Two Truths and a Lie

by Ellen McGarrahan

  Peter finds a dip in the road, almost like a cradle, and pulls the car to a stop. As he does so, I feel a deep stab of panic along my breastbone into my stomach. It burns.

  “Are you sure you’re ready for this?” Peter says.

  I stare at the road, willing myself to not be afraid. I nod. Yes.

  “And you sure you don’t want me to come?”

  Of course I want him to come.

  “I’ll be fine,” I say.

  “I’ll be right here,” he says.

  I lean over and kiss him and then, before I lose my nerve, I’m out of the car, walking.

  It is indeed very remote, even in this very remote part of west Ireland; there’s the spectacular view down the mountain toward the sea, there are the rocks on the hill in the high meadow to my right, there are the wildflowers growing in tangles along the old stone walls that line the road. That’s it. No traffic, no people, no sound except the wind. As I walk, the Irish PI’s warnings about Pringle ring in my ear. He said his sources were concerned that Pringle and Sunny are raising money—quite a bit of it. Publicly, the campaign is for the Sunny Center, a sanctuary for exonerated inmates they are planning to run here in western Galway, according to their website. They want $600,000. But Pringle was by his own account a member of the Irish Republican Army—well known for its “Once in, never out” creed—and then a leader of the Irish Republican Socialist Party, whose paramilitary wing has been banned as a terrorist group. That was why Liam, the Irish investigator, thought that maybe he should come along with me, armed and wearing a body cam. Then again, Pringle’s son is a member of the Irish legislature, and Pringle himself has long since publicly stated that he is no longer a member of any group, terrorist or otherwise.

  I shake it off.

  The red caravan is parked in front of a tidy white cottage. As I approach, three dogs come hurling out from behind the house, and behind the dogs looms Pringle himself. Looking—well, I don’t know him. But he does not look pleased.

  “How are you?” I call out across the yard.

  “I’m fine, and yourself?” A booming voice. He’s a big strong tall man in his seventies, in blue jeans and a blue fisherman’s cap. He has reached the gate, where I’m standing, and he’s looking at me closely. He looks like he wants to know what the hell a windblown American with an armful of white roses is doing at his front gate.

  “I’m fine. I’m sorry to intrude, but I’m hoping to speak with Sunny.”

  And with that, I burst into tears.

  * * *

  •

  Pringle reaching through, unlocking the gate. “There, there.” His voice softer now.

  “Were you in that silver car, then? Did you follow me up here? Does your friend want to come in too?”

  We’re walking across the yard, around toward the back door of the house. His eyes are on me, intent and intense. It’s not a dreamlike quality, this walk across the front yard toward Sunny Jacobs’s house, because dreams can sometimes feel real. It’s a parallel track, running just alongside my real life but on entirely separate ground. Pringle takes me around back, ostensibly to show me the view but really, I think, to quiz me. What’s my name? Where am I from? Who is the man I was with in the silver car? I get it. We are on the back half of the moon, and he—well, there’s an element of distrust here that seems born of experience, whispered meetings in hidden rooms, night vision, no sudden moves. Or maybe it’s just life out in the sticks.

  Now I’ve passed the test, I guess, because we are heading toward the house.

  “Ellen, what is your surname?” Pringle says suddenly, just as we reach the doorstep.

  It will be a big problem tomorrow, me being me. Thank you, Internet. But for the moment, it’s fine.

  “Sunny, are you still on the phone?” Pringle calls out, as we step across the threshold of the kitchen doorway.

  “No, I just finished.” From the living room, Sunny Jacobs’s voice comes floating back, high and squeaky and clear.

  “This is Ellen from Michigan and she’s come here to see you.”

  A small, plump, wrinkled, gray-haired woman in an oversized green sweater, sweatpants, and wire-rimmed glasses appears in the living room doorway, clutching a walker.

  “All the way from Michigan?” Sunny Jacobs says.

  I burst into tears again.

  * * *

  •

  “Tell me, tell me,” Sunny is saying. “Oh, baby, tell me.”

  We are sitting at her kitchen table and holding hands. It’s a big wooden oval table in front of a picture window, with a view to the west out over the lakes and mountains beyond. The table is cluttered with mail and papers and teacups and coasters; a bookcase along the wall is crammed with more papers and boxes, semi-unpacked. Pringle is bustling around, eavesdropping and making tea, and Sunny is restacking things on the tabletop to clear room for the mugs. I’m still crying. Actually, I have taken my eyeglasses off and set them down on the table so I can weep.

  “Did you know Jesse?” Sunny says.

  “No, but I witnessed his execution,” I whisper, and pretty much put my forehead right down on the tabletop.

  It’s hard to explain, but it’s such a relief to sit here with my head on the table like this. Maybe because of all of the people I’ve ever talked to in my entire life about the execution, I feel that Sunny Jacobs is not going to judge my grief. I judge my grief.

