With Love from the Inside (10 page)

Sophie didn't sleep more than a half-hour at a time all night. Thomas's words saturated her every thought and tainted her every perception.
Avoid a scandal. Make it go away. Avoid a scandal.
No matter how many times she spun the conversation with Thomas in her mind, a mother on death row always came out sounding scandalous.

The only bed and breakfast in town had five rooms, and they all smelled like cat litter. Mrs. Neiland, the owner, gave Sophie her pick of the place, since she was the first (and only, by the looks of things) guest to check in that night.

Eager to do something other than socialize with Mrs. Neiland, Sophie woke the next morning before daylight, put on her running clothes, and escaped out the side door. A jog could clear her head and give her an excuse to miss breakfast, which smelled like it wasn't going to be any better quality than the rooms.

Thomas didn't like Sophie running so early in the mornings. “You never know who's roaming the streets before the crack of dawn,” he'd warn, when her insomnia led her to lace up her sneakers before the sun came up. She knew he wouldn't approve of this early-morning run, but the crime rate in Brookfield had to be nonexistent.

As far as she knew, the only violent crime committed in Brookfield had occurred in her own house. “Try and protect me from that, Thomas.” She smirked as she spoke the words out loud.

For the longest time, Sophie had actually believed her mom was innocent. Her dad told her time and again: “This is all a mistake. Your mom loved William. She never would have hurt him. Someday the truth will come out.”

He promised to save her mom and get her out of that horrible, scary place. A pledge he repeated to his wife and daughter every time they visited the prison. “I will find out what happened. Don't give up, Gracie, please don't give up”—his hands touching hers through the glass window separating them. “We will be at home soon, together, as a family.” Every word sounding less and less convincing as the years dragged by.

Sophie had believed her dad. After the dishes were washed and put away and her dad checked her homework, they both sifted through newspaper articles and court transcripts, organizing file folders that read
Expert Defense Witnesses
and
New People to Interview
. Each folder stuffed with regret and dollar signs. “It takes money to mount a good defense,” her dad told her as he looked through the old court cases, labs tests, and profiles of expert witnesses that he could never actually afford to hire.

“We can't give up, Sophie. We can never give up,” he said to her as he lay in the hospital bed after his first round of chest pains led to open-heart surgery. Sophie, who was then a junior in high school, squeezed her dad's hand and promised him she would continue to fight even if he was too weak to help her.

A few months later, the battle became hers. Around Sophie's eighteenth birthday, she came home to find her father slumped over at the kitchen table, his heart finally stopped.

After his death, Sophie's friends, especially Jillian, tried to get Sophie to “be a normal teenager” and go to the mall or at least to a drive-through. Every night after school, when other kids were applying to college or searching for prom dresses, Sophie was either visiting her mom in prison or searching for ways to get her out.

Close to Christmas of her senior year, Jillian gave Sophie a ride home after school. “I'm worried about you,” she said as she got out of the car and invited herself into Sophie's living room. “You are so obsessed with getting your mom free, you've made yourself a prisoner.” She'd pointed to the dishes piled in the sink and the overflowing trash cans. “Locked up in this house, doing God knows what.”

“I'm trying to get my mom out of prison,” Sophie cried. Her voice escalated to a volume that startled even her.

“It's Christmas. You're here alone.” Jillian spoke softly, trying to calm her. “No tree, no lights. Nothing. Please come stay at my house.”

“Why, so you can lecture me? I get the ‘normal kid' speech from neighbors when they feel well enough to check in on me.”

Jillian, who shared third lunch and always ordered the mean girls to scoot over so Sophie could sit by her, started to apologize. “I'm sorry. I have no idea what it's like to have a mother in prison. Or, for that matter, to have a father who's passed away, but Sophie”—she paused as if to weigh the consequences of what she was about to say—“someone has to tell you the truth.”

“The truth? I know the truth.” Her words hissed as they came out. “What are you talking about?”

Jillian pulled the coffee table close to the sofa and sat across from Sophie, their bare knees touching. “Your mom is sick. Sick in the head. She made William sick. She made him die.” Jillian tugged on her French braid, refusing to sugarcoat the truth any longer. “Everyone knows that but you.”

Sophie was speechless, deflated, like all the hope her dad had filled her with had run off with the words of a friend she assumed believed in her mother like she did.

“How can you say that? You
know
my mother. You went shopping with her. You saw all the times my mom took William to the doctor. You
saw how much he cried. You of all people should know she wasn't capable of hurting anyone.”

“Well, apparently she was. She hurt your brother. You heard the prosecutors. She had Munchausen.” Jillian's once responsive eyes hardened.

Sophie clutched her stomach and turned away. “Can you please go? I need to be alone.”

“Fine, I'll leave you alone,” Jillian replied. “But think about it—the description for Munchausen fits.”

—

S
OPHIE RAN FASTER AND FASTER
through the streets of Brookfield, but with every turn another bad memory or unwelcome thought invaded her. Her high school, out of session for the holidays, only reminded her of graduation. Alone.

