Just Mercy: A Novel

by Dorothy Van Soest

  She knew she felt that way because she was tired, so bone tired that for nine years she hadn’t been able to pick up the phone to call a friend to go to lunch or stop in at the women’s bookstore she used to support for a cup of tea or to pick up a book—but then, she’d stopped reading anyway. She’d still managed to shop for food and cook dinner for the family on Friday nights, but the joy had gone out of it.

  Then one day while mopping the kitchen floor, she’d happened to hear Sister Helen Prejean on National Public Radio say, “The only way I know what I really believe is by keeping watch over what I do.” Bernadette would never understand why on that particular day those words quickened in her a desperate desire to live again and an urgent need to rid herself of the grief, pain, and anger that kept her from doing so. All she knew was that she had picked up the phone and called Regis. That was well over a year ago. An eternity.

  She looked at Regis now, at his compassionate hazel eyes with that mysterious tinge of sadness around the edges, his thinning brown hair with specks of gray covering his ears, the upturned corners of his mouth, and, of course, those dimples that made him look as if he was smiling even when he wasn’t.

  “What would I do without you?” she said, squeezing his arm.

  He smiled at her but he looked worried. Amy Whitehall kept glancing at the clock with an anxious look on her face, too. Best not to look at either of them, Bernadette thought. She fidgeted with the public information folder on her lap, turned the page to the Offender’s Rap Sheet:

  Raelynn Blackwell. Age and race (39 White), DOB (03/03/72), Date of Offense (05/03/01), Date of Arrest (05/03/01), Age when arrested (29), Height (5’3”), Weight (100), Eyes (blue), Hair (blonde), execution date (July 15, 2011), amount of time on death row (3,732 days – 10 yrs., 2 months, 20 days).

  Bernadette’s eyes stung. This wasn’t anything like the other rap sheets she’d seen over the years. This one was personal. She flipped the page. There was no need to read the facts of the crime when the excruciating details of that day were forever engraved in her very being: the police officer at the door telling them Veronica had been found lying in a pool of blood by the bus stop at 8:45 p.m.—she and Marty clinging to each other after identifying Veronica’s body—carrying her backpack to the car, her inhaler falling out of the side pocket and onto the ground—the police calling later that night to say a squad car had picked up a crazed and bloodied woman staggering around the east side of Austin, gripping in her hand a gold necklace with the initials VB on it—forensics later determining that the blood on Raelynn Blackwell was a combination of her own and Veronica’s.

  The door opened, and Bernadette brushed away the tear making its way down her cheek. She recognized Warden Fredrick’s round face from a picture that was hanging on the wall downstairs. But why was he here? And why was Amy Whitehall still looking askance at her from the opposite side of the room? She looked at her watch. Six fifteen. They should all be in the death chamber by now. Her stomach knotted up. The muscles in her neck went on alert, her imagination running wild with a herd of all things that possibly could have gone wrong.

  “Welcome, Mrs. Baker,” the warden said with a warm Texas smile. “I came to see if there’s anything you might be needing.” His thick fingers were soft against hers when he shook her hand.

  “Something’s wrong, isn’t it?” she said.

  “Just waiting for the governor’s call,” he said. “Shouldn’t be long now.”

  He patted her shoulder in a gesture of sympathy and she shrugged it off with a frown, but when he brought her a cup of acidic-smelling coffee, she saw that under his bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrows his blue eyes were kind like Marty’s and she didn’t have the heart to refuse it. After he left, she set the cup on the floor under her chair.

  The folder sat open on her lap. Years ago, when she was active in the anti-death-penalty movement, she’d gotten her hands on a similar packet, so she already knew what was in it—a list of scheduled executions, execution methods and procedures, the Texas capital punishment code, criminal and witness procedures, Texas death row history and facts. She had no need to read any of that, not now.

  Right after she closed the packet, a man she’d never seen before walked into the room. She cringed at the sight of the gaudy tie hanging loose around the folds of his crimson neck and coming to rest on his protruding belly, his bulbous nose marinated in sweat.

