I described every aspect of it to Ricky. There in his car, driving toward the beach, I almost felt like a hostage—as if I had to be sure to endear myself to him and make him feel a connection with me so he wouldn’t hurt me when I was vulnerable. He hadn’t done anything to make me feel that way, but it began to happen inside me naturally, I suppose as a type of learned response.
So I kept talking to Ricky about the Spiral Jetty and how it was like an ancient petroglyph recreated in modern times, and how Smithson had reversed the spiral to symbolize eternity. I talked about how hard I had to squint in the intense sunlight, because the desert sky was big and clear and the rays from the sun felt absolutely direct, and the way the wind whipped at my mother’s silky scarf so that it rippled like a flag. I was painting this picture for him, I suppose, so that he would be imagining me as a ten-year-old child with her mother, and when we arrived at the beach he wouldn’t have the heart to do anything unseemly to me.
But when I stopped to take a breath, he said, “It’s covered now.” I asked, “What’s covered?” and he said, “Spiral Jetty. The water level rose, and it’s been covered for a decade now. The whole thing’s underwater, like Atlantis.”
I stopped talking then. I had no idea this childhood landmark of mine had vanished, and I felt bewildered and sort of sad to realize it. Ricky looked over at me—he was still driving then—and I guess he saw the look on my face, because he said, “Hey, it’s still there, though. Eventually there’ll be a drought again and it’ll be visible, like before. I think that was part of the artist’s point.”
“When do you think that will be?” I asked.
“I don’t know. But everything goes in cycles, right? And probably when it turns up again it’ll be all covered in salt from the lake, like those crystals you can grow in a jar.”
I was trying to picture all of Spiral Jetty under the water, preserved and silent, like a shipwreck. And while I was doing that, Ricky pulled into a parking space and I felt anxious all over again because I had been off my guard as far as setting up some kind of advance protection from what he might do. But it turned out he was very much a gentleman for things like that. He didn’t touch me unless he was certain I wanted him to. Ricky could be very intuitive and empathetic, which you may not realize. I think that’s why he was so good with my cats, and why he could unapologetically and without hesitation attack my stepbrother at the front door of my home. Yet his strong feelings could be too much for him at times, and sometimes he would get overwhelmed and shut it all down, like a shopkeeper dropping the metal grate across his storefront at the end of a day. That way of his could feel bewildering, but it never occurred to me how insidious it would become. When he liberated himself from compassion he was a very dangerous kind of free.
Well, my pencil lead has run down to a stub, and my new mechanical pencils aren’t ready yet. I will write again when the wood has softened.
Yours truthfully,
Clara Mattingly
* * *
The lockdown wears on through the next day, with our meals delivered by cart and pushed through the slot into our cells. The night before, Sergeant Schmidt came by my cell during night count and told me Janny’s arm was broken and they took her to the hospital to have it set and put in a cast, but I haven’t heard any more news since then. My heart aches to think of how disoriented she must be, shuffling from one place to the next without any awareness of the space around her, fearful of the unfamiliar voices. I never spoke to her before the fight that blinded her, but she was skittish and anxious long before she lost her sight. Others may not realize this, because years in prison had hardened her by the time she was attacked, but I know it is her nature because she shot her husband to death while he was sleeping. She wasn’t angry, she told me; she was just done. Tired of the way he behaved when he was awake. They arrested her outside the Greyhound station, with a child on each side of her and a cardboard sign balanced on the baby stroller in the middle, begging for bus fare to Mexico City.
To pass the time I read the ski lodge romance, I work on Intérieur, and I dance to a melody in my head, moving to a Cyndi Lauper song I’ve been thinking about since the day they took my cassettes away. It’s called Time After Time, and it was one of the songs on my mix tape from Ricky. I hadn’t listened to it in a very long time, because it was far too evocative; at the time they put me in here the song was at the height of its popularity and seemed to blare from every radio every hour of the day. Back then—when I felt so confused and so bereft, insanely hopeful that one morning a C.O. would unlock my cage and explain there had been a mistake, that none of this had ever happened—it drove me half-mad to hear it all the time, as if all my secret feelings were being projected outward to the entire prison. After a while, people in the world grew tired of it, it fell off the music charts and I rarely heard it anymore. The effect, when I did, was much like opening the drawer in which my father, while living, had kept his undershirts. Long after he had died, but before Garrison Brand, I went looking for a comb and in my haphazard search pulled his drawer open. Suddenly the ghost of my father seemed conjured before me, and I sank to my knees from the shock of it, breathing in the intense and living smell of this man who didn’t exist any longer. I didn’t like that feeling, because even before I went to prison I liked things to be clear and orderly. It made me a good Catholic, because in Catholicism everything runs in neat, up-and-down lines.
