“I love you,” he said.
I started to cry. The tears began to flow automatically, as if at the flip of a switch. I wanted to curl onto the floor into a tiny ball, to wrap my arms over my head and rock and wait until all of this was over. But then there came a rush from behind me, and Chris reached around me and tried to grab the gun from my hands. In the erupting chaos Mr. Choi stood and began to yell, urging his family up, shouting in a language I couldn’t understand. For a few seconds Chris and I struggled—I knew what he would do to the family, and didn’t want to hand over the gun. But he was much stronger, and he wrested it away. Without a moment’s hesitation he aimed and fired—five shots, one after the other, the sound of each one echoing in my skull with a deafening bang. Mr. Choi fell backward with shocking momentum, as if he had run full-force into an invisible door.
The small room fell into a sudden, icy silence, but out in the store Ricky was shouting for us to leave. I stepped out of the room, staggered sideways into the milk refrigerator, and felt my forearm gripped by someone’s hand. It was Forrest, pulling me toward the exit door. “We need to get out of here,” he said in a voice like a grunt. I stumbled after him, clinging to the sleeve of his jean jacket.
And then we were out in the cool clear night, in the stirred, starlit airIn the distance I could make out the dark and shadowed shapes of the mountains, and I felt the impulse to run toward them and not stop until all the breath was gone from me, until the wind had blown every shred of this terrible burden from my shoulders. But that was never to be.
When my hand recovered from the previous letter I wrote the next one to Karen, cribbing out the rest of what I remembered. I set them both aside to mail to her, then used my one remaining stamp to send a note to Annemarie apologizing for the way I revealed the news to her, all while trying to explain the frustration of wanting to protect her from the upsetting facts. Whether she will understand is something I can’t predict, and what’s more, my gut is twisting with the growing sense that I should have been honest with her from the beginning. Still vivid are the memories of how quickly my own family abandoned me when I went to prison—how every aunt and uncle, every cousin, and even my stepfather recoiled from me as Forrest’s testimony about my relationship with Ricky came to light. And that was only the beginning, because as I live out my life inside these walls, the Clara Mattingly known to the world is nothing more than Ricky’s weak-willed sidekick. To distance myself from him at every opportunity has been ingrained in me to the level of instinct, and when Annemarie appeared, I couldn’t overcome that for the sake of simple, revolutionary honesty.
Later that day the cart clatters through the cellblock with all our canteen boxes stacked onto it. “Canteen’s here,” I say, giving Penelope’s shoulder a shake through her blanket. Though it’s five in the evening she’s lying in bed with the covers pulled up to the top of her head, revealing only an inch or two of mussed hair. Her job starts a half-hour earlier than mine, and when I returned from the workshop she was already back and asleep in bed. She murmurs unhappily at my rousing her. I unpack the box delivered to me. I find moleskin for my socks, packets of aspirin for my increasingly achy joints, snacks, golf pencils and paper and, of course, a new book of stamps. But as I scan over my canteen receipt, I notice something strange. My account balance is much too high—by a hundred dollars at least.
I frown and wonder at the mistake as I begin to unpack my order. But when I drop the box of golf pencils and it clatters against the floor, Penelope cowers and moans beneath the blanket.
“Too loud,” she mumbles miserably.
I look at her in surprise. “Do you have a headache?”
She doesn’t reply. I move closer, and she peeks out above the sheet, squinting. In the shadows beneath the bunk I can see puffy discoloration around her eye. Obviously she’s been punched, and in spite of my hardened feelings it’s impossible not to feel a wave of sympathy for her. She lets out a muffled sob, and in an instant I’m sitting beside her, smoothing back her hair from her injured eye. “Aw, honey,” I whisper, and make a few shushing noises. “Looks like you had a bad day.”
She’s sniveling, her face pressed into the pillow, making snotty gasping sounds. “My—head—hurts,” she cries.
“Should I ask what happened?”
“She hit me when I was folding uniforms. Big Mexican girl.” Her voice sounds baleful and despairing. I rub her back in circles, but she winces and shrugs off my hand. “Ouch.”
“I’m sorry. Is your back hurt, too?”
Penelope rolls over further and pulls up the back of her uniform shirt. From below her shoulder blade to the top of her left shoulder are four angry, dappled red streaks—the mark of someone’s fingernails. Somebody grabbed her, got a grip on her skin, and didn’t let go of her easilywhen she pulled away. The index finger broke the skin, and the rest are superficial but ugly. I wince sympathetically. “Did you go to the clinic?”
“They gave me ointment.”
“Did you put any on?”
“No. I can’t reach back there.”
I find the tube of ointment on the desk and squeeze a dollop onto my finger, then carefully apply it to her back. Gradually, as I rub it in, her muscles relax. Her skin is soft, though firmed by the elasticity of youth, and I think I can see the shadow of a bikini top in its changing tones. “You know, my last cellmate was in her fifties,” I tell her, keeping my voice low and soothing, “and the only moisturizer she would use was Vaseline. When she broke her arm I had to be the one to rub the Vaseline into her hands. Have you ever used it?”
“Uh-huh. It’s sticky.”
“Yeah, it feels a lot like this ointment. Wouldn’t be my choice as a hand lotion. At least you’re not asking me to coat you in it.”
She offers a brittle, tentative smile. “Back home I have a whole shelf of ones from Bath and Body Works. Maybe I can ask my brother to bring one of them in.”
“They won’t let you.”
“It’s just lotion.”
“They’re strict.”
“Don’t they ease up after you’ve been here for a while?”
“No.”
She exhales a shaky sigh. “I was standing there folding shirts and the woman just lunged at me from behind. I didn’t do anything to her. I don’t even know who she is. She said I looked at her. What does that even mean?”
I lay my hand on the back of her head comfortingly and stroke her hair. It’s very soft, not at all coarse like Janny’s, and I flash back to the afternoons sitting beside my mother as she rested in bed, during her first round of radiation therapy. Her hair was blond and similarly soft, like the fur of my oldest teddy bear. It’s the same motion here, the same quiet feeling.
“Something like that happened to me when I had that job,” I tell her. “I wasn’t as new as you, though. I’d been here for a year. One of my coworkers was making comments about the dirty laundry, and I laughed. Another woman heard me and thought I was laughing at her. She shoved me into a wall. Kneed me in the stomach.”
“Ow,” Penelope says.
“It wasn’t that bad. You have to learn to keep your head down.” I pat the back of her head meaningfully. “Be aware of your expression. If anyone thinks you look cocky, they’ll be quick to wipe it off your face.”
“I don’t want to be here. I don’t belong here.”