  “There’s been a slight delay,” the man said in a raspy voice, “nothing unusual. Just make yourselves comfortable.” Then he turned and left as quickly as he’d come, slamming the door behind him.

  So much waiting time gave space to Bernadette’s natural impulse to worry, and it didn’t take long for her to succumb to it. She started with Fin.

  “Be careful what you wear,” she’d told him that morning on the phone. “Don’t make yourself a target.”

  He’d said what he always said: “Don’t worry, Mom, I can take care of myself just fine.”

  Of course he could. Her drop-dead handsome son was no longer the sweet little curly-headed, red-cheeked boy who had been every bully’s target. He was thirty years old now, six feet tall, like his dad, and as capable as they come. Still, she worried about him. She couldn’t help herself.

  “I bet Marty’s got his nose in a book right now,” she said to Regis. “It’s his way of losing track of time until I call to tell him it’s over.”

  Good old solid Marty. She knew her attention to detail and her tendency to micromanage things drove her philosophy professor husband crazy sometimes, but she had never had cause to question his love for her.

  “I thought he would come with you today,” Regis said.

  “I told him not to,” she said.

  Regis looked at her with that raised eyebrow of his again.

  “He said he would come, but I know he would only be doing it for me,” she said. “It’s a good thing Annamaria decided not to come. She’ll be frustrated enough having to wait for it to be over. Just so she doesn’t take it out on Patty. The two of them fight about everything as it is, just like me and Annamaria did when she was sixteen, and my granddaughter has enough teenage angst already without having to fight with her mother over this tonight.”

  They fell silent then as her thoughts turned to Raelynn Blackwell. The tie-down team should have secured her to the gurney in the death chamber by now. Or was she still in the holding cell? Bernadette looked at her watch. Six thirty. She pressed her fingers into the sides of her head and massaged her temples.

  “What are you thinking about?” Regis asked after a few minutes.

  “If Veronica were here, she’d tell me to stop worrying. She was the opposite of me, always so easygoing. When she was three days old, already she was smiling, and I knew it wasn’t gas, no matter what people said. The terrible twos never happened for her, either. And she was sailing through her teenage years without the torment that Annamaria and Fin suffered at that awkward stage until… until…”

  Regis rested his hand on hers. She wiped a tear from her eye, took in a breath and released it. Raelynn Blackwell would soon pay for what she did, and then it would be over.

  THREE

  Fin’s muscular arms throbbed from holding his homemade sign high in the air for four straight hours, and when his fingers tingled and then finally went numb, he had no choice but to let the poster drop to the ground. He propped it up against his sinewy legs and rubbed his hands together to bring his fingers back to life.

  “Want me to hold it, bro?” Chuck asked.

  Fin smiled at his best friend. Even though Chuck shied away from any kind of protesting or political activity, he had taken off work to be with Fin today, something neither of them did often. They had so much in common and were together so much that some people started to think they even looked alike—both tall, handsome, fit—seemingly ignoring the fact that Fin was white with purplish morning-glory blue eyes and Chuck was black with deep brown eyes. It was their unwavering dedication to helping preteen b
oys stay out of trouble—Chuck at the Big Brothers Big Sisters program, where he matched at-risk boys with men who served as mentors and role models, and Fin at the Communities in Schools program, where he counseled middle-school boys—that brought them together, and Fin considered the day the two of them met to be the best day of his life. Tears of gratitude filled his eyes now as he handed his poster over to Chuck.

  “Wish I could cry at the drop of a hat like that,” Chuck said with a grin.

  Fin shrugged, embarrassed. He looked down at his watch. It was after six o’clock. He ran his fingers through his thick, wavy hair and hopped from one foot to the other. The sweltering heat was getting to him.

  “Come on, any time now,” he said. “Mom said she’d let us know as soon as it was over.”

  “You and your mom,” Chuck said with a shake of his head, “two peas in a pod.”

  “Not about this, we’re not,” Fin said. “She shouldn’t be in there. I don’t get it. I don’t get her.”

