Forgive Me (4 page)

The Death House reeked of disinfectant, as if the guards had baptized its cinder-block walls with ammonia in preparation for tonight's event. Xanadu Marx, the tallest and grumpiest of the twenty attendees whom the guards were leading down this short beige corridor, coughed into her fist and then rubbed at her eyes. If they were half as bloodshot as they felt, they would soon be leaking red.

“Normally, we'd just bring you in through the other door,” said the guard, “but there's something wrong with one of its hinges. The other door leads direct to where y'all will be sitting. We're almost there.”

None of them appeared to be in a rush. Apparently toxic exposure to ammonia fumes wasn't enough to kick this group past the speed of a tortoise. At least Hayley, with her personal oxygen tank in tow, had an excuse for her slow pace. The rest of these people were just rubberneckers.

“Having a good time yet?” Xanadu muttered to Hayley.

The nineteen-year-old replied with a glare. “What is wrong with you?”

“The science is inconclusive.”

The guard stopped in front of a metal door that he unlocked with one of the keys on his belt. On the other side of the door was a cement room with three rows of wooden pews and, at the back, another door striped over with duct tape. The attendees filled the back two rows first and then the front row. No one told them to do that.

Xana and Hayley, bringing up the rear, got to have front-row seats.

They were now facing a blue curtain. On the other side of the curtain would be a bay window. On the other side of the window would be a room that was utterly featureless but for a gurney. What color sheets would be on the gurney? Would there be one pillow or two? In her nearly thirty years with the FBI, Xana had never felt the compulsion to attend an execution. Not once. And she certainly wouldn't have attended this one had Hayley not expressed curiosity.

Oh children and their curiosity.

On the drive down here from the city, Hayley had been visibly nervous, so much so that she almost swerved off the road a few times, and Xana had said to her in as maternal a tone as she could deliver, “We can turn around.”

The sun had long since dipped below the horizon and the stars, so well hidden by the light pollution of the city, had begun to button the sky. On either side of the interstate was, well, nothing. Nothing at all. As the saying went: Once you leave Atlanta, you enter Georgia.

“It's not that I'm having second thoughts,” said Hayley. “It's just…I don't want them to think we're, you know, impostors.”

“We have permission to be there, just like everyone else.”

“Yeah, except everyone else is going to be, like, family and friends of the victims. We're just…interested bystanders.”

“You're an interested bystander. I'm an apathetic onlooker with nothing better to do on a Tuesday night.”

“You're not really apathetic,” Hayley responded. “Nobody's apathetic about capital punishment.”

“I am. I honestly could not care less.”

“How can you say that?”

“I open my mouth and the words come out.”

Hayley sighed until she wheezed. “So you're telling me that you have an opinion about everything in the world—and you do, because I've heard them—loudly—you have an opinion about everything in the world except the death penalty.”

“It's not a debate. The death penalty exists. It has since the first syllable of recorded time and it will until the last of us gets melted down by the sun. Society exists for one reason and one reason alone: to perpetuate itself. In the name of self-preservation, the most civilized cultures in the world have ostracized and butchered without hesitation. And I'm not just talking about Socrates and Jesus. You know what the most popular form of capital punishment is?”

“Death by rant?”

“Ha. No. War is the most popular form of capital punishment. State sanctioned and government issued. Abolish war, and then maybe I'll start to give a rat's ass about the death penalty, but until then, thanks but no thanks.”

“Thanks.”

“You asked.”

“I know,” replied Hayley. “The mistake was mine.”

But at least her nervousness had abated.

Nevertheless, Hayley's nervousness returned once they were all seated in the observation room. Her fingers danced to and fro along the length of plastic tubing currently resting on her lap. The other attendees had already given her nasal cannula the requisite side-stare. Normally, she took such looks in stride—years of such ogling had inured her, it was perhaps the only thing left in the world to which she was inured—but tonight, already plagued with nascent impostor syndrome, tonight she felt their gazes and took it as judgment and her throat shrank and her gasps of air trebled in speed and the neurons in her brain tingled from this sudden glut of oxygen, tingled and numbed and clouded her eyesight and chilled her extremities and—

The blue curtain in front of the observation room whooshed open.

There was the gurney. Its sheets were white and were tucked neatly underneath a twin mattress. A white blanket woven of thin cotton rested on top of the gurney. Between the sheeted mattress and the cotton blanket lay the man. His name was Jeremiah Stanhope. He was forty-three years old. He had the same black skin as his father, and his father's father, and so on back to a plantation not far from here, and so on back to Africa, as far from here as humanly possible. His bare head reclined on a solitary pillow. His arms, also bare, were stretched away from his body at a thirty-degree angle by the gurney's metal wings. His wrists, thin like rivers, were bound to the gurney's wings by leather straps. The straps had shiny golden buckles, like one might find on a child's belt. Clear plastic tubes wormed from his bare arms and along the floor and into an adjoining room hidden behind a one-way mirror.

“Why does he have two IVs?” whispered Hayley.

