Notes on an Execution(9)

Lavender sank into the hardwood. She wished to be a speck of dust on the ceiling.

*

Weeks passed, and the new baby did not have a name. One month melted into two. Baby Packer, Ansel would coo, as he played with the bundle on the floor by the fireplace. A little song he’d made up, tuneless and lilting. Baby Packer eat, Baby Packer sleep. Brother loves you, Baby Packer. Brother loves you.

*

Johnny made the occasional show of tenderness, a halfhearted attempt to bring her back to life. He rubbed Lavender’s feet, crouched at the end of the mattress. He cleaned her wounds with a sponge, ran a hairbrush through her tangles. She stayed nestled in bed while Johnny brought the baby in to nurse—the rest of the time, Baby Packer squirmed under Ansel’s watchful four-year-old eye.

For the few minutes a day that Lavender held the baby, she wondered how he had gotten here, whether it was possible that this sweet suckling thing even belonged to her. With Ansel, she’d felt the same way, but her love had been so new and fierce. Now, she feared she had used it all up.

“Take him,” she monotoned, once the baby finished feeding. “I don’t want him here.”

Johnny’s frustration was hardening. Lavender could feel it, building up in his chest like molten lava. The horror only made her sicker. Numb. She had been subsisting on a single can of corn or beans per day, the hunger pangs like background static. More when you start contributing again, Johnny promised idly, his voice turned sour with disgust and frustration, repeating the words that had become a fixation. You have to learn to earn your keep.

So by the time Johnny stood over the bed, brimming with indignation, Lavender was so weak and brainless, she could not bring herself to care. Lavender looked up at the mass of him, seething, enraged, and tried to conjure the Johnny in the field with the raspberries. It wasn’t that he’d been replaced by this grizzly stranger, more that he’d evolved. Grown into his own shadow.

“Get up,” Johnny said.

“I can’t,” Lavender told him.

“Get the fuck up, Lavender.” His voice itched, curdled. “You have to get up right now.”

“I can’t,” she said again.

Lavender felt like she’d willingly asked for what came next. Like the plot had already been written out for her, and all she had to do was live it. She realized she had been waiting months for this. The locked food, the little bruises—warnings she had registered but not heeded.

Before Johnny lunged, she expected some nightmare version of him, a person she’d never seen. But no. In the milliseconds before the blow, Lavender looked at the same rugged man she had always known, and she thought, with a clarity that bordered on sympathy: You could have been anything, Johnny. You could have been anything but this.

*

A fistful of hair, yanked from the scalp. A scream, pleading, as Lavender’s aching bones slammed against the floor. The wound between her legs, open now, searing. Johnny’s steel-toed boot, rearing back like a horse, landing square in her stomach. The shock, a glittered red.

When the sound came from the door, Lavender saw double: the stuttering form of Ansel’s silhouette. He held the baby like Lavender had taught him, one arm beneath the head. Blurred, he looked too young—pants-less and chicken-legged—to be holding an infant. Ansel and the baby were both crying, panicked, but when Lavender reached for them, her whole body smarted, a series of wounds she had not yet cataloged, her mouth a sandy pool of blood and grit.

“Ansel,” Lavender croaked. No sound came out. “Go.”

Time slowed.

“No,” she tried to scream. “Johnny, please—”

It was too quick. Too thoughtless. With one massive hand, Johnny yanked Ansel’s head back and slammed it with a crack against the wooden doorframe.

After, the silence.

It rang in Lavender’s ears, punctuated only by Johnny’s heavy, labored breaths. Even the baby had stopped crying, surprised. The room was incredibly still. Lavender watched from the floor, stunned, as the realization seemed to wash over Johnny. His giant body trembled with bewilderment as he backed out of the bedroom. They listened as he stormed down the stairs, slammed the back screen door. Ansel blinked slowly, dazed.

Lavender dragged herself across the hardwood. A slugging creak. When she reached her children, she gathered them in her arms and wept.

Johnny did not come back that night. Lavender huddled in the bed with the boys, vigilant and alert. She nursed the baby until he fell asleep—when Ansel withered hungry, Lavender shook her head in apology. Not enough milk. Ansel peered up at her with spindly wet lashes, the hollows around his eye sockets like those of a frightened little ghost.

*

At the first light of dawn, Lavender slid from the bed. The bruises across her legs and stomach were already purpling—both boys were asleep on the old mattress, breathing steadily. The wound on Ansel’s head had swollen, protruding to the size of a golf ball.

Lavender creaked open the window, stuck her face into the morning. The breeze was a gasp on her cheeks, the dewy air like a new kind of promise. Beyond, the fields were a morning yellow. Beyond, beyond. Beyond was a place Lavender could hardly remember. Beyond this room, beyond this house, there were mothers who cooked pot roast for their children. There were little boys who watched cartoons on Saturday mornings, innocent and unafraid. Buttered popcorn at the movie theater, boxed cereal, real toothpaste. There were televisions and newspapers and radios, schools and bars and coffee shops. Before she moved to the farmhouse, a man had landed on the moon—for all she knew, there could be a whole city up there by now.