Notes on an Execution, page 26
Kristen hands Saffy a candle. The wax drips down, melting onto her fingers.
It is almost time. A thousand miles away, justice is being served—but justice, Saffy thinks, is supposed to feel like more. Justice is supposed to be an anchor, an answer. She wonders how a concept like justice made it into the human psyche, how she ever believed that something so abstract could be labeled, meted out. Justice does not feel like compensation. It does not even feel like satisfaction. As Saffy takes a long breath of alpine air, she pictures the needle, pressing into Ansel’s arm. The blue pop of vein. How unnecessary, she thinks. How pointless. The system has failed them all.
* * *
“Come over tonight,” Kristen says, as the crowd disperses. “You shouldn’t be alone.”
Her son is already in the car, adjusting the mirrors. He has thirty more hours of supervised driving before he can test for his license. Kristen’s earrings glint in the rearview, a gifted souvenir from Saffy’s trip last year to Rajasthan, gold tasseled droplets with stones that match the warm turquoise of her friend’s eyes.
“I can’t tonight,” Saffy says. “Work.”
Kristen smirks, warm, sarcastic. It occurs to Saffy how long they have grown together, how far they have walked, the things they have outlasted. “The parking brake, honey,” Kristen says to her son, as she sinks into the passenger’s seat. Her voice is like a lullaby, carrying through the night.
* * *
It’s late by the time Saffy reaches the station. A Friday night, and most everyone is gone. Only Corinne remains, bent in the spotlight of her desk lamp.
“Captain,” she says. “What are you doing here?”
Corinne glances at the clock. She knows what is happening tonight—Corinne is observant as always, meticulous. Once a month, Saffy has Corinne and Melissa over for dinner, where they sit in her kitchen, chatting as the smell of baked salmon or homemade pizza wafts from the oven. Corinne’s wife declined the wine; they have been trying through IVF for a baby. Saffy is grateful for her crow’s-feet now, for the lines wrinkling around her mouth. See? she wants to tell Corinne. You don’t need to have it all. You only need to figure out how much is enough.
Saffy almost sits. She almost collapses, rests her head on the cool surface of Corinne’s desk. Almost, she confesses the truth: she cannot go home, to that blissfully empty house. Most nights, Saffy is thankful for her solitude, but tonight that gift feels empty. Why don’t you find yourself a good man? You’re still pretty, and young enough. Kensington’s wife had looked so sincere as she’d said it, cubic zirconia glinting from her ears. Saffy had smiled politely, wondering what this woman thought she could possibly gain from such a thing.
This, right here, is all she needs. A good fight. The only one.
“The Jackson case,” Saffy says to Corinne. A feeling like hope pricks the base of her throat.
Saffy keeps her files stacked on the desk. They waver in piles, messy reminders—when she leans back in the rolling chair, shaking her computer’s mouse awake, the white light is comforting, an accusation she knows intimately.
The Jackson case waits, impatient, on her keyboard.
In the photo clipped to the top of the report, Tanisha Jackson is smiling. She is fourteen, her hair in braids, purple beads dangling. She stands in an overgrown backyard—elbows jostle for paper plates in the background. Tanisha has been missing for six days. They have a few promising leads: a teacher at her middle school with a sketchy alibi, a strange man with a scar on his cheek, passing through town. It is a matter, now, of sifting through facts until the truth comes winking to the surface, like gold in a pan. She studies the freckles that span Tanisha’s cheeks—Saffy believes that Tanisha is still alive. That vitality is possible even after trauma, that the path does not always lead to devastation. That not every girl must become a Girl.
The minutes stretch, blinking into hours. Saffy jots down notes, chips at the information. She will sit here until dawn. She will sit here until something shakes loose. She will sit here.
Hazel
Now
Hazel stands at the edge of the motel pool. The pool is drained and full of dead leaves, a smattering of plastic lawn chairs lying haphazard around the perimeter.