“In case one of them gets blocked up,” replied Xana.

Behind Jeremiah, silent as stone, stood a prison guard, and a much smaller man in a reverend's frock. The reverend held a Bible. The guard held a clipboard. In another corner of the room stood a doctor with her head bowed. Then the warden entered. This particular warden, John-Dave Smith, had overseen six executions in ten years. It showed on his face. Warden Smith was forty-three, same as Jeremiah, but the wrinkles on his skin and the deep depressions under his small blue eyes made him appear at least two decades older. Xana recalled a rumor from a year ago, that the warden would be retiring, that he was going to join the church. But here he was.

The reverend stepped forward to Jeremiah's left shoulder and placed a pair of fingers on him. Warden Smith stepped forward to Jeremiah's right shoulder.

This was when some of the attendees began to sob. Soft, wet sounds.

“Son,” said the warden, “do you have any last words?”

Jeremiah replied, “No, sir.”

The warden nodded and then stepped back.

In the adjoining room, hidden behind the one-way mirror, a member of the staff pressed a button. This activated the pentobarbital.

Jeremiah, lying in his bed, under his cotton blanket, shut his eyes.

The cotton blanket rose and fell with each breath.

Up, down. Up, down. Up, down.

Up…down. Up…down. Up…down.

Six minutes later, the doctor pronounced Jeremiah Stanhope dead.

Almost immediately, the blue curtain was once again drawn, but this time, one of the attendees, an older woman with dark skin, pounded on the window with both of her curled arthritic hands. Her jaw worked up and down, up and down, but she wasn't saying anything. She continued to strike against the glass until another older woman with dark skin took her in her arms. One of them, Xana was certain, was the mother of Jeremiah, and one of them was the mother of Jeremiah's victim. She had deliberately not reviewed the case before coming here so she wasn't sure which woman was which. Then she felt Hayley tug on her sleeve.

It was time to go.

As they left the visitors' lot and drove past the mob of reporters with their cameras and then past the mob of protesters with their placards, Xana and Hayley didn't talk. Xana wanted to talk, of course, but she at least waited until they reached the highway before opening her big mouth.

“So did you get what you needed out of that?”

Hayley shot Xana a look that could have punched a small bird. “I appreciate you coming with me.”

“Hey,” replied Xana, “what else was I going to do on a Tuesday night?”

The dashboard clock read 11:53
P.M.
At that moment, sixty miles to the north, Crystal McCormick was stepping out of her shower in Room 2702 of the Peachtree Marriott. Hayley checked the radio for suitable music, but soon flipped it off.

“Why didn't he have any last words?”

Xana shrugged. “I don't know.”

“I mean, whether he believes in God or not, why not apologize? He must have known who was in the room with us. He must have known that's what they came there to hear.”

“They came there to see the end of the life of the man who ruined theirs. Would a heartfelt I'm-so-sorry have made their hearts any less broken? Eh. Probably as much as watching him die cured all their woes.”

“So you
are
against the death penalty.” Hayley said it triumphantly.

“No, I'm against futility. But seriously, why did you want to come here? I get that you want to experience as much as you can before you…you know…die, but we could've gone to Nashville or this strip club in Nashville that I love that's just down the street from the Grand Ole Opry and—”

“You really want to know?”

“Yeah.”

Hayley sighed, which never was easy for her and often was followed by a series of coughs. Once her coughing had subsided, though, she answered Xana's question.

“In a year or two, that's going to be me. And that's going to be my parents watching me lying in a bed. I guess I wanted to know…what I was going to put them through.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah.”

“Wow. You're a fucking idiot.”

“I knew that was coming.”

“No, seriously, Hayley. For someone who supposedly got a perfect score on her SATs, you're sometimes a moron. You wanted to know what they're going to be feeling? News flash: They're going to be feeling awful! It's going to be the worst moment of their lives! And bullshit you needed to witness an execution to realize that. So what's the real reason, huh? Because since the day you were diagnosed you've known what that day, in a year or two or more, is going to be like for them. So what's the real reason?”

“Never mind.”

“I think I deserve to know. You dragged me out here. And for what? Huh? Curiosity? Sociology? Something to check off your bucket list?”

“I said never mind!” yelled Hayley, and then she wheezed, and then she gripped the steering wheel until she was able to regain control of her breathing, and by then Xana had grown silent as well. By the time they crossed the city limits of Atlanta, the police had already swarmed Room 2702. By the door, which was propped open with a rubber wedge, the forensics team was gauging the temperatures of the corpses. In the bedroom, Scott and Crystal McCormick were being quizzed for the fourth time about the events of the evening.

Once they neared the intersection of I-75N and the I-285 belt, Xana said, “I need you to drop me off in Decatur.”

“What's in Decatur at one
A.M.
?”

“The United Methodist church on Scott Boulevard.”

“What's at the United Methodist church on Scott Boulevard at one
A.M.
?”

“A meeting.”

“Oh,” said Hayley.