While other seniors had thrown their hats and celebrated, Sophie kept her head down and her goals clear (
Get
my diploma and get out of here
), but no matter how much she avoided others, she still couldn't escape the stares and whispers, even from her teachers.
That poor
Bradshaw girl. What is she going to do now?

William would have been eighteen this year. A senior, graduating with his class in this exact place. Sophie wondered what he would have looked like, what he would have become.

The high school was within walking distance of her childhood home. The house she'd packed up and pushed away, vowing never to return and never look back. Her dad's Ford Explorer weighed down by everything she could possibly fit into a college dorm room. Her clothes, a few linens, a bicycle, and William's baby blanket—a faded blue-and-pink-and-yellow crocheted blanket now hidden in a JCPenney bag underneath the box preserving her wedding dress back at her house in West Lake.

Family pictures, dishes, and all her mom's case files still resided at 365
North Prairie Street. At least, she assumed it was all still there, although she'd never been back. A few days after Jillian confronted her, she'd finally had the courage to power up her dad's computer to take a closer look at all of the court documents.

She knew he always kept his password on a yellow sticky note locked in his desk drawer. When she couldn't find the drawer key anywhere, she'd taken a hammer to the lock and beat it until the latch disassembled and dangled from the inside of the small drawer. Her heart had beat faster than it ever had as she entered the password, john832, into the box on the computer screen. A Bible verse, Sophie later figured out, which read:
And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

On that day, the truth did set her free. Instead of unwrapping presents on Christmas Day, she opened documents from Brookfield's chief medical examiner:
Cause of death:
ethylene glycol poisoning.
Police reports:
bottle of windshield wiper fluid
found in the Bradshaws' garage.
Toxicology reports:
traces of ethylene
glycol in bottle Grace Bradshaw last fed William with at
the hospital
. Notes from a court-appointed psychiatrist:
mother who fits
profile of someone suffering from Munchausen by proxy. Depressed mother
who seeks attention from medical personnel by repeatedly making child sick.

Seeing these without her father there to immediately translate what she was reading, she realized that Jillian had been right. They were all right. The mean kids in the hallway who snickered at her when she passed—“Why didn't your mom poison you?”—to the janitor after school who'd told her, “It doesn't matter who you come from, you control your destiny.”

How could she have been so stupid? How could her dad have been so naïve? Her mom was guilty. Guilty of lying, of poisoning and killing her only son. Sophie's brother. Had her mother wished she could kill her, too?

Sophie had turned off the computer, devastated. Furious at her dad for manipulating the facts, for dying, but most of all for making her believe.

—

S
OPHIE THOUGHT ABOUT TURNING AROUND
, or at least not looking at her old house when she ran by the church located at the corner of her street and not too far from her high school. But something inside her felt otherwise, and before she could stop herself, she turned and found herself standing in front of her childhood.

It looked exactly as she remembered, a modest Victorian-style two-story home with a cracked wraparound lattice-framed porch still needing a paint job. Chipped pieces of yellow paint hung for dear life to rotted wood, praying the next gust of wind would not send them on their way. Weeds and dandelions covered the sidewalk in front of the house and forcefully pushed their way through the broken concrete.

Sophie hadn't set foot in the house since she locked the doors the summer before her freshman year of college. The city, she guessed, had been maintaining the lawn. She'd stopped paying those bills when she married Thomas and failed to leave a forwarding address.

I'm not sure I can do this,
she thought to herself as she stood in the driveway of the property she once called home. The swing on the front porch was still in the same place, empty and unoccupied, as if waiting for its family. She pictured her mom sitting there, swinging, with a fresh glass of lemonade, watching for her to turn the corner on her way home from school.
How was your day, sweetie? Any homework?

Her mom would be so sad to see the house run-down like this, she thought, as she contemplated whether or not to search for the spare key that used to be taped behind the wrought-iron mailbox that hung on the wall outside the front door.

A car horn dazed her before she could look for the key. “I'm glad I found you here, Mrs. Logan,” the woman from the law office shouted through her open car window. “I didn't put two and two together until I was brushing my teeth this morning. Mr. Taylor would never forgive me if I let you get away.”

This week has been hard. I'm not
going to pretend to be strong—I don't think I have
the energy. There were times I felt like my last
breaths couldn't get here fast enough. I realize that sounds
morbid, especially coming from me, but these past few days
have been almost unbearable. Walter's execution made everything around here
feel heavy. My spine even fought me when I tried
to stand up straight. I hate to be negative, especially
in my journal to you, but I have to be
honest.

Even in prison, holidays are days of note, but not
this Thanksgiving. My last Thanksgiving, and I contemplated staying in
bed all day. Sleeping through like it never happened. The
thing that stopped me was this strange sense of obligation
I felt to Jada and Roni, like I needed to
make sure they didn't feel alone this holiday season. Everyone
deserves a nice holiday, don't you think?

Carmen's husband came to visit, so she spent the morning teasing her hair, trying to get some “height” at her crown so her face didn't look so long. I tried to be polite when she asked me for the third time if her face looked younger if she parted her hair on the right or on the left side. “Your husband will like it either way,” I finally said, in the most encouraging voice I could muster.

