Notes on an Execution, page 3
The blood, it appeared, was coming from his hand. In his fist, Ansel clutched a chipmunk with no head. It looked, in shadow, like a mutilated stuffed animal, a decapitated doll. It didn’t seem to bother him—just another forgotten toy.
A scream built in Lavender’s throat, but she was too exhausted to let it out. She scooped Ansel onto her hip and hiked back up to the house, shuffling him into the outdoor shower. Bugs flew in clouds around the single bulb, while Lavender ran the mottled sponge over Ansel’s toes; she kissed each one in apology as the freezing water pounded.
“Come on,” she whispered, as she toweled him off. “Let’s get you something to eat.”
When she turned on the kitchen light, Lavender’s body felt like a funnel, her relief draining slowly away.
The house was quiet. Johnny had gone. But while Lavender had been pacing the perimeter of the property, he had taken a trip to the shed. His grandfather’s dusty old locks had been pulled from storage and fitted to the pantry door. Johnny had locked all the canned food away, locked the refrigerator, drilled a hole in the cabinet above the sink just to fit a lock over the dry pasta and the peanut butter.
Lavender could hear his words, an echo parroting constantly in her ear: You and that boy need to learn to earn your keep. Never mind the long afternoons she spent in the garden, trying to bring the tomato plants to fruit. Never mind the mornings she passed with Ansel, teaching him words from the leather-bound dictionary. Never mind the evenings she spent scraping grime from Johnny’s old hunting boots. Johnny had made himself clear: his job was to provide. Lavender could not parse exactly what her job had become, but clearly, she was failing to do it.
Okay, Lavender thought, as she surveyed the locked food. Her head, a scramble. Okay. They would eat in the morning.
She did not dare sleep in her own bed that night. She could not face him—she did not know what she might find. Instead, she curled up with Ansel on the hard floor in the extra bedroom, on top of the old blanket from the barn. Hungry, Ansel babbled into the night, as Johnny’s footsteps finally thunked up the stairs. When Ansel began to shiver from the hunger, Lavender took off the bathrobe she’d been wearing since the shower and wrapped it around him. Naked on the floor, breasts bared to the window, Lavender caught the glint of her mother’s locket, shining in reflection—the only thing she owned for herself. Gently, she unclasped it. She threaded it around Ansel’s neck.
“This is yours now,” Lavender said. “It will always keep you safe.”
Her voice quavered, but the words themselves seemed to lull the boy to sleep.
Lavender waited until the house was completely still before she crept downstairs and pulled one of Johnny’s jackets from the front closet. Until that point, her worry had been negligible. Johnny had never done something like this—had only gripped her wrists a little too hard, shoved her aside on his way up the stairs. The locked food was a promise and a threat, spurred by her inability to do the most basic thing: the mothering.
The pickup truck loomed near the edge of the field. Lavender waded barefoot through the tall damp grass. The night was so dark. No moon. She felt faint, withered. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast. The key fit easily into the lock on the door; it opened with a whining creak.
Lavender settled in the driver’s seat.
It was irresistible: the almost. She almost put the keys in the ignition. She almost drove through the night, until she found the ocean. But the sight of the stick shift pushed the truth over Lavender, even more devastating now that she’d made it this far. She didn’t know how to drive. She didn’t know if the car had gas, and she wouldn’t know how to fill it either way. She wasn’t even wearing a shirt, and she couldn’t get a shirt without going into the room where Johnny slept. It was so desperate, too much. She could never.
Lavender bent over the steering wheel and let the sob overtake her. She cried for Ansel, for the chipmunk, for her own grumbling stomach. She cried for the things she had wanted, which she couldn’t even picture anymore. It was like she’d held her own desire too long in the palm of her hand and it was now just an object, devoid of meaning, useless and taking up space.
* * *
She woke the next morning to the smell of sizzling bacon.
Lavender was alone on Ansel’s bedroom floor, the blanket tangled at her feet, sun streaming through the window in sharp, doughy rays. She slipped into the bathrobe, discarded in a heap, and padded downstairs.
