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.