Just Mercy: A Novel

by Dorothy Van Soest

  “You’re hurting yourself,” she gasped, holding out her open hand. “Here, give the knife to me.”

  The woman raised her hand high in the air. The knife hovered over her head. Click. The blade shot up toward the night sky. Click. It was gone. She tucked in her chin and narrowed her eyes. Click. Her left eye twitched. Her lips sneered.

  “Please, let me help you.” Veronica’s voice shook. Where was that bus, anyway? What could she do to calm the woman down until it got here?

  “What makes you think I need help? Huh? Huh?”

  At the feral look in the woman’s eyes, Veronica’s heart started hammering against her chest. “It’s okay. It’s okay. I just don’t want anyone to get hurt.” She raised her palms in front of her.

  “Like you? Huh? Huh? Like you?”

  When the woman took a step forward and pointed the knife at her, Veronica raised her hands again. She lifted her left foot up and in slow motion set it down behind her. Then she lifted her right foot and set it down, repeating each tiny step and going as slowly as possible in order to reach her backpack without setting the woman off. If only she could get to her cell phone. She needed her inhaler, bad.

  Too late. With a terrifying howl, the woman charged at her. Veronica tried to push her away and felt the blade slash her fingers. She raised her hands to cover her face as the woman screamed and lunged at her again. Then the blade was everywhere, tearing into her arm, her shoulder, her face. It flashed over her as she fell to the ground. With each stab, she screamed and begged the woman to stop. The pain was excruciating until suddenly, gratefully, she felt nothing.

  TWO

  July 15, 2011

  Nothing turned out the way Bernadette thought it would on the day she went to Huntsville to witness the execution of the woman who murdered her daughter. She’d expected a large crowd, but not this large. Yellow tape divided more than a thousand screaming people into separate camps: protesters against the death penalty on the left, supporters on the right, media in the middle. Uniformed police were scattered about to maintain order and discourage violence.

  The walk to the building known as The Walls wasn’t what she expected, either. The space between the two opposing crowds was nothing but a narrow path, the building seemed miles away, and the steps up to its entrance looked too steep for her stocky legs, strong as they were, to manage. Just as she wiped away the beads of perspiration that were bubbling up and causing strands of her gray-nutmeg hair to stick to her forehead, someone to her right waved a homemade sign in her face that said “It’s about time.”

  “Give the bitch hell, Mrs. Baker,” a young crew-cut-headed man screamed as others around him joined in.

  Bernadette cupped her arthritic fingers over her ears, cursing the Texas heat—well over a hundred degrees in the mid-afternoon sun—and striding forward as fast as her thick ankles would permit.

  “We’re praying for you, Bernie!”

  “God be with you, Bernie!”

  She turned toward the familiar voices on her left and saw Father Gilpatrick’s ruddy Irish cheeks and Sister McDonald’s sweet oval face smiling up at her from where they knelt on the pavement.

  “Bless your heart, hon.”

  Bernadette’s soft, blue eyes filled with tears. It was Eddie Silas, president of the Texas Coalition Against the Death Penalty. Even though “bless your heart” could mean any number of things, no one had to explain to her what he meant by it. She didn’t blame him for being disappointed in her. After she canceled her membership in the coalition ten years ago, she had refused his calls and ignored his plea-filled letters until he gave up on her. He was a dear soul. They all were. But there was no way they could understand what had happened to her. Even her own children couldn’t.

  “Kill the bitch!”

  She turned to her right. The crowd cheered. She recognized some of their faces. How strange to see them smiling at her now. What would they think if she told them she wasn’t there to support their cause any more than she was there to support the cause of the coalition?

  She kept walking, her head down, her eyes turned away from both the devout and the hate-filled, her ears closed to both the earnest cries for mercy and the vindictive screams for justice. With her fingernails digging into the fleshy palms of her clenched fists, she stumbled down the ever-narrowing path, wishing she were as certain about why she was here as everyone else seemed to be.

