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“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 ma
“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 ope
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 di
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.”