Notes on an Execution, page 5
* * *
Here is what you remember of your mother.
She is tall, and she is mostly hair. She crouches in a garden, lazes in a rocking chair, sinks into a rusty claw-foot tub. Sometimes the tub is filled with water and your mother’s long dress floats wet like a jellyfish. Other times she is dry—she holds out a strand of her own hair, a gift, glistening orange. You remember nothing of your father. Not a sound, not a smell. Your father is a vague presence, looming in the distance; he is an inexplicable ache at the back of your skull. You do not know why they left or where they went or why your mother exists so alone in these recollections. You only remember a rusty chain, pooled in the dent of your collarbone, and how you felt wearing it, like nothing could touch you.
Your mother is the part of the Theory you have not yet figured out. We are all bad, and we are all good, and no one should be condemned to one or the other. But if good can be tainted with the bad that comes after, then where do you place it? How do you count it? How much is it really worth?
In most of your memories, your mother is gone. And before she is gone, always, she is leaving.
* * *
The memory summons it.
You try to focus on the physical. The familiarity: Clanging metal doors, the smell of canned meat. Dust, urine. Greasy hair. You slide to the floor, press your spine into concrete.
It comes anyway.
In the pit of your subconscious, Baby Packer starts to wail. If you could play a soundtrack of your life, this noise would be the loudest constant, the screeching misery of an infant. The silence of your own helplessness. The fading of that shriek into a slow, pathetic whimper.
* * *
There is only one place that keeps the screaming away. You arrived there on a Saturday morning, seven years ago.
A bright summer day. 2012. You’d woken before sunrise, too anxious to stay in that empty bed—months after Jenny left, and her absence still felt like a raw sore. You drove slowly, memorizing. It was late June, and the morning was a juicy blue, scented with spruce, wet from a long night’s rain. Tupper Lake, New York, had one crumbling church, a small boxy library, a gas station. A smattering of houses, surrounding a foggy lake. The clouds rolled like steam over the water, curling gentle into the sky. Your memory bestows a fated filter on this drive, this morning, the dense humidity. Though you only spent those few short weeks in Tupper Lake, it took the entirety of your life to bring you there. A series of conspiring and intentional years, all leading to this.
At the gas station, a pimpled teenager was scraping bits of melted cheese off a pizza display case.
Yeah? she said, without looking up.
I’m looking for a restaurant.
There’s only one, the clerk said, as she picked a fleck of burnt cheese from the spatula and popped it into her mouth. You wanted to hear her say it. The Blue House.
* * *
As the baby’s screaming begins—as your hands clap fruitlessly over your ears—you make the promise.
It will not end here.
The first time you hurt someone, you were eleven years old, and you did not know the difference between pain and wanting. You lived in a crumbling mansion with nine other children: it started with a wink, nearly accidental, a test of your own sweetness. When the girl across the dining room blushed beneath the heat of your attention, you felt your own power, surging addictive. You could not have seen how that tiny decision would catapult you into the future, directly onto this concrete floor. How your actions would become a chain, marching purposefully into the present.
When you are free, you will walk the length of the Texas desert. You will hitch rides on fast trains; you will wash your face in frigid lakes. Eventually, you will reach the Blue House.
You will not do it. You are certain of that. You will not hurt a single person again.
Saffy
1984
Saffron Singh could tell you how many things she loved, and there were four of them.
One: the sound of Miss Gemma’s house late at night. From the room she shared on the third floor, Saffy could hear everything. Sneeze, groan, whimper. At night, the mysteries of the house laid themselves bare. Saffy huddled beneath her scratchy pink comforter and reveled in the exquisite aloneness as the house shifted, exhaled.
Two: the picture frame she’d taken from her mother’s dresser, before the social workers brought her to Miss Gemma’s. Her mother had placed a sheet of notebook paper beneath the glass, with a line of chicken-scratch cursive scrawled hastily across. Felix culpa. Saffy did not know what these words meant, but her mother had written them, and so she loved them. She slept with the frame tucked beneath her pillow.
