Chapter 8 - The Prison Visiting Room
The South Carolina Department of Corrections Camille Griffin Graham Correctional Institution in Columbia is a landscape of razor wire, beige cinderblock, and heavy electronic gates that slam with a dull, hydraulic shudder.
Six months after the wedding, I sat at a stainless-steel table in the non-contact visitation room, separated from the opposite chair by an inch of scratched, bullet-resistant polycarbonate.
The heavy steel door on the inmate side buzzed open.
Clara walked in.
The transformation was so total, so absolute, that for five seconds my brain refused to connect the woman in front of me with the smiling bride from the conservatory.
Her long, honey-blonde hair had been chopped into an uneven, shoulder-length bob by prison barbers. Her skin, stripped of luxury serums, chemical peels, and digital smoothing filters, was gray, blotchy, and mapped with stress acne along her jaw. She wore a baggy, stiff orange jumpsuit with SCDC stenciled across the back in black paint. Her nails were bitten down to the quick, raw and red.
She sat down heavily on the metal stool, picking up the heavy plastic telephone receiver with fingers that shook uncontrollably.
I lifted mine.
"Rachel," she whispered. Her voice sounded thin, cracked, stripped of every trace of that theatrical musicality she had cultivated for her channel. "You... you actually came."
"I came because the restitution papers need your signature," I said, sliding an envelope against the glass partition. "The court ordered eighty-five thousand dollars in legal and forensic costs. Your corporate entity has forty-two thousand left in its liquidation escrow. I agreed to waive the balance if you sign the non-disparagement rider."
Clara looked at the envelope, but she didn't touch it. Her dark eyes welled with tears that spilled over her lashes, carving clean tracks through the gray pallor of her cheeks.
"Rachel, please," she sobbed, pressing her forehead against the scratched plastic. "Talk to the prosecutor. Talk to Judge Vance. My lawyer said... he said if I don't get a sentence reduction, I’m going to serve seven years. Seven years, Rachel! I’m twenty-six! My life is over! Nobody will touch my brand! The internet... they made a documentary about me on Netflix! They're calling me the 'Barbed Wire Bride'!"
I looked at my little sister through the glass.
I looked for the anger that had sustained me through the hospital rooms, the grand jury testimony, the depositions.
It wasn't there anymore. There was only a profound, hollow sadness—the sadness you feel watching a magnificent, toxic weed finally get pulled up by the roots.
"Your life isn't over, Clara," I said softly. "Your performance is over. There’s a difference."
"I did what Mom told me to do!" she cried, her voice rising into that familiar, hysterical pitch that used to make our father reach for his checkbook. "She told me you were going to ruin us! She said you were jealous because I was pretty and you were plain! She said you always hated me!"
"I loved you, Clara," I said.
The sentence hung in the small, sterile booth like an anvil suspended by a thread.
Clara froze, her mouth slightly open, the tears stopping on her chin.
"I loved you when you were seven years old and had the measles," I told her, my voice steady, calm, absolute. "I stayed by your bed and read you fairy tales for four days while Mom was in Palm Beach. I loved you when you failed high school algebra, and I spent three months tutoring you every night so you wouldn't get held back. I loved you enough that when you shoved that crown into my head, my first thought wasn't to hit you back. My first thought was to get Harper out of the room so she wouldn't see what you had become."
Clara’s hands came up to cover her mouth. A ragged, terrible wail tore from her chest, muffling against her palms.
"Sign the papers, Clara," I said, pointing to the envelope beneath the glass. "Do your time. Read some books that don't have pictures of yourself in them. And when you get out at thirty-three, maybe you can figure out who you actually are when the camera is turned off."
May you like
I hung up the plastic receiver.
I stood up, adjusted my coat, and walked toward the heavy steel exit door without looking back through the glass. Behind me, the sound of Clara’s weeping was cut off completely by the pneumatic slam of the security latch.