Around 11:47 a.m., the food trays came out. Late, but at least
the processed turkey slices weren't cold. Roni, Jada, and I joined one another at the metal round table in the dayroom. No one said “Happy Thanksgiving” on this otherwise ordinary day, but we made a point to sit together. An unspoken survival tip to help us manage the mundane.

“Serena should be getting her driver's license this week,” Jada boasted, swirling the congealed brown gravy into her mashed potatoes. “Daryl said his daughter wouldn't be driving a piece-of-crap car to school like he had to. He'd get her something nice to drive.”

The only time Jada spoke with such animation was when
she was talking about her family. I suspect she'd say
the same thing about me.

“Daryl didn't want his kids to do without. He bought Robbie one of those camouflaged Jeep trucks on his fourth birthday. Paid three hundred and some dollars for it. He rode that thing up and down the driveway until the wheels fell off.”

She laughed, and I did, too. Roni grunted. She had her head tilted to the side and her thumbnail was busy picking dried macaroni off the corner of her tray. I tried to ignore this disgusting evidence appearing on our sanitized food trays more often than not. It was hard enough to eat the food in here the first time around.

“They're probably going to eat at his mom's around one. They do every year.”

“That sounds nice,” I said to Jada. She reminded me of the Mrs. Beasley doll I had as a child. When you pulled her string, she repeated the same few phrases over and over.

I'd heard the prison doctor had tried to bring her back to reality. “Your family is gone.” His words had met only an empty stare. “Your husband and two kids died in a house fire, remember?”

I'm not sure Jada has ever acknowledged that fact. She still talks
about them in the present tense, even though she's been sitting here without them for the past nine times we've been served pumpkin pie.

The judge called her a pathological liar with no maternal instincts when he sentenced her for three counts of premeditated murder. Empty gasoline cans and three sixteen-day-old life-insurance policies were found in Jada's car the night of the blaze. She was the only one who made it out alive.

I made it my mission not to judge Jada, or the other ladies who now shared my holidays. I chose instead to love the people I knew they were meant to become if they had made different choices or had been given different skill sets. As terrible as their crimes were, I made it a point not to define them by their worst mistakes made so many years ago.

Were you alone today?

We had twelve Thanksgivings together before I left you. Another five with you sitting across the glass from me, sneaking glances at your watch, forcing yourself to fake happy so I'd believe everything was all right. I didn't know the seventeenth Thursday we spent celebrating would be our last.

Who are you with?

Did you think about me?

Did you tell them about our cinnamon rolls, how late we stayed up rolling the dough and sticking our fingers in the powdered-sugar icing, laughing, and licking it off until we made ourselves sick?

I cherish those memories, but when I think about it, I don't care if you told them about our homemade desserts, or about my philosophy on setting a simple table—I hope you just said, “It was my home, and I loved being there.”

I've spent a lot of time in my life not knowing. Not knowing if it will rain when I've planned our after-church picnic, or not
remembering the friend of a friend's name I've met several times. These things don't bother me too much because I know there are solutions out there somewhere. Like factual responses, answered by watching the Weather Channel or apologetically asking your friend's friend his name once again.

The big unknowns are what keep me from my peace. Taunting me, like a snotty girl at recess: “Where's your daughter?” “What really happened to your son?”

I replay, without will, the months before William's death. The endless hours trying to get him to eat, the helplessness when he continued to lose weight and the horrifying moments when his body would inexplicably stiffen. And then, finally, the time it never ended and I realized once I left him at the hospital that he was gone forever.

Our day before was perfect. You walked Teddy through the park while I pushed William in his new stroller. Do you remember the one that had the paisley canopy so he wouldn't get too much sun? Every so often we'd stop and Paul would sing to William.

“The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round.”
William had just learned to clap his hands.

After we walked home, I fixed William a bottle while you tried to teach Teddy how to shake for a treat. “Shake,” you'd say to him over and over while you held a Milk-Bone above his head.

Paul prepared his sermon in the study while I fed William. At first he acted hungry, sucking so hard formula drooled out of his mouth, pooling in the folds underneath his chin.

“Need another bib,” I yelled to you from the living room.

“Hungry, hungry hippo.” You poked his belly as you handed me a burp rag.

I'll never forget what I saw next. What you saw next.

William was no longer William. His pudgy face became hard and the thick formula leaking out of his mouth started to bubble.

“Get Daddy,” I shouted. “Get Daddy fast.”

By the time Paul ran into the living room, William's blue eyes had stopped moving, but his eyelids hadn't. They blinked—over, and over, and over again—until they didn't anymore.

When the paramedics took William away, I never imagined he wouldn't be returning.

That I wouldn't be returning.

My last perfect day, and the final day in our home I'd spend with you.

xoxoxo

After the meal, and after I had put in my self-imposed social time, I returned to my cell. I didn't want to watch my last bowl game on TV, or glance at the sales in the newspaper advertising Christmas presents I'd never buy. I just wanted to pull that gray, scratchy blanket over my head and go to sleep.

But I didn't. I couldn't. I had only a few more months to write to Sophie. For that reason and for that reason alone, I needed to keep breathing. I keep remembering things I need to teach her.