Notes on an Execution, page 14
* * *
The breeze calls you back. A smack to the face, whistling through the window of the transfer van. You surface from the memory to find that you have already passed the lake, that the Sam Houston Monument is rising in the distance, towering over the border of Huntsville. This is Shawna’s cue. As the van speeds closer, the statue reveals itself, gigantic in sculpted marble.
The world seems to slow, sinking into the molasses of the moment. The importance builds into an anxious thrill, and your ears start to ring, blood thudding through your body like a drum.
The future expands before you. It will be scary, to run. It will be exciting and dangerous and hungry and hard. You don’t have a plan, beyond basic survival. You will hide in drainage pipes. You will scale the roofs of train cars. And even if you never see the Blue House again, the fact of that place will push you forward. A reminder, a testament: You are capable of being better. You are capable of living on.
* * *
It’s time.
The seconds stretch into eternity. The whole of the weeks spent planning and the years spent waiting converge into a span of three crucial seconds. In one graceless motion, you lean as far as your handcuffs will allow—you extend one leg beneath the driver’s seat, your foot brushing metal.
You pull, as hard as you can.
What slides out is not a pistol. It is not a gun. It is the metal tip to a pair of broken jumper cables.
* * *
What if I had done it?
You asked Shawna this question last night, your forehead pressed up against the streaky window.
Done what?
You know. Everything they say I did.
Why? Shawna had asked. Why would you ever do something so awful?
I wouldn’t, you told her. But say I did. Just for a second. Would you still love me?
You had been certain. You had been sure you’d pulled Shawna far enough, that she was ready for the possibility—that she’d been feigning delusion until now, that deep down, she knew the truth. The distaste in her eyes felt like a punch. It was a fascinated repulsion, laced with an unfamiliar suspicion. You had been certain of Shawna’s fawning laugh, her bashful longing. You had been certain of an easy yes.
I didn’t do it, of course, you said, too quickly.
A long pause. You wondered, briefly, if you had blown it. If all the work you’d put into Shawna could implode with this tiny mistake. You tried to backpedal, but her face had already crashed.
It’s all in my Theory, you said, grasping. You’ll see, when you read it. Good and evil are simply stories that we tell ourselves, narratives we’ve created to justify being alive. No person is wholly good, and no person is wholly evil. Everyone deserves the chance to keep living, don’t you think?
The fluorescents were a blinding white. The pimples around Shawna’s mouth made her face look like a bruise.
I have to go, she’d stuttered, stepping away. I’ll have an answer for you in the morning.
* * *
The officers stiffen at the surprise of your lunge, draw their guns in apprehension, growl their warnings. You stare at the jumper cables, all rusted metal and peeling wire.
You know now what has happened.
The options: You could smash your own head against the window. You could stretch your legs, kick your feet against the driver’s seat. You could start screaming, demand the things you’ve planned for; you could reach, cuffed and stunted, for the jumper cables. The truth is overwhelming, a staggering fact. You are one hundred and eighty pounds of flesh, handcuffed to a vinyl seat, surrounded by five armed officers with military training. You have placed your trust in Shawna, a person you severely overestimated—a person who proves the only thing you’ve ever known about women.
Always, they leave you alone.
Lavender
2002
Lavender spoke to the redwoods, and sometimes they spoke back.
There was a language special for the trees. A whispered understanding. The sound was clearest early in the morning, when the mist curled between rustling leaves and Lavender could still smell the night, lingering smoky in the redwoods’ bark.
Though Lavender did not believe in God, she did believe in time. She had been coming here every morning for the past twenty-three years, and the trees had seen her evolution. They had welcomed her as a girl, broken and wandering in dirty jeans—and they soothed her now, forty-six years old and a different person entirely. The scent always brought her back: to the deck behind the farmhouse, all cedar breeze and alpine sigh. Sometimes Lavender caught a whiff of milky breath, puckered baby lips, tiny hands flailing, and in these moments, she pressed her forehead to the mottled bark and prayed.