But two years later, when word came to me that Ricky had hung himself, I wanted that feeling. I dusted off the tape and listened to the song over and over again for several days. But then the music pulled me in two directions. I was drawn toward Ricky, remembering what he had been like at his best, and toward the potent memory of those first months in prison, when I faced the reckoning for loving him at his worst.
As I dance, I wish desperately that I had a pair of pointe shoes. Now and then, holding on to the bars or my bunk, I hesitantly try to rise onto my big toes; I believe I could do it, if only I had the right shoes. But for now I tie the loose legs of my blue pants tight against my ankles with string, and in the center of my cell I practice adagios, which are very difficult to do correctly. The guards walk past and cast long glances through my bars, probably wondering if I’ve lost my mind, but I’m suffering from nothing except a poignant song.
“Mattingly.”
I’m jarred back to reality and I come to the bars, where Officer Parker is standing with his thumbs in his belt. “They’re going to keep Hernandez in the clinic for a couple of days,” he says.
“Why? Is something wrong besides a broken arm?”
“I can’t tell you that. Privacy laws.”
I press my forehead against the cold steel bars in frustration. “Can you have her dictate a note to me? Or could I visit her? At least let me send down some of her things. Her special toothpaste and her rosary—”
“Sure, I’ll give ’em to her.”
Hastily, I gather up Janny’s favorite items and stuff them into her quilted bag, which she can identify by touch without any trouble. I reach for the romance novel, then realize nobody there will read it to her. The thought makes me feel a little desolate, and not only for Janny’s sake. It’s truly lonesome without her here. For eight years she has been beside me, and her absence calls to mind the sick feeling from my first long months of incarceration, when they kept me in administrative and then medical segregation because of my pregnancy. Without someone whose needs I can focus on, in the vacuum of human interaction, all I can think about is how terrible it is to be lonely.
Late in the evening they dim the lights. I sigh and put away my dancing socks, smoothing down the edges of moleskin that are peeling from the knit fabric. Before I crawl into bed, I pour the water from the Gatorade bottle into the sink above my toilet and peel the saturated wood pulp from the pencils. With all of the graphite safely stowed—we probably won’t have another contraband check for a while, and the grab was arbitrary in the first place—I say my last prayer of the day and pull the blanket up almost to my eyes.
I can’t stop thinking about him.
For years I forced myself not to think. When all arousing thoughts are terrible, forbidden for their awfulness or else for the yearning they bring, it’s better to make the mind a sheet of white paper, an empty screen, and the act of releasing tension as perfunctory any other bodily function. If the guards catch you, it’s thirty days in solitary. Be careful.
But to remember Ricky is to remember all things about Ricky. The dogbeat kid behind the register at the Circle K, the young man clowning on the beach, the impish boy with one of my kittens in his arms, the bare-skinned lover and, yes, the raging, dirty wanted man with nothing left to lose. Clear as any other memory is the sight of him pacing the kitchen with the phone pressed to his ear, his damp floppy bangs grasped in his hand, grit caught in the sweat that shone on his arms. The weight of his body amplified itself in his heavy footsteps, and his voice was a hoarse and ragged edge of what it had once been. I’ll talk to Clinton Brand, he half-shouted, over and over. You want to talk to me, send him in. Send him right here. Clinton Brand.
I scroll back. Picture the one before. The second-to-last Ricky.
Sometimes, when he had worked the graveyard shift at the Circle K, I would come to the house after work and find him fast asleep on his mattress on the floor. I’d slip beneath the covers and find him already nude, because he had known I was coming. After hours asleep, the space under the covers was as heated as an animal’s den. I would run my hands all over his buttery skin, drinking in the scent of him: warm and alive and male, a body that my own body wanted to pull close, hold tightly. Not cologne or shampoo or soap—I loved the smell that ran beneath all those things. The one that completed a circuit in my brain, made a tingle of electricity dance down my spine.
