Chapter Eight

In the chow hall there’s a flurry of excitement. All day I’ve been hearing the distant audio from other inmates’ televisions. News reports that Penelope Robbins is being transferred here to await trial. Normally inmates don’t arrive at the prison until after their convictions, but in some cases, where there is exceptional notoriety—mine, for example—a county jail is deemed not secure or safe enough for the inmate. The reports don’t offer many details, but I suppose the daughter of a Congressman is a target at any facility. I wonder if I’ll catch a glimpse of her here.

There’s a festival air to the chow hall, a buzzing of anticipation at the arrival of this celebrity. Earlier, as I tried to read my way through a slow Friday afternoon and distract myself from worrying about Janny, I kept hearing my name in a tinny echo every few minutes. The newscasters were listing the famous inmates of the El Centro facility—the six merry murderesses, so to speak. Most of the others are in Administrative Segregation and I never see them. The majority of murderers are not as well-behaved as I am.

Today I sit alone. No one has returned to tell me how Janny is doing or where she is—privacy rules, I’m sure they’d tell me, but I think they like to control information simply for its own sake, too. During the workday I was desperate enough to quiz one of my coworkers, a woman I’ve seen getting special-diet meals in the chow hall, with questions about her symptoms. Now I feel reasonably sure Janny’s outburst was a blood sugar crisis, but still my heart is sick with worries about her—and Annemarie, as well.

I listen to the conversations around me, force myself to eat my hamburger, line up for roll call. Once we’re all back in our cells the mail delivery comes around. There’s a card from a church group that sends uplifting messages to women in prison, and I wonder how the woman who drew my name felt about her luck. There’s also an envelope with Karen Shepard’s return address in the corner. She corresponds with me from a P.O. box, which is amusing in its way. It’s not as though I’ll ever get out and track her down. Perhaps she’s worried that I could send people after her, arrange some kind of a hit or confrontation from prison. She’s a writer, so I suppose she has a good imagination.

The note from Karen is a short, rectangular slip of paper clipped to a larger photocopy. I unfold it and begin to read.

Dear Ms. Mattingly,

I hope this letter finds you well. Thank you for your recent correspondence. I am enclosing a photocopy I think might be of interest to you. In my research, sifting through many old documents in the Rowan file, I came across this letter that is dated the day of Ricky Rowan’s death. The documentation indicates it accompanied his suicide note, but it’s not clear whether it was ever released. I am aware from previous cases I have researched that private letters are usually held for the addressee, and that if that individual can’t be located, the letters are simply overlooked. This makes me curious whether that was the case with this letter, since it is only through your comments and my recent study of the court transcripts that it is clear to me who Kira is. By the time Ricky died, the relevant people may not have been cognizant of that. In any event, it is enclosed. I look forward to our ongoing communications.

All best,

Karen Shepard

{CC: photocopy from Rowan file}

Kira,

“Fight them, fight them. Call the animals.”

(Ah, hell there’s no point is there.)

BAM. Here it is. November 16, 1982—that was the day I was dying to see the Columbia land at the end of its space mission. You packed up a picnic and we drove all the way down, five and a half hours. They chased us away from the perimeter of the air force base—remember? We had to park in the desert. The sun was setting, streaks of blue and shadow, and we ate peanut butter sandwiches sitting on the hood of my car. You wrapped that Indian blanket around your shoulders when it got cold. And then we saw the fighter jet come in real fast like a wasp, then the shuttle behind it—silhouettes, both of them—dark and beautiful in the yellow sunset sky. Ominous and fragile at the same time, zipping by, speeding. Spectacular. I had to do a little dance there for it—imagine a little Bob Marley, steel drummin’, feel-good music. You laughed at me, but I didn’t care then and I don’t care now. I forgive you, I forgive you. I never blamed you in the first place. Is there enough time in a life to say that as much as you really need to? Om mani padme hum, I forgive you, I forgive you.

Funny thing—I always thought life was for the living, but now all I can do is hope there’s an afterplane, a parallel to this one where the souls go, and no God. I want to say, Kira, Kira, I’ll always be with you, but what living person can say that? “I’ll always be an angel watching over you.” Folly, I say! That’s the quandary, is that if there’s judgment then you know where I’ll be, and if there’s no judgment then I rot like the meat I am. The one sure thing now is, if life is for the living, I’m tapping out. I waste the air, turn food into shit, and even the trees can’t benefit from my CO2 output because there isn’t one motherloving tree in a hundred miles of here. It’s a zombie life and I’m going to stake it.