Lavender crunched through the morning dim. She slipped past the Spruce building, then past Aspen, Magnolia, and Fern. The main house, Sequoia, stood towering on its hill, a single light aglow in the belly of the kitchen, where Sunshine was already kneading the day’s bread, rolling the dough beneath her scarred red fingers. She slipped past the laundry lines, flapping like clean white ghosts, past the horses, dreaming in their stables. As she entered the forest, Lavender focused on her breath, measuring like she’d learned in group workshop. The fresh cold moved up through her sinuses, igniting her groggy mind.
When Lavender reached the clearing, she knelt at the base of the tree.
Sequoiadendron giganteum—a redwood, massive and existentially untouchable. When she rested her brow against the splintered wood, a wide generosity overcame her. The tree loved her back; Lavender did not take this for granted.
Today, though, she had questions. Today, she thought of Johnny and the farmhouse, her baby boys, a scene now decades in the past but still lingering in her bones. As the breeze sighed through the forest leaves, Lavender asked the question she’d tucked so carefully away—to murmur it still felt like whispering a secret.
What have I done?
The tree never answered to desperation. Lavender pressed her mouth to the bark, the sap stinging raw against her lips.
* * *
By the time Lavender slipped back into the valley, the sun had risen entirely, bathing the hills in a milky orange glow. Gentle Valley split open at her feet, lush and imposing. The vegetable gardens and fruit trees rose from the center field, lines of organized chaos. The women were awake: steam chugged from Sequoia’s chimney, and Lavender could hear their distant laughter, echoing over the clink of breakfast dishes.
After the redwoods, Lavender often felt small. Mortal, flimsy. It was always disappointing: the sun would rise, and again, the truth. No matter how far Lavender traveled, that girl from the farmhouse followed on her heels, a wispy shadow, starving for relief.
But today, she would have an answer: she was going to San Francisco. Today, she would find out what that girl had created.
* * *
Harmony sat with Lavender while she packed.
“It’s okay to feel anxious,” Harmony said. She was using the voice she saved for group sessions, a manufactured soft. When Harmony was drunk, she sounded like a completely different person, her voice blazing with the affectations of whatever world she’d left behind. A shrieking snort, a nasal laugh—so unlike this honeyed calm. After many political disputes within the hierarchies of the commune, Harmony had finally been elected workshop leader, and now she seemed desperate to prove herself.
“You’re sure you don’t mind driving?” Lavender asked, for the third time.
It was fruitless. Harmony was not backing out. The women had voted to set aside the van for Lavender’s trip, and Harmony had arranged an overnight with a friend in the Mission. It was a three-hour drive into the city, but in the past two decades, Lavender had only occasionally left Gentle Valley, accompanying Sunshine into Mendocino, where they stopped at the hardware store, the wholesale market, the bank.
Lavender tucked a pouch of balsam into her duffel. Harmony handed over a balled-up pair of socks, her expression transforming into a focused sort of sympathy.
Things had been different, since Lavender told the women. The truth had come out six months ago, in a group therapy session that went long into the night. Her whole story. She’d kept her secrets tucked tight for so many years, she had thought expulsion might feel like relief. But so far, the endeavor had only resulted in a recognizable ache, a pooling unease in the pit of Lavender’s gut, a tamping down of something poisonous. It lived inside her now, a writhing virus. When the idea for the trip came up, Lavender regretted telling them at all. She was grateful, of course, that the women were so supportive, that they’d put so much thought and effort into her healing, but gratitude did not make the anxiety any lighter. We want to help you find your center, Harmony had said, while everyone nodded from the circle on the floor. We cannot be whole until we face what has broken us. Even Juniper had gotten behind it, her weathered face crinkling as she nodded her approval. So Lavender had not protested when they hired the private investigator, sent those emails, RSVPed yes on her behalf. It’s time, Harmony had said. Time to face your demons.
