They had spent less time, Eliza realized now, on the nature of forgiveness. She told her children that when someone was sincerely sorry for a misdeed, he or she must be forgiven. And in the context of a family, that was true. Family members must forgive one another. (Although—another stellar example from children’s literature—Jo did not need to forgive Amy for burning up her manuscript, and Eliza always thought Amy’s near-death experience was a bit heavy-handed on Louisa May Alcott’s part.) But then again—if one doesn’t forgive someone, doesn’t one, in a sense, lose that person forever? And what could be better than to lose Walter in that sense? She was under no obligation to forgive him. Was she?
“I appreciate that. I appreciate that you said it straight out, without any of those weasel words that politicians use.”
“Weasel words. I love that. You always did have a great way of talking.”
She did? No, Eliza wanted to say, that was Vonnie, the writer and star debater. She had been proficient with words, even tidy with them. But creative? She was not one to fish for compliments, and she would never, under any circumstances, invite Walter to praise her, yet she found herself saying wistfully, “I never saw myself that way.”
“Well, you weren’t talky. Thank god. But you used words in an interesting way. I wasn’t a big reader when I met you, but I’ve become one here and words are real to me now. They have, like, shapes. And colors. Some of them are so right for what they are. Dignity, for example. Dignity is like…an older cat on a window-sill, his paws folded beneath him.”
She wanted to disagree. She didn’t want to have any common ground with Walter. But she thought of words in this way, too, and he was onto something.
“That’s a good image,” she said. “Cats are dignified, whereas dogs—”
She stopped herself. Everything she knew about dogs had been gleaned from Reba, who was not at all typical of her species. Besides, she would no more invoke Reba with Walter than she would speak of her children, or her day-to-day life. It was Elizabeth who spoke to Walter, a grown-up version, but Elizabeth nonetheless.
“I never cared for dogs.”
“I remember.” All dogs barked at Walter.
“You know another word I like? Serendipity. I was thinking about that very word when I saw your photo. The magazine used it to describe what people might find at local farmers’ markets. But that doesn’t make any sense. There’s no serendipity in what the earth produces. There’s bad luck, sometimes—droughts and pests. But there’s no serendipity to it. Then I turned the page. Me finding you—that was serendipity.”
“And what does serendipity look like to you?” she asked, keen to change the subject, to move him away from the moment he had found her. She wasn’t sure, in fact, if he was referring to this past summer or a summer long ago.
“I…well…I’m not sure I should tell you.”
“That’s okay.”
“No, I shouldn’t have secrets from you. I think of serendipity as a woman. A green woman, with stripes.”
“Oh.”
“I know, I sound nuts. I’m sorry. The thing about dignity—I’ve thought a lot about that. How to die with dignity.”
“Really?”
“We have a choice here. Lethal injection or the electric chair. I almost chose the electric chair. I didn’t want to…fade away. Although there are those who say even lethal injection might be cruel and unusual. It takes twenty minutes. Did you know that? Twenty minutes from the dose until they pronounce a man dead.”
“Hmmmmmm.”
“One thing I know for sure—I’m not going to let the media know what my last meal will be. I’m allowed to keep that private, and I will.” A pause. “You have some choices, too, you know.”
Another noncommittal noise, only this one ended up, to imply a question. “Hmmmmmmm?”
“You can be a witness. In private, they don’t have to let the media know.”
“I don’t think that’s of interest to me, Walter.”
“Why?”
“I don’t feel that’s something I have to explain to anyone. It’s just not what I want to do.”
“Because you’re against the death penalty.” Fishing, probing.
“It’s just not something I choose to do.”
“I am going to go with lethal injection, if that makes a difference.”
“No thank you, Walter.” He did manage to bring out one’s good manners. She remembered Holly in the pickup truck. Please, mister, please.
“Then how about coming to see me? Alive, I mean, here at Sussex I?”
“I don’t think that would be possible.”