Hazel’s mother appears, fumbling with the key to her room. She has dressed up for the occasion. She wears a pantsuit dug straight out of the eighties, the shoulders too wide for her shrinking frame. She edges around the derelict swimming pool in a pair of chunky black pumps. As her mother comes closer, Hazel feels a mild suffocation—it could be the humidity, or that ill-fitting suit, or the thing her mother’s eyes do when they first catch sight of Hazel. They snag, widen. A brief flicker of hope cools into disappointment. In that bottomless millisecond, her mother sees two daughters. Hazel is always the wrong one.
A beige sedan pulls into the motel parking lot, and a woman with a haircut like a poodle approaches them. Linda, she says, as she shakes their hands, her French manicure crisp and bawdy. Linda is a representative from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Victim Services—she will drive them to the prison, but first, they have paperwork to review.
For months, Hazel’s mother has been feigning excitement. I can’t sleep, Hazel, not until I watch him fry. It has been seven years since Jenny’s death. Their father died of a heart attack just six months later, and her mother often refers to them as a unit, like they are together by choice, simply living elsewhere. They’ll be glad to hear it, she muttered, when Ansel’s sentence rippled through the courtroom. But it appears her mother’s bravado has evaporated—as Linda sits them down around a water-stained table, as she fans out the stack of paperwork, Hazel’s mother looks like she might blow away in the wind.
Linda reviews each page slowly. A description of the offender’s crime—As if we forgot, Hazel nearly spits—and an overview of the execution process. The evening’s schedule, like they are attending the theater. Ansel has invited two witnesses: his lawyer, and a name Hazel has never heard before. Beatrice Harrison.
What is the point of all this? Hazel wants to ask. Ostensibly, today is occurring for her own benefit. For Jenny, for their family, for some twisted form of recompense. But it feels backward. Almost like a gift to Ansel.
He gets the attention. He gets the media, the discourse, the carefully regulated procedure. Real punishment would look different, Hazel knows—like a lonely, epic nothing. A life sentence in a men’s prison, the years rotting as they pass. The long forgetting of his name. A heart attack or a slip in the shower, the sort of faceless death he deserves. Instead, Ansel has been given this noble sacrifice. Martyr status. Hazel feels guilty, complicit in the process. She sees the constant stream of Black men on the evening news, shot by police as they’re stopped for broken taillights, hauled into prison for carrying a pocketful of weed, and she tries feebly to teach her children about inequity, about institutional prejudice, about the poisonous history of this country’s justice system. She makes cardboard signs and marches through Burlington’s downtown, chanting for equality. She repeats these phrases to Alma, even as she knows: it is a privilege, to stand in front of the cameras. It is a privilege to be seen, to speak your last words into a microphone. Ansel gets the glorified title of serial killer, a phrase that seems to inspire a bizarre, primitive lust. Books and documentaries and dark tunnels on the internet. Crowds of women, captivated.
As Hazel helps her mother into Linda’s car, which smells like saltine crackers and air freshener, she feels a magnified sense of helplessness. The dread curls in her gut, a dozing animal.
* * *
The building is made of stately red brick. Colonial, grandiose. It looks to Hazel like a courthouse or a suburban high school. She helps her mother through the imposing front door.
They are greeted by a somber crowd. The trauma support team, the emergency action staff, titles that flow through Hazel’s consciousness like water. The warden is square and stocky, his handshake clammy.
“How was your trip?” he asks.
Hazel’s throat is empty of answer. He gestures to the tub where she should place her shoes—the concrete is frigid beneath Hazel’s bare feet. The prison smells like linoleum, like dust and metal. They pass through the security scanner, Hazel’s mother’s hair puffing out of its bun in a wiry frizz, then down the hall to the support room, a dismal parade. Brightly colored office chairs surround a sterile wooden table.
“Water?” the warden asks. “Coffee?”
Hazel shakes her head no. The room echoes when the warden is gone, exaggerating her mother’s every shuddering breath. It will be okay, Hazel wants to reassure. It will be better, once all this is over. But such promises would feel false coming from her mouth, so Hazel only listens to the buzz of the overhead lights, the prison clatter muted through the heavy steel door. She hears the faint din of men. A far whoop, a husky laugh. She waits.
