Free Inside These Walls by Rebecca Coleman Page A

probably not on the softball team she said she loved. She told me she grew up with a dog but not with cats because her father was allergic, and that made me feel sad. Ricky had loved our cats, especially Brundibar and Mischa, the gentle siblings he brought home from a box outside the grocery store. One of my calmest and most potent memories of him is the way, on stormy days, he sat on a battered easy chair on the back porch with his feet up on the overturned milk crates, watching the rain fall as he stroked our scaredy-cat Brundibar, who always curled up on his lap. Annemarie would have seen that, too, if things had gone differently. It would be one of her earliest memories.
    But that would never have been, I think. There would be no Annemarie if things had gone differently .
    I would have raised her Catholic, that much is sure. The parents who adopted her are Lutheran. With me there would have been a long christening gown, a First Holy Communion, a picture of the Blessed Virgin watching over her as she slept. I would have been like my own mother in that way, and Ricky would have tolerated it. Up until the end he kept his grudging, born-and-bred tolerance for the Catholic Church, probably just for my sake, but I always feared pushing him over the line into the hostile heresy I suspected he would readily embrace. Had I been completely honest with him about my encounters with the church, he would have lost his patience with it much sooner—but he also never would have put that gun in my hands at the rectory that night.
    I picture Father George’s face, the way his small eyes narrowed when I pushed up my mask, the way he scowled as if I were a familiar troublemaker. As if, once he recognized me, these circumstances fit fine with his impression of who I was. On his knees he was shorter than me, and that had made me feel all the more that this could not be borne.
    I shove the image from my mind and cover my eyes with both of my arms, breathing out a slow, heavy sigh. In the hallway there’s a familiar shuffling, and then the bars clang open. “Clara!” comes Janny’s voice. “You here, right? Hey, they say my blood sugar was real good today. I say, ‘Clara don’t let me eat the brown sugar no more. I tell her to put it on my canteen, she ignore me and say, ‘Oh, yeah, I did it.’” She laughs and feels around on my bed until she finds my calf, then pats it. “You awake? Let’s read the new book, okay? We got confession in an hour. Gotta read the sexy stuff real fast.”
    “I think I need some sleep right now.”
    “Okay. I wake you up for confession, then.”
    “Just let me sleep.”
    I roll over and pull my pillow over my head, blocking out the light, the sound of Janny’s voice, everything. Everything except the noise in my mind, and I know I must square my shoulders to bear that, because I don’t know why I ever thought I deserved peace.
    * * *
    For hours I lie still in bed, but not for a moment do I sleep. Around two o’clock in the morning I climb down silently from my bunk, being very cautious not to wake Janny, from whose bed rises the sound of wheezy, rhythmic breathing. It’s the song I sleep to every night. I take the shoebox from my shelf and go to sit by the bars, where the corridor’s security light is brightest. Inside are twelve cassette tapes, their clear plastic cases scratched and scraped. I run my fingers down the stack and slide out the one without a liner. I threw the liner away decades ago, leaving the tape loose in its case.
    KIRA, reads the label in bold sharp pen. At one point there were two stars on either side of the name, but I pulled off the sticker from both edges, giving up when scraping its center began to damage my fingernails. I take my radio down from the desk and click the tape into its ancient cassette player, turning the volume down to its absolute lowest. Too much clicking will catch the attention of the guards, so I fast-forward most of the way through without checking