I set the card on my desk and watch the rest of the words blur on the page. It’s all so neat and formal, so authoritative and assured. The Leskas’ daughter is getting married. She is joining the Dawsons, uniting these two families in a happy rite of passage. I can imagine the celebration, the clinking of glasses and claps on the back, the dance with her father.
It doesn’t say any of the other true things. That she was born a Rowan. For a few days, before they scrubbed my name from the paperwork, I suppose she was Baby Girl Mattingly. I picture the home of Ricky’s parents, with its full bookshelves and Oriental rug, the bottles of wine on the rack, the tinted daguerrotype of great-grandparents on the wall at the top of the stairs. A perfectly respectable middle-class home, the refuge of two hardworking people. We had all failed in such spectacular style, that their grandchild had been passed from one set of hands to another, finally entrusted to a family who could meet the minimum standards set by the state.
Annemarie Rowan, I try in my mind. But she never would have been that. By the time the egg that would become her emerged within my body, Ricky was already a doomed man. And I wouldn’t have named her Annemarie. I don’t know what I would have called her, though, because I never considered the question.
Saturday arrives, and by the time confession rolls around Penelope Robbins still hasn’t made her appearance. It’s just as well. Despite my voyeuristic curiosity about her crime, I’m not in any hurry to meet her. I step into Father Soriano’s office with a confident stride, sitting down in my usual chair and crossing my legs almost casually, as if in a moment someone will pour us coffee. We go through the normal call-and-response. He doesn’t bat an eye at my rather spectacular count of self-gratification episodes, nor at my confessions of vindictive thoughts and mild dishonesty. These sins are the buttered toast and orange juice of prison life, served up daily as part of the bland square meal of existence. We lie and we resent and we accept whatever small and furtive relief we can offer ourselves against the monolith of the state’s authority. I’m sure I bore him.
I don’t confess the kiss with Forrest. There’s no sin in an unmarried woman kissing an unmarried man. Every day I row back to that memory, drag my fingertips through the water where I left it, but every day it slips deeper and deeper beneath the surface. Soon its electric thrill will be gone, and I’ll probably feel disgusted with myself then.
“Is there anything else?” he asks.
“Well, yes.” I swing my foot in a slow circle as I consider how to phrase it. My white canvas sneaker, an off-brand version of the Keds I used to wear every summer, is a blindingly clean spot above the nicotine-yellow linoleum. “I’m beginning to hate prison.”
He offers an indulgent smile. “I’ve yet to meet an inmate who says she likes it.”
“I’d gotten to a point where I didn’t really mind anymore, though. Did you know they moved Janny out of my cell? Taking care of her was the one rewarding thing about being here, and it was very rewarding. It’s good to be needed. But now that’s gone.” I pause, let my gaze drift to the ceiling’s pocked acoustic tile. “And now that my daughter comes to visit, I find I can’t stand being in here. She’s getting married and I can’t go. It makes me very angry.”
He seems unsure of how to respond. Several priests ago I had confessed the sins that led to my pregnancy—it was very obvious by that point, and I cried, repented, was consoled and forgiven. But I haven’t mentioned it to any clergyperson since, because there has been no reason to. I’m sure the mention of my daughter catches him quite by surprise, but I don’t care. No doubt he’s heard stranger things.
“The best course is always to seek solace in the Lord,” he tells me. “Confess your burdens to him, and you’ll find them lifted.”
“That’s a pat answer, isn’t it?” He raises both of his bushy eyebrows and looks affronted, but I continue unfazed. “I told you what my stepbrother did to me. You know, I confessed my burdens about that to a priest every week for years, and neither he nor God ever intervened on my behalf. I keep showing up because I believe the church is larger than the sins of one man, and by that I mean Father George. It isn’t fair to blame him anymore, I know. I should have left it to God and not let my anger take over my conscience. That’s my own responsibility, and I know it. But I wouldn’t be here today if it hadn’t been for Clinton training me to hollow myself out and do what I was told. And it eats at me now that I’m in here and he’s out there living his la-de-dah life. If I had explained all of that in court, they might have had mercy on me and not put me away for life. But I didn’t, only so I could spare my mother the trauma of feeling that she’d failed me, and she’s been dead for almost twenty years now. I’m not sure who the hell I’m protecting anymore.”
He folds his hands in front of him and offers a show of mulling it over. “Sometimes, when we’re young, we make choices that we need to live with for a lifetime. And it’s regrettable—I can see that. But the challenge is learning to grow and flourish within the constraints. And you do that well, Ms. Mattingly.”
“Of course I do.” I lift my chin and stare at him, my lips pressed together hard as if working in tandem to suppress the next thought that my brain is churning into words. “But coping well is not necessarily anything to celebrate. You can learn to love a captor. To find excitement in the drama of a bad relationship. I used to enjoy it sometimes when my stepbrother raped me. Is that ‘flourishing,’ or is that demented?”
His eyebrows go up again, and this time they stay there. He bounces his templed hands against his mouth, pondering. “I’m sure you don’t mean that,” he demurs.
“I do mean it.” I can hear my voice winding tight. “For a while there, after it sank in that he was going to force me do it no matter what, I stopped fighting. He tried to force me to feel some kind of pleasure, I suppose because it made him feel more powerful, and sometimes it worked. You have no idea the guilt that comes along with that. How long it takes to unlearn.” I don’t shift my gaze, even though he’s looking uneasier by the moment. “It isn’t just me. What he did is something abusers do all the time. I used to ask Ricky to hurt me, because I only understood pleasure as an antidote to pain. He never would, of course. He wasn’t like that. I had to retrain all my nerves. But even now, I think about it sometimes, by myself. I try not to, but if I do?” I snap my fingers. “I’m done. Like that.”
He sits up straighter and folds his hands on the table. “All right. Thank you for your confession. Are you ready for your penance now?”
“That’s all right. It makes me uncomfortable, too.”
“One rosary,” he says. “Spend time in prayer. It’ll take your mind off what bothers you.”
Penelope Robbins arrives just before yard time. I hear the crackle of radio static and the clink of her ankle shackles as she and the guards make their way down the cellblock, and then she stands on the other side of the bars in her new blue jumpsuit, wearing a self-consciously hard expression belied by the bewilderment in her gaze. From the other cells inmates are shouting her name, making lewd suggestions and mocking her with faux-upscale invitations to tea and tennis. She’s trying to look unimpressed, and it’s pitiable how transparent her efforts are. Inside she’s screaming.