  The crowds were getting more and more restless, which made Chuck fidgety. Fin studied the people standing and kneeling nearby, a varied bunch of young, old, and middle-aged, with men and women in about equal numbers, most white, a few Latinos, no blacks except for Chuck. Fin felt bound to those who came to protest the execution, yet set apart from them at the same time. No one else was like him. No one else was Veronica’s brother.

  “Do it! Do it now! Do it! Do it now!”

  “Hateful Sam Houston U students,” Fin mumbled, “hateful and ignorant.”

  “Finbar Baker, my dear man.” The sound of Father Gilpatrick’s soft Irish brogue made his ears burn. Ten years ago Fin had cursed the priest and stormed out of the confessional, and he hadn’t set foot inside St. Austin’s or any other church since then. He noticed that the priest’s back was now curved, his face covered with deep wrinkles, his thick hair a shocking white.

  “How are you, my boy?” the priest asked.

  Fin bit his tongue. Just say you’re fine, he told himself. But it was ludicrous to think anyone could be fine tonight, so he shrugged and left it at that.

  “It’s hard,” Father Gilpatrick said.

  “You were wrong.” Fin’s body tightened as the words snuck out through his pursed lips.

  “What?”

  “It wasn’t a sin to blame myself for what happened.”

  Father Gilpatrick’s eyebrows went up, and he tilted his head to the side.

  “It wasn’t,” Fin said. “It isn’t. Veronica would still be alive if I hadn’t moved into my own apartment while she was still in high school. I should have been there to drive over and pick her up that night when her bus was late.”

  “I see. I see.” The priest looked as if he was about to say something else but changed his mind. “Well,” he said, “please do give my regards to your mother for me, Finbar.”

  “Did you see her go in?”

  “Yes. I would have liked to talk to her.”

  Father Gilpatrick patted Fin’s shoulder then and disappeared into the crowd. Fin wanted to call him back, say more, tell him he knew what Veronica thought—that he knew what she thought because they both thought the same things and always had—that he was working hard to make right all the things that needed to be made right in this world because he had promised his sister he would not only do his part but her part, too.

  “Getting pretty late, isn’t it?” Chuck said.

  Fin looked at his watch and his breath stuck in his throat. He grabbed Chuck’s arm and squeezed it.

  “Ouch! Why’d you do that?”

  “It’s six thirty.”

  Fin crossed his fingers. He pressed his hands over his stomach. Glanced down at his watch again, just to be sure. He blew his breath out through his lips, not daring to say out loud what he was thinking, what he knew Veronica would be thinking, too, if she were here.

  FOUR

  The butterflies in Annamaria’s stomach had been there since she woke up. She’d thrown herself into her work both to keep them at bay and so that she would appear to her colleagues to be the same competent attorney today that she was every other day. She tugged at her amber corkscrew curls—a habit she’d started as a child in a futile attempt to straighten them—and pushed her chair back, her eyes glued to the legal folder that lay open on her desk. No one wanted the Hinson case. Now she knew why. Jacob Hinson had been set up big time, and it was up to her to prove he wasn’t guilty. Volunteering to take the case would help smooth some of the feathers she’d ruffled at the last office meeting.

  “Check his estranged wife’s holdings,” she’d insisted when they were discussing the troublesome embezzlement case. “That’s where the money is. You’ll see.”

  No one had listened to her, but, of course, it turned out that she had been right—again. Because her always being right grated on her colleagues’ nerves, she tried to mollify them by working longer hours than anyone else and taking on cases they didn’t want—like the Hinson case. If she played her cards right, she could make partner by the time she was forty, one year from now. Not an easy feat at a law firm as prestigious and competitive as Benton and Smith.

  But that’s not what she’d been thinking about all day. Her frenzied focus on work was more about containing her anxiety than about promoting her career. Or was it excitement she felt? It had been ten long years, after all, and she’d often doubted that this day would ever come. Well, now it was here. At last.

