I almost laugh. Oh, Clara, I think, you should have known he wouldn’t come running down here just to apologize for wronging you. But instead of feeling incensed or used, I’m strangely light inside. “Well, I suppose we’ll be seeing each other again, then,” I tell him, and make my slow way out the door.
Another month drags by, the slow days perked up by a visit from Forrest, one from Mona, and several from Ms. Chandler. I’ve asked her to bring me books that were made into movies in the past five years, so I can be less ignorant of popular culture if I ever get out of here. One at a time she brings me each of the Harry Potter books, and I enjoy them much more than I had first expected. I like Harry’s escape from his miserable home life and identify with his feelings about his parents, but it’s Hermione I really love—the way she speaks up for herself and doesn’t let anyone push her around. I wish I’d had these books when I was a girl. The librarian sends Twilight as well, but I can’t get through it. I already know too many stories about a girl who falls in love with a boy who’s obviously a bad idea.
They bring in a specialist from the hospital to cut off my cast, and while I’m waiting in the clinic I come across a magazine article called “The Etsy Revolution,” about a very popular internet site on which artists can sell the crafts they make to people all over the world. The concept takes my mind by storm, and I fall in love with the idea of creating customized, Degas-inspired portraits of real little ballerinas—commissioned by parents, created from photographs, and sold for an affordable price. On the good thick paper Forrest sends me I create a logo for my shop, then spend a good amount of time musing on what pseudonym I might adopt to ensure I don’t scare away potential customers. Clara Hayes, I think, like a girl in junior high school. I push away the thoughts as quickly as they appear, but they keep sneaking back.
Christmas comes, and a card arrives from Annemarie. It’s a cute, childlike design with a large red and green ornament hanging from a narrow pine branch against a glossy pink background. I spot the curlicue of her old initials, AL, tucked unobtrusively beneath the drawing. Beneath the printed sentiment—Jolly Holidays to You and Yours!—is a simple handwritten signature: Annemarie. It isn’t much, but then, it means a great deal—the hope that she isn’t forever gone after all, and that Forrest was right when he said she is still in search of peace with me.
And then one day, at my cell door, it’s Mona. She’s smiling. The door swings open with a creak, and she steps in carrying a plastic shopping bag and a manila envelope. She holds up the paperwork and says, “Congratulations.”
The C.O. brings boxes, but I don’t have much to pack. I put in my court transcripts and pointe shoes, my radio and rosary, a few books and drawings, all my art supplies. There are the gifts from Annemarie, of course, and the prettiest string of prayer flags. But beyond that, I have lived almost all these years as if time consists only of one day lived over and over, and I have saved very little. None of Emory Pugh’s gentle, friendly letters remain. Not one extra Magnificat, and certainly not a single photo of the past twenty-five years.
Well, there is one. The picture of me with Forrest in front of the mural is already tucked into one of my soft-edged novels. Looking at it filled me with too much fear and longing, and so I put it away.
On my final night I lie awake in bed, my arms behind my head, and listen to the catcalls and door-banging of the other inmates. I run my tongue along my flattened canines and remember my very worst days here. The deaths of the people I loved most, the loss of the small girl who should have mattered more to me than anyone. I think of the best days with Janny, and the joy of the work I will miss so much. Above all I linger on the sublime moments, when despite everything I felt at peace—in the chapel now and then, or out in the sunshine with Clementine on my lap, or when I got lost in my dance music so thoroughly that, for a few minutes, I truly and absolutely had escaped.
I remember the sight of the enormous night sky through my hospital window and wonder how I will bear the world. I promise myself I won’t let fear or bitterness stand in the way of my becoming, at last, what I might have been. And finally, I promise God that I won’t go a single day without remembering why I was here all this time, and putting forth enough kindness to pay a few pennies on my incalculable debt. Because I know I don’t deserve this twist of fate. I deserve nothing, and the fact that I will receive the gift anyway makes me understand, in its crushing entirety, the meaning of mercy.
I sign my name on the paperwork the C.O. sets before me and slide it back across the counter to her. She looks it over, and as I wait I reach back and scratch just below the nape of my neck. Mona brought me a new outfit for my release, something she thought would be pretty and comfortable. I’m wearing jeans that fit strangely low on my hips and seem tight at the seat, and a white eyelet top with fluttery sleeves and little padded buttons down the front. The air-conditioning is hiked up so high in the Intake room that goose bumps have broken out on my arms. “I know it’s a little young,” Mona said as I held up the shirt between pinched fingers, “but you’ve got the figure for it, so why not. And it’s a bit bridal-looking, isn’t it? That seems appropriate for a fresh start, don’t you think?”
The C.O. nods and disappears into a back room, then reappears with a clear plastic bag labeled PROPERTY. “Here you go,” she says.
“What’s this?”
“Your stuff.”
I peer down into the bag. In it is a pair of jeans and a belt with a silver buckle, a white cardigan sweater, and a faded pink T-shirt with a logo on the chest that reads Spectrum Supply. There’s also a pair of white flats. It’s the outfit I was wearing when I got arrested. I find a small envelope deep within the bag, open its flap, and shake its contents into my hand. Into my palm slip a pair of gold hoop earrings and a thin gold necklace with a pendant Ricky gave me for our first Valentine’s Day—a heart with a diamond chip at its center.
“Sign here to confirm that’s everything and you received all your property,” the officer says.
“I have no idea if that’s everything. I’m astonished you keep this stuff for so long.” I sign where she’s drawn an X. “I wonder if any of it still fits.”
“Even if it does, you probably don’t want to go around wearing it,” she says dryly. “Look like you arrived in a time machine.”
“Like in Back to the Future,” the officer at the next desk says, but I haven’t seen that movie.
I loop the bag around my wrist and reach down to pick up the cat carrier Mona brought for me. It took fifteen minutes to coax Clementine out of a cubby near a gutter this morning. She hadn’t seen me in so long, and I was wearing the wrong clothes. Now she thumps around in the small gray box offering a periodic, dissatisfied meow, and one of the C.O.s is sneezing.
The officer presses a rubber stamp against my paperwork, sets it onto a scanner, and watches as the image slowly appears on her computer screen. “All right,” she says at last. “That’s it. You can go.”
“Out that door?”
“That’s the one.”
“Hope you enjoyed your stay at the El Centro Intercontinental Suites,” says the other officer at the desk, and I laugh. That alone is something to marvel at.
She presses a button and the double doors pull open. I feel the blast of heated desert air from outside, and there, at the curb where I saw Penelope jostled from the Corrections truck and into the building, sits a black pickup truck. Forrest is leaning against it, hands in his pockets, bouncing one foot impatiently. At the sight of the open doors he reaches in through the open passenger-side window and pulls out a white paper bag with the In-N-Out Burger logo on the front. He shakes it a little, as if he needs to entice me to step outside.