And yet, somewhere else in their own town, perhaps at this very moment, there was a mother who was comforting a child who believed Iso was the enemy.
24
IT WAS NEVER REALLY QUIET on Sussex I. It didn’t matter how many men were here, whether it was close up to full or spindly as it was now, with fifteen men rattling around a unit built for fifty. It was a loud place. The sound was weird, too, hard to pinpoint, whipping around corners and bouncing off walls, almost like a living thing that was stalking them all. Banging someone in, ingrained tradition that it was, was almost painful for Walter, but he wouldn’t deny anyone that honor. After all, he had the distinction of being the only man here who had been welcomed back twice.
Now, lying awake at what he figured to be 1 A.M. or so, he listened to the noises that seemed to prevail at night, roaming the unit like little forest creatures. Pops, whistles, echoes. You would think a person would get used to it, after twenty-plus years, but he still found the night sounds disturbing, and although it was not the noises that wakened him, they made it that much harder to get back to sleep. He thought he might have a condition of sorts, some kind of overly sensitive hearing. His father had hated loud sounds—the television, the radio, all had to be kept at low hums. He said he needed it that way because he spent his days surrounded by clanging and banging. As a young man, Walter had thought his father crotchety. But now that Walter was forty-six, he wondered if it was a change that came with age, if the ears just got plain worn out over time.
Forty-six. His father had been almost that old when Walter was born, his mother a few years younger. He was what they called a change-of-life baby, and he knew the exact moment of his conception: Christmas Eve, or maybe an hour into Christmas Day, after his mother had had some apple brandy. It was, his sister told him once, easy enough to date. It was the only time their parents had sex that year and probably the last time, ever. Of course, his sister could have been teasing. Although she was thirteen years older and should have known better, she had been hard on Walter, jealous of her new sibling. He always thought she resented him for getting the good looks that she could have used. Ugly as a mud fence, as the saying went, and the fact that Walter had never seen a mud fence didn’t get between him and understanding that phrase. His mother said his sister was plain, but Belle—unfortunate name—was ugly, aggressively so, with a lazy eye and a big nose and a witchlike chin. She had been lucky to find a man who wanted to marry her. A decent-looking guy at that, who made a good living. Some men just didn’t respect themselves.
Belle was his only living relative, and she had cut off all contact with him shortly after his parents died, a one-two punch, within six months of each other. Lung cancer had taken his father, and his mother had died from the stew of complications that went with diabetes. They had both been in their seventies, but Belle blamed it all on him, said they had died from the shame of being his parents. Why don’t you die, then? Walter had asked. Belle said she was lucky enough to have her own name and live in a different town, that she had escaped being Walter Bowman’s sister, otherwise she might be dead, too. To which he said: bullshit. He didn’t doubt that his arrest and his trials had been hard on his parents, but—lung cancer, diabetes! The men on Sussex had nothing on God when it came to killing people in painful, prolonged ways. The hardest case here hadn’t taken more than a few hours to kill anyone. God took months, years.
Besides, it wasn’t as if his parents had dropped dead in the immediate aftermath. They had both hung on for seven, eight years. Belle had just been looking for an excuse to cut him off, and once she buried their mother, she had one. She would be almost sixty now, her own children grown and, almost certainly, the source of some heartache for her. And he would be dead short of fifty, if the commonwealth of Virginia had its way. As of this year, he had spent exactly half his life in prison. Walter supposed some would see a neatness to that, a pleasing symmetry.
Walter begged to differ.
He sighed, practiced some techniques recommended for insomnia—breathing, counting, emptying his mind, meditating with the mantra Barbara had supplied him—but he could tell that this was going to be one of those nights where he was destined to lie awake. Sometimes he wondered if a part of his mind was greedy for a few more hours of consciousness, if it was trying to grab every moment of wakefulness it could. It’s okay, buddy, he soothed his fretful subconscious. Don’t count me out yet. We might have years ahead of us, still. Funny, how hard it was to get two parts of his own mind to talk to each other.
