“That’s nice of you. We’re not planning to wait too long after the wedding to start working on kids, so I really appreciate your help with that.” She fidgets uneasily with the corners of her photographs. “If you want to give me my father’s family’s information, I can save you the trouble of tracking down that part.”
I hesitate. “I’m not sure I have it.”
“Do you know where he is?”
I answer that question honestly. “No.”
She nods. I know what’s coming next. His name, tell me his name, my father’s name. I feel my body stiffen in anticipation of it. This is the question for which I still have not yet worked out an answer. The only thing certain about my response is that I will not tell her the truth.
But instead she says, “They have Scrabble here.”
I blink once. “What?”
“Scrabble. Are you any good at Scrabble?” She gestures to the space behind me, and when I pivot my head to look, I see a stack of board games piled up on a shelf below the copies of the Bible and Koran. “I’m pretty bad, but it beats playing checkers.”
My reply is very serious. “I, too, hate checkers.”
“Well then, let’s play.” She slides out from the side of the bench and retrieves the Scrabble box. “There are worse ways to spend an afternoon.”
And she’s right, there are. I lose badly, but I don’t care. At the end of the hour, when the officer comes to collect me, Annemarie looks disappointed, and she puts her arms around my shoulders in a light, tentative hug. And I feel a little more of myself tear away with that, because it was so easy once I no longer loved anyone on the outside, and now I do.
Back in my cell, after Janny has been taken away for a medical appointment, I lie on my bed with my hands behind my head and daydream about how Annemarie’s childhood with me would have been different from hers with the Leskas. I would have put her in piano lessons, but probably not on the softball team she said she loved. She told me she grew up with a dog but not with cats because her father was allergic, and that made me feel sad. Ricky had loved our cats, especially Brundibar and Mischa, the gentle siblings he brought home from a box outside the grocery store. One of my calmest and most potent memories of him is the way, on stormy days, he sat on a battered easy chair on the back porch with his feet up on the overturned milk crates, watching the rain fall as he stroked our scaredy-cat Brundibar, who always curled up on his lap. Annemarie would have seen that, too, if things had gone differently. It would be one of her earliest memories.
But that would never have been, I think. There would be no Annemarie if things had gone differently.
I would have raised her Catholic, that much is sure. The parents who adopted her are Lutheran. With me there would have been a long christening gown, a First Holy Communion, a picture of the Blessed Virgin watching over her as she slept. I would have been like my own mother in that way, and Ricky would have tolerated it. Up until the end he kept his grudging, born-and-bred tolerance for the Catholic Church, probably just for my sake, but I always feared pushing him over the line into the hostile heresy I suspected he would readily embrace. Had I been completely honest with him about my encounters with the church, he would have lost his patience with it much sooner—but he also never would have put that gun in my hands at the rectory that night.
I picture Father George’s face, the way his small eyes narrowed when I pushed up my mask, the way he scowled as if I were a familiar troublemaker. As if, once he recognized me, these circumstances fit fine with his impression of who I was. On his knees he was shorter than me, and that had made me feel all the more that this could not be borne.
I shove the image from my mind and cover my eyes with both of my arms, breathing out a slow, heavy sigh. In the hallway there’s a familiar shuffling, and then the bars clang open. “Clara!” comes Janny’s voice. “You here, right? Hey, they say my blood sugar was real good today. I say, ‘Clara don’t let me eat the brown sugar no more. I tell her to put it on my canteen, she ignore me and say, ‘Oh, yeah, I did it.’” She laughs and feels around on my bed until she finds my calf, then pats it. “You awake? Let’s read the new book, okay? We got confession in an hour. Gotta read the sexy stuff real fast.”
“I think I need some sleep right now.”
“Okay. I wake you up for confession, then.”
“Just let me sleep.”
I roll over and pull my pillow over my head, blocking out the light, the sound of Janny’s voice, everything. Everything except the noise in my mind, and I know I must square my shoulders to bear that, because I don’t know why I ever thought I deserved peace.
For hours I lie still in bed, but not for a moment do I sleep. Around two o’clock in the morning I climb down silently from my bunk, being very cautious not to wake Janny, from whose bed rises the sound of wheezy, rhythmic breathing. It’s the song I sleep to every night. I take the shoebox from my shelf and go to sit by the bars, where the corridor’s security light is brightest. Inside are twelve cassette tapes, their clear plastic cases scratched and scraped. I run my fingers down the stack and slide out the one without a liner. I threw the liner away decades ago, leaving the tape loose in its case.
KIRA, reads the label in bold sharp pen. At one point there were two stars on either side of the name, but I pulled off the sticker from both edges, giving up when scraping its center began to damage my fingernails. I take my radio down from the desk and click the tape into its ancient cassette player, turning the volume down to its absolute lowest. Too much clicking will catch the attention of the guards, so I fast-forward most of the way through without checking my place, then hit Play in time to catch the fading strains of Bob Marley’s Three Little Birds. At the very end I hold the machine close to my ear, and there it is, that distant, two-word utterance. “Goddamn it.”
I hit Rewind. Listen again. Goddamn it. Goddamn it.
The technology is a scourge and a miracle.
At one point I had half a dozen tapes with Ricky’s voice on them—his long, wandering introductions to songs he thought I should appreciate. All of those I threw away without an iota of regret. I kept this tape, I told myself, for the music. The ten songs, painstakingly curated, which I love independent of the fact that it was a gift for that final Valentine’s Day. Here he is, speaking from beyond, but only to utter a curse.
You talk to her, I want to order him. Apologize. Claim her. Tell me what to say to her. I can’t do this on my own. I can’t even defend myself, let alone you.
This is the truth. Annemarie will only be the daughter of two murderers if I say the words that will make that so. On the records of the state, and in the knowledge of the public, her father is a nameless, faceless man who could be anyone. In all the life that stretches out in front of me, I will never be able to give her anything more meaningful than that name. And once I say the true one, I can never take it back.
I rub my fingers against my temples. It’s an agonizing question, and its answer, no matter what I choose, must be bolstered with true details that won’t undermine her chance at a healthy baby. The name I give her must be credible. Virtually untraceable. One onto which I can tack the authentic family medical history without raising suspicion. But I can’t think of any man I have known who would match that profile.
Tell me a name, Ricky, I think. Help me figure out your fall guy.
And then, miraculously, I do.