Clementine grows tired of me and pads out into the sun. I pull up my knees and rest my elbow against one, drawing my fingers through my bangs in an idle, comforting way. There was a time, in the midst of my years with Ricky, that I never could possibly have imagined it would end this way. Then, he was the good one, the protector, the one who had brought a particular Clara back from the dead. By the end of my trial he was only a figure in a funhouse mirror, and has been nothing else ever since.
The shape of her mouth, the set of her front teeth. The way her shoulders sloped, then straightened as she slapped the certificate against the glass.
Was this the legacy of us, then? From that desert of waste and loss, something beautiful and good? How was that possible?
After Mass on Sunday I attend a crochet class in the art therapy room. In the center of the table is a pyramid of skeins of donated yarn, some in colors I recognize as having been fashionable when I was a child. I’m assigned a crochet hook marked with a number, which the teacher records in a notebook before I can begin.
I’ve crocheted before—my mother taught me when I was in junior high—and it comes back to me more quickly than I’d expected. The teacher hands me an instruction booklet of patterns for dish towels, and I begin working on a more advanced one as my fellow students struggle to make a beginning chain. They’re loud and boisterous, but they leave me alone. I’ve taken a seat near the television bolted into the corner so I can keep an eye on the news as I work. I’m hoping for more information about Penelope Robbins, but I missed the first twenty minutes of the hour, and now the broadcast is focused on trivial celebrity news, sports, and reviews of movies I will never see. Still, I picture little Penelope languishing in her cell in the county jail, stoically terrified and possessing not a single coping skill for her new environment, the way I used to be. I’m sure she’s reading a lot of novels. Earnestly eating the canned vegetables they serve her, doing jumping jacks beside her bunk so she can keep her figure. Light and pretty and very nervous; a Bambi of the cellblock. It’s only a matter of time before she lets her guard down in the shower—disarmed by the delicious, steaming heat of the water—and finds herself railroaded face-first into the tile wall, someone’s thick fingers shoved in where they shouldn’t be, a giant hand on the side of her neck, a hissing whisper that she likes it. If she had reason to order a hit on her own father, perhaps she’s used to that kind of thing, but that won’t take away from the shock the first time it happens.
I work for a long time, in part because it keeps me away from my cell and the possibility of a visit from the priest. I didn’t take Communion this morning, and I don’t want to talk about it. At the end of an hour I have a nice yellow rectangle without a single flaw, as I’ve fixed each mistake along the way. It’s good work, and good work is satisfying.
Once back in my cell, I write a reply to Emory Pugh’s latest letter. And for the first time since my mother died, I ask someone for a favor. It feels strange and fills me with chagrin, but I don’t have much choice in the matter. Prison becomes a simple life if you don’t need anything outside it. But once you do, it’s hell. It’s what they intended.
“You hear that?” Janny asks. Her voice is low. We’re sitting on opposite sides of her bed, playing a game of Jenga her daughter sent her for Christmas five years ago. She’s remarkably good at it; to choose her next move, her sensitive fingers patter down the sides of the column without ever making it fall. She jerks her chin toward our cell’s farthest wall, and I listen, but hear nothing.
“What is it?”
“You can’t hear that? You’re getting deaf, old lady.”
I get up, cautiously so as not to upset the Jenga tower, and stand near the bars with an ear cocked to the left. Now I can hear it—the hum of our neighbor’s voice beneath the current of noise from her television, a one-sided conversation. She’s talking on a contraband cellphone. This particular neighbor is in for ten to fifteen for armed robbery, and while I can’t quite tell, it sounds like she’s arranging a surprise for the person who snitched on her.
“While you’re up, can you get me my Rolaids?” Janny asks.
I fetch the package and return to my spot on the bed. It goes without saying that neither of us will report on either the cellphone or our neighbor’s retaliation plans. During my first few months here I went to the guards for everything like that. I had no idea—or rather, the wrong idea—and I tried to understand prison by applying to it the rules of high school, where currying the favor of teachers was the best way to receive privileges and recommendations. I graduated third in my class, so I was eager to apply the skills that had served me so well a few years earlier. What I didn’t understand yet was that the guards were not looking for the fulfilling experience of helping young people reach their potential, and I couldn’t distinguish myself from my delinquent peers by demonstrating the great moral distance between myself and them. I was a murderer, and everyone knew it, and what the guards wanted was for me to stop turning myself into a cat toy to be batted around in the corridors. It made their workdays more tedious.
“Wish I had a phone like that,” Janny says. She lays a Jenga block on top of the tower with gentle precision. “I could call my daughter whenever I want. No more standing around waiting, then everybody yell at you if you talk too long.”
“How old was she when you got here?” I ask. Her brow furrows at the question, and I know it’s a strange one. We each know what the other did, but etiquette dictates that information like this should be volunteered. It’s like talking about money in the outside world—prying is in poor taste.
“Six,” she says. “She’s nineteen now.”
I redo the calculation quickly in my mind. “She would have to be twenty-one.”
“No, she’s nineteen.”
“Janny, you’ve been here for fifteen years. If she was six when you came in, she’s twenty-one now.”
“I know how old my daughter is,” she scoffs. “You gonna take your turn, or not?”
I slide out a block from the center. It moves easily; time has rounded its edges, left the wood with a certain velvety slickness. My mind is filled with a jumble of questions I want to ask Janny—questions which, in eight years together, I have never thought or cared to ask. Does she have memories of you from before? How did you build a bond with her, when you’ve been here almost all her life? Does she resent you for what you did? Forgive you? Do you have hope that it will be normal after you’re released?
Yet I can’t ask any of these. When Amber Jones asked her question in an ecstatic whisper—didn’t you have his baby? —it was nothing Janny hadn’t heard about me before. But from the beginning, I denied it was true. I’ve always brushed off the rumor as silly gossip. And I don’t know what to tell her now.
Or what to tell Annemarie. At the end of our visit, as she gathered her purse to leave, she said she would try to come back in a month or so. She lives in Riverside, which is only two hours away, but a four-hour round trip still requires planning. You have three more weeks to pull it together, I think. To figure out how to come across as an ordinary mother and have in place the right answers to all her questions.