Johnny stood over the stove like always. That familiar hulking self. Lavender knew his body so well, it was like she had become a part of it—she felt silly now, remembering her thoughts of the highway. Johnny stretched a plate toward her. A pile of steaming eggs and two strips of the crunchy bacon they froze for special occasions. A quick glance told her: the cabinets had been locked again, the extra food cleared and tucked away.
Ansel sat at the table, happily gulping a glass of milk.
“Please,” Johnny said. Soft now. “Eat, my love.”
Lavender could no longer remember what Johnny had promised, but she recognized the sound of it. She let Johnny twist his fingers in her hair. She let him kiss the ridge of her hip. She let him whisper I’m sorry I’m sorry until the words sounded like a completely different language.
While Johnny napped, Lavender sat with Ansel in the rocking chair. The chain of the locket had left a faint green smudge around Ansel’s neck, and her fear dipped in a momentary panic at the resemblance to a bruise. They pulled all the books from the shelves—technical manuals and maps of the Philippines, Japan, Vietnam—until they found it. A cartographer’s map of the Adirondacks. Lavender jiggled Ansel in her lap, spread the paper over their legs.
“We are here,” Lavender whispered. She traced Ansel’s hand down the highway. Farmhouse to town to the edge of the page.
* * *
It was a specific violence, the white of her underwear. Four weeks late, then six: Lavender prayed for a spot of blood. Every morning, her body betrayed her, morphing slowly without her permission. She vomited into the crusty bowl of the toilet, the terror rising up with her insides—swelling tidal, petrified.
* * *
Dear Julie.
Do you remember how we loved the Manson girls? How we followed the trials like a television show? I dream about those girls now, how they reached that bloody end. I wonder if Susan Atkins ever felt like this. If there was a whispering voice in the dark of her head, saying: Go.
It’s growing, Julie. I can’t stop it.
* * *
Lavender found a burlap sack in the barn. Inside, she placed one meager can of corn—she’d stolen it when Johnny’s back was turned, a lump beneath her shirt, heart hammering with the recklessness. She stuck an old winter coat in the sack, and though it was too small for Ansel, it would keep him warm if necessary. Last, she added the rusty kitchen knife that had fallen behind the sink. She shoved the sack in the back of the closet in Ansel’s room, where Johnny would never look.
That night, Johnny snored like always and Lavender placed a hand on her stomach, which felt swollen, alien. She thought of the bag in the closet, beaming its promise. When she’d told Johnny about the baby, bracing for explosion, he had only smiled. Our little family. Bile, rising treacherous in her throat.
Lavender grew. As she expanded, she took up residence in the rocking chair by the back door—she sat first thing in the morning and often only moved for bathroom breaks. Her brain was a sieve, no longer hers. The new baby ate her thoughts as they came, and Lavender was just the shell, the zombie vessel.
Ansel crouched constantly at Lavender’s feet. He squished bugs between his fingers and presented them like gifts. He cracked acorns with his baby teeth and gave her the splintered halves. Johnny disappeared for days at a time, and Ansel fetched Lavender the cans of soup Johnny left on the counter. Their rations. They’d take turns licking the cold spoon. When Johnny returned, his mood was snarling—Lavender thought of the bag in the closet, the jacket, the knife. She had grown too big to walk up the stairs.
* * *
Dear Julie.
I wonder about choices. How we resent them, and how we regret them—even as we watch them grow.
* * *
The contractions started early. A shooting pain, in the cold husk of dawn. Lavender begged: No barn. Let’s just do it here.
Johnny rolled out a blanket next to the rocking chair. He and Ansel stood over Lavender while she shrieked and bled and pushed. It was different this time—like she was not inside her own body, like the pain had consumed her and she was only there to spectate. Halfway through, Ansel flung himself over Lavender, his sticky palm pressed to her forehead with worry, and Lavender felt a primal bursting that brought her briefly back into herself: a swell of love so powerful and doomed, she was not sure she’d live through it.
After, there was calm.
