Inside These Walls Read Online Free PDF

other side—blonde, young—looks at a guard uncertainly, then lifts the phone receiver and presses it to her ear. I do the same.
    “Clara Mattingly?” she asks.
    “Yes. I don’t do interviews.”
    “Well, this isn’t really a typical interview. I promise I’m not going to disclose anything you tell me.”
    I scowl. “Putting it in a book is disclosing it, don’t you think?”
    She regards me with an uneasy gaze. She has poor eyes for a journalist—too large and rabbity looking, lacking in reserve. “I wouldn’t do that.”
    “Listen, I’m not about to feed you information you can use to cobble together some biography of Ricky, whether or not you quote me on it. It’s a worthless project. And no, you can’t quote me on that, either.”
    She nestles the phone more tightly against her jaw. “I don’t think you understand,” she says. “You see, you’re my mother.”
    I stare.
    With her free hand, she grasps, drops, then grasps again at a sheaf of papers on the slim counter before her. “I have…I have all these papers. I just want to know some things. I just want—it’s nothing for a book. I had a miscarriage last year, and…well, it was the wrong time anyway, but before I get married…”
    She’s got the phone crammed against her shoulder, both hands now working through her file folders. Her fingers shake. Her mouth is moving so fast, but already I don’t like what I see. I don’t like this, I want to leave, and then she slaps a single rectangle of paper up against the window. It’s pink and patterned and it bears a seal.
    “This is my birth certificate,” she says. “The names are wrong, I know. Those are my adoptive parents. But if you recognize this—maybe this date or this place. It says, California State Women’s Prison at El Centro. And so I looked and looked—”
    “I know nothing about this,” I say.
    All five of her fingers fly out in an urgent stop motion, and the paper slips down to the table. I can see her face again, and her eyes have welled with tears. “No. I know . I’ve searched and searched. I’ve put up one query after another on these adoptee search sites. And this woman, she was a nurse here in the 1980s, she replied. She said, absolutely for sure, that it was you. I didn’t believe her at first, maybe for obvious—”
    “Good. You shouldn’t have.”
    “No, no. I don’t judge you, I don’t judge you. Please know that. I only want some medical information. Because after my miscarriage—it was pretty late for one—the doctor said, do you know of any genetic issues in your family, and I said I just don’t know. So that’s all I want. I’m not here to…to bother you.”
    Ricky’s mouth. Ricky’s jaw. The particular set of her front teeth, the narrow slope of her chin.
    She shoves the heel of her hand against her eye, smudges a streak of moisture toward her ear, tinted with tiny black flakes of mascara. There is a diamond on her ring finger, and the gold band is loose against her skin, sliding around with the motion of her hand. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “I know this is so inconsiderate of me. I just thought if I sent you a letter, you might not believe me. So I came and I brought everything.”
    I look to the guards, who stand on each side of the booths, hands folded at the front of their gray-and-black uniforms. Neither looks as if they are about to end this visit, as they sometimes do when emotions reach a fever pitch. I look at the girl again and feel myself swallow hard, by reflex, as if forcing down a stone.
    “That date looks a bit familiar,” I say. “What did you say your name was?”
    “Annemarie. It’s Annemarie Leska.”
    It’s like a roaring noise tearing upward through time, from the end that was always an end to a beginning that was never a beginning. What was torn from me has always been gone, the relief of a particular torment and nothing more. But a name, a name—she has a name. She can never again be a nothing, never