  At five o’clock, early for her, she closed the Hinson file and gulped down what was left of the white zinfandel in her glass. Most days she had only one glass of wine at the end of the day to relax, but today she had two. She didn’t keep any alcohol at home, not because she worried about her own consumption or because of her mom’s warning that alcoholism ran in their family or even because of her ex-husband Roberto’s drinking problem, but because it just seemed wise not to have the stuff around with a teenager in the house.

  There was no line at the KFC drive-through when she picked up dinner for herself and Patty, so by five thirty she was already turning off Balcones Drive and pulling her BMW up the long sloping driveway and into the garage of their modern Hill Country house. Another half hour and it would be over.

  Her keys clinked as they collided with Patty’s oversized key ring in the glass bowl on the marble-topped table in the front hall. There was a strong smell of disinfectant in the house, a sure sign—along with the extra gleam to the wood floors and special shine to the glass walls—that Guadalupe had been there. How fitting that today was cleaning day. She kicked off her three-inch heels in the hallway, noting even today, as she always did, the contrast between her thick ankles (which she’d unfortunately inherited from her mom) and her reasonably long, slender legs (which she’d fortunately inherited from her dad). On her way to the kitchen, Annamaria set her designer briefcase down on the dining room table next to the freshly cut flowers from the backyard, careful not to leave her fingerprints on the shiny teak surface. Everything had to be perfect—just as a new beginning should be.

  Patty bounced into the all-white kitchen just as Annamaria dropped the KFC bag onto the glistening island counter.

  “Tell me you did not go outside looking like that,” she said when she saw her braless sixteen-year-old daughter wearing a too-tight tank top and cutoff jean shorts.

  “Like I would, Mom.”

  Annamaria reached over and stroked the silky black hair and smooth, golden-brown cheeks that Patty had inherited from her handsome father. Sometimes she wished Patty’s father were still here to protect her, especially during these difficult teenage years, but Roberto Gonzales was long gone, having disappeared to El Paso or Mexico or wherever the hell he went fourteen years ago. It was one thing to run away from her and their drunken fights, she got that, but she could never forgive him for abandoning his two-year-old daughter. Though she had changed her name from Gonzales back to Baker when they divorced, Patty’s official name remained the same: Patricia Roberta Gonzales. Her middle and
last names—in addition to those brown-sugar eyes and long, curly eyelashes—were all she had left of her father although none of that seemed to matter much to Patty.

  Annamaria looked at her watch. Twenty minutes to go. She reached inside the glass cabinet for two plain white plates, the good ones, and the fancy glass goblets.

  “The good linen napkins, too?” Patty closed the door of the doublewide stainless steel refrigerator with a kick and plopped two cans of Diet Coke on the counter.

  “It’s a special occasion.”

  “Fine, but, like, I’ll just help myself from the boxes, if you don’t mind.” Patty pulled the KFC containers from the bag and loaded her plate with a chicken breast—extra crispy, just the way Annamaria knew she liked it—coleslaw, mashed potatoes, gravy, green beans, and an individual-sized apple pie. She gulped her Coke from the can.

  Annamaria looked at her watch. Five forty-five. Try not to think about it, she told herself. It’ll be over sooner that way. But she couldn’t help herself. She looked at her watch again. Still five forty-five. And again. Five forty-six.

  Patty mumbled something through the two huge spoonfuls of mashed potatoes she’d stuffed into her mouth, in response to which Annamaria rolled her eyes and pursed her lips, then proceeded to pick at the food on her plate. She glanced down at her watch. Five fifty. Patty muttered something else that could have been anything from “Don’t worry” to “Fuck you,” for all Annamaria could tell.

  “Don’t talk with your mouth full, young lady,” she said.

  Patty grinned and bit into a piece of chicken. It was five fifty-seven.

  “Shore is finger-lickin’ good, Ma.” Her daughter chewed with her mouth open, then swallowed with an exaggerated gulp.

  “What… are… you… doing?” It took all the effort Annamaria could muster to not stab her chicken breast but instead slowly lower her fork onto her plate. Why the hell was Patty acting like a four-year-old? She didn’t need this. Not tonight of all nights.