November 25, the fretful half roared back. Less than two months. And you didn’t even get to talk to her today!
It’s okay, he said. It’s okay.
Walter was not the least bit perturbed that Elizabeth had needed to cut their conversation short. He assumed it was something serious—and definitely not a husband requiring a ride from the airport. Funny, how she still couldn’t lie for shit. Whatever it was, it was serious, but not scary-serious, not an injured child. He would have heard that in her voice. But something involving one of the children. What did children require that was serious, yet fell short of actual harm? He had no idea.
He had no doubt that Elizabeth was a good mother. But he was still disappointed that this was all Elizabeth’s life had amounted to, that this was what she had chosen to do with the great gift he had conferred on her. Ironic, he knew, because he was the one who was always advocating that women return to their natural roles. But he had never meant all women, just those women who took it too far, imagined themselves men. Fact was, he hadn’t always thought about Elizabeth as female, although he could understand why people were confused on that score.
The boy they banged in today, he had stolen an eighty-seven-year-old woman’s purse, then raped and killed her. Disgusting. Walter could never understand someone like that, nor would he ever understand those that thought he should. The outside world saw the men in Sussex I as indistinguishable from one another, a clump of monsters and savages. But the fact that their crimes fell into the same category didn’t make the men the same. Walter might not even be here if it weren’t for a stupid metal box found on the side of the road. Well, they had the kidnapping charge and the rape charge, but those could have been mitigated by a smart lawyer, not that he had a smart lawyer back then. He had one now, though, in Jefferson D. Blanding, who, he suspected, was actually named Jefferson Davis Blanding, after the president of the Confederacy, and had the bad sense to be ashamed of it. Not that Walter held Jefferson Davis in any esteem, and he would be the first to remind people that West Virginia seceded from Virginia rather than be part of the Confederacy. But no one’s responsible for his name.
One’s actions—yes. And no. He had done what they said he did. In a different system, he might have owned up to his crimes more readily. There was a part of him that would have liked to tell the whole story, although the catch was that he didn’t understand his own crimes until he’d had years to think about them. Here, in Sussex I, amid all the indignities, there was this one freedom, absent in the outside world. A man got to think. A lot. Walter had thought about what he had done, and he saw there was no way he could ever live outside prison. He belonged here. In fact, if he were scientifically inclined, he would want to find a way to extend prisoners’ lives so they could serve multiple life sentences. He owed Holly Tackett a life, he owed Maude Parrish a life. And, yes, he owed the other girls, too, but it wasn’t his fault that he had never confessed to those crimes. That was the system, refusing to make a deal, refusing to acknowledge that he had any power. Wipe out the death penalty and I’ll tell you everything, he had said more than once, but they wouldn’t even entertain the notion. Justice for the one—the rich girl, the doctor’s daughter—trumped justice for all. That wasn’t right.
The other thing that bothered him about his situation, as he chose to think of it, was that he didn’t understand what it meant, to be judged by a jury of one’s peers. He wasn’t fool enough to take it literally, to think that they had to
find a dozen Walter Bowmans. Still, what was a peer? There had been women on his jury, for example, and with all due respect, he did not think women could really understand what he had decided was a temporary insanity, the bottled-up energy of a young man who knew he had something to offer, something of value, but couldn’t find anyone who understood that. Today, with the Internet, he’d have no problem finding a woman. As he understood it, based largely on advertisements he saw for dating services and articles he read in magazines, technology had brought back good old-fashioned wooing. He had been in such a rush, as a young man, anxious and urgent. Could women even understand that? Did they know what it was like to have an erection at the wrong time, or what it would be like not to have one at the right time? His hard-ons had been like a faulty check-engine light, the kind that popped up just because you didn’t screw the gas tank tight enough. Like the ladies who came into his father’s shop, all fluttery anxiety, he had worried that he would ignore them at his peril.
