I smooth the picture against my desk, trying to rub the folds from the page. The fact that I want this picture and will not toss it into the trash has the feeling of a small defeat. I picture his messy, blanket-strewn bed at his parents’ house, his face nuzzled into my neck, moving in the same insistent, friendly way of a young cat reminding you he’s ready for his dinner. Like that, where I sit back and say Oh, all right, all right, but not with resentment, only fondness.
Father Soriano’s forehead wrinkles as I step into the office we use as a confessional. “And here you are,” he says. “I’ve been concerned about you.”
“I have some things on my mind.”
“Well, this is the place to discuss them.”
I revert to the usual confessional patter, cross myself, list my sins. “I’ve committed acts of sexual impurity,” I tell him. “And perjury.”
This time he doesn’t ask me how many times I’ve gratified myself. “Perjury?” he asks.
“I lied under oath during my trial. Repeatedly.”
He leans back in his chair and runs a hand down his chin. “Ah, Clara,” he says. “I think that’s beyond my scope. You need to talk to your lawyer.”
“It wouldn’t do me any good. She already said it’s too late for a new trial. I just want to be absolved for it. It is a sin, after all.”
He regards me with a long, unblinking stare. His eyes look tired and uncertain. “Well, you’ve been taking the Eucharist all this time knowing you hadn’t confessed to this. So why did you recently decide it was an issue?”
“Because I did it for the right reason, and I was willing to accept the consequences. But the person I was protecting is gone, and now the decision I made affects somebody else, and so I realize my guilt matters.”
He’s still running his thumb beneath his chin. His manner is ponderous, and I feel the tension gathering as he considers whether to ask me the question he’s thinking. The one they’re all thinking, every confessor I’ve had for the past twenty-four years, the one I know they’re dying to ask and don’t dare.
At last he blurts it out. “Are you going to tell me it wasn’t you who shot that priest?”
Though I was braced for the question, I still feel my teeth clench. In a flash I picture that moment. My mask pushed up, rage blowing through me like a fire tearing up the walls to reach the roof, the bang, the blood. There is no satisfaction in the memory, only emptiness. “No. I shot him.”
He almost looks relieved. “Then what was your lie?”
“That there were no extenuating circumstances. That I was entirely to blame.”
“Well, who else do you feel was to blame?”
I lace my cold fingers together and fold them in my lap. “Clinton.”
Chapter Four
My crocheting is getting better. During the Sunday class I’ve been making a little brown coat for Clementine, which is a silly project because I’d certainly never try to put her in it. I’ve given it a rounded collar and a flounce around the hem. It’s very stylish for a prison cat, needful of a matching cap and perhaps a flower to pin at its collar.
“Can I feel it?” Janny asks when I describe it to her. She holds her hand out as if waiting for me to place it in her palm. At the moment I am combing her wet hair, which I have just helped her wash, starting with the tangles at the bottom.
“Not until it’s finished. We’re not allowed to bring yarn back to our cells, which is too bad. I was thinking I could make a crochet hook with a golf pencil, you know? If I soaked it in water and rubbed it against the edge of my desk for a while to form a crook.” I’ve made mechanical pencils with a similar method. They won’t let us have full-sized pencils, because they can be turned into shivs, so I’ve soaked the short golf pencils until they can be peeled apart and stripped of their lead. Then the lead can be coaxed out of a pencil otherwise left intact, and after the empty one has dried, the leads can be pushed through it just like a mechanical pencil. They’re very useful, perfect for sketching.
“What kind of bad stuff do they think you’re gonna do with yarn?”
“I don’t know. Hang yourself, I guess. Garrote someone.”
“Ga-what?”
“Come up behind them with a piece of yarn and strangle them.”
Her face lights up with understanding. “Oh. Yeah, I guess you could do that. But they let you bring the little coat back when it’s done? Couldn’t you just chew off the knot and untangle the yarn and then boom, kill somebody?”
“Nobody ever said the rules make sense.”
Janny chuckles. “You got that right, chica.”
That evening I lie on my bed in the dark of my cell, long after lights-out, and think about Annemarie’s visit. My wet hair is piled up above my head on the pillow, and I feel relaxed from the hot water and sense of cleanliness. I’m thinking about all the things I want to tell her about my childhood and my mother—all the really wonderful things we did during the in-between time when she had recovered from her grief over my father but hadn’t yet met my stepfather and remarried. I imagine telling her what I was like in high school, and hearing her exclaim that she was the same way, enjoyed the same things, suffered the same embarrassments. My mind has been slow to acknowledge it, but when I picture her face, I realize she looks like me. Around her jaw she is all Ricky, but the narrow line of her nose, the wide set of her eyes, and her coloring—that is all me.
I want to tell her about the night Ricky drove us out to the beach at Santa Cruz, when the warmth of the air made the vinyl upholstery of his bench seat stick to the backs of my legs, and I noticed that his wrist above the stick shift bore a heavy silver watch that showed the wrong time. He was left-handed, he explained—I felt bemused that I had never noticed—and he didn’t care about the time, he just liked the watch’s weight and design. At the beach we walked out past the boardwalk, past all the tourists, to where the air was quiet and the sand was damp from the outgoing tide. He rolled up his pants to just below his knees and showed me how well he could do cartwheels. He’d walk on his hands a bit, then tuck and roll when he began to lose his balance, to make it look deliberate. I was laughing, and the cold, wet sand squeezed up between my toes, and every time he turned upside down I looked at his stomach and his navel and the down of dark hair against them, which seemed to say, Don’t forget, under here, I’m a man. There wasn’t any thought of What will he become? There wasn’t even one of Where is this going? That evening it was only the two of us on the beach, clowning and playing, secretly eager to kiss, and a little hungry.
But I won’t tell her about that. I wish I could recreate these moments as tactile drawings, leaving his face a blank. I would include everything else—the watch, the rolled-up pants, the limber strength of his agile body—so she could run her hands across it and nod and say, Oh. But not the face, on which her fingers would recognize those sleepy eyes and twice-broken nose from so many photographs and cause her to say, Oh, no.