Lavender wished the floor would open beneath her, pull her into a different life. She was certain that her soul had exited her body along with the baby’s head, fingers, toenails. As Johnny passed the bundle to Ansel and tried to rouse her from the floor, it occurred to Lavender that reincarnation was in fact a last resort: there were other lives, in this very world. California. She turned the word over in her mind, a sweet sucking candy that disintegrated on her tongue.
She could not look at either of her sick, sniffling children. Ansel, with his strange monster face. The new baby, a bundle of warm skin that she couldn’t bear to touch without feeling like she’d catch some disease. What disease, she didn’t know. But it would trap her here.
Lavender sank into the hardwood. She wished to be a speck of dust on the ceiling.
* * *
Weeks passed, and the new baby did not have a name. One month melted into two. Baby Packer, Ansel would coo, as he played with the bundle on the floor by the fireplace. A little song he’d made up, tuneless and lilting. Baby Packer eat, Baby Packer sleep. Brother loves you, Baby Packer. Brother loves you.
* * *
Johnny made the occasional show of tenderness, a halfhearted attempt to bring her back to life. He rubbed Lavender’s feet, crouched at the end of the mattress. He cleaned her wounds with a sponge, ran a hairbrush through her tangles. She stayed nestled in bed while Johnny brought the baby in to nurse—the rest of the time, Baby Packer squirmed under Ansel’s watchful four-year-old eye.
For the few minutes a day that Lavender held the baby, she wondered how he had gotten here, whether it was possible that this sweet suckling thing even belonged to her. With Ansel, she’d felt the same way, but her love had been so new and fierce. Now, she feared she had used it all up.
“Take him,” she monotoned, once the baby finished feeding. “I don’t want him here.”
Johnny’s frustration was hardening. Lavender could feel it, building up in his chest like molten lava. The horror only made her sicker. Numb. She had been subsisting on a single can of corn or beans per day, the hunger pangs like background static. More when you start contributing again, Johnny promised idly, his voice turned sour with disgust and frustration, repeating the words that had become a fixation. You have to learn to earn your keep.
So by the time Johnny stood over the bed, brimming with indignation, Lavender was so weak and brainless, she could not bring herself to care. Lavender looked up at the mass of him, seething, enraged, and tried to conjure the Johnny in the field with the raspberries. It wasn’t that he’d been replaced by this grizzly stranger, more that he’d evolved. Grown into his own shadow.
“Get up,” Johnny said.
“I can’t,” Lavender told him.
“Get the fuck up, Lavender.” His voice itched, curdled. “You have to get up right now.”
“I can’t,” she said again.
Lavender felt like she’d willingly asked for what came next. Like the plot had already been written out for her, and all she had to do was live it. She realized she had been waiting months for this. The locked food, the little bruises—warnings she had registered but not heeded.
Before Johnny lunged, she expected some nightmare version of him, a person she’d never seen. But no. In the milliseconds before the blow, Lavender looked at the same rugged man she had always known, and she thought, with a clarity that bordered on sympathy: You could have been anything, Johnny. You could have been anything but this.
* * *
A fistful of hair, yanked from the scalp. A scream, pleading, as Lavender’s aching bones slammed against the floor. The wound between her legs, open now, searing. Johnny’s steel-toed boot, rearing back like a horse, landing square in her stomach. The shock, a glittered red.
When the sound came from the door, Lavender saw double: the stuttering form of Ansel’s silhouette. He held the baby like Lavender had taught him, one arm beneath the head. Blurred, he looked too young—pants-less and chicken-legged—to be holding an infant. Ansel and the baby were both crying, panicked, but when Lavender reached for them, her whole body smarted, a series of wounds she had not yet cataloged, her mouth a sandy pool of blood and grit.
“Ansel,” Lavender croaked. No sound came out. “Go.”
Time slowed.
“No,” she tried to scream. “Johnny, please—”
It was too quick. Too thoughtless. With one massive hand, Johnny yanked Ansel’s head back and slammed it with a crack against the wooden doorframe.
After, the silence.
