Just Mercy: A Novel

by Dorothy Van Soest

  “But what happens to Raelynn Blackwell now?”

  “I’ll tell you exactly what will happen. A panel will be assigned to review her trial, and the results will show that the evidence in the case didn’t change because of Groundtree and O’Grady’s stupid little liaison, that she had admitted guilt and the mitigating circumstances were fully vetted at the punishment phase of trial. That will put a lid on it. Not to worry.”

  “Not to worry?” A splotch of pink moved up Fin’s neck and started to take over his face.

  “Nothing is going to change,” she said.

  Fin’s hands trembled as he picked up the teak tray on which were arranged two glasses of wine, a plate of sliced apples and cheese, and two bright red- and yellow-flowered cloth napkins. Annamaria followed him into the living room, grabbed a glass of wine, and sank back into the soft purple couch cushions.

  “You’re wrong,” Fin said, tears now welling up in his eyes. “I know you’re wrong.” He shook his head and lowered himself into the chair adjacent to the couch.

  “Sometimes, Fin, I think you care more about that monster than you care about what it’s been like for us. How many claims has she made so far, do you think? I stopped counting. Guess we were duped into thinking she’d run out of them this time. Trust me, she knew she wasn’t going to die last night.”

  “So you and Mom finally agree about something.”

  She shot up from the cushions. “Really? Mom gets it now? She knows she was lied to all this time?”

  “She feels betrayed.”

  “I bet she’s pissed. Tell me she’s pissed, Fin.”

  “No need to gloat about it.”

  She sat back on the couch. Could Mom and I find common ground at last? It was almost too much to hope for. She couldn’t remember the last time they had agreed about anything.

  “Well, I’ve got her back on this one,” she said with a smile.

  “You’re both wrong.”

  “I have to see her.”

  “Don’t go rushing over there.”

  “Why not?”

  “Just don’t.”

  She scowled and sat back on the couch. What was with Fin sounding authoritative all of a sudden instead of trying to smooth things over like he usually did? And who did he think he was, anyway, telling her what to do? Besides, he was the one who was wrong. Dead wrong.

  “Mom is too well-meaning.” She articulated her words as if explaining a complicated concept to a child. “She doesn’t see it. Neither do you. But criminals are master con artists. I’m not saying Mom shouldn’t keep looking for the good in people if she wants to. You, too, Fin. Just don’t be so naïve about it. At least next time maybe Mom won’t be so easily fooled.”

  “Don’t expect her to agree with you,” he said.

  “Why not? She always said the punishment should fit the crime.”

  “That never included murder, and you know it.”

  “The punishment does fit the crime for that monster.”

  “You know what Mom says about you always calling her that.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Well, if you ever listened to her, you would know she thinks that when you demonize Raelynn Blackwell, you’re letting her off too easy, not holding her accountable to the same moral standards as other human beings.”

  Annamaria’s face flushed. “Oh, I hold her accountable, all right, and justice will prevail.”

  “Retribution, you mean.”

  “That’s justice.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “You’re just like Mom, thinking forgiveness is the same as justice.”

  “Mom says confronting Raelynn Blackwell with her inhumanity forced her to face what she did. Isn’t that a form of justice?”

  “Not in my book, it isn’t,” she said. “And just for the record, I was against Mom getting involved with that dialogue shit from the start. I sure would never do it myself.”

  “I guess it’s not for everyone,” he said with a sigh.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll get my justice in thirty days, thank you very much.”

  “Not if I can help it.” Fin’s eyes drilled into her.

  Annamaria held his gaze with an intensity intended to match his. Let there be an explosion, if there had to be. She wouldn’t back down. But after several minutes, Fin’s face softened a little and soon his lopsided grin was back. She welcomed her conciliatory brother back with a smile of her own.

  “So how’s my favorite niece?” he asked.

  Her stomach clutched up. She looked at her watch. Why hadn’t Patty called yet?

  “Something wrong with her?” Fin tipped his head to the side, a look of concern on his face.

  “No, no, she’s fine. Still a handful, of course.”

