Notes on an Execution(4)

You hunch over, so the camera placed in the corner of your cell cannot catch the note. There, in Shawna’s trembly handwriting. Three words:

I did it.

Hope rushes in, a blinding white. It sears through every inch of you as the world cracks open, bleeds. You have eleven hours and sixteen minutes left, or maybe, with Shawna’s promise, you have a lifetime.

*

There must have been a time, a reporter said to you once. A time before you were like this.

If there ever was a time, you would like to remember it.





Lavender





1973




If there was a before, it began with Lavender.

She was seventeen years old. She knew what it meant, to bring life into the world. The gravity. She knew that love could swaddle you tight, and also bruise. But until the time came, Lavender did not understand what it meant to walk away from a thing she’d grown from her own insides.

*

“Tell me a story,” Lavender gasped, between contractions.

She was splayed out in the barn, on a blanket propped against a stack of hay. Johnny crouched over her with a lantern, his breath curling white in the frigid late-winter air.

“The baby,” Lavender said. “Tell me about the baby.”

It was becoming increasingly clear that the baby might actually kill her. Every contraction proved how horribly unprepared they were—despite all Johnny’s bravado and the passages he quoted from the medical textbooks his grandfather had left, neither of them knew much about childbirth. The books hadn’t mentioned this. The blood, apocalyptic. The pain, white-hot and sweat-soaked.

“He’ll grow up to be president,” Johnny said. “He’ll be a king.”

Lavender groaned. She could feel the baby’s head tearing at her skin, a grapefruit, half exited.

“You don’t know it’s a boy,” she panted. “Besides, there’s no such thing as kings anymore.”

She pushed until the walls of the barn went crimson. Her body felt full of glass shards—a jagged, inner twisting. When the next contraction came, Lavender sank into it, her throat breaking into a guttural scream.

“He’ll be good,” Johnny said. “He’ll be brave, and smart, and powerful. I can see his head, Lav, you have to keep pushing.”

Blackout. Her whole self converged into one shattering wound. The shriek came then, a mewling cry. Johnny was covered in gore up to his elbows, and Lavender watched as he picked up the gardening shears he’d sterilized with alcohol, then used them to cut the umbilical cord. Seconds later, Lavender was holding it. Her child. Slick with afterbirth, foamy around the head, the baby was a tangle of furious limbs. In the lantern’s glow, his eyes were nearly black. He did not look like a baby, Lavender thought. Little purple alien.

Johnny slumped beside her in the hay, panting.

“Look,” he rasped. “Look at what we made, my girl.”

The feeling hit Lavender just in time: a love so consuming, it felt more like panic. The sensation was followed immediately by a nauseous, tidal guilt. Because Lavender knew, from the second she saw the baby, that she did not want this kind of love. It was too much. Too hungry. But it had been growing inside her all these months, and now it had fingers, toes. It was gulping oxygen.

Johnny wiped the baby down with a towel and positioned him firmly against Lavender’s nipple. As she peered down at the scrunched and flaking bundle, Lavender was thankful for the dark of the barn, the sweaty damp of her face—Johnny hated when she cried. Lavender placed a palm on the ball of the baby’s head, those initial traitorous thoughts already laced with regret. She drowned the feeling with assurances, murmured against the baby’s slippery skin. I will love you like the ocean loves the sand.

They named the baby Ansel, after Johnny’s grandfather.

*

Here were the things Johnny had promised:

Quiet. Open skies. A whole house at their disposal, a garden of Lavender’s own. No school, no disappointed teachers. No rules at all. A life where no one was ever watching—they were alone in the farmhouse, completely alone, the nearest neighbor ten miles away. Sometimes, when Johnny went out hunting, Lavender stood on the back deck and screamed as loudly as she could, screamed until her voice went hoarse, to see if someone would come running. No one ever did.

Just a year earlier, Lavender had been a normal sixteen. It was 1972, and she’d spent her days sleeping through math class then history class then English class, cackling with her friend Julie as they smoked pilfered cigarettes by the gym door. She met Johnny Packer at the tavern, when they snuck in one Friday. He was older, handsome. Like a young John Wayne, Julie had giggled, the first time Johnny showed up after school in his pickup truck. Lavender loved Johnny’s scraggly hair, his rotation of flannel shirts, his heavy work boots. Johnny’s hands were always filthy from the farm, but Lavender loved how he smelled. Like grease and sunshine.

The last time Lavender saw her mother, she’d been slumped at the folding card table, a cigarette dangling from her mouth. Her mother had attempted a housewife’s beehive—it was flat, lopsided, like a drooping balloon.

You go right ahead, Lavender’s mother had said. Drop out of school, move to that ratty farm.

A sick, satisfied smile.

Just you wait, honey. Men are wolves, and some wolves are patient.