“All right, I guess.” I crack open my can of soda carefully, as if I may have forgotten how to do it right. I lower my voice to expand on my comment. “I’m trying to get to know her without getting myself shanked by all the other women who want to get to know her.”
“Maybe it’s better to leave her alone, then.”
I shrug and drink from the can. The fizziness is like static on my tongue. I desperately want to tell him the truth, all the truth—that there’s some chance I might get out of here, which is an immeasurably important thing for him to know. But also how torn I feel about the moral conflict beneath it all. How much I loathe seeking her trust only so I can gain from it, even as that proves to me that I still have the will to fight for a better life. And I can’t say a word about any of it. Any chance of a rumor getting out is too high a risk.
I brush a finger toward the envelope. “What did you bring pictures of?”
“Oh, my house and kids and stuff.” He shakes them into his hand and flips through them with embarrassed haste. The house is a Spanish-style place with a red tile roof, the girls smiling, healthy brunettes who look like their father. There are several photos of a black and white cat, its eyes bright and pale in the camera’s flash. “That’s José. I thought you’d get a kick out of seeing him.”
“He’s pretty. I don’t think I’ve ever met a cat named José.”
“It’s short for José Cuervo, like the tequila.” He wraps both hands around his Coke can. “I picked him up from a box outside the grocery store not long after my wife left. Told myself it was better to get a kitten than a drinking problem. So he’s the bottle of tequila I never bought.”
I grin. “Smart move.”
“You said yours is named Clementine, right?”
“Yes, but she’s not really mine. She’s a feral cat they keep around as a mouser. The rest of the inmates call her Frankfurter.”
He nods and glances around to take stock of who may be listening. The room is crowded today, with only a couple of guards, both hovering near known gang members. “How do you do it?” he asks, and he drops his voice down very low. “Day after day.”
“I don’t have a choice.”
“But I knew you before this. You were a regular person. A sweet girl.” He tips his head, his gaze respectful but searching. “The way you were then—I would have thought you wouldn’t make it two years.”
“I’m tougher than I thought I was.”
“Are they super-protective in here, when it’s women?”
I answer with an abrupt chuckle. “No.” I scan the room myself, then lean in closer and pull the collar of my blue top aside to show the small gouge at my neck; I gesture to the fading red line down my arm, still showing the thinner pink marks of the stitches. “I have all kinds of interesting scars. Did you notice both of my canines are broken?”
“I’m sorry.” A dullness washes over his gaze. “Clara. Bad things happened to me when I was in jail.”
I nod. He locks eyes with me, infusing the look with deliberate meaning, but I’ve already guessed what he meant. “Some things I don’t ever talk about,” he continues.
“I know.”
“Most people wouldn’t understand.”
“Well, I’m pretty sure I do. You might be surprised how well I understand.”
He presses his lips together.
“Tell me about your house,” I say.
He takes a nervous sip of his soda, and I can see that he’s working to switch gears in his mind. “It’s nice. I worked hard for it. Got a patio I built and a hot tub out back, and a built-in barbecue. It’s got three bedrooms, and I don’t know what I’ll do with the extra ones once the girls move out for good. Not ready to think about that yet, anyway.”
“Turn one into a room for the grandkids.”
He cracks a smile. “I’m forty-eight. I’m too young to be thinking about grandkids.”
“How did you get to be forty-eight,” I muse. “Forrest Hayes. I feel like my twenty-three-year-old self is having a very strange dream.”
Again he tips his head, his longish hair falling aside to show an ear scarred by a small healed piercing. His golden-tanned skin makes the green of his eyes stand out like jewels in desert sand. He reaches across the table to touch my jaw with his strong warm fingers, and, rising up from his seat, he leans in and kisses me. His lips are soft, and I feel the heat of his exhaled breath against my mouth. Then he sits and glances around, just as I do, to see if any of the C.O.s have noticed.
“There,” he says. “Weirdest dream ever.”
“I’ll say.”
“Ricky’s going to be mad,” he jokes.
“Ricky’s dead,” I say.
He meets my eye with a nervous gleam in his own, and then, his mouth twisting into a wicked grin, utters a low, delicious laugh. And I have to laugh, too. These things that are happening right now, it’s as if Time is standing on the other side of a wall, tossing us the materials to build a future. Now it’s up to me to make it possible. And I have to. We’ve had enough heartbreak, both of us.
The visit from Forrest enables me to push through the day. Through the two-o’clock mark, when I know the wedding is beginning, and the three o’clock mark, when I imagine they’re all bustling out of the church in a joyous, exuberant crowd. Guests congratulating the new couple in a shower of rice and good wishes, children running about in satin dresses and tiny creased suit pants, the chaos of a parking lot, the older folks smiling and walking slowly, holding hands, reminded of how it feels to be young. Around four, when the first dances must be taking place, I think about how Ricky would have looked in a tuxedo, grinning and swirling his daughter around the dance floor. For the first time I allow myself the indulgence of imagining him as a father. He would have been the fun type of dad, I’m sure—lackadaisical about discipline and housework, never willing to be the bad guy. All horseplay and second bowls of ice cream and late summer evenings at free concerts in the park, dancing among the fireflies. He would have been a difficult partner with whom to raise a child. But he would have loved her. With all his wild heart, he would have loved her.
I write Annemarie a short letter letting her know I’m thinking about her, praying for her, and wishing her well as her marriage begins. Every few days I’ve been sending these notes off to her, and if she wants me to stop it’s going to take a no-contact order to make me. I set it out on Monday morning to be collected by the mail staff, and I go to work.
Our new project in the Braille workshop is a surprisingly compelling one. It’s a high school Biology textbook, complete with twenty-eight drawings of plants in cross-section, the life cycle of a frog, human cells, and other challenging things. I can hardly wait to delve into it. I was never very interested in science when I was in school, but the challenges of scientific illustration—capturing the essential truth, but beautifully—are a pure delight. The first couple of days consist of prep work. Transcribing the Table of Contents and copyright information, dividing up the chapters amongst ourselves, all seems to go by with exceptional slowness, and I spend all my idle time thinking about how I will approach my drawing of that human cell.
But my work week is interrupted by a visit on Wednesday from Karen Shepherd, whom I knew had applied for a private interview. Those are allowed, although they’re rare; most people’s crimes aren’t that interesting. Over the years I’ve gotten countless notifications about these attempts, and I’ve declined every one of them. But for this one I’ve said yes.