* * *
Alma woke up early this morning, to say goodbye before the flight. She padded downstairs in her pajamas and perched at the kitchen island while Hazel prepared her coffee for the car. Alma’s cheeks were imprinted in the pattern of her pillow, her dark hair pulled into a sloppy bun, tangled and spilling down her shoulders. Alma is fourteen now—she has a mouth full of shiny braces and constantly adjusts the straps of the training bra she doesn’t need. Before school, she spends twenty minutes in the bathroom trying to wrangle herself into some unnatural shape. When she laughs, her hand flies self-conscious to her mouth.
Are you going to be okay, Mom? Alma asked, handing over the sugar bowl.
I’ll be fine, sweetpea.
Aunt Jenny would be proud. Alma reddened, embarrassed by her own sentimentality. She’d be proud of how brave you are.
Hazel cupped her daughter’s cheek.
Hazel does not know if Jenny would be proud. In one version of the universe, Jenny’s grin is sardonic. Classic Hazel, Jenny says, with her signature eye roll. Making this all about you. In another, Jenny is relieved to have Hazel there, a body double, a stand-in duplicate. In yet another, Jenny is still alive, and she and Hazel wait in line for coffee—when Jenny turns to take Hazel’s order, she looks very much like someone new.
* * *
The warden returns to the conference room, followed by two men in button-up shirts. They take seats in the far corner, nodding vaguely in acknowledgment—they wear lanyards clipped to plastic badges.
Reporters.
Hazel does not like journalists. In the weeks after Ansel’s confession, they parked their vans on her curb, lingered on her lawn. They showed up at Luis’s office, at the ballet studio, and they even went once to Mattie’s daycare, cameras hefted onto their shoulders. They cornered Hazel outside the playground—Go away, she shrieked, as the other mothers ushered their toddlers away. Please, just leave us alone.
It has never been about Jenny. Jenny is not interesting. Men kill their ex-wives all the time.
It’s about the other girls.
The question, of course, is why. This is the reason the reporters still appear, shoving microphones in Hazel’s face, the reason Ansel is granted space in the newspapers. He is captivating. Fascinating. A national phenomenon. It is shocking—intriguing, someone told her once—to be so unpredictably bad. Why did he kill those girls as a teenager, then no one until Jenny, twenty years later? Why them? Why then?
Hazel cannot fathom a less interesting question. Of course, she is sorry for those girls, for their families. But the attention, that big question: it baffles her. It does not matter how Ansel felt. His pain is irrelevant, beyond the horizon of her consideration. It does not matter why he killed those girls, or Jenny. Hazel believes that a person can be evil, and nothing more. There are millions of men out there who want to hurt women—people seem to think that Ansel Packer is extraordinary, because he actually did.
* * *
The bathroom is lit fluorescent green.
Hazel curls over the sink, wheezing. She exhales, waits for the panic to slink away. The bathroom accosts. A mistake—she should not have come in here. Today, the mirror will not be kind.
It happens in flickers, flashes. When Hazel looks inevitably up from the porcelain, she catches her own reflection, her short hair, that teardrop freckle. But Hazel will never be just herself again: Jenny reveals herself in a flare, a lurch. Jenny smirks in the curve of Hazel’s jaw. She hides in the crease of Hazel’s eyelid, lingers in the divot above Hazel’s lip.
A toilet flushes. Hazel breaks from her trance, startling backward into the sharp corner of the paper towel dispenser. When the stall door creaks open, a girl appears in the frame. She appraises Hazel, confused, the silence curdling.
“I’m sorry, I—” the girl finally stammers. “It’s just, you look exactly like her.”
“Excuse me?”
She reaches out, passive, as though to shake Hazel’s hand, her arm hanging limp between them. A flash of tattoo, a little bird on the inside of her wrist. She is dishwater blond, mid-twenties and notably unsettled, though her eyes flame with a distinct curiosity.
“Um, I’m Blue,” she says, like a question. “I’m really sorry, I should have known. He told me Jenny had a twin, I should have—”
“You knew my sister?” Hazel asks.
Blue shakes her head. “I never met her.”
The girl’s eyes are Ansel’s. A faint shade of light green, like early-summer moss.
“You’re here for Ansel, aren’t you?” Hazel asks. “His witness. You’re not—you can’t be his daughter.”
“Oh,” Blue says quickly. “No. I’m his niece.”