One last thing:

I love you, now and yesterday and tomorrow, beyond whatever’s next and deep down into the crazy time-physics we can’t even conceive now. Into the four-dimensional geometry of whatever’s there, where it’s a shape filled up with my love for you. And I know “I forgive you” isn’t the true mantra, but “forgive me, forgive me, forgive me.” Please forgive me, Kira. Forgive me for all the wrong I did you. Let me be a sky burial so the wind blowing over my bones can be like a prayer flag carrying that request to the terrible gods, so if there is a good place beyond all of this, I’ll have paid your passage with the only things I had left to give.

All of my love,

JEN

My legs won’t hold me. I grip the side of the bunk for balance as I let myself drop onto the bottom mattress. My body is shivering from head to toe. The mere sight of his handwriting—the neat slice of his black pen, trailing down on the long letters in the gentle curve of swords— both stuns me and pulls me in. And his words, they flood into my mind and find nowhere to go.

I am glad I didn’t realize he felt this way. I couldn’t have survived it, long ago, knowing that he did.

Tear it up, I think. Throw it out. Flush it. It’s all long gone.

But I can’t. I don’t have the heart. I want to be able to read his words again, over and over—his love and regret, the things that made him human and worth my heart. It shouldn’t matter one bit anymore, but instead it means everything.

* * *

Dear Ms. Shepard,

Thank you so very much for the letter from Ricky. I have tried to write you several replies and I can’t properly put together the words to express my gratitude. It truly means the world to me. I must say, your letter arrived at a delicate time. I have been struggling with an emotional situation involving a family member, and my cellmate is in poor health, which has left me burdened with an unusual amount of psychic distress. While Ricky Rowan may be the last person I should want to comfort me, his words are strangely welcome at the present moment.

In thanks for what you have shared with me, I feel moved to offer you a part of the story I haven’t previously spoken of to anyone. Please bear with me, as this is difficult to explain, but hopefully it will shed light on some of the more puzzling aspects of the chain of events, particularly my own crime. I realize your book is about Ricky, but perhaps this will help you understand the big picture.

Garrison Brand, my stepfather, was a good man. He suffers from Alzheimer’s disease now and lives in a senior home, yet even after all these years he remains in my daily prayers. He married my mother in 1972, when I was eleven years old, and I believe she was very fortunate to find such a partner in life. He was a loving man and a thoughtful one, a good provider and one who, until the very end, honored his vow to be true to her in sickness and in health. I called him Pop. It was a compromise between calling him by his first name, which we all felt was disrespectful, and calling him Dad, which I felt was disloyal to my late father. But despite the friendly nickname he and I were never very close, probably because he and my mother married at the time I was becoming a young woman. That must be an intimidating thing for any stepfather. Girls of that age are best known for their volatility and drama, and while I was a well-behaved child, I wasn’t immune to either of those things.

Pop brought with him his son, Clinton, from his first marriage to a woman who was unfit to take custody of him for reasons that were never really shared with me. The family had moved to town about four years earlier, and the parents were divorced about a year after that. Mrs. Garrison was said to have “run off,” whatever that means. We knew them from our church. Clinton was fifteen at the time of the remarriage, and my impression of him was that he was bossy and blunt in his criticisms. At the time I assumed he was angry about his mother, because he was, in the language of the era, a male chauvinist pig. He was openly critical of my mother for not changing her surname to Brand. She kept my father’s name because she didn’t want me to feel isolated as the only Mattingly in the family. Clinton had a habit of ordering me around, especially when my mother and Pop were out of the house. He’d announce that I needed to make him a sandwich or tell me to go mow the lawn, which was his responsibility, and he would yell at me in a very hostile way if I was slow to obey. My mother wasn’t a yeller, so this behavior rattled me, but I assumed it was just the way of teenage boys. It didn’t help that Clinton and I looked physically similar—blond hair, slender builds, etc—so many people assumed we were true siblings and often referred to him as my brother, which elevated my perception of his authority.