  “Oh, Ellen, I’ve talked about you,” Sunny says. “I’m glad you found me. I’ve talked about you, not knowing it was you, so many times. I say, ‘And the people who were there on behalf of the media said it was so horrible that ten years later they were still writing about it.’ ”

  It’s a line taken from The Exonerated, and I feel a twinge as she recites it. That line may refer to a piece I wrote about the electric chair for Slate in 1999, just before I testified in that last electric chair hearing. I’ve always felt uneasy that the line was in the play, because it’s made me feel like I’m supposed to agree with what the play had to say about the case, when in fact my feelings are complicated. A small uh-huh takes shape now somewhere in my weepiness, but it gets elbowed out of the way by the tears.

  “What an awful burden to carry,” Sunny says, squeezing my hands. “Don’t sit with it anymore. Let’s share it. Because I’ve never gotten over it myself. You needed to come and I needed to do this with you. Really. It’s huge.”

  I know I’m not here for her to comfort me. But right now it feels so good that I don’t want to let it go.

  * * *

  •

  “He looked very intense. He had a very, very memorable expression in his dark eyes,” I’m telling her, about Jesse’s last moments. She hasn’t asked. “It was like he was very conscious of what was going to happen. He looked at each of us individually, like, You’re watching me, I’m going to watch you, and that was very—it was individual, you know?”

  “Oh, that was his intention,” Sunny says. She’s got herbal tea in her mug, I’ve got black tea in mine. Pringle is off somewhere. “You’re not just watching something you can be detached from. You are going to watch me die and you are going to feel it with me. He connected with your soul.”

  I don’t want that to be true.

  “I used to be afraid, actually, that Jesse would take me with him,” she tells me, still holding my hands. “He was that powerful, and we were that connected. When they gave him the final death warrant, I got scared. I was afraid I’d be an empty shell left behind. There was a part of myself I had to reserve to myself, in order to survive, from then on.”

  * * *

  •

  When they were first sent to death row, Jesse painted her a circle on paper, and she stuck that painting on the wall of her cell and studied it every day. Because circles are perfect, and they contain the universe. Jesse was intense. He had an energy like nobody else’s.


  “He pushed you to come here. He made you come here! I have no doubt. I mean, how in the world would anybody find me here? Take a look around you! At the end of this road, you know? He had to have pushed you.”

  “I have kind of asked myself why,” I say, reaching for a tissue from the box she’s put on the table.

  “I’ve given up trying to understand the whys,” Sunny says. “I used to think, Why did this happen to me? Not out of self-pity, out of confusion. I just didn’t understand. I was—and everybody else that knew me would say—the last person in the whole world that would ever be involved in any way with somebody getting killed. I was a hippie! And a vegetarian!”

  Then she says, “Is that your husband?”

  I look up to see Pringle outside the picture window, and yes, there is Peter right beside him. They are looking out over the garden, arms crossed over their chests, with Peter nodding and smiling, like, Wow, nice goats! Then they disappear from view and reappear in the kitchen, Pringle in the lead, striding across the room toward the door to the front parlor. As they come in, Peter shoots me a look that is such a perfect Oh shit! that I almost laugh. Peter and I have no game plan. We have never exchanged so much as one syllable about him coming in. He has no idea what I’ve told Pringle and Sunny about why I’m here, and I have no idea what he’ll say when Pringle starts grilling him. And now Pringle has shepherded Peter straight into the living room and is closing the door.

  “Maybe you two can spend the night!” Sunny says.

  “Oh, we’d love to, but I left my asthma medications back in Galway,” I say.

  That does happen to be true.

  * * *

  •

  An hour or so later, and I am completely up a tree. Let’s see: (1) I cried upon arrival, so that’s not badass; (2) I’ve sat here at the kitchen table drinking tea and holding Sunny’s hands, also not badass; (3) I have failed to ask one single question about the crime, and not only is that not badass, it’s not even competent.

  Right now, I can see that this is—well, disaster is a pretty strong word. But I have no clue as to how to get on track.

  “So,” I begin. Always propitious. I feel squeamish about it. Bait-and-switchy. The Weeping Detective. We are still at the kitchen table, and we’ve been chatting about nothing much for—Oh God. Two hours? Now that my grief episode is behind me, the tension I feel is a toxic ball of twine in my solar plexus. But I finally manage to say it. “My goal is to write the real true story of what happened.”

  “Good!” Sunny says.

  Just then, Pringle, with Peter in tow, reappears and announces that they are off to buy dinner. Peter looks pale and strained, but he manages a quick smile. After they leave, Sunny gets out pretzel sticks. And as she eats them, she talks. Finally, I think. After so many years, it is time for the truth.

  The feeling doesn’t last long.

  After about twenty seconds, it becomes clear that I am being given her standard speech. I’ve read pretty much an exact word-for-word version of this before. And I feel a little hurt. I can’t quite believe she’s going to try to blow me off. She spends a total of about three minutes describing the events leading up to that fateful morning—she and Jesse needed a ride, Walter was a friend of Jesse’s, they stayed with Walter for a couple of days and she decided, Wow, this dude is creepy, and then her son Eric had a nightmare and she begged Jesse to get another friend to help, so he did, and Walter was giving them a ride to the other friend’s house.

