Notes on an Execution(13)

My team filed another appeal this morning, Tina says. All we can do now is wait for the phone call. We should know by this afternoon whether the court will consider it.

Tina has never been afraid to look you in the eye. Her gaze is constant and austere. Usually, the pure strength of it makes you inexplicably furious, but today Tina is small. She is insignificant. You press your toe to the crumple of Shawna’s note, a reminder of that blistering secret.

The warden tells me you’ve invited a witness, Tina says.

Witness? you ask, though you know perfectly well.

For the execution, Tina says.

The execution, you repeat.

You like the flinch. The tremble of Tina’s nostril when she speaks the word.

You’ll never forget the look on Tina’s face when she saw what you had done. She met you at the Houston jail, before the trial and the sentencing. One of Tina’s assistants handed her the folder—the crime scene photos. Her face went ashen, and her gaze liquified into a shocked sympathy. You have since become accustomed to this display. You saw it on the judge. You saw it on the jury. You saw it on the courtroom audience, when the prosecution blew up those photos on a projector, magnifying the details to ten times their size.

You don’t like to look at the photos. They are not how you remember it.

Will you be there, Tina? you ask.

You use your nicest voice, the one that softens people. But Tina only looks at you with the expression you know well. Sometimes you stand in front of the metal mirror in your dark white cell and you practice this face, twisting your own brow into a furrow, your eyes melting and sad. The look is horror. It is confusion. It is the worst kind of pity, a pity that despises itself.

I’ll be there, Tina says, and you cannot help the flicker of smile.

In just a few hours, you will be running. Your legs will be burning; your lungs will be gasping fresh oxygen. You twist your expression back into the face it is supposed to be (solemn acceptance), but the joy of your secret rises in your chest, ecstatic, a choke. When you swallow down the burst of laugh, it sears like smoke held too long in your throat.

*

It will happen on the transfer van at noon.

What if they see me? Shawna asked, pausing outside your cell late one stolen night. You’d spread the plan out on three days’ worth of notes, slid beneath lunch trays—Shawna clenched one in her fist as she gnawed at her nails, an anxious, twittering mumble.

You fixed her with your best imitation of hurt.

Shawna, my love. Don’t you trust me?

*

It has been done before. There was a hostage situation in the seventies: two inmates escaped from the Walls Unit with guns pressed to the prison librarians’ heads. Just a few years ago, three men broke free from the Polunsky recreation yard. They were shot, hauled back. There is a rumor that a man once escaped by using a green highlighter to dye his white prison scrubs and walked out pretending to be a doctor. Given the circumstances, you would make like Ted Bundy and crawl through an air shaft. But you haven’t been given an air shaft—only Shawna, and forty minutes in a van between Polunsky and the Walls Unit.

Back in your cell, you stand over the bulk of your notebooks, the red mesh bags sprawled taunting on the bed.

Five legal pads—seven incarcerated years of thinking and writing, transcribed onto yellow ruled paper. The stack on your cot looks like a pile of handwritten pages, not visibly the masterpiece you know it to be. You always imagined you’d sign copies by mail, you’d get letters from fans and reviews in newspapers. On the jacket, they’d use that photo from the courtroom, your gaze so stark in black and white.

You will leave your Theory here. Shawna knows to find it under the bed. When they are looking for you—when the panic erupts, and the search parties scatter, and helicopter lights beam down on the plains—she will point them to it.

So, like a manifesto? Shawna asked, when you described the basics. You twitched with a rushing annoyance. Shawna could tell she’d said something stupid; she turned a humiliated shade of magenta. Manifestos are for crazy people, you explained slowly. Manifestos are incoherent, scrawled hastily before pointless acts of terror. Your Theory is more an exploration of the most inherent human truth. No one is all bad. No one is all good. We live as equals in the murky gray between.

*

Here is what you remember of your mother.

She is tall, and she is mostly hair. She crouches in a garden, lazes in a rocking chair, sinks into a rusty claw-foot tub. Sometimes the tub is filled with water and your mother’s long dress floats wet like a jellyfish. Other times she is dry—she holds out a strand of her own hair, a gift, glistening orange. You remember nothing of your father. Not a sound, not a smell. Your father is a vague presence, looming in the distance; he is an inexplicable ache at the back of your skull. You do not know why they left or where they went or why your mother exists so alone in these recollections. You only remember a rusty chain, pooled in the dent of your collarbone, and how you felt wearing it, like nothing could touch you.

Your mother is the part of the Theory you have not yet figured out. We are all bad, and we are all good, and no one should be condemned to one or the other. But if good can be tainted with the bad that comes after, then where do you place it? How do you count it? How much is it really worth?

In most of your memories, your mother is gone. And before she is gone, always, she is leaving.

*

The memory summons it.