But even if a woman could understand such things, why did one’s peers judge a man? Shouldn’t his victims have the final say? Oh, he could imagine a prosecutor’s comeback for that. How convenient for a killer to want his victims to judge him. But there was Elizabeth. He hadn’t been lying when he said he felt the greatest guilt toward her. What he did to her—that was a betrayal. The others, he didn’t know them, they weren’t real to him. But Elizabeth had been his copilot, his running buddy. Charley to his Steinbeck.
The next time they talked, he resolved he would say “I’m sorry” first thing. No small talk, no edging into the conversation. He would say the words he had never been allowed to say to her, one on one, the words that had burned in his throat and his chest all these years. He had understood, of course, why he had never been allowed to speak to her, why even during her cross-examination he had been instructed to regard her with the blankest of faces, listening with sorrowful eyes that never quite met hers. Still, there had been a part of him that always felt it wasn’t such a strange thing to ask, a final good-bye, just the two of them, maybe in a room in the courthouse, an armed guard standing outside. He had known better than to ask, but that didn’t mean he knew not to want it. He still wanted it.
No, he had to blurt it out, straight and true: “I’m sorry.”
Then maybe she would finally say she was sorry, too.
Part III
IN MY HOUSE
Released 1985
Reached no. 7 on Billboard Hot 100 on February 16, 1985
Spent 22 weeks on Billboard Hot 100
25
“I’M SORRY.”
The words came so fast, tumbling out the moment the collect call was approved, that they were almost cut off. Eliza stared at the beige receiver in her hand, wondering if Walter had been speaking into space, if he was reaching the end of a long and breathless recitation.
It had been a week since his last call, although Eliza marked the passage of time as a week since the school had called. She hadn’t forgotten Walter; the telephone was there every morning, the first thing she saw. But it was Iso who dominated her waking hours. It had been a tiptoey time in their household, she and Peter trying to observe Iso without crowding her, attempting to judge if she was headed toward real trouble. When she made fun of Albie—was that bad, or typical sibling behavior? Should Eliza let that go, in hopes that it would satisfy whatever aggression Iso needed to express, or should she nip it in the bud?
Eliza’s parenting had always been natural and easy, largely uninformed by texts and experts. Even her parents, experts in their own right, had encouraged Eliza to find her own way as a mother. For years she had felt that her immersion in children’s literature had been better preparation than any parenting guide. There it was, all the fears and emotions and needs of childhood. When other mothers asked where she sought guidance, she often said, “Everything I know about parenting I learned from Ramona Quimby.” People thought she was being glib, but she felt those particular books, written from a child’s-eye view of the world, were indispensable. Inez once told Eliza she was a good mother because she had never forgotten what it was like to be a child. Like nursing mothers who squirt milk at the sound of any baby’s cry, Eliza could be catapulted into childhood by a tantrum or a plaintive whine. She remembered it vividly, perhaps because it was sharply fenced off in her mind. The before time, the Elizabeth time.
So while she could never forget Walter, embodied as he was by this bland, beige instrument—the phone of Damocles, Peter had taken to calling it—Iso was uppermost in her mind, Iso was the present, Iso was a situation that could be improved, changed, monitored. Walter was the past. And not her responsibility.
“Elizabeth?”
“Yes, I’m here.”
“I’m sorry. Did you hear me say that? I’m sorry. I wanted to say it first thing, in case we get interrupted again.”
Oh lord, Eliza thought. I hope we don’t get interrupted again. She felt that her life had already reached its drama quotient for the next decade. Any more worries—a call from a neighbor that Reba had gotten out of the yard, even a rumble in the Subaru’s motor—might push her over the edge.
“I’m sorry for everything. I’m sorry that I kidnapped you. I’m sorry for the way I treated you, in those early days, when I wanted to make sure you would do whatever I said, when I said all those awful things about what I would do to your family. I am sorry, most of all, for what happened the last night.”
“What happened?” She meant only to echo his words, to question the euphemism.