It rang in Lavender’s ears, punctuated only by Johnny’s heavy, labored breaths. Even the baby had stopped crying, surprised. The room was incredibly still. Lavender watched from the floor, stunned, as the realization seemed to wash over Johnny. His giant body trembled with bewilderment as he backed out of the bedroom. They listened as he stormed down the stairs, slammed the back screen door. Ansel blinked slowly, dazed.
Lavender dragged herself across the hardwood. A slugging creak. When she reached her children, she gathered them in her arms and wept.
Johnny did not come back that night. Lavender huddled in the bed with the boys, vigilant and alert. She nursed the baby until he fell asleep—when Ansel withered hungry, Lavender shook her head in apology. Not enough milk. Ansel peered up at her with spindly wet lashes, the hollows around his eye sockets like those of a frightened little ghost.
* * *
At the first light of dawn, Lavender slid from the bed. The bruises across her legs and stomach were already purpling—both boys were asleep on the old mattress, breathing steadily. The wound on Ansel’s head had swollen, protruding to the size of a golf ball.
Lavender creaked open the window, stuck her face into the morning. The breeze was a gasp on her cheeks, the dewy air like a new kind of promise. Beyond, the fields were a morning yellow. Beyond, beyond. Beyond was a place Lavender could hardly remember. Beyond this room, beyond this house, there were mothers who cooked pot roast for their children. There were little boys who watched cartoons on Saturday mornings, innocent and unafraid. Buttered popcorn at the movie theater, boxed cereal, real toothpaste. There were televisions and newspapers and radios, schools and bars and coffee shops. Before she moved to the farmhouse, a man had landed on the moon—for all she knew, there could be a whole city up there by now.
Johnny stayed away until noon. Twigs in his hair. He’d slept in the forest. The look on his face made him so much smaller, like a completely different Johnny, slumped and ashamed. His entire body was a beg, curled desperate for forgiveness.
Lavender could not fathom forgiveness. But she would do this one thing—for the blue sunrise, that tantalizing beyond. For the world outside, which she was starting to fear her children would never see.
“Please,” Lavender said. She bared her teeth so Johnny could see the chip he’d left in her canine. “Take me for a drive.”
* * *
Lavender put on real clothes for the first time in months. She combed her hair, splashed water on her puffy cheeks, and tied a sweater around her waist, the soft wool knit she’d spent all winter making.
“Are we going to the barn?” Ansel asked, as Lavender slipped on her nicest shoes, penny loafers, untouched since her school days. Johnny was already waiting in the car. It had taken surprisingly little to convince him: a pointed gaze at the marks up her thighs, plus the reassurance that the boys would be fine for an hour or two. Lavender did not have a plan. But she could not see a way forward that was not also out.
“Daddy and I are going on a trip,” Lavender said. “We’ll be back soon.”
Ansel stretched his arms out from the floor, and she picked him up. He was getting too big to sit on her hip, but the weight was familiar, like she’d been carrying it a long time. The bump on his head bulged like a fist, and Lavender resisted the urge to touch it. She kissed the hair around it, then squatted over the baby. Wrapped in one of Johnny’s jackets by the fireplace, Baby Packer squirmed and babbled; they’d been playing with a set of old spoons, and his spastic palms were stained black from the polish. Lavender pressed her nose to the baby’s scalp, breathing in his sweet, tangy musk.
“Ansel,” Lavender said, pressing both her hands to his cheeks. “Can I trust you to take care of your brother?”
Ansel nodded.
“If he cries, where do we take him?”
“To the rocking chair.”
“Good,” Lavender said. Choking now. “Smart boy.”
It was time. Lavender’s decisions did not feel like decisions—more like flakes of ash, settled on her shoulders. The moment was not hers to judge. She could hear the grumble of the truck’s engine at the edge of the field, Johnny’s looming presence, constant and menacing.
Lavender could not bear even one more glance. Somewhere deep and full of denial, Lavender knew the last time she saw her children had already passed—she could not withstand their questioning eyes, their rosebud mouths, the little fingernails she’d grown from nothing. So she didn’t look. With her back turned, Lavender stepped into the day.
“Be good,” she said, and she shut the door.