  “Like most sixteen-year-old girls,” he said. “Veronica was an outlier that way. She was always so good.”

  At that, Annamaria’s stomach tightened even more and then went into full-throttle churn. Why was Fin comparing Patty to Veronica when they were both good kids; neither was a hell-raiser like she had been at that age, that’s for sure. And what did being good have to do with anything, anyway? It hadn’t kept Veronica safe, hadn’t made life just and fair the way Fin thought it should be, didn’t make life predictable, either, no matter how much she wished it could. Life was a crapshoot, and it always would be.

  “What’s wrong?” Fin asked.

  “Do you think Mom’s still asleep?”

  “Don’t bother her,” he said. “Wait for her to call you.”

  Annamaria stared at her brother’s tightened jaw, his lips pursed into a threat. It wasn’t like him to give orders like this, but then, neither was it like her to take them from him or anyone else. Yet that’s just what she did. She took her hand out of her purse and reached for her wine glass instead of her cell phone.

  ELEVEN

  The curtains were drawn tight, and in the dark bedroom Bernadette couldn’t tell what time it was. Not that she cared. Her head throbbed from last night’s nightmare that wouldn’t end, its images, like a hangover, refusing to go away: the gurney, the smile, the slammed curtain—gurney, smile, curtain—metal buckles and brown leather straps—IV tubes—but mostly Raelynn Blackwell’s victory smile. How could she have been so foolish as to assume she knew what that smile meant? Everything had been nothing but a sickening lie. She should have known. It’s not that she hadn’t been warned.

  “You’ll see, Mom,” Annamaria told her a year ago. “She’ll meet with you just to avoid the needle.”

  “I’m not doing it for her,” she had replied, “I’m doing it for me.”

  “Fine, but just don’t go drowning in sympathy like you always do, Mom.”

  Bernadette rolled onto her back and stared up at the ceiling. Annamaria had been wrong about one thing. She had accused her of considering a bad childhood an excuse for murder, and that just wasn’t true. Bernadette had even told Regis, at least at first, that she didn’t want to hear anything about Raelynn Blackwell’s childhood. And she had been cautious every step of the way. Hadn’t she? Still, she should reconsider whether some of what Annamaria said was true, whether she’d missed something critical that might have made a difference. She thought about how she almost didn’t call Regis at all. That was being careful, wasn’t it? And then, when she did call, she had questioned him about everything. She’d even insisted that her confrontation with Raelynn Blackwell not take place until there were no more appeals left and the execution was scheduled, so there would be no room for manipulation.

  No, what Annamaria had said wasn’t true. She had been plenty skeptical. Take Raelynn Blackwell’s discovery of religion on death row as an example.

  “Everyone who’s looking for Jesus should go to prison,” she remembered telling Regis. “Seems to be where he hangs out. Those crazy fundamentalists are crawling all over the place looking for jailhouse conversions. Like somehow that makes every crime okay.”

  She had, right away, apologized to Regis for sa
ying that, because he was a Protestant minister—at least he had been one before he left the church for some unknown reason she would never ask him about, not wanting to pry into his personal life—and since she didn’t know what religion meant to him, she was careful not to offend by sharing her opinion that Raelynn Blackwell’s conversion was a cheap form of grace. She didn’t understand people’s passion about religion. To her it was about ritual and tradition more than anything else—although she credited the Catholic Church with instilling in her the moral objection she’d had to state-sanctioned executions before Veronica’s murder, and to abortion, too, although that was another matter and something she kept to herself.

  She rolled onto her side and closed her eyes, still wondering if, in the end, there was some truth to Annamaria’s accusations. Maybe she was naïve. Yes, she’d questioned what religion might mean to Raelynn Blackwell, but had she really given enough serious consideration to the possibility that the woman had used both religion and the dialogue program just to avoid being executed?

  She set about reviewing the details of their face-to-face meeting two weeks ago. Were there warning signs then? If there were, she wouldn’t be at all surprised if she had missed them. During a tour of the Gatesville prison compound the day before their meeting, she had found the incongruous beauty of the place disconcerting: the attractive foliage in front of the Mountain View Unit, the resilient vine that crept up the red bricks of the low building and embedded itself in the crumbling mortar. A testimony to life, it had seemed to her at the time.