  Regis Dorfman steered her through the jostling crowds with his hand on the small of her back. He was wearing brown slacks and a short-sleeved beige shirt—thrift store purchases, no doubt, and years out of style, yet a perfect fit for this man who had come to know her so well over the past year. She turned to him and he gave her his deep-dimpled smile, which she interpreted to mean just what she wanted it to mean: that all the tears she’d shed, all the pain and rage he’d guided her through, would soon bring the healing for which she longed. That after tonight she would be able to move on, to live again.

  Swarms of microphones and television cameras were thrust in her face and Regis darted in front of her, transforming his body into a protective shield.

  “Mrs. Baker! How do you feel?”

  “Are you glad your daughter’s murderer is finally going to be executed?”

  “What do you think her last words will be, Mrs. Baker?”

  Bernadette tripped and started to panic, but when she grabbed the back of Regis’s shirt to keep from falling, the familiar spiciness of his Aqua Velva cologne calmed her. She stopped to look at the reporters’ hungry faces and couldn’t help but want to feed them something. She stood up straight and gave them her sturdy, tough, midwestern housewife look.

  “Don’t even go there,” she said. “It’s not that simple.” Her voice rang with a strong maternal authority that rendered the reporters mute; even she turned to see if the words had come from someone other than herself. But when she looked down at her hands, she saw that they had begun trembling. The reporters must have noticed, too, because they went back to bombarding her with questions.

  “Will you be happy to see Raelynn Blackwell die, Mrs. Baker?”

  “No.”

  “Do you support her execution?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you changed your position on the death penalty?”

  “No.”

  “Then what do you hope to get from witnessing the execution?”

  “Yeah, Mrs. Baker, why are you here, then?”

  “Enough.” She glowered at them. If they were going to insist on taunting her, she would refuse to answer any more questions. Not that she could have answered them anyway. She raised the palms of her hands in a peremptory gesture, and much to her surprise the reporters fell away, like the Red Sea parting. She flicked the short, coarse strands of hair off her cheeks, placed her hands on her thick hips, and forged her way along the path before her.

  With the reporters and cameras now focused on the crowds, the mob’s screaming reached a fever pitch.

  “The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!”

  “Justice now! Justice now!”

  “Shame on Texas! Shame on Texas!”

  “An eye for an eye! A tooth for a tooth!”

  Bernadette craned her neck and looked back at the crowd, her heart leaping when she spotted a handsome young man with wavy multicolored hair. He looked like Fin. She squinted and saw that it wasn’t her son, after all, but she knew he was there and worried about him being alone.

  “Texans don’t cotton much to executing women,” Regis said.

  Bernadette nodded. She knew only two women had been executed in Texas before tonight. The first, Chipita Rodriguez, had been hung from a mesquite tree in San Patricio on November 13, 1863—falsely accused, it was later established, of robbing a man and murdering him with an ax. It would be 135 years before Texas had the stomach to execute another woman, and when Karla Faye Tucker was put to death on February 3, 1998, for murdering two people with a pickaxe, almost two thousand people from all o
ver the country and even other countries had protested the execution. Bernadette had been there, too, shivering in the rain outside, standing next to Chipita Rodriguez’s ghost—who, with the noose still hanging around her neck, wailed at the crowd’s back-slapping, cheering, and spontaneous rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” once the official death announcement was made.

  Now, as Bernadette lifted one foot after the other up the steep steps to the main entrance of the Walls Unit, she wondered if Chipita’s ghost would be here tonight. And Karla Faye’s, too. The media had been obsessed of late with the fact that another woman was going to be executed. They were fascinated by the similarities between Raelynn Blackwell and Karla Faye Tucker: how both had stabbed their victims multiple times—had admitted their guilt—were close to the same age—had been drug abusers and prostitutes until religion found them on death row and turned them into model prisoners. How both had suffered sad and sordid childhoods.

  Thank God none of the reporters had asked Bernadette about any of that. If they had, she would have told them in no uncertain terms that none of those comparisons mattered, that Raelynn Blackwell had killed her Veronica, her precious baby girl, and that made all the difference.