Three: her bottle of Teenie Bikini nail polish. The color was a pastel purple, creamy and comforting. Saffy used it sparingly, only allowing herself one coat at a time. She did not love the bottle itself, but instead how it made her feel, like someone fancy and grown-up, a girl with clean shiny fingers.
Four: the boy downstairs. He slept in the room directly below hers. Lying awake, Saffy imagined the oxygen traveling from her lungs and out her nose, across the hall, down the staircase, and into his open mouth.
And that night was different. Special. That night, Ansel Packer had winked at her across the dining room table.
* * *
“Liar,” Kristen had said earlier, when Saffy came rollicking upstairs. Kristen was on the floor, practicing the moves she’d memorized from the VHS of Jane Fonda’s Workout. “Ansel could have any girl in the house. Are you sure he wasn’t winking at Bailey?”
Bailey was the prettiest girl in the house, maybe the prettiest girl Saffy had ever seen. Bailey was fourteen years old—Ansel was eleven, Saffy was twelve—and she had hair like drippy caramel. Kristen and Lila often practiced swishing their hips like Bailey, rolling their eyes like Bailey, chewing their nails like Bailey did. Kristen had once stolen Bailey’s bra, a 32C, and they’d all taken turns trying it on in the bathroom, fumbling with the clasp and pulling down their shirts to see what they’d look like. But Bailey had been sitting two seats over from Ansel at dinner. He would’ve had to turn his head a completely different direction.
The other option was that Ansel had winked, on purpose, at Saffy herself.
The thought spread through her stomach, then cracked down her legs. Liquid hot, thrilling. Saffy played the moment over until she couldn’t remember what he’d been wearing or how the wink had been shaped, until she couldn’t picture Ansel’s face at all. But the fact remained: he had caused this feeling. She was pinned to the mattress. Electric, aching. She did not dare move, in case this melting decided—like everything did—to leave her all alone.
* * *
The yard behind Miss Gemma’s was a wide slope, an acre of rolling field that led down to a creek. After breakfast, Saffy spread her scratchy pink blanket on the dewy grass; she’d inherited the blanket from a now-grown girl named Carol, who had been born with only one arm. Miss Gemma’s patch of land near the Adirondack mountain range was rich in the summer, a wet, ecstatic green, and Saffy sat with her gangly legs stretched out, her notes sprawled in her lap. She picked an aphid off her favorite polka-dot leggings and squinted down at the page.
Saffy was solving a mystery.
It had started with the mouse. Headless. Just a tiny pink body splayed on the kitchen floor. Lila had been the one to find it, and she’d screamed until everyone had come running—Saffy and Kristen had helped her bury it in the yard. They’d worn black and recited somber poems while Lila sobbed.
Then, there was the squirrel. Shoved beneath a bush near the driveway. Saffy caught Miss Gemma carrying it to the garbage with a shovel, her face scrunched in disgust. Coyotes, she said, as she deposited the pile of bones in the dumpster. A second squirrel, left in the same spot. Miss Gemma made one of the older boys clean it up, while she watched in her bathrobe from the lawn. Didn’t I tell you to stay inside? Miss Gemma barked at Saffy, when she poked her head out the sliding back door, curious.
Saffy knew a mystery when she saw it. She’d been reading the Nancy Drew books, one by one. She’d since spent every day outside, scouring the edges of the property, looking for clues. She did not know what exactly to look for, but she desperately wanted to be the one to solve the crime. So far, she’d scrawled down the dates of the murders. Described how the bodies had looked. (Horrific!) She wished she had a George or a Bess, someone to help her with her theories, but Kristen and Lila would rather gossip about Susan Dey’s haircut, lying upside down with their torsos hanging off Kristen’s top bunk.
She hoped maybe Ansel would help.
Ansel had spent his summer wandering along the marshy creek at the edge of Miss Gemma’s property. Saffy liked to watch from her blanket as he traversed the perimeter of the field, taking notes in the big yellow pad he kept tucked beneath his arm. She’d seen the books he took out from the library’s adult section, encyclopedias and biology textbooks. She’d heard Ansel was so smart, he skipped the first grade. She hoped that by watching, she could memorize his every motion: the slope of his shoulders as he picked through the cattails, ballpoint pen tucked behind his ear. Saffy wondered if she could see the facts on him, written in the tragic swoop of his neck.