Lavender wanted to tell them what she had learned about demons. Often, they were not demons at all—only the jagged parts of herself she’d hidden from the sun.
* * *
Lavender found Gentle Valley twenty-three years ago.
She had been on a bus, traveling up the coast. The sign had flashed, a vision from the side of the road—finger-painted words adorned with bright flowers, primitive and friendly. There was something distinctly feminine about the red and yellow cursive, something vital. Lavender stood, asked the bus driver to pull over.
She’d been in San Diego for two long years: 1977 to 1979. There had been motel rooms bathed in faded green light, camps beneath highways and men who smiled with rotting teeth, thumbs outstretched for rides across the desert. A brief stint at a club off the interstate, where Lavender strutted lazily across a raised platform in a gold bikini, swiping singles from truckers who told her she looked like Patty Hearst. On every curve of every freeway, she searched for Julie. Often she spotted Julie at a distance: a woman laughing in the window of a coffee shop, a tangle of long hair whizzing past in a pickup. She never did find her friend, but Lavender pushed forward those years on the road with a surprising sense of infallibility—the world felt bearable, knowing Julie had survived it first.
There were men. Men with tattoos, men with ponytails, men with dead eyes, just back from Vietnam. And to Lavender’s surprise, there were women, too. Another dancer at the club, her fingers like honey as they slipped beneath Lavender’s skirt. She’d spent a few intoxicating months with that woman, an art student who danced to support her sick mother, loved Led Zeppelin, and kept an apartment full of potted plants. So what’s your deal, exactly? she had asked one morning in bed, thumb roving Lavender’s bare hip. Lavender knew she was waiting for an answer: lesbian, bisexual, maybe neither, maybe both. But she’d only shrugged. Most days she barely felt like a person.
The dancer told Lavender about the communes. Take a drive up the coast, and you’ll find them. The area was littered with self-sustaining homesteads like Gentle Valley, havens that promised healing and togetherness. It was pure luck that Lavender had not stumbled into one of the communities that had turned quickly feral or cult-like—in the last twenty years, nearly all the others had imploded. Leadership flaws. Male ego. It was dumb, beautiful luck that of all the communes Lavender could have found, she stopped at Gentle Valley: a group of thirty women that had since grown to sixty, established by a pair of psychologists, Juniper and Rose. Their mission statement aligned vaguely with second-wave feminism, a small-scale dismantling of the patriarchy and its many accoutrements, with a focus specifically on behavioral therapy for traumatized women. Rose had since died, but Juniper still ran sessions from the Sequoia building. The women of Gentle Valley lived entirely off the land, supplemented with income from the hammocks they wove from natural materials and sold to health goods and tchotchke stores across the country. Lavender loved Gentle Valley’s motto, so inarguably appealing: Eyes wide, heart open.
Lavender still missed men, sometimes. The gruff of them. Their unruliness. Occasionally, Juniper allowed a man to stay for a while, a brother or a son or a husband, as long as it was clear the mountain still belonged to women. During these periods, the energy shifted, tensed. Lavender thought sometimes about that question—so what’s your deal, exactly?—and she loved Gentle Valley for the fact that here, it didn’t matter.
On that day twenty-three years ago, Lavender had stepped off the whining bus and onto the gravel road that led into the valley. When she saw the Sequoia building for the first time, glistening statuesque with its solar-paneled roof, Lavender burned with weariness, and awe at the natural perfection of the place. The trees, gigantic and swaying, like soldier guardians. The smell, like fresh grass and wildflowers. In one hand, she clutched the small duffel of her belongings, and in the other, she clutched her stomach. Her body had never gelled back into its own shape—it wrinkled and folded in ways that reminded her constantly of where she’d been. What she’d left behind. Lavender grabbed a fistful of skin from her belly, clutching the flesh, proof of a past life, as she walked into the dust.