“Yeah,” said Xana.

“Shit. Now I feel terrible.”

“You should. My alcoholism is entirely the fault of a nineteen-year-old girl.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Very, very rarely.”

Once they reached the church, Hayley shifted into park.

“Want me to wait?” she asked.

“Em is here. She'll give me a ride home.”

“So you already knew you were coming here.”

“Call me crazy, but given what we just saw? Yeah, I had a feeling I might need a meeting after. The question is—are you going to be OK?”

Hayley nodded. But she wasn't convincing anyone.

“I'd invite you in,” said Xana, “but…”

“I get it. I'll see you tomorrow.”

As Xana watched Hayley drive off, she imagined a part of herself remaining in the passenger seat to keep the dying girl company on the ride home. Xana had never wanted a family, certainly not the family she was born with. And yet…

Ah well. Einstein was wrong. The gods did indeed play dice.

The United Methodist church on Scott Boulevard in Decatur possessed no outstanding features at all. In architecture, with her pitched black roof and white wooden frame, she could have been mistaken for any of the several hundred other churches in the Atlanta metro area. Her small lawn was well maintained and the bushes along her brick foundation were neatly trimmed, but so were several hundred other small lawns and several thousand other bushes. Her steeple was unornamented, but this was a Protestant church—of course her steeple was unornamented. No, the United Methodist church on Scott Boulevard in Decatur possessed no outstanding features at all, none whatsoever, save one, save this: From 12
A.M.
to 5
A.M.
, her basement was open, and well lit, and occupied, and to a twelve-stepper like Xanadu Marx, just knowing that this place was here, these people were here, night after night, just in case, provided equanimity.

But sometimes equanimity wasn't enough.

Xana wove around to the rear of the building and climbed down the steep brick steps. A solitary bare bulb jutted out from the back wall of the church and illuminated the path, more or less, although Xana was convinced that this—the solitary bare bulb, the steep brick steps—was some kind of gauntlet meant to deter those lacking in conviction and/or sobriety. Or grace, although that was a loaded word in these parts, wasn't it?

For a moment, it looked as if tape had been slashed across the door at the bottom of the steps, but those were just the shadows of tree limbs. Xana mused at the illusion, at herself, and knew she had made the right decision to come.

Tonight's meeting was well attended, or as well attended as these late night meetings were. Seventeen of the twenty-five folding chairs were occupied, and an eighteenth person was up at the front, offering a testimony. It was Em. How about that timing. Xana ladled herself a Styrofoam cup full of strawberry Kool-Aid and took a seat in the back. She could recognize the people she knew in here by the backs of their heads, but the person she paid attention to was Em.

“—and so, I guess, ever since, that phrase has always struck me as funny. ‘Rock bottom.' It makes me think of a mine. There's a pit in the mine, right, and it's boarded over, but the boards are plywood, so you got to be careful when you're walking over the pit, and you got to walk over the pit because it's right there in your path. You got to walk over the pit every day. And because you got to walk over the pit every day, you get used to it. You stop worrying about it. You even stop thinking about it. Your feet step over the plywood boards and that's that. You're on to another part of the mine. And sometimes they even replace the old boards with new boards. Same cheap plywood, right, but so what. And maybe in the back of your mind you realize the reason they had to replace the board. And maybe in the back of your mind, you wonder if whoever fell through those old boards and down into that pit is still there. And maybe you just get real good at ignoring the back of your mind.”

To this, several of the men and women nodded. Their heads bobbed up and down, up and down.

Damn it.

Xana had never been real good at ignoring the back of her mind. As a child, she had self-medicated with research, shredding the solid continent of her brain into dozens of islands, and each island a different language and culture. But then, one miraculous night, an assistant of her father's returned to the base camp and introduced her to booze. Xana was ten years old. They were at a dig on the steppes of Tibet. They were always at a dig. Later that week, the assistant also tried to introduce her to sex. He must have convinced himself that here was this pliable girl with whom he could have his way. He must have been surprised when she fought back. He must have been very surprised when she dug her girlish fingers into the upper left quadrant of his face and tore out his eyeball.

Em was winding down. “Because we're not in the mine alone. And we forget that. We can ask for help. And we forget that. Someone put down those boards to make it safe for us to walk and we can thank them by putting down boards of our own to make it safe for someone else. Without you all, I would still be in that pit. I'm grateful and I love you all.”

Later on, in bed, Em asked Xana how the execution went. They were both breathing through loopy grins and staring up at the twin fans Em had going 24/7 in her bedroom.

“These fans are always running the same speed,” Xana said, “but they never are the same. They never match. What is that? Is that thermodynamics? Is that stubbornness?”

“Just one of the fans is stubborn. I call her ‘Xanadu.' ”

Xana grinned.

And then Em asked again how the execution went, and Xana turned on her side, and Em fitted spoon-like behind her lover, and soon one of them was asleep while the other listened helplessly to the whir of the twin fans while the back of her mind gibbered on and on.