A couple of years passed, and it was the spring of Clinton’s senior year of high school. He earned an acceptance to his first-choice university on the East Coast. Life with him around wasn’t terrible. Except for occasional things like the incident with the kittens, he was nothing more than a bossy and obnoxious stepbrother most of the time. But I was looking forward to a more relaxed household with him away at college. Clinton played lacrosse for his high school team, and our house was often filled with noisy players and some of Clinton’s many female hangers-on, because he was a blond, blue-eyed California boy and the target of much romantic intrigue. When his friends filled the house I spent most of my time shut away in my room reading and drawing, which, little did I know, would prove to be good preparation for my adult life.

One evening my mother and Pop were out at the church—they were on the committee that prepared the fellowship hall for the repasts after funerals—and I was reading on the sun porch while Clinton watched television. I heard him call my name, so I set down my book and went in. He looked at me from where he was lying on the sofa and said, “Go to your room and go to bed.” I asked him why, and he told me just to do it, which was typical of him. But it was around eight in the evening, so it wasn’t a ridiculous thing to demand on a school night. I went ahead and obeyed him, dressing in my nightgown and taking a book to bed with me.

It was only minutes after I had turned out my light when I heard my room door creak open. I pretended to be asleep, but I could hear his footsteps coming closer. At first I thought he was going to confront me about reading in bed, but that wasn’t his purpose at all. He sat on the side of my bed, and I probably don’t need to describe to you what came next. I kept my eyes shut tight and continued to act as if I were asleep, and he stopped just short of actual intercourse. The experience absolutely gutted me. I had my back to him so I didn’t even understand what he was doing—it was simply a humiliating thing for which I had no words.

For the next several months he continued that pattern—coming in whenever he had the chance and using me as a sort of lifeless masturbatory aid—and I didn’t say a word about it to a single soul. I had been warned about adults who try to “touch” children and that if this happened I must report it, but what Clinton did was not anything I could have described aloud. He was neither tentative nor gentle. When he came in, it felt as though I excused myself from my body and went somewhere else for a while. It was as if I knew a secret about what was happening to Clara, but that was somehow a step removed from such a thing happening to me. It was a necessary distinction to make. My mother had told me many times after she remarried that one of the worst aspects of my father’s death had been that I was being denied the experience of growing up in a real family. To upset and disappoint my mother was unthinkable, so I had to find a way to make this not exist. And I knew Clinton would be going away to school in a few months, and it would all be over.

Then a crisis occurred. Clinton’s grades had dropped too much, and his East Coast school rescinded his acceptance. That meant he had to go to the local community college in the fall, and he would continue living at home. I thought very hard about what to do, and I worked out that I would ask my mother for a lock for my bedroom door because Clinton’s dog, a Golden Retriever, had learned to nudge my door open with her nose and it made me feel anxious while I was getting dressed. I was thirteen years old, and this seemed like a credible enough excuse at the time, although looking back, if I had ever used it I’m sure my mother would have immediately grown suspicious and everything would have blown up right then.

But before I worked up the nerve to ask, there was another evening alone in the house with Clinton and again he ordered me to go to bed. This time, though, when he climbed into my bed, I elbowed him away, hard. He snapped at me, and with a level of courage I didn’t know I had, I turned around— for the first time admitting I wasn’t sleeping through all of this—and told him to get out and leave me alone.

I should never have done that. It made him angry, and he shoved down my arms and rolled onto me, planting his forearm across my neck. He already had his pants down, and although I was struggling against him, I couldn’t scream. Eventually I stopped struggling, because I was beginning to black out due to lack of oxygen. Clinton started telling me I was a good girl, a good girl, as he completed the rape. It was a terrible, burning pain, and I was certain that he was tearing me apart, but by the next morning—regrettably, perhaps—there was no physical sign of what had occurred. He was always careful to ejaculate outside my body, and on later occasions usually came prepared with condoms. I wish I could see this as a mercy, that I was fortunate not to have become pregnant. But later, when he grew more worried that I would report him, he sometimes warned me that if I tried to accuse him there was no evidence to prove it. And I believed him.