* * *
Now, Lavender buckled herself into the front seat of the van. The women from therapy were lined up at the edge of the valley path—one by one, they approached, whispering lines of poetry through the open window. Rilke from Lemon, Yeats from Brooke, and some Joni Mitchell lyrics from Pony. Faced with the prospect of the outside world, Lavender considered how strange they looked, lined up in their homemade clothing, hair shorn identically to reveal sturdy, stubbled scalps (Juniper encouraged them to embrace the unfeminine). When it was Sunshine’s turn, she uncurled Lavender’s fingers to place a figurine in the center: the lucky Buddha that sat on Sunshine’s nightstand.
The day was bright, crisp, cloudless. A perfect California autumn. As Harmony maneuvered the van down the long dirt road, Lavender examined the translucent jade Buddha. It looked graceless in her palm, hokey and small. She tucked the figurine into the pocket of her shirt, then took a quavering breath as she traced the edges of the manila folder.
She did not need to open it. She’d memorized most of the pages. They were comforting, in the van’s distinct claustrophobia—reports Lavender knew by heart, phone numbers she’d copied mindlessly, printed emails she’d labored over in the back office of the Sequoia building. It all culminated now in a nauseous sense of understanding, as Lavender fiddled with the folder in her lap: she had lost control. She didn’t want this. She had let the women’s kindness obscure everything, and now she was careening into her own nightmare.
Still, there was the name. Once she heard that name, Lavender knew she would never forget it.
Ellis Harrison.
* * *
What’s the worst that could happen? Harmony had asked, as she convinced Lavender to hire the private investigator. What’s the worst thing you could find?
Lavender liked to imagine that her children were happy. That her boys had found their own ways to exist in the world, that they were soft and satisfied. This was as far as she would go. This was the reason she’d swaddled herself so forcefully in the isolation of Gentle Valley—here, she did not have to look. She did not have to wonder about the long tentacles of a choice she’d made when she was a different person, practically still a child. She did not have to see how the arms of that choice had reached into the world, the infinite number of realities they might have sculpted.
* * *
The private investigator found Baby Packer first.
It was easy, from the records. He had been adopted back in 1977, after only a few days in the hospital. A two-month-old baby with a case of malnutrition. When Lavender closed her eyes, she could still remember how he had looked, that last day on the farmhouse floor, his infant limbs squirming spastic.
Cheryl and Denny Harrison had filled out the proper paperwork, still available in the state records. They had given Baby Packer a starchy new name. Ellis. According to the investigator, Ellis Harrison no longer lived in New York City, but he’d grown up there. When Lavender tried to picture that skinny infant as a twenty-four-year-old man, her heart beat so slowly, so exaggeratedly, she wondered if it had liquified.
What about Ansel? Lavender had asked, tentative.
Ansel would be twenty-nine years old now. According to the investigator, he lived in a small town in Vermont—he had studied philosophy in college and now worked at a furniture store. At this, Lavender beamed with pride. College. Of course. He’d been such a smart little boy. Harmony had printed Ansel’s address on a folded sheet of paper, which Lavender had purposefully let slip through the dusty crack behind her dresser.
The women had spent the following weeks in therapy discussing Lavender’s options. Harmony urged Lavender to write Ansel a letter—wasn’t she always writing letters in her head? But even the remote prospect felt impossible. The thought of meeting her children again made Lavender so queasy, they often had to end their sessions early so she could lie down.
Ansel, especially. Ansel would remember.
Eventually, they settled on a compromise. She would start with the furthest point of contact, a level of interaction distant enough that Lavender could gather some information without crushing herself entirely.
Dear Lavender, Cheryl Harrison had written, in response to the letter she and Harmony had crafted. I’m glad you reached out. I have a photography show opening in San Francisco next month—would you like to meet then? I don’t know what you’re hoping for, and I’m not sure I can help, but I’m happy to talk. If you want to come to the gallery, my assistant can arrange it. With warmth, Cheryl.