“Well, it wouldn’t be easy. Almost no one gets on the visiting list for a death row inmate, unless it’s a lawyer, maybe a journalist. But they would make an exception for you, I’m pretty sure.”
“Maybe,” she said, meaning to say only that she might be an exception, not that she would consider it seriously. In fact, that might be the best way to go: have Peter approach prison officials and make the request, all wink-wink, nudge-nudge, we’ll understand perfectly if you have to say no. Make them the bad guys, instead of her.
She reminded herself that Walter was the bad guy.
“I would really like,” he said, “to say I’m sorry in person. I don’t think it means as much over the phone. I don’t think you believed me.”
“You did a fine job,” she assured him. “It was a great apology.”
“But you didn’t forgive me.”
“I don’t think I’m the person who can forgive you, not really.”
“You’re the only one I care about.” There was a buzz of conversation in the background, a quick exchange, and Walter came back on the line. “That’s it for today. I gotta run. I’ll call you later.”
She hung up the phone and lay back on her bed, staring up at the ceiling. You’re the only one I care about.
Stop, she prayed to the lighting fixture, one of the old-fashioned touches in the house that had never been updated. Eliza loved it, but Peter had recently held some sort of gauge to it, discovered that it generated heat to some obscene temperature within minutes. He wanted to rewire the overhead lamp, or at least replace its regular bulb with a fluorescent one. But Eliza loved this rose-colored globe of cut glass, couldn’t bear to see it replaced or fitted with a bulb that would cast a colder light. Please stop, she prayed, remembering a book where a boy thought God had lived in the kitchen light, because his mother was always addressing it, shaking a wooden spoon. Eliza wasn’t the kind who would shake a spoon at God or demand anything. She wasn’t even sure she believed in God, but she still couldn’t resist asking him this favor. Please make him leave me alone.
26
BARBARA LAFORTUNY WAS ONE of the wonders of her twice-weekly yoga class, the kind of older woman whose effortless flexibility and strength mocked the girls with more perfect bodies and outfits. She was, in fact, a little smug about her standing as one of the best in the practice, which she realized was antithetical to the experience, but there it was. If you couldn’t face the truth about yourself, then you weren’t ready for the truth about anything, and Barbara recognized this fact about herself: She was competitive. She liked to win.
Yet, for all her skill at holding difficult poses, she failed at the most basic task of all: stilling her mind. Right now, she was in child’s pose, about as relaxed as a person could be, or should be, and her mind was racing, racing, racing, far outside this pleasantly dim studio in a converted mill.
“Be kind to your body,” cooed the instructor. “Tune into what it’s feeling.”
She tried, but all she managed to locate was the caffeinated rumble of her heart. This was a 9 A.M. class, what Barbara thought of as the ladies-of-leisure and college-students class, because who else was free at 9 A.M. every Tuesday and Thursday? Technically, she belonged to the first group, but she didn’t see herself that way. Barbara had been up since six, checking her Google alerts, eating a healthy breakfast of homemade whole-grain bread
and organic almond butter, reading the Times on paper, the local paper, and the Wall Street Journal online.
Barbara had never been a patient person, and her near-death experience had not changed that aspect of her personality. She sometimes thought her impatience, her shortness with fools, had contributed to the attack. Not that she was making excuses for the boy, who was one of the rottenest kids she had met in her years of teaching. That boy had been dead inside, with flat, lightless eyes. But he might not have attacked a more good-humored, patient teacher. Barbara had humiliated him in front of his friends. And if he had lashed out then, in an impulsive fit of anger, she almost could have made sense of it. But he had waited for her by her car, in that ill-lit parking lot, springing up, knife in hand. Luckily, he was as inept as an assailant as he was in the classroom, and he had mistaken the blood gushing from her face for a mortal wound and left her there. The attack had led to many profound changes in Barbara’s life—a new purpose, an interest in healthful food and pursuits, the amazing gift of prosperity, which only led her to hold the rich in greater disdain. But it had not made her more patient.