After that first incident I grew afraid to ask my mother for a lock on my door, because what had happened was so horrible that I was frightened of saying anything that might raise her suspicions. She was very protective of me, and I knew she would be devastated that, in this most egregious way, she had failed. I was also very concerned that she would think less of me if she knew I was no longer a virgin, because she was religious and it was something she had discussed with me many times in the few years prior. I rationalized that it couldn’t be undone, and so all I could do was try to contain the damage by not making it my mother’s calamity, as well.

Since I could no longer pretend to be asleep, and Clinton was now escalating his behavior with me, I tried out a different technique. When I was very young I used to love a television program called My Living Doll, about a man who is given custody of a female android, named Rhoda, originally designed for the Air Force. She is utterly naive to human society, and must be taught how to display normal emotions. When Clinton came in I took to imagining I was a Rhoda-like machine, able to endure this because I was unaware that it was wrong, feeling empty of any emotion about it. Usually I would pretend that I had been shut off entirely, but when he forced me to do specific things—grabbing me by the back of my head, for example—I imagined that this was a mode, or a function I was performing, the way a washing machine can be switched to rinse or spin.

However, as the abuse went on, I began for the first time to confess it to my priest. I didn’t merely confess to “sexual immorality” or “sins against the Sixth Commandment”—I was quite specific about what Clinton was doing, and I used his name. I was actively hoping Father George would intervene. In school they had taught us that nothing could break the Seal of Confession, even if a person confessed to a terrible crime, but I still thought what I told him would have an effect. Clinton still went to church with us, but not to confession, so obviously the priest would have to start denying him the Eucharist, which would have certainly gotten my mother and Garrison’s attention. Or perhaps Father George would go to Garrison and say, “You need to talk to your son,” without breaking my confidence. But each week he assigned me three Our Fathers in penance and forgave my sins, and that was the beginning and end of it. Clinton continued to take Communion, and my mother and Garrison remained oblivious.

In the fall Clinton started college, and a sort of ebb and flow began with this whole situation. He would stop it sometimes for months, just long enough to make me believe he had outgrown it, and then start up again. I grew taller and stronger, but also more resigned, and—this is difficult to express in a way that makes sense to an outsider—it became a kind of normal. A human being is designed to get used to nearly anything. One afternoon, as I tried to lie very still and pretend I was shut off and that my body had no inhabitant, I felt strangely lightheaded and then, all at once, I was fully inside my body; it was as though a front door had blown open in a raging blizzard and the tempest rushed in, impossible to ignore or constrain. I cried out, and Clinton knew what that meant. I remember the look in Clinton’s eyes afterward, like a man who has just beaten the house at blackjack. I was a Catholic school girl, extremely sheltered from the worldly influences of society; I knew absolutely nothing about female sexual response, and I didn’t understand what had happened or where it had come from. I only knew that it was the profoundest shame of all, to have felt so good from something so filthy. From that point forward, though it went unspoken, he and I both knew I would never expose him for what he had done. No matter how I hated it and always would, I believed it was damning evidence against me that, every now and then, my nervous system would crash like a malfunctioning computer and produce a response that most people seek on purpose.

The final time Clinton approached me he was already dating Susie, the woman he would soon marry. I was seventeen and headed to college myself soon. He had left me alone for a couple of months, although by now I was wiser than to think that meant it was over. A year before, I had installed a hook and eye on my bedroom door, and I kept closer track of my mother’s church schedule. That had slowed him down a bit. But he had taken it as a challenge, and so his assaults were less frequent yet much bolder and more aggressive when they occurred. Risks he never would have considered before were now fair game, and he was rough and punitive when he managed to pin me down. After so many years of my listless cooperation, he now felt I had become difficult about something that was his right.

And so that last afternoon, when I heard him coming down the stairs while I was doing laundry, I thought about the fact that the house was empty, and I felt afraid. In the basement window my mother kept all sorts of pretty glass bottles she had collected from flea markets and vacations to Mexico. I grabbed a green ginger ale bottle in my right hand while shifting the laundry to the dryer with my left. When Clinton touched my hip I spun around and hit him on the side of the head with the bottle, which broke on impact and cut a deep gash across his scalp. He had to call an ambulance and tell them it had happened while he was working on his car, while I swept up the glass and rearranged the bottles in the window to hide the empty spot. But he never touched me again. And the most pathetic part was I was more concerned about Susie at that point than about myself. Susie was a nice girl, and I didn’t want any part in Clinton being sleazy to her.

