Notes on an Execution(14)

You try to focus on the physical. The familiarity: Clanging metal doors, the smell of canned meat. Dust, urine. Greasy hair. You slide to the floor, press your spine into concrete.

It comes anyway.

In the pit of your subconscious, Baby Packer starts to wail. If you could play a soundtrack of your life, this noise would be the loudest constant, the screeching misery of an infant. The silence of your own helplessness. The fading of that shriek into a slow, pathetic whimper.

*

There is only one place that keeps the screaming away. You arrived there on a Saturday morning, seven years ago.

A bright summer day. 2012. You’d woken before sunrise, too anxious to stay in that empty bed—months after Jenny left, and her absence still felt like a raw sore. You drove slowly, memorizing. It was late June, and the morning was a juicy blue, scented with spruce, wet from a long night’s rain. Tupper Lake, New York, had one crumbling church, a small boxy library, a gas station. A smattering of houses, surrounding a foggy lake. The clouds rolled like steam over the water, curling gentle into the sky. Your memory bestows a fated filter on this drive, this morning, the dense humidity. Though you only spent those few short weeks in Tupper Lake, it took the entirety of your life to bring you there. A series of conspiring and intentional years, all leading to this.

At the gas station, a pimpled teenager was scraping bits of melted cheese off a pizza display case.

Yeah? she said, without looking up.

I’m looking for a restaurant.

There’s only one, the clerk said, as she picked a fleck of burnt cheese from the spatula and popped it into her mouth. You wanted to hear her say it. The Blue House.

*

As the baby’s screaming begins—as your hands clap fruitlessly over your ears—you make the promise.

It will not end here.

The first time you hurt someone, you were eleven years old, and you did not know the difference between pain and wanting. You lived in a crumbling mansion with nine other children: it started with a wink, nearly accidental, a test of your own sweetness. When the girl across the dining room blushed beneath the heat of your attention, you felt your own power, surging addictive. You could not have seen how that tiny decision would catapult you into the future, directly onto this concrete floor. How your actions would become a chain, marching purposefully into the present.

When you are free, you will walk the length of the Texas desert. You will hitch rides on fast trains; you will wash your face in frigid lakes. Eventually, you will reach the Blue House.

You will not do it. You are certain of that. You will not hurt a single person again.





Saffy





1984



Saffron Singh could tell you how many things she loved, and there were four of them.

One: the sound of Miss Gemma’s house late at night. From the room she shared on the third floor, Saffy could hear everything. Sneeze, groan, whimper. At night, the mysteries of the house laid themselves bare. Saffy huddled beneath her scratchy pink comforter and reveled in the exquisite aloneness as the house shifted, exhaled.

Two: the picture frame she’d taken from her mother’s dresser, before the social workers brought her to Miss Gemma’s. Her mother had placed a sheet of notebook paper beneath the glass, with a line of chicken-scratch cursive scrawled hastily across. Felix culpa. Saffy did not know what these words meant, but her mother had written them, and so she loved them. She slept with the frame tucked beneath her pillow.

Three: her bottle of Teenie Bikini nail polish. The color was a pastel purple, creamy and comforting. Saffy used it sparingly, only allowing herself one coat at a time. She did not love the bottle itself, but instead how it made her feel, like someone fancy and grown-up, a girl with clean shiny fingers.

Four: the boy downstairs. He slept in the room directly below hers. Lying awake, Saffy imagined the oxygen traveling from her lungs and out her nose, across the hall, down the staircase, and into his open mouth.

And that night was different. Special. That night, Ansel Packer had winked at her across the dining room table.

*

“Liar,” Kristen had said earlier, when Saffy came rollicking upstairs. Kristen was on the floor, practicing the moves she’d memorized from the VHS of Jane Fonda’s Workout. “Ansel could have any girl in the house. Are you sure he wasn’t winking at Bailey?”

Bailey was the prettiest girl in the house, maybe the prettiest girl Saffy had ever seen. Bailey was fourteen years old—Ansel was eleven, Saffy was twelve—and she had hair like drippy caramel. Kristen and Lila often practiced swishing their hips like Bailey, rolling their eyes like Bailey, chewing their nails like Bailey did. Kristen had once stolen Bailey’s bra, a 32C, and they’d all taken turns trying it on in the bathroom, fumbling with the clasp and pulling down their shirts to see what they’d look like. But Bailey had been sitting two seats over from Ansel at dinner. He would’ve had to turn his head a completely different direction.

The other option was that Ansel had winked, on purpose, at Saffy herself.

The thought spread through her stomach, then cracked down her legs. Liquid hot, thrilling. Saffy played the moment over until she couldn’t remember what he’d been wearing or how the wink had been shaped, until she couldn’t picture Ansel’s face at all. But the fact remained: he had caused this feeling. She was pinned to the mattress. Electric, aching. She did not dare move, in case this melting decided—like everything did—to leave her all alone.