She’d heard the story.
Everyone had.
Lila had whispered it excitedly one of the first nights after Saffy arrived at Miss Gemma’s, bouncing with the glorious drama. One of the older boys had stolen all the files from Miss Gemma’s den, and the details had spread around the house, changing shape as they expanded. Ansel had been abandoned by his parents at four years old, Lila said. They had lived on a farm, or maybe a ranch. When the police found Ansel, he was nearly starved. But the worst part—Lila’s eyes had bugged during the retelling, like this was the worst part but also maybe the best—there had been a baby. Only two months old. By the time the police arrived, Ansel had been trying to feed the baby for a whole day. But it was too late.
The baby had died.
Saffy would never forget the image. A real baby, no bigger than a doll. She’d since heard a half dozen other versions: the baby had been sent to a different foster home, Ansel had killed the baby on purpose, the baby had never existed at all. But that first image stayed with her, grounded itself as truth. A tiny, lolling neck. Saffy had never seen a dead person, not even her mother, and certainly not an infant.
She watched Ansel pick through the brambles, so studious and intent, and she thought how sad it was that a single bad thing could turn you into a story, a matter to be whispered about. Tragedy was undiscerning and totally unfair. Saffy certainly understood that.
* * *
That night, Saffy watched him all through dinner. Thirty-second intervals, so no one could accuse her of staring. If Ansel winked again, Saffy missed it, her gaze trained on her mashed potatoes as she counted down from twenty-nine.
When everyone gathered around the television for the eight o’clock episode of Family Ties, Saffy stole down to the basement. Her chest was heavy with disappointment, and the basement felt like the right place to be, all concrete and spiders and randomly strewn carpet squares. Miss Gemma kept a dusty record player down there, along with a cardboard box of albums. Saffy liked to sift through them, to study the photographs on the covers. Joni Mitchell had such an inviting gaze—Saffy had practiced that expression in the mirror, but it never looked the same.
“Hey.”
It was Ansel.
He stood at the base of the stairs, half in shadow. His hands were stuffed in the pockets of his corduroys, shoulders hunched self-conscious.
“Can I take a look?” he asked.
Then Ansel was beside her, flipping through the box. Saffy studied his fingers as they flitted past ABBA, Elton John, Simon and Garfunkel. Ansel’s hands were too big for his body, the hands of a boy much older than eleven, like a puppy not yet grown into its paws.
“Have you heard this one?” Ansel asked, pulling a record from the stack. Nina Simone. Saffy let out a stupid, embarrassing squeak and shook her head no.
“Let’s sit,” Ansel said, gesturing to a clump of carpet squares on the floor. When he smiled, Saffy shivered. Once, Ansel had aimed this exact smile at Miss Gemma, who had blushed scarlet and pulled her bathrobe tighter—the girls made fun of Miss Gemma for days afterward.
When the music started, the feeling was uncanny. Saffy was certain she’d lived this moment before, in some other life, the song reaching through her chest to touch a place she’d somehow forgotten. Ansel lay down next to her, flat on his back. His shoulder was close to Saffy’s, and when she began to see stars, Saffy realized she was holding her breath. The song swelled, the singer rasped—I put a spell on you—and Saffy wished she could stop time right there, take a still shot and save it, just to prove it back to herself.
Then it was over. The record hummed a beat of silence before the next song started. Ansel did not move, so Saffy did not either. They lay there until the record had finished, until Saffy’s spine was sore against the hard, cold floor, until the bedtime bell rang, and the other kids’ feet pounded and thunked across the ceiling. None of it touched her, because she had this. It was magic. Maybe, even, it was love. Love was a thing that could move you and change you, Saffy knew, a mysterious force that made you different and better and warmer and whole. A delicious smell. Familiar, untraceable. It made her hungry.
* * *
Before Saffy’s mother died, she liked to talk about love.
Saffy’s favorite nights were those she’d spent sitting cross-legged in her mother’s closet, picking through floral hippie skirts from her mother’s time in Reno, pairing them with clunky jewelry. You’ll see, Saffy girl, her mother used to say. Real love is like fire.