Walter, however, had patience to burn. Too much, she sometimes thought. She wondered if prison had perverted his relationship with time, if he didn’t understand how little they had. Bureaucracies moved as nimbly as eighteen-wheelers, as Barbara knew from her years in the public school system. They needed time and space to turn this thing around, and yet Walter could not be more goddamn nonchalant.
She raised her right leg behind her, swung it down into pigeon pose, gloating a little at the openness of her hips. Some of the thinner women in the class looked absolutely constipated.
Or maybe Walter wanted the drama of everything happening at the last minute, which was truly harebrained. She had said as much, the last time they spoke: No drama, Walter. Then too much attention will be paid, and she will run away. She’s a scared little mouse.
Barbara knew from scared little mouses. Mice. She had been one, behind her cranky facade. She had skittered to her car in the morning, worried it wouldn’t start, skittered into the school, tried to teach history to bored seventh and eighth graders, skittered out of the Pimlico neighborhood at day’s end, cooked dinner, fretting over calories and fat and cholesterol. Graded papers in front of the television, usually falling asleep there. Rinse, lather, repeat.
Then she had awakened in the hospital, her face bandaged, twelve hours, a half day, lost to her. She had known even before they removed the dressing that the repair—she could not dignify it with the term surgery—had been botched. She could sense how lumpy the scar was, how large the stitches. They had not bothered to summon a plastic surgeon to the ER. That might have been another lawsuit, another arrow in her quill, but the hospital had been quick to remedy its work, and the result wasn’t bad. Her scar was like a ghost smile, a little happy face off to the side. “For Halloween,” she once told Walter, “I might go as both of the Greek masks that represent the theater.”
Yet it was in that moment—waking up, disoriented, unsure of the damage done—that Barbara realized she was no longer scared. This was before the settlement left her well fixed, before she even really knew what happened. But she understood this: She wasn’t scared anymore. She had almost died. She didn’t. There must be something she was supposed to do.
The first task she tackled was finding out everything about the boy who had sliced her face, following him through the system. Tuwan Jones was fourteen, a juvenile, and it was harder then to try juveniles as adults. Barbara didn’t have a problem with that, although she believed her assailant to be beyond rehabilitation. Someone, a parent or a relative, had killed that boy long ago. He was sent to the Hickey School, where he promptly became an escape artist, leaving at every chance, only to be flummoxed by the surrounding suburbs, so still and quiet. Tuwan could get out of Hickey, but not out of the neighborhood. He never got much farther than Harford Road, the main strip nearest the school. They called Barbara every time he escaped, a courtesy and probably a defensive measure against future lawsuits. Tuwan had no intention of coming after her. He didn’t even remember her. He was released from Hickey at the age of sixteen. By eighteen, he had finally managed to kill someone and was sent to Supermax in Baltimore City.
Perhaps another person would have taken this experience and resolved to prevent such tragedies, to help young men before they became assailants. But Barbara had been there already, on the front lines, and she had little confidence that she was the type of person who could change others. Instead, she became fixated on the idea of the death penalty. It was wrong to kill. Someone had tried to take her life from her, and failed. Given a chance to live, she had to become a better person. Not nicer, necessarily, but more confident, vigorous, even a little selfless. Perhaps men on death row could become better people, too, if only they could be spared execution.
And although Maryland had its share of interesting inmates, the best ones, the ones whose cases really deserved to be reconsidered, had all been taken. Barbara wanted an inmate more or less to herself, she wanted to champion someone that no one else thought worthwhile. She wanted to take a perceived monster and persuade the world that he was human.
Which is what led her to Walter, back in the 1990s, when his first execution had been set. She could not believe the bloodlust at the time, how keen people were to see him die. The man she saw in newspaper photographs and courtroom sketches looked gentle to her, resigned. Besides, it wasn’t immoral of him to challenge the state of Virginia’s right to execute him on jurisdictional grounds. “Loophole,” editorials snarled. “Technicality,” complained pundits. But Barbara, the former history teacher, knew that state lines were more than arbitrary markers on a map, that the United States were the united states, and if Holly Tackett had been killed in West Virginia, then Walter should have been tried there. That was no technicality. It was a cherished tenet of most conservatives, the right for states to make their own laws, the insistence on less interference from the federal government. It was hypocritical for these same conservatives to claim that state lines didn’t matter when they wanted to kill someone.
