In the yellow hallway I plant one crutch against the concrete floor and rest the other against the railing that surrounds the stairwell, then balance cautiously on my good foot. After my first couple of weeks in Med Seg, Ms. Chandler came around with her library cart, greeted me with surprise, then promptly went to the cellblock captain and arranged for me to read to Janny for thirty minutes a day. Ever since I began my daily hikes down to Janny’s cell, the staff’s treatment of me has grown lenient in the extreme. They don’t even lock my door most of the time and allow me to walk the hallway whenever I like, even ignoring me when I pause at a particular support beam and watch, at a distance, the TV in the staff coffee lounge. In a single conversation, the librarian was able to achieve what my lawyer never could—a hint of special privilege for an obedient prisoner.
I lurch a few steps, being careful not to put too much pressure on the toes of my injured foot, then pause for a few moments before trying again. There’s no hurry. For all my fears about Janny’s quality of life here, she seems to have adjusted very well. They’ve given her an unflattering short haircut, but it’s easy for her to take care of on her own, and she does many tasks for herself now that I did for her for years. Maybe, she was better off without me, after all. Maybe I needed to take care of her more than she needed the care.
When I arrive at her cell I see she already has a guest. Father Soriano is perched on the narrow stool in a tenuous stance that stretches the edge of his cassock. Janny raises her head when I come in, that little worry line forming between her eyebrows. “Clara,” the priest says, his voice jovial. “I was just about to pay you a visit. Thought I would make my rounds first.”
“Aren’t you early?” I ask.
“By a couple of hours, yes.” He lays a clerical hand on Janny’s head, murmurs a blessing, then pats her cheek. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning, Ms. Hernandez.”
“I’ll come back after my confession,” I tell Janny, and crutch out of the room. But as soon as he closes and latches her door, I say, “You brought him, didn’t you.”
“Yes, he’s in the chapel. Or at least, that’s where he was when I left him.”
He rests his palm against my back as I start down the hallway. The chapel is around the corner, but when I reach my cell I stop and turn into it. Father Soriano looks at me in confusion as I sit on the bed and let my crutches fall beside me with a clatter.
“I can’t go.” My throat feels so tight that I’m not sure how I’m still breathing. “There’s no way I can walk in there.”
“I’ll be with you, Clara.”
I shake my head. My hands, resting on my thighs, are trembling. He steps into my cell and crouches down beside me, balancing in his creased black dress shoes. The weariness has gone from his deeply tanned face, and he only looks kind. It’s the focus of his dark eyes that cuts through my climbing panic. For the first time in the years I’ve known him, he has pulled away the invisible wall between us—the confessional screen, the communion rail—and looks at me the way I imagine Jesus looked upon a woman as he healed her.
“You asked for a brave thing,” he says. “You did it because you have a brave heart. Don’t let your mind trick you now into believing otherwise.”
He holds out his hand, and I let him pull me up to stand.
The sunlight streaming through the stained-glass window is low and pale, touching the opposite wall with faded shards of color. The pews are worn and nicked, like our old desks at Our Lady of Mercy. I see Clinton the moment I walk in. He’s sitting in the wooden chair just in front of the chancel, elbows on his knees and his legs loosely apart. He’s cracking his knuckles. He’s looking at the floor. I stop short, waiting out a feeling in my stomach like the last dregs of water being sucked down the drain. Then he looks up and, right away, he stands.
His hair is very thin on top now, the blond salted with gray and combed carefully to the side. He wears glasses, and his sharp jaw has softened its edges. His neck is not the lean pillar it used to be. I follow the line of his body down and find a different person entirely. He’s a little paunchy, broader and softer at the shoulders, dressed in a cream-colored shirt traced in a thin plaid and dark khaki pants. He looks ever so much like his father.
He swings his arms, letting the side of his fist bounce against his palm when they meet at the front; but then he stops himself, his hands writhing nervously against the sides of his pants. I can see he’s waiting for me to approach him, but I can’t. To walk up the aisle to this man waiting at the side for me, as if I’m a bride—no.
“Come over here,” I say.
He gives a single nod and starts down the aisle. Father Soriano stands just behind me, like a spotter in case I fall, but I feel steadier than I expected. At close range Clinton looks even older, and I remind myself he’s fifty-two. The last time I saw him he was twenty-eight, sitting on the witness stand in court, but I barely remember him then. In my mind’s eye he is always eighteen.
“Clara,” he says, with another nod of greeting.
He doesn’t extend his hand, and I don’t offer mine. I sit down at the edge of the last pew, and he takes a seat in the one across the aisle, which is no wider than a table—a distance just great enough that I can breathe. The priest takes my crutches and rests them against the back of the pew, then retreats to the doorway.
For a moment Clinton takes in my analytical gaze, my flat face, my silence. “Do you want to start, or should I?” he asks.
I raise an eyebrow. “Do you have something to say?”
“Of course I do.” He rubs his thighs. “First, the day you hit me on the head with that bottle, I wasn’t coming down there to do anything to you. I was just trying to reach the bottle of stain remover. I’d gotten jelly on my shirt, and it was the shirt I needed for an interview, and there was nothing on my mind except getting it out—”
“What?” My face contorts into a mask of disbelief. “That’s what you want to tell me? After all these years?”
“To clear the air, yes. I know you have this idea that I wanted to do something to you, and that’s why you overreacted so much, and it’s always bothered me because it isn’t true. I was with Susie then, for God’s sake. I wasn’t going to try anything.”
I sit up straight and choke on a humorless laugh. “Clinton, you never tried anything. You did whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted. Trying implies that I might have had a choice in the matter.”
He holds out both hands, palms toward the earth, in a placating gesture. “I’m not saying you’re wrong there. Just that wasn’t one of those times.”
“And while we’re at it, I should have overreacted like that about five years earlier.”
His hands drop to his knees. “Fair enough.”
That small admission surprises me into silence. He gnaws his bottom lip and looks toward the narthex. Rectangles of light gleam on his glasses—hard, shifting little points.
“I hate it that you see it this way,” he says. “I was hoping that wouldn’t be the case.”
A fresh surge of fury courses through me. “How did you think I would see it? As a game? Some kind of exciting affair? You raped me. When I was a child. And you did it a hundred times.”