Inside These Walls Read Online Free PDF Page A

finished repenting.”
    “If I remember correctly, we discussed saying a daily rosary for one of your victims.”
    “My youngest victim.” I look at the mirror past his head, see my face reflected pale beside his dark shoulder. “I’m not sure who that is.”
    “I believe it was the nineteen-year-old daughter. Was it not?”
    I close my eyes, feel a line form between them. “So you meant Eun Hee specifically?”
    He opens the folder in his lap, flips through some of the lined yellow pages held in by a strip of metal. “It says in your file—”
    “I know what it says in my file. It’s hard to explain.”
    His face has clouded with a kind of suspicion. “Is there a reason you can’t pray for the one you believe to be the youngest?” he asks. “Or for more than one?” It’s not like you don’t have a variety of choices, I imagine he’s thinking. I wouldn’t blame him.
    “Penance for Catholics is very specific,” I point out, gently chopping the air with my hands to draw the neat, invisible box this faith creates around my soul. “This many prayers, not one more, not one less. You must repent for every sin, or the penance doesn’t cover it. It isn’t a vague, generalized sort of forgiveness. So it bothers me if you don’t give me a specific name.”
    The droop at the corners of his eyes tells me I have worn his patience to a frayed edge. “Eun Hee, then,” he says. “Pray for her.”
    My sigh embodies both relief and, oddly, disappointment. “All right.”
    He nods, but there’s an uncertainty to it. He takes a breath, releases it. “The goal here is to make personal progress, Clara. Spiritual progress. I want to help, but I feel like there’s something you’re holding back,” he says.
    “Not at all,” I say. Now I will need to confess to a lie.
    * * *
    I pray for Eun Hee, and the following Sunday I stand in the Communion line once again and taste the dry wheat starch on my tongue. That afternoon I sit outside in the sunlight for a long time with Clementine on my lap, looking out over the steel frames of the high-voltage towers marching across the valley, the looping sweep of their cables. Between the irrigated fields the land is in its desert state. The green is so fragile. It looks as if it could be wiped away with the swipe of a finger, like moss on a stone.
    I think about asking Emory Pugh to send me a package of catnip. I’ve made cat toys for Clementine before—knitted mice, a feather tied to a piece of yarn—but I used to love watching the ecstasy of a young cat rolling in the grass under the spell of the stuff. I never ask him for anything, but for Clementine, perhaps I’ll make an exception.
    * * *
    On Monday morning, back at work in the Braille workshop, I’ve got a print of Picasso’s Guernica on the light box when the public address system crackles and I hear my number barked out on the list for visitors. At first I think, This is strange; I haven’t had a visitor in years . Usually visits are restricted to Saturdays, and those during the week are only for rare situations where the visitor has traveled a great distance or can’t often come. And then, in a flash of insight, I know who it is. It’s Karen Shepard, making good on her last letter’s breathless insistence to “meet in person” to “discuss those questions on which no one else could shed light” but me.
    “I’m sorry,” I say to Shirley, who is frowning up at the intercom, her curled white hair resting cloudlike against her shoulders. “I didn’t request any visitors.”
    “It’s all right, Clara. It must be somebody special. You go. Enjoy your visit.”
    I set down my pencil and try to conceal my irritation, lest the guards interpret it as hostility. My wrists shackled, I am led down the long hallway and then the stairs, to the yellow cinderblock room filled with booths. The second from the end is empty. I sit in the chair and face the visitor through the thick, smudged Plexiglas. The woman on the