My celibate life began that day, and continued until a few months after I started dating Ricky almost five years later. Once I began seeing him I was surprised to discover I wanted to be close to him, and I was intrigued rather than panicked by the idea that he wanted me. I didn’t want my experiences with him to be tainted by Clinton’s abuse, and I was afraid he would think I was dirty and undesirable, so for a while I said nothing to him about that. But a secret that dark is impossible to hide. If you have never tried to nurture a normal adult relationship when you only associate sexual pleasure with violence followed by sickening guilt, you’ll have to take my word for it that it’s not easy. Yet Ricky was patient and understanding. He grasped that it would take work to reshuffle my associations and avoid my panic triggers. He always kept things bright and playful, and he was very loving.

One evening—Ricky was still living at his parents’ house then— we had a particularly nice time together and made plans to get together again the following day. Clinton came over with Susie and their son to visit with our parents, and when Ricky pressed the doorbell and Clinton answered it, Ricky attacked him. Later Ricky explained it to me this way: “I had this one fantasy about killing your stepbrother, and another one about what you and I were doing last night. I was expecting you to answer the door, and when he showed up instead, I switched fantasies. It was like a reflex.”

Needless to say, Clinton insisted our parents not call the police about that incident. I think it was clear to him then that Ricky knew what he had done, and bringing the police into it was certainly the last thing Clinton wanted.

So perhaps it will make more sense now why Clinton was so eager to speak out against Ricky at the trial, and so quick to voice his suspicions that Ricky was capable of sexual violence. It’s my observation that a habitual liar is always the first to suspect others of dishonesty, and the public champions of morality often prove to be those with the dirtiest secrets. I’m sure that in Clinton’s defense of me, however, he believed he was settling a debt in a way that must have soothed his conscience. Clinton is a delusional individual, and one of my many regrets is that he managed to get rid of me so easily.

Thank you again, ever so much, for the letters from Ricky, and I hope to be in touch with you again soon.

Yours truthfully,

Clara Mattingly

* * *

Through the reinforced window alongside the breakfast line I can see a flutter of activity over at the Intake door—lots of police cars, two dark extended vans, several cars from the Department of Corrections. Farther away there are news trucks, their twisted antennae and satellite dishes reaching up like beanstalks. I rest my hand on the windowsill and watch through the crosshatched wire, and am rewarded with a glimpse of a small figure in an orange jumpsuit and black bulletproof vest, her wrists shackled behind her back, being whisked through the double doors. Penelope Robbins has arrived. The Sacred Heart alumna is about to get her delousing and body cavity search, and I’ll bet she isn’t going to like it.

As breakfast ends I hear my name called down to the visiting room again, and I’m deeply pleased. It hasn’t been very long since Annemarie’s last visit, and she hadn’t even sent a letter to tell me she was coming. Without Janny I have felt especially lonely, and the company is most welcome. Today there are many people milling around the room, and they’ve opened up the patio in spite of the blazing heat outdoors. I look around, but I don’t see her. As the officer unshackles me I scan the room, feeling a frown line form between my eyebrows, but still, she isn’t here. And then, just as I’m standing there like a lonely child on the playground, a man rises from the bench along the wall and comes toward me.

He isn’t anyone I know—that much I can tell. He’s in his late forties, fifty perhaps, with soft eyes but a tight jaw that suggests he’s endured things. His silver hair is shaggy and layered, but thinned to a widow’s peak at the top, and he has the deep tan of a man who has spent a lifetime under the sun. As he approaches me I look him up and down—in his jeans and a button-down shirt that look like a carpenter’s best outfit—but I can’t make any connection. I wonder if he has me confused with someone else.

“Clara,” he says.

I stare back, but I just don’t know him.

His mouth pulls tight. “You’re still angry, aren’t you,” he says, and he nods in a resigned way. The glance he casts on me is chagrined, and all of a sudden, all at once—at the sight of his clear green eyes, up close—I throw my arms around his neck and press my body along the length of his, holding to him as if he can save me from the edge of a bridge. It’s Forrest. It’s Forrest Hayes, and I’m sobbing, and an officer is pulling me off of him, forcing me toward a seat.

