He picks up the phone at the same moment I do. “What are we doing here?” he asks, gesturing to indicate the smelly, green-painted room. “What happened to Scrabble and that beautiful waterfall?”
I try to work up a smile. “No in-person visits for inmates in Med Seg. Some of us are contagious, so they act as though everybody is. Sorry. I appreciate that you came.”
“Well, how long are you going to be there?”
“It’s going to be a while.” I meet his eyes through the smudged glass and implore him to listen closely, though our words crackle with static across the weak phone connection. “Forrest,” I say. “They might reduce my sentence. There’s a chance.”
His forehead creases hard with a sudden frown. “I thought you got life without parole.”
“Yes. I can’t tell you the details, and it isn’t for sure, but my lawyer is trying to get them to reduce it to time served. It would be…something similar to your deal.”
He holds me with a long look. For a few moments he says nothing. “Wouldn’t that mean you’ll get out?”
“It would.” At his puzzled expression I give a short, embarrassed laugh. “I don’t know where I’d go. It’s like Mars out there now.”
“Oh, I’d help you. You know I would.”
“I can’t even think about it too much. I’d lose my mind if I get my hopes up. I keep thinking, would they give me the rest of my canteen money? Everything seems so expensive now. When I see car commercials on TV, the cars cost as much as my parents’ house did.”
“Don’t worry about that. Clara. Could that really happen? Because I’d be there for you every step of the way. I have plenty of room at my place. I mean, I owe you.” His laugh is rueful. “I owe you.”
“You don’t owe me anything at all.”
“Okay, fine. I want to help. I told my daughters about you.”
I smile and perk up. “You did? What did they say?”
He shakes his head, but he’s smiling too. “They think I’m crazy no matter what I do. That’s never going to change.”
“I don’t want them to hate me.”
“Because you’re a felon? They’d have to hate us both.” He leans in on his elbows, pressing close to the window. “Maybe God’ll work a miracle. I’ll pray for it.”
“Pray for one with my daughter, while you’re at it. She’s not speaking to me anymore.”
“She’ll come around.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“You’ll see. If you get out.” He nods, then lifts the corner of his mouth in an understanding smile. “She came to you looking for a sense of peace about her background. That’s never a straight road. She’ll be back.”
“Maybe you’re right. Thank you.”
“It’s probably heartbreaking in the meantime. It always is, when people leave.”
I nod ardently. It’s the truest thing I know, and he knows it too. He holds up his hand and presses it against the glass. I lift mine and fit it against his from the other side. And then, before I even realize it’s going to happen, I begin to cry. It starts with a shaking in my chest, then rises, and before I can control it I’m sobbing and sobbing, my face streaked and overheated, my breath coming in choking gasps. I have to hang up the phone, and the C.O. catches sight of me and comes over to remove me. They don’t allow scenes like this, and I can’t blame them. I don’t even look over my shoulder as they hustle me away.
I’ve been in my new cell for just over a week when a Saturday brings me my one permitted houseguest—Father Soriano has come to take my confession and offer me the Eucharist in these new surroundings. The C.O. opens the bars to let him in, and the priest looks around the small cell with a pitying gaze. “I’d like to ask what you did to get in here,” he begins, “but maybe that will be part of your confession.”
“Not mine, but maybe somebody else’s. I got attacked in the yard. Apparently some of the others felt my cellmate was starting to like me too much.”
He nods. With one finger he flicks the edge of a new piece of my décor—strips of toilet paper hung wherever I can attach them, each square torn most of the way apart but not entirely, to form a long banner of squares. On each bit of the thick, industrial paper I have drawn, in pencil, a Buddha or an ohm symbol, a lotus flower, or a wheel. They have allowed me my pastels, and so each image is smudged with careful strokes of color dampened just a bit with my saliva to create a watercolor effect. These are prayer flags, which I saw on a television show on PBS while I was in the hospital. The idea is that as they flap in the breeze, they carry prayers to the heavens, and the paper does indeed flap lightly when the air-conditioning vents come on. Each of my fingertips is a different shade of pink, blue, pale green or yellow, and the dyes are impervious to soap thus far.
“Very nice,” he says. “Festive.”
“I’m praying for the Chois. They were Buddhists.”
He takes a seat on my little stool. “I see. Well, how are you feeling? How’s your leg?”
“My leg is all right,” I say, but I dodge the larger question. In terms of isolation Med Seg is only a half-step above the Hole, and the past ten days have been a grueling trial. The lights never go off, the noise never quiets down, and yet the interaction with other inmates is virtually nonexistent. It’s the strange feeling of being suspended in a single endless moment, a skipping record that plays the same line of a song over and over. I begin to sleep a lot, using my cardigan sweater as a shield against the relentless fluorescent light; and in the hazy twilight just before sleep and at awakening, I come to understand exactly why Ricky felt the way he did on the day he killed himself. When his cousin Dan came to visit me years and years ago, suicide note in hand, he’d mentioned that Ricky had been in the Hole. Only now does it occur to me that he’d probably been in protective custody for months, perhaps the entire time. Ricky couldn’t even go an entire shift at the Circle K without getting jerked around by jocks two years younger than himself. I can only imagine what the showers must have been like at Chowchilla.
The priest waits a brief interval for me to expand on my answer, but I say nothing more. He lifts his eyebrows and asks his question. “Are you ready to begin your confession?”
“I have nothing.”
He smiles thinly. “Let’s go over an examination of conscience and determine whether that’s true.”
“Let me propose an idea to you, instead.”
He rests his hand on his thigh and looks at me curiously.
“I want to see my stepbrother. He’s done things to me that I can only forgive if I have clearer information. I know what you’re going to say—that I should forgive him simply on principle, to be Christlike. But unfortunately, I’m not Christ.”
The priest offers a spontaneous, indulgent smile. “None of us are, Clara. Go on.”
“I want you to reach out to him and get him to come here and talk to me. I don’t mean in those silly little visitation booths, either. I mean face to face.”
He gestures to the walls of the cell. “That’s never allowed in Medical Segregation.”
“But it’s allowed in the chapel, if you’re present. You could arrange that. He still lives in San Jose, as far as I know. I can give you the address, and maybe you can find a phone number based on that.”
His gaze shifts to the side, and I can tell he’s pondering the idea.
“Just listen,” I say, losing the strident voice he seems to dislike so much, and finding a softer tone instead. “It doesn’t have to go well. I don’t need him to be sorry, or to find a reason to excuse any of the things he did to me. I just want to look at his face and see how much time has passed. I want to see how old my wounds are. And I want to hear and see that at some point in his life, he was somehow vulnerable too. Because I can’t forgive a monster, but for my own peace of heart, I can forgive a human being. I need to see that he is one.”