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.