“No more of that,” the officer commands, “or I terminate this visit. You got it?”

I nod and cry. I sit. This is the man who testified against me, the one who lied and snitched to save himself, and I know every bit of that, but I still can’t control the rush of strange, spontaneous fondness—of love—I feel at his presence. I press the front of my uniform blouse to my eyes to absorb the tears and try to get my breathing back to a more even pace. He sits down cautiously across from me.

“Sorry for upsetting you,” he says. “Or...whatever that is.”

I can’t even speak. I only nod again.

“I thought you were still mad at me,” he muses. Oh, I am, I think. I can’t meet his eyes, and so I watch his hands as they fumble for a casual posture, one flat but fidgety on the table, the other rubbing the side of his thumb beneath his mouth. He wears no wedding ring.

“So how’s it going?” he asks, and I finally lock eyes with him. He holds the gaze for a moment, then looks down uncomfortably. The degree to which he has aged is absolutely bewildering. The headful of gray hair, the tiredness around his eyes. He was a bone-skinny young man in a jean jacket covered in heavy metal band patches, a sharp-jawed kid with a rock-and-roll mullet. I can still see that kid in him now if I peer hard, but it’s a pure creative exercise. He did seven months in the county jail, that’s all. He handed out equal portions of his sentence to all his friends. Shared with the whole class, like teachers always demand you do with candy.

“Listen, Clara,” he says. “I came a long, long way to see you. I live in Phoenix now, and I took the day off work because I can’t call you here and I hate writing. But I’ve got to tell you about this.”

I raise my eyebrows in reply. Wipe my cheek with the heel of my hand.

“A woman called me a few days ago. She says she’s your daughter. Says you know about her. And she thinks I’m her father.”

Now I blurt a breathless laugh. “What?”

“So you don’t know about her. I suspected she was a con artist.”

I shake my head. “No, I mean, I do. But I didn’t suggest to her that you’re her father. I didn’t even imply it. I told her—she asked if her father was still alive, and I told her no.”

“Well, she didn’t sound too convinced, but she said she was going with a process-of-elimination thing and wanted me to do a cheek swab. You know, a genetic test. Obviously I know I don’t have a child with you, but—” He shrugs. “I don’t one-hundred-percent know I don’t have a child that age with somebody else. I thought maybe she’s trying to get me to take one where I’m convinced it’s wrong, but it’s really for a case where, for all I know, she could be right.”

“No, no. It’s nothing like that.” I rub my forehead wearily and then look up at him. The room is too close, too filled with tightly-packed inmates and their overeager relatives. “Do you mind if we go outside?” I ask.

We walk out onto the patio, where the visitors are more spread out and there’s a slight breeze that gathers beneath the awning. Away from all the listening ears, it’s easier to talk. “I had a baby not long before the trial,” I explain. “She found me a few months ago. She wants to know who her father is, and I wouldn’t say.”

Forrest grins. He looks truly delighted by this, like a proud father himself. “It has to be Ricky.”

“Of course it’s Ricky, but I don’t want to tell her that. I told her it wasn’t him, and when she pressed me I implied—or I thought I implied—that it was Jeff Owen. I said her father was an artist, that I shouldn’t have been involved with him, and that he was part of the whole sordid story. I don’t know how she’d get you out of that.”

He shrugs. “It would fit me, if you’d been involved with me.”

“You weren’t an artist.”

“Yes, I was. I played guitar in a metal band. I don’t care what your opinion of heavy metal is—it still counts.”

I respond to that with a snicker. “Also, you’re still alive.”

“Maybe she thought you were trying to throw her off the trail. Or that you were confused and had heard a rumor of my untimely demise.”

I lean against the support pillar, my hands behind my back, and look out at the sky. “I don’t know, Forrest. She’s a good person and I’m very fond of her. I don’t want her to be tormented by the truth, but it sounds like she’s being tormented by the lies just as badly. I guess she’s not leaving me with much choice but to straighten her out.”

“Now, that is something,” Forrest marvels, and I break my focus on the horizon to look at him once again. He’s squinting into the sun. “A baby of yours and Ricky’s. I had no idea you were pregnant when all of that was going down.”

“I don’t think I was. I think it happened because I got stuck at the Cathouse and my pills were back at home. Stop taking the Pill all of a sudden and—” I snap my fingers. “It’s out of your system in three or four days, but sperm can live for seven.”