  Then there was the inside of the building. It was clean and well kept, with colorful painted murals of children and inmate art in a display case that made the place look like a cheerful retreat center. Officer Handley, a ruddy-faced man dressed like a camp director in gray slacks and a pale green polo shirt, had welcomed her and Regis and talked on and on about this and that (she wondered now if it had been nervous chatter) while escorting them around the place. Everything, from the unexpected setting to the cordiality of the staff, camouflaged the true purpose of the Mountain View Unit as the place where death-row women waited to die.

  The massive visiting room, a sterile and empty space where her meeting with Raelynn Blackwell was to take place the next day, had been altogether different. While there, she’d imagined what it would be like during visiting hours, with a line of women convicts sitting on one side of the long row of tables, and their mothers, fathers, spouses, children, and friends sitting on the other side, the bulletproof window with several inches of wire mesh at the bottom prohibiting any kind of touch. She could almost hear the buzzing echoes in the room, people shouting to hear each other over the din. No privacy. No holding of hands or hugging. Good lord. Annamaria was right. Bernadette had already been drowning in sympathy before she even laid eyes on Raelynn Blackwell.

  “I don’t want to meet here,” she had told Regis.

  “It’s what we agreed to, remember?”

  Of course she remembered. Every aspect of her meeting with Raelynn Blackwell had been worked out in advance: the rules to be followed, goals of the session, how long it would last, what each of them wanted and needed from the meeting. They’d even signed a contract that included Raelynn Blackwell’s wishes: no special arrangements would be made for her, she would not be treated differently from other prisoners by having the meeting in the chapel or another place besides the visiting room, which was the only place other prisoners were allowed to interact with people from the outside. What a fool she’d been, Bernadette realized now, to think of all that as evidence of Raelynn’s remorse, as her way of accepting responsibility for what she’d done.

  Then there was the meeting with Raelynn Blackwell the day after the tour. Had she missed something critical then, too? A plump, pleasant woman with short frizzy hair the color of carrots had shuffled her and Regis to the visiting room while balancing a pitcher of ice water and two glasses on a tray. When they sat down, the screeching sounds of their metal chairs scraping on the concrete floor echoed through the massive room, shattering its glassy silence. Bernadette thought about how fidgety she had been, how she’d stared at the Plexiglas divider, waited for Raelynn Blackwell to appear. Still, she had been convinced at the time that she was ready; at least she thought she should have been, after all the work she’d done to prepare.

  When a handcuffed Raelynn Blackwell was led to her place on the other side of the Plexiglas, Bernadette’s first impressions of her had been so startling that she could see her now just as vividly as then, looking childlike with her blonde hair pulled back in a neat ponytail, her cheeks flushed a natural pink. Except for the white prison jumpsuit, she looked like someone you might meet on the street or in the grocery store, maybe even smile at, say hello to, strike up a conversation with about the weather or the price of food these days. Those first impressions surely must have clouded her judgment.

  It’s not that she hadn’t known at the time how unsteady she was. She’d hardly listened to Regis as he clarified the role he would play in the session and reviewed the rules. All she’d been able to do was stare at Raelynn Blackwell while gripping the plastic pouch that hung from a ribbon around her neck. Inside it was a picture of Veronica in her cheerleader outfit with arms outstretched, a maroon and white pom-pom in each hand, a radiant smile on her innocent face, her pink cheeks glowing with excitement.

  ***

  “Do you have any questions?” Regis asked. Neither of them did. “Okay, Bernadette, whatever you want to say.” The oversized round clock on the wall ticked away the minutes. “Whenever you’re ready,” he said. “Take your time.”

  She brought the picture of Veronica up to her lips and kissed her daughter’s face. It was time. She saw fear in Raelynn Blackwell’s eyes and remembered what Regis had told her the day before.

  “She’s scared,” he’d said, “of being torn apart by your rage. Or by her own shame.”

