He replies with a hearty laugh. “Your idea of heaven and mine are pretty different, let’s say.”
I grin back. It’s a quiet Saturday, and we have two whole hours before visiting time is over. After a while we take out the Scrabble board, and I beat him soundly, then go easy on him the second time. Only when the guards shout a five-minute warning do I realize how much I don’t want the morning to end. I wish moments like this weren’t so hopeless, so fraught by my understanding that there can never be more than this, but I must push past that type of thinking. There’s a world beyond these walls, and Annemarie is in it, and so I must keep reaching out in whatever ways I can. I am imprisoned here, not entombed. And I won’t believe that her goodbye is truly a goodbye. If the past few months have taught me anything, it’s this: people come back.
All through the long Saturday afternoon I’m very quiet, going over in my mind, again and again, the things Forrest told me about himself and the bits of information I shared with him in return. Those I offered to him are simple. Mint chocolate chip ice cream is my favorite. At least, I think that’s still true. I love watching Olympic figure skating. I have a cat here, sort of, named Clementine. If I could go anywhere? Hawaii. It feels indulgent, even dangerous, to say these true things about myself. In here nobody cares, and if they did, you’d wonder why they wanted to gain your trust. You lie, even about small things, to be safe.
Penelope has a visit with her lawyer, then returns to our cell not long before chow hall. “Who was that guy I saw you with in the visiting room?” she asks, dropping a stack of papers onto her bed.
I’m caught off-guard by the question. The room had been fairly full, and I hadn’t noticed her there. “His name is Forrest,” I tell her. “He’s someone I know from way back.”
He was a minor character in the film they made, or so I read in People years ago, but she offers no sign of recognition. “Is he your boyfriend?” she asks.
“No. Just a friend.”
“It looked like he was flirting with you.”
I laugh. “That wouldn’t be a very productive effort, would it?”
“Are you really in here for life?”
“Without parole. Yes.” Her gaze tenses sympathetically. “Who visited you?” I ask.
“Steven. My brother.” She turns on the sink and splashes water on her face, which looks a bit pink around the eyes, as if she’s been crying again. The girl is a virtual factory for tears; she’s going to need to unlearn that, and quickly. “We argued. The doctors have all these decisions they want us to make about what kind of care our dad gets—feeding tubes, stuff like that—and he’s being a jerk about it. He keeps insisting our dad wouldn’t want extreme measures, and that’s bull. Our dad would be all about the extreme measures.”
I remember that her parents are divorced and her father had a much younger fiancée, which was part of the scandal that came out, but I suppose the fiancée doesn’t have much ability to make medical decisions on his behalf. Penelope’s concern for him intrigues me. If she was an incest victim—as I have assumed her to be—I doubt she would be so determined to keep the man alive and breathing. And if she had ordered a hit on him, it seems she would be eager to prevent any chance of a miraculous recovery.
“I had problems like that with my stepbrother,” I say, mostly so I won’t look as if I’m too deep in thought about her personal business. “When my mother had cancer, and I was in here, he tried to convince my stepfather not to do what the doctors suggested and just to ‘let her go peacefully.’ Because she was burning through his future inheritance, is why. I’m sure every morphine IV felt like a punch right in his wallet.”
She winces and plunks down on the bed. “That’s sick.”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
Her laugh is low and rueful. “Likewise. Sounds like your stepbrother and my brother ought to get together for a drink.”
Now she has me curious, but I resist the urge to press her further. This isn’t like with Janny, where we had sound reason to trust one another and, until the end, posed no risk to the other’s fate. Penelope is new here. She doesn’t know how tenuous trust can be, and that she should be very careful with whom she shares her business. But soon enough she’ll learn, and when she does, I don’t want her worrying that I know too much.
“Time for dinner,” I say, in a bright brusque tone that dismisses the conversation at hand, and as I pull my freshly-cut hair back into a rubber band I catch, in her expression, the shadow of disappointment.
Mass is held in the chapel, a reasonably large, high-ceilinged room at the far end of the main building. This prison was built in the 1950s, when people still went to church each week and everyone was assumed to be Christian, so the inward arch of the ceiling and rows of hard wooden pews give the room a special feeling, a place apart from the multipurpose look of the rest of the building. It has a single stained glass window—a bit uneven and amateurish, fitted into an existing window and made by prisoners in a shop class many years earlier. When I first arrived here there was still a cross attached to the wall behind the pulpit and five rows of pews. But then more and more of the women who arrived were Muslim—or became Muslim during their stay here—and so the cross was ripped out and the first two rows of pews removed to make a better space for prayer mats. I understand the need for this, but the room has had a shabbier feel to it ever since—from the rough brown marks near the ceiling where the cross had once hung, the gouges in the linoleum where the pews were removed, the awkward distance I must sit from the priest as he says the ancient phrases I long to hear. But regardless of these things, walking into the chapel offers a feeling of small liberation, as I make my way down the narrow hallway free of guards to exercise one of the few freedoms I still have.
During the quiet moments, I pray for Annemarie. For Janny, and also for Forrest—willfully letting go of my lingering anger for what he did to me, opening my heart to the willingness to understand his confusion and fear and genuine belief that he was telling the truth. Because he’s right. In his shoes, I, too, would have offered up the truths as I saw them. Fear would have motivated me, but that overpowering desire to confess would have driven me as well. The instinctive desire to see a wrong righted is a complicated thing. It can drive us to assist in the bureaucratic pursuit of justice, and also to vigilante crime.
I pray for every victim of our crimes, including Father George. I force myself to hold up each of their faces in my mind and attempt to feel, even in a dim and inadequate way, what I took from them. Afterward I stand in the Communion line and slowly approach Father Soriano. In front of me, the fine tendrils of Alexandra’s hair swing at the small of her back. When the priest offers her the wafer she cups her hands but stares straight ahead, her hard little chin jutting forward, jaw set firmly. We’re all a little proud around here.
At the end of the service I follow my straggling fellow Catholics out of the chapel and into the hallway. The C.O. at the intersection with the main hall is calming a belligerent inmate who is copping an attitude, rolling her neck and straining forward though her wrists are shackled, and I slow my pace in hopes they’ll move her before my path crosses with hers. And then in a flash there’s an arm across my neck; my head is jerked back, and all I can see is the water-stained ceiling as I thrash against the dense body behind me. I try to suck in air, but the pressure is too hard against my windpipe. She wrestles me into the slight corner where the chapel wing joins the narrower hallway. Before my eyes she flashes a shiv—a shard of clear glass ground to a knifelike point and wrapped in tape for a handle—and holds it to the side of my throat.