He ponders that. “You know what would be funny, is if you got pregnant that night when you two barricaded the bathroom at Champion’s and made everybody hold it while—”

“There’s not one damn funny thing about it,” I say dryly, and Forrest bursts into a string of apologetic giggles. “It’s tragic, Forrest. It’s awful.”

“It’s a wildflower after a forest fire,” he says. I say nothing in response. “Life sure loves to go on, no matter what you tell it to the contrary.”

Between us the conversation goes quiet. The chatter of the other inmates, friendly and muted, drifts from the picnic tables. When Forrest speaks up again he says, “Well, I guess I can just disregard that phone call, then. I’m sorry I helped put you in jail for longer, though. There, I said it.”

Indeed he has. My mother’s long training of me springs first to my mind—now, Clara, accept his apology—but, no. I can’t. “You didn’t just snitch,” I remind him. “You snitched and lied.”

His voice is infused with a note of offense. “I didn’t lie.”

“Yes, you did. You lied that you saw me shoot Mimi Choi. That’s impossible, because I didn’t do it.”

He looks weary, and his head drops back a bit. “Listen, once all the testimony was in and accounted for, it did put things in a different light. It all happened so fast, and—”

“It wasn’t just that. You lied about what my relationship with Ricky was like, and how much of the initiative I took that evening, and especially how close you were with all of us. We hardly knew you before that night.”

“That’s not true. I hung out with you guys all the time.”

“We hung out without you a lot more.”

He utters a sharp laugh. “Then I was guilty of believing you folks liked me more than you did. I didn’t lie, Clara. I called it the way I saw it, and when I heard the other testimony, it did make me wonder if I saw it right. Not a day went by for the next two decades that I didn’t call into question something about what I saw and what I said about it. But I didn’t set out to lie. They wanted me to talk, my lawyer told me I had to, and all I could do was describe the way it looked through my eyes. What would you have done in my shoes, huh? Wouldn’t you have told them what you thought was true, whether or not you stood to gain from it?”

I sigh through my nose and let my gaze wander back to the yard. The razor wire spirals across the top of the fence, gleaming silver beneath the hot sun.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” he asks, and there’s a tenderness to his voice that’s unexpected. We’ve been through a war together, he and I. On opposite sides, yes, but having seen the same carnage, dragged ourselves through the same trenches. In a lonely world that counts for something.

I think for a moment. “Sure,” I say. “Kiss me on the mouth.”

He laughs. He looks at me to see if I’m serious.

“I just want to remember what it feels like,” I explain. “It’s not really allowed, but if they ban you from visiting me again, so what. You weren’t coming back anyway.”

He squints out at the barren yard with a tense smile. “Gee, Ricky’s girlfriend,” he says in a voice that’s only half-joking. “I feel like I should definitely say no to that.”

“You owe me,” I tell him.

I glance around for officers, and so does he. He takes two steps closer and slips a hand into my hair, and he touches his mouth, half-open, to mine. Oh, yes, I remember this thrill—the warmth and unhindered desire of a man’s kiss, the plea it makes, the naked sensuality. His hand tightens on the back of my head; his kiss grows deeper, and the gentle brush of his tongue sends a shock down through my belly. A moment later an officer barks at us, and we separate at once.

“Don’t you dare start with that foolishness,” the corrections officer says. “Miss Mattingly. Don’t even try that.”

I turn to Forrest, who has moved a courteous distance away. He offers me a respectful nod. “Well, see ya. Good luck, Clara.”

“Thank you. Thanks for visiting.”

He’s gone, and I’m left feeling drained of my anger and a little dizzy from arousal. I’m exhausted, and it’s not just from the sun, or even the emotional rush of the morning. It’s the pure effort of feeling new things, day after day, without a break. It’s so easy to sustain oneself as a machine, but as a human it takes energy far beyond my reserves.

* * *

That night I find myself lying wide awake in bed, listening to the distant echoes of guards’ footsteps in the hallway and the clanking of chains, and I think about Forrest’s kiss. Even though it happened only hours ago, in my memory it is the much younger Forrest pulling me against him, bringing his mouth to mine. I think about the quick darting of his tongue before the guard separated us, and the thrill that zigzagged through me. It warms me more than I could ever have imagined to learn that youthful passion lives on, even in someone my very same age, who once was young with me. It’s still out there for the taking.