Is that how you loved Dad? Saffy asked, tentative. Like fire?
Let me show you something, her mother had said, and she’d reached for a shoebox on the closet’s highest shelf.
Saffy wondered often about her father. He’d left them before Saffy was born, with nothing but his last name—Singh, a name the kids on the playground mocked in an accent they’d learned from taxi drivers on television. At the grocery store, people stared, as if Saffy could not possibly belong to her own blond mother. Her dad was from a city called Jaipur, and he lived there now, a fact she used to report proudly, until she realized it meant he had not loved her enough to stay.
Inside the dusty shoebox, there was a photograph. The only evidence Saffy had seen of her father’s real, tangible existence. He sat in a library, books splayed across the table in front of him. He was smiling, his hair proudly covered in a navy turban, which her mother explained was a part of his religion. In his gaze, Saffy saw herself for the first time, squinting back like a startle in the mirror.
Why did he leave? Saffy had asked, careful, like her mother was a bird she might frighten from a branch.
His family needed him back home.
But what about us?
Listen, her mother had sighed, and Saffy knew she’d pushed too far. Do you remember why I named you Saffron?
It’s a flower.
The most rare and precious flower, her mother said. The kind of flower that could start a war.
She put the photograph back in the box, her green eyes focused somewhere else—Saffy desperately wanted to see that place. To touch it by herself. You’ll know it when you feel it, her mother said then. The right kind of love will eat you alive.
* * *
Ansel held both hands out, to help Saffy off the basement floor. His palms were damp, his thumbs stained with ink from writing all day in that yellow notepad—as he followed her up the stairs, Saffy was conscious of how he moved behind her. It was thrilling, Ansel’s closeness, almost frightening. She wanted that closeness in the same way she wanted to watch a scary movie, with a chattering sort of precariousness. She wanted the jump, the shiver. The unexpected bite.
By the time Saffy settled on Lila’s bottom bunk, she was breathless with the story, even more exciting in recollection. They pored eagerly over Kristen’s stolen copy of Teen magazine, huddled together, a flashlight rigged to the mattress above so Miss Gemma would not yell about bedtime. They’d practically memorized the issue, but they flipped the worn pages anyway, breezing straight past their favorite interview with John Stamos. The most important piece in the magazine was finally relevant: You’ve Snagged the Perfect Guy: Here’s How to Keep Him.
“You should go with option three,” Lila hissed through her retainer. She’d gotten the retainer before she came to Miss Gemma’s, and her teeth had since shifted, leaving blank gaps around the plastic. Lila’s fingers were always wet, hovering constantly near her mouth. On her middle finger, she wore a gigantic vintage ring, which Saffy didn’t have the guts to ask her about—it was too big for Lila’s hand, fortified with layers of Scotch tape so it didn’t fall off. The ring had a brassy gold band, studded with a massive purple gemstone. Saffy guessed it was maybe amethyst, though she once heard Lila claim purple sapphire. The gem was always shiny with Lila’s slobber, her lips caressing it obsessively. The ring was in Lila’s mouth now, and a string of drool bridging from her finger. Saffy grimaced.
“Number three,” Kristen said. “Show him how much you care.”
It was decided. Lila slumped over her pillow, already drowsy, while Saffy had never felt more disastrously awake.
The next morning, Saffy pulled a stack of construction paper from the craft box in the basement and set up on the bedroom floor. Her sixth-grade art teacher had said she had an affinity for the visual. Saffy swelled with a ruffling pride at the memory.
Hours later, the result was half poem, half comic. She and Ansel were miniature stick figures, the record player drawn in realistic detail between them—Put a Spell on You, she’d titled it. In the next frame, they held hands down by the river, a magnifying glass in Saffy’s other palm as a cheering crowd clapped in the distance. Mystery Solved, she’d called it. A coyote hung from a net, and a group of happy squirrels ran circles by her feet. Saffy drew a heart between her little pinpoint head and Ansel’s, though she crossed it out on second thought and replaced it with a fat black musical note.
