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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 fu
“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.