Read Online Inside These Walls by Rebecca Coleman - Free Book Online Page B

is a small pile of papers. She throws a nervous look in my direction. “I wasn’t sure what to do when they sent me to this room. They seem to change the rules constantly.” I nod, and she adds, “That must be hard to live with.”
    “You get used to it,” I say.
    She slides the papers across the table to me, and I realize they’re large photos, upside down. “I brought some pictures of me growing up,” she explains. “I figured we have to start somewhere, and you were probably wondering. So, here.”
    Oh, the guilt. I feel the stab of it in the soft place below my rib cage, and it keeps going, like a knife is digging around in there. In twenty-four years I hardly gave a moment’s thought to the subject. I’d surrendered her for adoption, and knew that people who adopted babies did so because they wanted one desperately. I took for granted that the infant was well off, but her fate was beyond my control in any case. With fumbling hands I flip over the photographic paper and see a picture of a toddler in front of a Christmas tree, a large green gift bow in her hands, smiling beside a Big Wheel tricycle.
    “I have really good parents,” she says. “My mom wanted a baby for years and could never have one. She always said I was her special blessing from God. So life’s been good to me, pretty much. My parents gave me everything they could, and that was a lot.”
    The other photographs are in the same vein—a school photo of a little girl with blond pigtails, a long-legged nine-year-old in a fancy black and white dress at a piano, and then a baby again, nearly bald and dressed in a cowgirl costume for Halloween. I feel the clutching inside my chest again, the way I felt when they told me about my mother. I try to relax, to soothe the tension, but in the end I shove the pictures back across the table and press my palms against my eyes.
    “I’m sorry,” she says, her voice thin as porcelain. “I just wanted you to see I was fine.”
    “I’m glad. I’m truly glad.”
    “I figured you probably worried a lot. So you can put that to rest now.” She pats my elbow in a tentative way, and I fold my arms on the table before me. “I wanted to tell you that I appreciate what you did, and I think it was very brave. I can’t imagine how hard it must be to choose to give up your child so she can have a better chance in life. Thank you.”
    Don’t you see? I think, and inside I’m screaming in frustration. What choice did I ever have? What was I supposed to do, hand her over to Clinton and his wife? To the parents who raised Ricky Rowan? She would have been better off left on a stranger’s doorstep. And back in 1985, nobody asked a prisoner in her second trimester of pregnancy whether she’d prefer a trip to the women’s clinic downtown. She just endured, and signed her paperwork at the end of it, and got on with her life in a smaller jumpsuit. That was all.
    A silence nestles between us, awkward and ungainly. After a few moments Annemarie speaks. “I read that you went to art school in Wisconsin.”
    “I did. I’m not sure what I expected to do with that degree. I had visions of being a portrait artist, like the ones you see at Knott’s Berry Farm. Lucrative work, that.”
    She smiles. “So is that why you came back to California? To get work there?”
    “No, I just didn’t like Wisconsin.”
    She laughs, and I smile at her—a natural reaction, but one that feels unfamiliar to me now. “I missed California,” I say. “I really loved the beach. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen it now, but I know it hasn’t gone anywhere.”
    “Did you work as an artist when you came back?”
    “No, I had a student loan to pay, so I decided to be practical. I took an office job instead.” I push my bangs back from my eyes. “I worked for a licentious dentist.”
    She laughs again. “A licentious dentist?”
    “Yes, he was always making off-color jokes and patting his office staff on the rear. The turnover