My thoughts wander to the first attempts Ricky and I made at that kind of love, long ago in the first months we were together. He had kissed me the first night, there on the boardwalk, and every day after—but kissing was easy. Clinton didn’t kiss, so it was the one realm free of trauma, and I was very glad for it. But the rest posed a challenge, and even after we had decided we would sleep together—it was a serious conversation, though not a decision he needed time to mull over—we made four earnest attempts before we found success. The first few times, cuddled up in the sweet privacy of his attic room at his parents’ house, he did everything he could. At the dentist’s office I always overheard the lunchtime talk of the other girls—their complaints and giggly personal stories of pushy, selfish men—and knew that, in this way, Ricky was a rare gem. Yet no matter how patient his hands, or how relaxed the mood he set, as soon as he lowered his weight onto me and began to press his body into mine—I panicked.

Then it was a rainy afternoon, and his parents were away for the whole weekend, and we were trying again. His bed was a twin pressed against the wall. On the opposite wall, the roof sloped to leave a low ceiling; in between, his two big bedroom windows looked out over his family’s wooded backyard. The lamp was off, but he had opened the shades to let in the late-afternoon light, and when he rose up on his knees to run his hands down my body the shifting clouds threw a palette of shadows across his chest, all different shades of gray. His hair had grown a bit too long and was falling into his eyes. He looked thoughtful. “You should get on top this time,” he said, and I laughed nervously. “I mean it,” he went on. “That way you can control everything. You won’t have to worry that I’ll force myself on you.”

“I know you wouldn’t,” I said, a reply so quick it almost overlapped his. “But I can’t do that. I don’t know what to do.”

“I’ll show you.” His hands were soft and so relaxing, their steady sweep and pressure lulling my mind into a trancelike state. He was so patient. I knew he was already sick and tired of having Clinton as the ghostly third party in his bed, and we had only barely begun to wrestle with that demon. For him to accommodate me I’d needed to give him an encyclopedic understanding of the abuse, and as humiliating as I found that, he was a tender custodian of my secrets. What he was suggesting now, at least, was something I had never done before. “I love it,” he said, for once conjuring his own past instead of mine. “I’d do it like that every time if I could.”

He nudged me over and lay on his back, then held my hips as I moved my legs astride his body. Very gradually, I lowered myself onto him. The way the rain struck the windows reminded me of the ballet studio when I was a girl, and the sound and sight of it calmed me. When he was fully inside me he closed his eyes and let out a slow sigh through his teeth; his hands, always gentle, swirled on my thighs. The bliss I saw in his face wasn’t scary or threatening; it was a beautiful sight, and he was a beautiful man. Now he is my lover, I thought, and Clinton is the past. I’ve moved on. Of course that was simplistic, and I knew it even at that moment, but the meaning rang true. Clinton’s stranglehold over me had at last been broken by this. He was no longer the only man who had claimed me; not the only man who would find pleasure in my body; he hadn’t savaged my mind, or my body, or my reputation so thoroughly that I would never recover. Ricky opened his eyes and met my gaze. “Don’t cry,” he said. “Does it hurt?”

I shook my head.

He laid his hands on my hips, began to rock me gently against him. “Let’s try to make it feel good. Go slow. Take your time.”

“Oh. I don’t need that. You can just—do what feels good for you.”

He grinned and shook his head. “It doesn’t work like that.”

That’s the way he always was. I am surprised to find the memories still so potent, so true, when more than twenty years have passed since I last dared to call them forth at all. It is such an aching pain to remember him that way and realize that even on that afternoon, his life was in its twilight, he was already an old man, only five years left and the days slipping away like playing cards falling from a deck. He would shoot a man, he would father a child, he would twist his linen into a noose on the hot water pipe and end it all by stepping off his desk. In all of it he would take me with him. I had known, for a certain truth, that our love story was the only one my meager life had been afforded. But as I drift off to sleep on the memory of Forrest’s hand against my cheek, I wonder. Over his bleached bones, over the resilient spiral of his DNA that I see in the eyes of our daughter, could a second life blow in?