She began writing Walter. He seemed skeptical of her at first. Other women had written him. “Crazy women,” he later told her. “They want a boyfriend. I can’t be somebody’s boyfriend in here. Where were these women when all I wanted was a girlfriend?”
She thought that was funny, even self-aware. Over time, she began to pull out bits and pieces of Walter’s life. The late-in-life parents, the coldness of his home, the consistent undermining by all those around him. She sent him an IQ test and he scored above average, although he admitted that he had never done well in school. Eventually, they began to talk about sex. Walter said his first sexual encounter was with a local girl who was sort of a for-barter prostitute; she had sex with men whose services she needed. He would go over to her house and help her with various tasks—putting up curtain rods, for example, or moving heavy furniture. But she was so businesslike about the arrangement that Walter never enjoyed it quite as much as he thought he should, didn’t really count it. “In a lot of ways, I was a virgin,” he said of the year he ended up on the run. He was, Barbara realized, hopelessly confused about sex and women.
“I’m not that man anymore,” he told her. “If I left here—I don’t know. But I’m not going to leave here, and I think that’s right. But that’s the thing that seems weird to me. They locked me up, and I’m a better person for it. Cured, even. I needed to be locked up, no doubt about it. But when they execute me, they’re going to kill the wrong Walter. The one they want to punish doesn’t exist anymore.”
Barbara was the only person who seemed to agree. Virginia was going to kill the wrong Walter, commit murder as surely as he had. The state had spent millions toward this goal, far more than it would have if it had just allowed Walter to be a lifer from the start.
She reclined on her mat. Barbara had caught an infection from using one of the center’s mats, or so she believed
, and she now brought her own bright fuchsia one. It was the part of class she hated the most, the part where she was supposed to empty her mind. My mind does not empty, she wanted to protest.
Instead she lay on her back, counting the days. November 25. Under Walter’s 1-2-3 plan, he wouldn’t even broach his request to Eliza until the third time they spoke, and Barbara was unclear whether he was counting that first, truncated conversation. He might enjoy more phone privileges as the execution date came closer, but still—Barbara thought he should just blurt it out, let it stew in her mind.
“I know her better than you do,” Walter had said, which was infuriating. He seemed to think he was closer, in some ways, to this woman than he was to Barbara. You don’t know Eliza Benedict, she wanted to tell him. You know a girl, one who hasn’t existed for years. And you might not even have known her, as it turns out. Barbara didn’t like Eliza Benedict and would give anything if they didn’t need her. She had disliked her the first time she saw her, walking down the street with that ugly dog. She had resented her…calm. This was a woman who clearly had no problem relaxing. Barbara had wanted to yell at her from the car: “A man’s going to die because of your testimony. But he’s not the same man who committed those crimes. You are killing a ghost, a phantom. How do you sleep at night? How can you live with yourself? You probably want him to die, but no court would give him death for what he did to you.”
She muttered “Namaste” but didn’t bow her head to the teacher. Barbara rolled up her mat and rushed out into the world, her muscles supple and stretched, her mind seething. Forty-seven days. They had forty-seven days to get to the governor and petition for a commutation. Forty-seven days to break down a shoddy little story that had somehow managed to stand, all these years, a child’s rickety tree house that should have fallen to ruin long ago. Forty-seven days to pry something out of Elizabeth Lerner that she might not even realize she had. It was like that child in that movie wandering around with stamps worth millions while grown-ups died. What if they had to hire a hypnotist, or some other professional? Barbara needed to go online, she needed another cup of coffee, she needed to see if Jared Garrett had returned her latest e-mail.
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