  It was a good thing Bernadette had been forewarned. Otherwise it would have been too hard to look such fear in the face and still do what she had to do. She took a deep breath and, with trembling fingers, pressed Veronica’s plastic-encased picture against the window.

  “This is my daughter,” she said. “This is the beautiful girl you killed.”

  Raelynn Blackwell lifted her hands to wipe away the torrent of tears that broke loose then, flooding her cheeks and her neck, seeping into her mouth. Her hands shook, her silent lips trembled. Minutes passed. The clock ticked. Yet not once did Raelynn Blackwell turn away from Veronica’s picture or do anything to interrupt her accuser.

  Bernadette gulped in a mouthful of air and let it out through her nose, then opened her mouth, but the words she’d rehearsed—Look at her, dammit, look at her—no longer seemed right and wouldn’t come. She coughed. Cleared her throat. Searched for new words. Raelynn Blackwell’s pain burned through the Plexiglas window and, with it, Regis’s words.

  “I won’t let Raelynn meet with you,” he had said many times, “until she has worked through the many layers of shame and guilt from her past. Don’t worry, it won’t be enough for her to admit guilt and take responsibility. She will have to be willing to be accountable to you if there is to be any healing.”

  That’s why she doesn’t turn away, Bernadette told herself. She’s being accountable. She lowered Veronica’s picture a few inches and took another deep breath, in and out. Then she placed the plastic holder on the table with the picture facing her. When she looked down at it, she could swear she heard Veronica say, Look at how courageous she’s trying to be, Mom.

  The women’s eyes locked, and a magnet of pain pulled Bernadette into the center of Raelynn Blackwell and melted her heart so that all she saw was the lifetime of shame and guilt that was the woman who murdered her daughter.

  “I know this is hard,” she whispered.

  ***

  Bernadette shivered. She pulled the sheet up to her neck in the dark bedroom, and its coolness enveloped her bare skin. Never in a million years would she
have expected to hear herself utter the words I know this is hard. Had she made herself, at that moment, a victim of her own compassion? Had she made it easy for Raelynn Blackwell to carry out the plot to use her and the dialogue program to get her death sentence commuted? The sinister duplicity of it all left her reeling. But it was her own fault. Hadn’t she put herself on the line? Hadn’t she set herself up to be betrayed? Why, she’d even dared to ask the question she’d been most afraid to ask. Even thought she’d been prepared for the answer. What a fool she’d been.

  ***

  “I need to know what it was like for Veronica at the end,” Bernadette asked Raelynn. “Did she suffer? What were her last words?”

  Raelynn Blackwell stared down at her hands.

  “Answer me! I need to know!” Bernadette hit the table with her fist, and a sharp pain shot up her arm.

  “I’m sorry,” Raelynn Blackwell said. Her face was hidden in her chest, her voice muffled. “I didn’t see her.”

  “How dare you—?”

  “I wish I could tell you, Mrs. Baker, but I don’t remember none of it. I was on so much junk that night…crack, pills, heroin, booze…whatever I could get my hands on.”

  “But you saw her.”

  “It was like I weren’t even there. The police told me what I done. I didn’t want to believe it. But I saw the blood on me. It tasted like metal on my tongue. I smelled it. I took a shower but the smell wouldn’t go away.” Raelynn Blackwell picked away at the skin on her fingers with short jerky snatches, as if she were still trying to get rid of the blood.

  “Did she have trouble breathing? Did her asthma flare up?”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Baker. I’m so sorry.”

  Bernadette fell back in her chair and closed her eyes. So there it was. She would never know if Veronica’s death had been swift and painless, as she hoped, or if her daughter had felt every piercing, brutal slash of the knife as she gasped for breath, which is what Bernadette had feared all these years. No one, not even her murderer, had borne witness to Veronica’s last minutes on earth. It was too much for Bernadette to bear. She was afraid she couldn’t go on. Regis, who had stayed in the background all morning, put his hand under her elbow then and helped her up. A walk over to the door and back helped her regain her composure. She sat back down and took a deep breath.