  “You got your ID?” A hefty bald man behind a glass window inside the front entrance held his hand up for them to stop—or was he waving at her?

  “So many people out there,” she said as she slid her driver’s license through the slot at the bottom of the glass.

  “Yes, ma’am. Crowds big as all hell and half of Texas,” he said with a grin. “Some damn Yankees, too, seems like. Looks like it’s fixin’ to happen this time.”

  She wondered if the man was smiling because he was glad another murderer was going to get her due. Or maybe he was one of the guards she’d heard about who liked, even respected, Raelynn Blackwell, in which case his smile could be a cover for sadness. Then again, maybe he was just being Texas friendly.

  “So dang hot out there, the fire aints don’t even sting,” the man said as he swept the back of his hand across his dripping brow. “Now y’all know you cain’t have no cameras or tape recorders or nothing of that sort in here, right?”

  She clutched her purse under her arm. Did he really think she wanted to take pictures? Just then, Amy Whitehall—a counselor and the only woman on the trauma team—appeared. Both her clothes—a sleeveless silk paisley blouse and tan linen slacks—and the pained expression on her face distinguished her as a transplanted easterner on a mission to humanize Texas.

  “I’ll take it from here, Henry.” Amy Whitehall was out of breath when she reached out to shake hands. “I am so terribly sorry, Mrs. Baker, that I wasn’t here… in time to… escort you in. We’ll go to the Turnout Room now. Witnesses for the condemned are kept in another building, so we don’t have to worry about bumping into any of them.”

  Bernadette was about to explain that that wouldn’t be a problem, but the sight of the massive enclosure adjacent to the stairway with its floor-to-ceiling walls of brass bars stopped her short. She stared open-mouthed at the prisoners—there must have been at least a dozen of them—who stood on ladders of varying heights as they polished the brass.

  “That’s the bullring,” Amy said. “It used to be the point of entry for new arrivals. Staff use it now to come into the prison through that walkway in the middle.”

  “Good lord, I’m not ready for this.” Bernadette clutched her stomach.

  “No one ever is,” Regis said.

  “I never saw anyone die before,” Bernadette said. “I was eleven when my mother passed.” Why did she say that? Raelynn Blackwell’s death tonight would be nothing like her mother’s had been—though all she remembered about that was her father describing her mother’s death rattle at the end, and how Bernadette was glad she hadn’t been there to hear it and then had felt guilty about being glad.

  When they reached the Turnout Room, she saw that, as with everything else that day, it was nothing like she expected. The room’s walls were bare, and plastic chairs—must have been fifty of them—were scattered around. A sixty-cup coffee urn sat on a Formica table in the corner, surrounded by way too many Styrofoam cups. She sat in one of the uncomfortable chairs and set about fixing things in her head: there should be a cozy conversation area with a soft leather couch and matching chairs, photographs of Texas bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush flowers on the walls, a multicolored cloth on the Formica table, and a twelve-cup coffeemaker and some clear glass mugs instead of the urn and Styrofoam cups. She would top it all off by adding a plate of homemade chocolate chip cookies with macadamia nuts. She glanced up at the way-too-big numbers on an institutional clock hanging on the wall and wished it wouldn’t tick so loudly. It was four o’clock. Two more hours to go.

  “Are you okay, Mrs. Baker?”

  She jumped at the sound of Amy Whitehall’s voice.

  “Raelynn Blackwell is in a holding cell now,” Amy said, trying to read Bernadette’s mind and not even coming close. “The chaplain is with her. At two o’clock she would have been allowed a phone call, at three a visit with her attorney. Between three thirty and now, she would have been served her final meal.”

  “So, each step of her death is being engineered to ensure as little pain and emotion as possible, isn’t it?” Bernadette said. “Well, my Veronica had no time to prepare, no witnesses to choose, no favorite last meal to eat, no final statement to make the night she was killed, did she?”

