Notes on an Execution(80)

“Will you take this with you?” Lavender asked.

Blue reached for the locket. She clasped it easy around her neck, the chain glistening along her collarbone. It was like sinking backward in time, Lavender thought. Like looking in a mirror at a younger self, glittering, golden. So blessedly unbroken.

“He won’t be alone?” Lavender said.

“He won’t be alone,” Blue told her. “I promise.”

Lavender knew, then, that the world was a forgiving place. That every horror she had lived or caused could be balanced with such gutting kindness. It would be a tragedy, she thought—inhumane—if we were defined only by the things we left behind.





18 Minutes




Every second is a year. Every second is your failure, every second is your lifeline. Every second goes to waste.

*

When you think of your confession now, you feel a burning incredulity—you cannot believe you said those things aloud.

Your lawyer tried vaguely to argue coercion, but your confession felt more physiological than that. A force, expelled. Saffron Singh was a bridge. A line drawn, an arrow pointed. When she took the pearl bracelet out of its evidence bag, when she slid the beaded barrette across the table, she took you back to those nights on the forest floor. Back to the Girls. Throughout those long teenage months, you carried the jewelry with you, loose in your pockets or on the dashboard of your car. It calmed you. The day you gave Jenny that ring—a thoughtless whim—you’d buried the rest in a panic. It was a shock to see those trinkets again, laid out like cadavers on a table.

Then, the song. Your old favorite. You remembered a fox, half decomposed. The irony: your child self led you here.

So it was not you who told the story—instead, that little boy. He possessed you, in the indignity of the interrogation room, eleven years old with sorry doleful eyes. You spoke to make the little boy happy. You spoke to set him free. As you sealed your own fate, there seemed an exquisite pain in the knowledge. There would be no release.

*

You have asked the chaplain not to return. You will see him in the execution room, and you cannot bear to spend your last sixteen minutes looking at his droopy, benevolent face. Alone, you pull your Theory from the floor. Gritty with dust, you reassemble the manuscript page by page—it looks unfinished in your hands, a disconnected series of digressions.

You wanted to talk about good and evil. You wanted to talk about the spectrum of morality. You wanted to talk, and you wanted someone to listen. You think of the men back at Polunsky—their hopeful chess moves, their hoarded photos, their sobs and moans in the middle of the night. A wash of embarrassment roils over you: Your Theory was supposed to make you different. It was supposed to make you special, better, more.

Now, the irony feels intolerably sharp. If you believe in the multiverse, you have to look at this:

You are seventeen years old, at the end of a long driveway. The first Girl appears, a doe in your headlights. You ease on the brakes, open the door. Do you need a ride? You wait at the curb until she’s safely inside. You are seventeen years old, sitting in that diner booth, nursing one last cup of coffee, working up the nerve to ask the waitress for her number. You are seventeen years old, in the crowd at that concert—when the last Girl offers you a cigarette, you take it. You smoke it down to the butt. You thank her. You go home.

*

Twelve minutes. The walls shrink, condense. You pull your knees to your chest, and weakly, you pray. You have never believed in God, but you address him now, last-ditch, halfhearted. God, if you are out there. God, if you can hear me. God—

*

You remember a meteor shower. You were small, maybe three. Grass poked through the thick wool blanket, and you gazed up with a child’s awe. Your mother’s breath was sour and sweet, like a dream interrupted halfway through. She held you by the ribs as comets shot across the sky. It is a comfort to know that once, you were little enough to be cradled. Once, there was only wheatgrass and wonder, the earth turning ordinary beneath the train of your spine.

*

You begin to cry.

Thoughtless, wordless. You cry like it is the last thing you will ever do, which maybe it is. You cry until you are not yourself anymore, until the sob has overtaken your body and transformed you mercifully into someone, anyone else. You cry for your Theory. For the person you were when you woke up this morning. You cry for the number of breaths you will not take, for the mornings you will not squint into the sun, the long drives you will not steer down mountain roads, the whiskey that will not sting your throat. Forty-six years you have lived, and all of it, for what. For this.

When it’s over, you straighten. You wipe your eyes, blow your nose onto the floor in a gleaming puddle. Though you refuse to look at the clock on the wall, you can feel them ticking by, slipping effortlessly from the room. Those seconds. You want to hold on to each one, to feel the texture of your life as it slinks regretfully away.

*

It is a surprise, but the inevitable kind, when you hear the footsteps ascending from the mouth of the hall.

It is time.

Vaguely, you want to fight. You want to kick and scream in the name of the things you will lose, but that sounds grueling, and painful, and useless. Down the hall, the footsteps shuffle louder. The tie-down team. Six trained prison officials will come for you, and they will come now. You have known, of course, that this moment would arrive, but you did not expect it to feel so trivial, just another second blending with the millions that make up your insignificant little life.