“When I—the sex.” He had clearly misread her tone.
“The rape.”
“Yes,” he said, his voice a somber whisper. “I am sorry that I raped you. In some ways, I am sorrier for that than for anything else I did.”
She sat on the edge of her bed, examined the quilt, the sheets, the shams, all new. Peter, who traveled widely, had wanted to fit their bed with expensive sheets, Frette or even Pratesi. Eliza had argued that their bed should continue to be hospitable to children, children who still spilled things and forgot to put the tops on their markers. She had ordered this carefully mismatched set from a catalog, mixing striped sheets with a riotous quilt. There was already a stain on the dust ruffle, if one knew where to look, and some ink on a corner of a sham, but that came from Peter working in bed. No matter how much money Peter made, no matter how mature Iso and Albie became, they were never going to be a Frette kind of family.
“Elizabeth?”
Again, that prompt, bordering on a demand. How dare he? What did he expect? That she would say it was okay? That she would offer forgiveness? This wasn’t Albie, using the guest room towels to wipe off Reba’s muddy feet, a typically dreamy, well-intentioned mistake on his part. It wasn’t even Iso, suspected of the crime of subtle bullying.
“Thank you,” she said. “You’ve never said that.”
“I never had a chance to speak to you.”
“I mean—in other, um, venues. You never spoke of it.”
“Other ven—oh, interviews. So you read them?”
“Sometimes.” She had, in fact, avoided them until a month ago, when she had reread everything, trying to figure out how Walter had gotten back into her life.
“I hate to say this, but I was told by my lawyer not to address any of the things where charges weren’t brought. Not even in my own defense.”
“The other girls,” she said, suddenly feeling protective of her little ghosts.
“I’ve never spoken of the other things I was accused of. Not even to you, not even when I wanted to…scare you.”
“No, no you didn’t. But the things I read made it pretty clear—”
“The things you read about yourself—were those true, Elizabeth?”
He had scored a point there, although she thought it unfair. True, Jared Garrett had speculated, with no seeming facts at his disposal, about Walter’s sexual proclivities. He had raised questions of premature ejaculation, necrophilia, pedophilia. It was, after a
ll, impossible to libel a convicted killer.
But the standards for Eliza should have been different. Shouldn’t they?
“I can understand that you don’t want to talk about the crimes with which you were never charged.”
“There was a time,” Walter said, “when they wanted to bury me with every unsolved murder from South Carolina to Pennsylvania. They made my father vouch for my work schedule, went through his files.”
“Yes, but there are still a lot of missing girls…one was from Point of Rocks.”
“That was just a place to cross the river, Elizabeth, nothing more. Elizabeth”—she wished he would stop the repeated use of her name, which made him sound like a salesman, or someone who had just read Dale Carnegie—“I don’t want to go over all of this, I really don’t. I called to tell you that I’m sorry for what I did to you. That’s long overdue.”
And inadequate, Eliza thought. What had she expected? To her, Walter’s attempts to communicate had been a continuation of his long-ago crimes, not a refutation. He held her captive again, violated her again. Despite his letter, she had not really expected an apology, yet he had made one today, clear and unambiguous. What did he expect in return? What did he deserve?
When Iso was small, she had quickly learned to lisp “I sorry,” even as she continued to do the very thing for which she was apologizing. Albie, by contrast, was almost too remorseful, brooding over his misdeeds long after he had been forgiven. A decade or so ago, Peter had written a piece about the nature of modern apologies, stringing together a spate of real and not-so-real ones—the official government acknowledgment of the Tuskegee experiment, a baseball player’s belabored rationale for spitting at an umpire, the ongoing discussion about reparations for slavery. This would have been, in fact, about the same time that Iso was careering through their little bungalow in Houston, throwing out “I sorry” as if it were confetti, her private little parade of destruction rolling past, leaving Eliza to clean up all of the mess. They had tried hard to teach their children the importance of genuine remorse, what it was to say and mean “I’m sorry.”
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