Notes on an Execution(81)

You hear the approach. The patter of fate, arriving to sweep you away.

You lift your chin to the sound.





Lavender





Now



Lavender bends over the laundry tub. Her knees are bare and dusty, sore from crouching in the dirt. Afternoon brightens over the Sequoia building. Inside, the women are washing the lunch dishes, bickering over the clang of pots and pans. Beyond the laundry basin, Lavender can see the silhouetting crest of the mountains, hazy wild citrus in the full day’s light. At the bottom of the hill, Sunshine bends over the vegetable garden in her wide straw hat. Lavender is sixty-three years old now, and she does not believe in happiness, not as a pure or categoric thing. But she does believe in the future, and she can see it now, stretching luxurious down the mountain, across the rippling grass. Sunshine pulls a zucchini from the vine, her body like a map, the ridges and peaks so carefully charted.

The sound begins soft at first, barely discernible. Lavender sits straight, wondering if she’s imagined it. She stretches to make it out—there. A whine, a gasp. An animal, dying in the gut of the woods. Lavender goes still, hovering with sudsy arms over the basin. The whimper deepens.

Something is in pain.

She tilts her head.

She listens.





Saffy





Now



Saffy steps from the shower. The mirror is cloudy—even through the condensation, the weight of this night sits heavy on her shoulders. Her funeral outfit is laid out on the bed, like a weary person flopped down exhausted. Saffy has worn this black dress to hundreds of funerals, her hair pulled into an authoritative bun. It feels too crisp tonight, too formal.

She wonders, vaguely, what Ansel is doing now. Eating his last meal or staring up at a blank gray ceiling. She hopes the cell is cold, she hopes his thoughts are haunting—she hopes, of course, that he is sorry. That he is afraid. As the sun sinks through the blinds, Saffy is grateful that Texas is so far away, that soon he will be somewhere else entirely, or maybe nowhere at all.

*

Saffy’s phone pings as she’s drying her hair.

Blue Harrison.

I’m here, the text reads. It’s happening soon.

Saffy still stops by the Blue House occasionally. She orders a tuna melt, chats with Rachel at the bar. When Ansel wrote to invite her to the execution, Blue called the station—I think I want to go, she’d said, almost a whisper. I think I want to be there. Saffy wasn’t sure exactly why Blue had dialed her, but she could hear a quaking in the girl’s voice. Blue was asking for permission. For some kind of acknowledgment. Saffy remembered how Ansel had looked as a boy, vulnerable and unstable, broken but not yet gone, his choices still his own to make. Ansel was bad, and he would die for it—but Saffy knew, along with Blue, that he was other things, too.

You should go, Saffy had told her. She could hear the Blue House espresso machine grinding in the background.

Will you come with me? Blue had asked.

The answer was easy. No.

*

The vigil is in the park by the high school.

When Saffy arrives, night has fallen in a velvet blanket, and she sees only the flicker of candles at the far edge of the lawn. She wades across the field toward the huddled, shadowy figures. There are maybe twenty people, a sprinkling crowd, heads bent in the dim candlelight. Saffy has abandoned her funeral dress, swapped it for a long blue skirt, dotted with daisies. She sees Kristen on the fringe, her arms crossed against the April chill—by the time Saffy reaches the spot, her sandals are slick beneath her toes, dewy from the grass.

“You made it,” Kristen says.

“We got these for you, Captain.” Kristen’s older son hands Saffy a bouquet of lilies—he is fifteen years old now, lanky and awkward. Saffy thanks him and takes the bundle, plastic wrap crinkling.

The photographs are blown up huge. Izzy, Angela, and Lila lie propped in a sea of flowers. Saffy recognizes many of the glowing faces surrounding the fountain: Izzy’s parents are here, along with her sister. Izzy’s little brother was only five years old when she went missing, and now he holds an infant, swaddled in the crook of his arm. Angela’s mother stands folded into their group, and she gives Saffy a small wave, stooped, withered. Twenty years have passed since they found the bodies—twenty-nine since the girls went missing—and still, a news camera hovers at the edge of the vigil, determined to make a story. Saffy feels slimy, the truth prickling. There would be no story, for these girls alone. There would be no vigil, no attention at all. They are relevant because of Ansel and the fascination the world has for men like him.

Kristen hands Saffy a candle. The wax drips down, melting onto her fingers.

It is almost time. A thousand miles away, justice is being served—but justice, Saffy thinks, is supposed to feel like more. Justice is supposed to be an anchor, an answer. She wonders how a concept like justice made it into the human psyche, how she ever believed that something so abstract could be labeled, meted out. Justice does not feel like compensation. It does not even feel like satisfaction. As Saffy takes a long breath of alpine air, she pictures the needle, pressing into Ansel’s arm. The blue pop of vein. How unnecessary, she thinks. How pointless. The system has failed them all.

*

“Come over tonight,” Kristen says, as the crowd disperses. “You shouldn’t be alone.”