  Then:

  “It was February, so days were short, so the decision was made to pull over at the rest area and wait till daytime. The rest is pretty much history and I choose not to go through that again. You can read it in my book,” she says. “Uh-oh, are those cows?”

  Sunny is pointing out the window behind me.

  I turn to look. “Yeah, those are cows,” I say.

  And that is that.

  There’s no going there, that’s perfectly clear.

  Pringle and Peter come back with pork chops and cook them up. We sit around the table, drink some more tea. Out the picture window, the mountains take on shadows like stone wings. We have dinner, we have dessert. They tell us about the time they took Kay Tafero, Jesse’s mom, out to dinner in Los Angeles, to a restaurant that had a group sing-along between dinner and dessert. Pringle and Sunny both break out into “That’s Amore”—When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie—and sway back and forth in their seats while they sing. We all laugh.

  The entire time, I feel like there is a ticking bomb inside my chest, ask her ask her ask her. But I cannot. There’s no point in trying, I can tell. All I’ll get is another no, and I don’t want one. I want to keep the door open. Plus, Pringle keeps looking at me like he’s trying to see right through me.

  After dinner I get up to help Sunny with the dishes. The dogs have been waiting for the leftovers and I put plates on the floor for them, as Sunny watches.

  As the dogs are finishing up, there’s a deep growl. It’s Barney, the terrier, baring his teeth. Every tooth, top and bottom. He looks like he’s smiling, but there’s no mistaking that sound.

  “That dog is going to bite someone,” I say.

  Sunny glances over.

  “Oh, that’s Peter’s dog,” she says.

  She doesn’t mean my husband. She means hers.

  * * *

  •

  Near the end of our evening—we’re back at the table again, watching the sun sink toward the mountains to the west—Pringle’s voice suddenly commands the room. He’s talking to me. “How did you know about Muiceannach?”

  He’s asking about our search for them at their former house, the one out at the end of that windswept spit by the water. Total silence falls while everyone turns to look at me. I can feel Peter’s anxious gaze.

  By doing a little bit of Internet research, I say.

  “No. Because, you see, we never said where we lived online,” Pringle says, very emphatically. He seems pissed off, like he’s decided he’s onto something. “So I’m very curious about how you found out we were in Muiceannach. Where online did you find it?”

  “On the registration for your website,” I tell him.

  “Go on, bring it up, she’ll show you,” Sunny says, jumping in.

  “I’ll just put in Sunny and Peter and Connemara and let’s see what happens,” Pringle says, almost sarcastically. And he takes an iPad out and starts typing his own name into Google, saying it out loud as he types each letter.

  The old address is not there. A low noise escapes Pringle, half groan, half growl.

  “In America, the search comes up with different stuff.” Sunny is explaining Ireland’s privacy laws. “That’s how she did it—in America.” She’s defending me. Or defusing Pringle—hard to tell. Pringle’s not having it.

  “Look, I’ll bring the piece of paper with your old address on it tomorrow,” I say, locking eyes with him across the table. They’ve offered to drive us around the countryside and we’ve said we’d be delighted. We’ve said we will be here in the morning, first thing.

  Pringle relaxes, just a bit, and Peter and I use the moment to take our leave. Pringle walks us out. We can see him standing at the gate as we drive off.

  * * *

  •

  All the way down the mountainside, I kick myself. Six hours! Six hours, and not one bit of information. I could fucking kill myself. Or cry.

  “I would have been fired,” I tell Peter, as he drives. “If I were still working for my old boss, he would have fired me.”

  The Irish hills glow with last light now around us.

  “And I’m such a liar,” I say. “Holding her hand like I’m some kind of penitent. Or pilgrim. I’m a liar and a thief.”

  Peter, for his part, looks pained. When we get back to Galway, he collapses on the couch, pale and tired. He is clutc
hing his hands across his stomach, with his eyes on the ceiling.

  “I don’t think I can do that again,” he says. “I had a little man inside my chest all day pummeling to get out and start asking questions.”

  “That’s because you’re honest.”

  “I just don’t think I can sit there and pretend everything’s fine.”

  “It’s like that scene in Roger Rabbit,” I say. “The one where Roger is hiding behind the wall and he hears ‘Shave and a Haircut’ and he just can’t stop himself, the longer it goes on the more he starts trembling, and when the final dun-dun-da-dun-dun comes, he bursts out and screams, ‘Two bits!’ That’s you.”

  Peter laughs, still looking pale.

  “But you know,” I add officiously, “really, you can’t do that.”

  We rest for a moment, listening to the rain on the windowpanes.

  “Do you think Pringle thought we were double agents?” I say.

  “Well, if we are MI6, we fucking suck at our jobs,” Peter says. We both laugh.

  But now I feel wretched too, and mad at myself. We’ve come all this way and we found her by going door-to-door in Gaeltacht Connemara and I sat with her at her kitchen table and held her hands? It makes me feel insane. And she’s not going to talk. She’ll never talk.