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.”