  “I’m sorry,” the trauma counselor said. “We’re here to help in any way we can.”

  Then tell me why I’m doing this, Bernadette wanted to say. But that was a question even she couldn’t answer. Maybe there was no answer—at least not one that made sense.

  “I brought you this,” Amy said, handing her a folder that said Public Information in bold letters on the front. “I’ll be right back …in case you need me for anything before …or after.”

  Bernadette waited until the counselor was gone and then whispered to Regis, “She seems awfully cautious, don’t you think? I thought this trauma team was supposed to be the best in the country.”

  “Well, this is a bit unusual for them,” he said.

  She glanced down at the familiar blue Texas Department of Criminal Justice logo on the folder’s white cover and opened it to the first page. She ran her forefinger down the names of the official witnesses and newspaper reporters until she got to the list of Raelynn Blackwell’s personal witnesses. There her finger lingered on her own name and Regis Dorfman’s before moving further down the page to the Victim Witnesses list, where it stopped once again at her own name. So that was why Amy Whitehall seemed nervous. She must have been surprised to see Bernadette’s name on both lists.

  Well, no one could have been as surprised as she was the day she got the letter from Raelynn Blackwell. “Dear Mrs. Baker,” she had written on elementary-school lined paper, “I am writing to ask wud you be a personal witness for me? I am asking Regis too. I no I deserve to die and I dont deserve for you to say yes but I hope you will think about it. Sincerely, Miss Raelynn Blackwell.”

  She had sat down to respond right away. “Dear Raelynn,” she wrote, “I hope having me as one of your personal witnesses will help you. But you must know that even if I agree to be a witness for you, I still think execution is the right punishment for the murder of my daughter.” But then she crossed out the second sentence, crumpled up the paper and started again. “Dear Raelynn,” she settled on after several tries, “I will be there to witness your execution. Bernadette Baker.”

  She turned to Regis now and, as usual, his eyes compelled her to say more about what she was thinking. “I must be crazy to do this,” she said. “I keep wondering why I said yes to Raelynn right away when I got her letter. She prints like a child, you know, maybe that’s all it was. Maybe Annamaria’s right that I’m just a soft touch.”

  Regis’s eyebrow went up, which she knew was his way of letting her know that whatever she had to say was okay, that it didn�
�t matter if he’d heard it before.

  “I still don’t understand why she only asked the two of us when she’s allowed five personal witnesses.”

  “You have doubts about saying yes to her?”

  “Yes. No. Oh, I don’t know. Annamaria asked me how I could be a witness for someone whose death I was hoping for and I didn’t have an answer for her. I’m surprised she’s talking to me at all anymore.”

  Bernadette took a deep breath and folded her hands on her lap. “I wish I could get her to talk to you. She clings to her desire for vengeance as if she’s clinging to Veronica herself. When Marty and I adopted Veronica, Annamaria was thirteen years old. She said if we wanted another kid so bad I should just have one myself. There was no reasoning with her. She’s stubborn, that one. Always was. She even swore she’d run away. But when we got Veronica, that girl fell more deeply in love with her baby sister than anyone could have even imagined. She’s really soft inside, people don’t realize that.”

  The door opened then, and Amy Whitehall walked back into the room, glancing in their direction with a worried expression.

  “I don’t need her here,” Bernadette said under her breath.

  “She won’t impose,” Regis said. “They’re here just in case they’re needed.”

  “But I have you.”

  “It takes a village,” he said.

  She smiled at the predictable Regis expression. “And to think I was terrified of you at first,” she said.

  It seemed like such a long time ago when she had first learned about Regis from an interview with him in the Austin Chronicle. After that he’d seemed to pop up everywhere: in an article about his restorative dialogue program from the University of Texas’s online magazine, in victims’ reports on Internet blogs, in a television documentary that featured victims and offenders talking to each other. Yet the more she learned about his program, the more adamant she had been that it wasn’t for her.

  “To even think about doing something like that turns my stomach,” she’d said to Marty.