My lawyer, Mona Singer, has aged so noticeably since I last saw her that it’s difficult to control the surprise on my face as I shake her hand. “Clara,” she says. “I was surprised to hear from you.” Her voice comes out older, too. All the smoking is catching up with her.
We sit down in the small private office reserved for attorney visits. The acoustic tile of the ceiling is pocked and dusty, and the room has a cool, metallic smell—drafty windows and steel desks. “I had a surprise visitor yesterday,” I tell her. “The…the baby.”
“What baby?”
“I guess she’s twenty-three now.”
Her eyebrows rise in fake recognition, but then it turns genuine. “Ahh. The one you surrendered to Social Services just before the trial. My, that was a long time ago, wasn’t it? It sure gets away from me.”
I fidget with the ballpoint pen set on the table between us. “She wants a medical history, you know, for her own records. Of both me and her father. What I have is so limited, and I really have no way of getting her father’s information.”
“Well, you could send his family a letter and ask. You could explain.”
“Except that his parents have died, and none of them knew about her in the first place. I refused to declare a father for her when she was born.”
Mona nods. Her eyes and mouth have shifted to a helpless, well-you-have-a-point expression that I don’t like.
“I just can’t think of a way to even get my own family’s medical history for her. My father died when I was six, and with my mother gone, too, there’s nobody else to ask. Nobody in my extended family would want to hear from me. None of them has spoken to me since my conviction.”
“Aren’t you still in touch with your stepbrother?”
I feel my flat expression return. “I’ve never been in touch with my stepbrother.”
“But I thought you two were close. Didn’t he speak in your defense at the trial?”
“Yes, but we’re not close.”
She presses her lips together tightly. “Hmm.”
“I also wanted to know whether…whether it’s too late for a new trial.”
Now she blurts a laugh. “A new trial? I don’t think so, Clara. Why would you think that’s called for?”
“If there were extenuating circumstances that hadn’t come up during the discovery process.”
“Such as?”
“I’m just asking.”
She shakes her head slowly. “I did everything I could to get you acquitted, and you’ve used up all your appeals. You were such a young woman at the time, so obviously scared and naive, but none of that made a difference to the jury in light of the evidence. Forrest Hayes testified against you, and what he saw was compelling. I can’t imagine what could come to light this many years later that would undermine his eyewitness testimony.”
I look away and feel my expression go sour. “Some eyewitness. He lied and lied. He was only out to save his own neck.”
“You know I don’t dispute that one bit, but the jury felt differently. As for your medical records, I think the best approach would be to provide your daughter with your stepfamily’s information and her father’s family’s information and leave it to her to ask them for it directly. Ricky was her father, correct?”
I hesitate, resting my curled fingers lightly against my mouth. “I don’t want to discuss that with her.”
She cocks an eyebrow. “She’s already found you. You think she won’t figure it out?”
“I’d rather leave it an open question. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be adopted and go looking for your biological mother and find out it’s me. I can’t let her think both of her parents were evil. That would be devastating.” I rub the bridge of my nose between my thumb and forefinger. “My mother was so wonderful. It makes this so horribly embarrassing.”
“You’re not evil, Clara,” Mona says in her measured, even voice, which is meant to be a gentle reminder that she’s my attorney, not my therapist. “You made some poor choices. And hiding the truth, even for noble reasons, always ends badly. My advice to you is, if she asks, tell her the truth.”
I nod, but only to be polite. She gathers the straps of her bag and rises from her seat. “I’m sorry I can’t be of more help, but this is really beyond my reach. I wish you luck with it.”
Luck. I don’t offer my hand for her to shake, and instead simply place my hands behind my back, awaiting the shackles.
Clementine struts across a picnic table, the top of her tail twitching. Some of the other inmates, a gang of cornrowed and heavyset women, call out to her. “Hey, Frankfurter. Tsk, tsk, tsk. Over here, Frankfurter.” But she leaps down and comes over to me instead, which could be dangerous later. Prisoners have fought over smaller things than the favoritism of a cat.
“Check this out,” says one of the women. She’s a big girl with pale, ruddy skin and dishwater-blond cornrows, in here for assault with a deadly weapon. Facing the crowd at the table, she stands on tiptoe and raises her arms above her head, fingers touching, like a jewelry-box ballerina. Then she begins a lumbering, inelegant dance, leaping and twirling. The women on the benches are dying of laughter. Their hoots carry across the yard, piercing the air like bottle rockets.
I ignore them. It’s times like this when I’m glad Janny is exempt from yard time. The heat and harsh rays of the sun are too much for her, so during this hour she goes instead to the little gym in Med Seg for a slow ride on the recumbent exercise bike. If she were out here I would feel anxious about the hostility from the white women, wonder how I can stop her from getting hurt if I’m attacked, since I know she would follow me like a shadow; but alone I can’t worry about it. Their goal is to set me on edge, and they won’t succeed.
I have nothing for Clementine today, but she stalks around me anyway and accepts a scratch behind her ears. I sit in a shady spot with my back against the building, gazing out over a part of the yard that offers no view of the valley, only scrub and fencing. I’m trying to remember the birth. The pain—wave upon wave of it, and I, like a shipwreck survivor, clinging to a shattered board and treading weakly in the cold tide—that’s all I can remember. I run my tongue across my chipped canines, the broken ends long since rounded smooth. For months before I went into labor my stomach had borne marks like the raking of a giant claw, but not until it began did I realize those scars had only been a warning of what was to come. In my lifetime I had been held down, I had been raped by force, I had felt a man’s tensed arm like a crook around my throat, twinned with a menacing whisper. But I had never known what pain meant, not until that day. My concept of it had been laughable, like a child’s fancy.
All those months I had assumed I was carrying a boy. Ricky’s son, a miniature he had planted there by the sheer hurricane force of his will—it seemed so obvious. After the night of the crimes we had retreated to the Cathouse, as the neighbors called it, and I had left my birth control pills in the back of my dresser drawer at home. So terrified was I that my mother would go through my things and discover them that I called my stepbrother from the kitchen phone—Clinton, of all people—and asked him to bury them in the garbage. I was far less afraid of pregnancy, an idea which seemed vague and remote then, than of my mother learning I wasn’t a virgin.
I never thought for a moment that it would be a girl. A girl was a creature who belonged to her mother, and the infant I carried clearly did not belong to me. When it kicked, when it tumbled, these seemed only to be shadows of Ricky’s hold over me, and it was reasonable that he had found a way to remind me constantly of my bond to him, even in our separation. I couldn’t see him or speak to him, but he was too large a presence to really be gone. He had simply tunneled inward, and when it was all over and I was at last alone, it felt like the greatest of mercies. It was a red-faced shame to me that I had ever loved him, and as long as I had been exposed as a fool, I could at least nurse my wounds in solitude.