Soon enough he would awaken and turn to me. Unbutton my blouse, run a warm, clay-roughened hand down my belly. Roll onto his back and relax into my touch along the sparse hair of his chest and simple flat plane of his stomach, and then the part of him I’d first feared, then loved. When I wrapped my hand around him he purred deep in his throat like one of our cats.
It’s what I miss hopelessly. How perfect the fit of his body into mine. The way he moved as we both grappled for what was just out of reach, his arousal built to feed and vanquish mine, and mine his. We could make each other desperate for what we alone had created, and then destroy it together.
There is no substitute, not inside nor outside these walls, for a lover who wants you.
I roll onto my stomach and keep it as quiet as I can.
* * *
In the morning the regular wakeup call sounds, and we all rise and head back to work. I return to the drawing of Guernica with intense focus, and Shirley even bestows a compliment for the speed and quality of my work. The hours seem to vanish behind me, and before I know it I’m back in the yard, squinting in the sunlight for the first time in days.
I walk the edge of the fence, clicking my tongue, looking for Clementine. The other inmates, gang members sitting at the picnic tables, watch me the way patrons of a café watch a homeless person mumbling down the sidewalk. The other inmates here have never been fond of my indifference to making friends. Even on the outside it was always difficult for me, and in here it’s all the more perilous. People snitch about petty violations, they get transferred to other prisons, they get released. An alliance that was very valuable can become a liability if the other person is unceremoniously taken away. There’s a rule that we can’t receive mail or visits from anyone who was released in the past year, so friendships, even the most carefully cultivated ones, die. But it’s just as well. If I were spontaneously pardoned for my crimes, I’d walk away from all this and never look back. Except for Janny, whom I would never abandon, I wouldn’t maintain my loyalty to friends on the inside or cling to my identity as a former inmate. I’d shed it like a dirty snakeskin and try never to think of it again.
Clementine is nowhere to be found. Dejected, I walk back to the other side of the yard, then pace back and forth near the C.O.s for a while to work the days of laziness out of my muscles. It’s a very hot day, and I suppose the cat must have been smart enough to find shelter. Sweat trickles down my temples and catches in the wispy bits of my hair flying out from my ponytail.
Several days’ worth of mail awaits me when I return to my cell. There is a letter from Emory Pugh, my copy of the Magnificat and a package. I set the other items aside and pull apart the cardboard tabs with the excitement of a child on Christmas morning. I can’t remember the last time I got a package, and this one bears Annemarie’s name in the upper left corner. Inside, a folded note sticks up alongside a pink notepad printed with cupcakes, a set of drawing pencils, a jar of coffee and a little bag of cat treats. There is also a bar of German chocolate and a postcard of a beach scene. With shaking hands I unfold the note, and read.
Hello,
It was lovely to see you the other day. I found out I can send a package but the rules are just—wow. No stickers, no stamps, books have to come straight from the vendor, etc. I hope this stuff gets through. You might not like chocolate or coffee, but personally I can’t imagine being stuck anywhere without them. I sent the beach postcard because you said you hadn’t seen the beach in a long time. A postcard is kind of a lame substitute, but it beats that mural on the visiting room wall, at any rate. Hope to have a chance to visit again soon.
Fondly,
Annemarie
I unpack each of the items and line them up on my little desk. She remembered everything I told her. About Clementine and my drawing and how I love the sea. It’s the sort of package I would have put together for my own mother, had my mother lived a terrible life.
The pink notepad has a message scribbled on the back. I bring it toward my face and look above my glasses to read it. This is one of the items I designed. Couldn’t send stickers or a poster, but wanted to show you. -A. Rounded little cupcakes dance along the border, festooned with sprinkles in between. It’s hard to tell how much creativity she was allowed in the design, but her handwriting is angular and stylized, consistent among the letters as if it’s a font she’s created. Her father’s was like that, too— not the same in its lines and loops, but holding a similar confident swagger, as if he knew it was beautiful and that it reflected on him. I wondered if she already knew Ricky had been an artist, and if it made her all the more suspicious that she was his.
But I have an answer for that. Maybe, if I phrase what I say just right, she will come to the conclusion on her own and not need for me to lie at all. If we’re both lucky she will hear what she hopes to hear, because I am certain she hopes not to hear Ricky’s name. I saw it in the wince in her expression when she first asked me. And I don’t want to see it again.