“Ansel doesn’t have any family,” Hazel says.
“His brother,” Blue says. “My dad.”
Hazel remembers that Christmas, so many years ago. How Ansel’s face had softened when he’d talked about his baby brother. A mask, she has since assumed, an intentional show of tragedy, engineered specifically for sympathy. Blue steps tentatively past—she flicks the faucet on, pumps soap from the dispenser. Hazel can see bits of Ansel in the slump of her shoulders. The pitch of her nose. It all seems so fallible, the things she once took for truth.
“Why are you here?” Hazel asks. “Why would you come, for someone like him?”
“If I’m being honest, I don’t really know.” The girl’s voice collapses. “I think—well, bad people feel pain, too.”
Blue’s hands drip into the basin. The bathroom echoes, cavernous. In the long wait, Hazel sees hurt. It is different from Hazel’s own, but it is hurt nonetheless. With soapy fingers, Blue reaches up. She says nothing more as she watches Hazel leave, her fingers playing at a locket, rusted red, dangling graceless around her neck.
* * *
When Hazel imagines death, she pictures a long, yawning sleep. More than a few times, she has yearned for it. She does not believe in heaven or hell, though faith would certainly be easier. As she stumbles back down the hall, abandoning Blue to the mirror, Hazel thinks how stupid it is. How absurd. A death like this—sterile, regulated, watched from a box—is just death. She has no idea to what extent it serves as punishment. The futility comes barreling down, a crumbling house. Hazel itches in the rubble. The utter pointlessness. The pure waste.
Back in the conference room, Hazel’s mother sips a paper cup of water. The warden paces by the door—when he sees Hazel, he nods toward the exit. The reporters gather their things, as Hazel takes her mother’s feathery hand.
“Are you ready?” the warden asks.
* * *
The memory comes with the first reluctant step. As Hazel follows the procession down the blank and empty hall, ribs thrumming, the enormity brings her back.
Come on, Hazel. I swear, the view is worth it.
Hazel is eight years old. She stands near the backyard fence, blinking up at Jenny, who straddles the highest branch of the maple tree. They are not supposed to climb this tree—too dangerous, their mother has warned. From below, Hazel can see the soles of Jenny’s bare feet, black from playing on the asphalt. Jenny leans down, offering a slippery hand, so confident, so easy to trust. Hazel kicks panicked at the trunk, fear twisting through her abdomen as Jenny grips her wrist, pulls her onto the creaking branch. Hazel balances, her legs dangling down toward the lawn, savoring the rush of fearlessness.
Look, Jenny says, beaming.
The neighborhood fans out through the speckled leaves. Hazel can see into neighbors’ yards, over fences and onto roofs, through shiny windows. The horizon is wide, and for the first time, endless. Jenny seems to know what she has gifted, because she pats Hazel on the shoulder, abundantly wise.
You can see everything, Jenny says, as the world folds open. From the beginning, all the way to the end.
* * *
The witness room is a tiny theater. The window is paneled with bars, the beige curtains drawn shut. There are no seats. Hazel leads her mother inside—they stand awkwardly in the center of the concrete box, the reporters lingering respectfully behind. From the other side of the curtain, Hazel can hear a faint, shuffling murmur. The glug of an IV bag. A heart monitor’s persistent beep.
Jenny arrives then, hovering. As the curtains slide open, as Hazel squints onto the stage, Jenny is here.
She is a scent, fleeting. A whiff. A glimmer. Jenny is in the oxygen that fills Hazel’s lungs, she is in the stubborn clench of Hazel’s fist. As Hazel peers through the glass and into the execution room, Jenny winks out from her own reflection. This, Hazel knows, is the miracle of sisterhood. Of love itself. Death is cruel, and infinite, and inevitable, but it is not the end. Jenny exists in every room Hazel walks through. She fills, she shivers. She spreads, dispersing, until she is nowhere—until she is everywhere—until she lives wherever Hazel carries her.
0
It is now.
As the footsteps arrive, you press a hand to your cheek. Stubble, jutting bone. You try to memorize the curve of your own jaw, the shape of the self you have lived with all your life. You do not know whether you hate your own body or if you will miss it when it’s gone.
