Just Mercy: A Novel

by Dorothy Van Soest

  “Then why file so many appeals?”

  “I’m done with them. I weren’t lying to you about that, Mrs. Baker, honest. I never asked to ever get out of here. Never. Just for some time to try to make up for what I done. Some of them in here are pretty messed up. Some had it worse than me coming up.”

  When Raelynn Blackwell’s voice trailed off, Bernadette wondered if she was aware that no matter how many good works she performed, it would never make up for what she did.

  “You don’t want to die,” Bernadette said again, this time in a whisper.

  “It don’t matter what I want. Whatever happens is Jesus’s will. ”

  Bernadette tightened her jaw. “Was it Jesus’s will for you to murder Veronica?” she asked. “Was it his will for you to pump your body with so much junk that you didn’t even know what you were doing?”

  Agonizing minutes passed as Bernadette tried to calm herself. It didn’t matter if she thought Raelynn Blackwell’s faith was childish and illogical. What mattered was whether her remorse was real—whether it came from the core of her, from a place as deep inside as her faith.

  “You say you’re sorry,” she said, “but you don’t know what it did to us.”

  “I can’t pretend to know what it was like, Mrs. Baker.”

  “What it is like. Don’t even think it’s over. Annamaria is consumed with rage. And my granddaughter, Patty—she’s the same age Veronica was when you killed her—has to live under that cloud every day. Fin keeps trying to make up for Veronica’s death. He thought what you did was his fault. Can you imagine? His fault? He still blames himself, deep down. I can tell. And Veronica’s friend, Natalie, the poor girl she was helping the night you killed her? She’ll never stop blaming herself for making Veronica miss that bus.”

  Raelynn Blackwell’s hands covered her mouth, muffling her voice so much that it was impossible for Bernadette to tell what she was saying, if she was saying anything at all.

  “I brought pictures.” Bernadette opened the photo album and propped it up so that it was facing the Plexiglas window. “This was at Disneyland. Veronica was ten. That’s her father with his arm around her. He doesn’t look like this anymore. When you killed Veronica, you sucked the life out of him.”

  She turned the page and pointed to another picture. “This was our last Thanksgiving together. No one smiles like that anymore. See how relaxed I look here? I used to love the mess of the holidays. The dirty dishes, the leftovers, the chaos. But you killed that. You about killed me, too. I was out of my mind for a while. All I could do was clean and clean and clean. I couldn’t help myself. I still don’t do any of the things I used to do, except shop for food and cook. We still have dinner together every Friday, but it’s not the same without Veronica. It never will be. See the smiling faces in this picture? Look at this one, too. And that one. Those faces don’t exist anymore. Do you understand? Those happy faces are gone. My family is being eaten alive by grief, and you want to know what I do?”

  She stopped, out of breath. Regis handed her a wad of Kleenex. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose. “I pick up,” she said with a sigh, “that’s what I do. I pick up.”

  Bernadette thought about how just this morning she’d kept Regis waiting because she couldn’t leave the house until she picked up Marty’s empty coffee cup from the table next to his recliner by the fireplace, put his philosophy journal in the magazine rack, fluffed up the pillows on the leather couch and put them in color-coded order, straightened the slightly askew candle on the dining room table. Then she’d had to check one more time to be sure everything was in its place. Just thinking about it was exhausting.

  “I want my life back,” she said. “I want myself back. I want my family back. Don’t you see? It’s about more than what you did to Veronica. It’s what you’re doing to us. Every day.”

  Raelynn Blackwell’s face was a blotchy red, twisted beyond recognition, as if the words she was hearing were cutting so deep that they threatened her very existence.

  “Guard,” Bernadette called out to the man standing by the door on the other side of the window, “please get her some Kleenex.”

  The round-faced guard jumped, then nodded and stepped forward. He slipped his hand into the front pocket of his gray uniform slacks, pulled out a clean, pressed handkerchief, and placed it in Raelynn Blackwell’s cuffed hands. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose and, with an apologetic look, handed the soiled handkerchief back to him with a whispered “thank you.” The guard stepped back to his place by the door and resumed his stoic position.

  “I won’t never stop being sorry for what I done to you and your family,” Raelynn Blackwell said. “Even when I’m dead, I won’t stop.” Her voice was hoarse.

  Bernadette sighed, let out her breath. She believed her.

  “I know I can’t never make it right, Mrs. Baker.”

  During the silence that followed, Bernadette felt her heart stop as she went into a place deep inside that, while devoid of any hope that she could change the past, contained profound hope for the future.

  “I forgive you, Raelynn Blackwell,” she said.

  A high-pitched gasp, almost a scream, came from the other side of the window as Raelynn Blackwell’s face fell onto the table. Bernadette pushed against the Plexiglas with her hands. She looked to Regis for help and saw that he was struggling to hold back tears. The guard shuffled his feet and stared down at the floor with wetness on his cheeks, and Bernadette felt his tenderness merge with her own.

  After what seemed like a very long time, Raelynn Blackwell, choking on a sob, lifted her head. “I wish you was my ma,” she whispered. “I’m sorry, I know it’s not my place to say that.”

  “I’m sorry about your mother,” Bernadette said.

  “If you can forgive me, maybe I can forgive her, too.”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  Raelynn Blackwell shook her head and bit her lip. “The welfare split us all up when I was eleven,” she said. “Timmy was six and Anthony was five. My sister Jenny, poor baby, she was just three. I never seen any of them again after that.”

  “There were four of you.”

  “Five, counting my baby brother. I never did know him. Never seen him. One day Ma went to the hospital pregnant, and when she got home she weren’t pregnant no more. I asked where was the baby, and she said to forget about any baby. I never knowed what happened. Maybe he was sick. Maybe he died. I never even knowed his name. It was all my fault.”

  “Your fault?”

  “It was me that told. I was scared Ma would do to Jenny and maybe even my brothers what she done to me. I didn’t know what else to do. But I never should have called the police. That’s when the welfare came.”

  “What about your father?”

  “There was as many daddies as there was us, but we didn’t know none of them. It was just us and Ma. And most of the time she was drunk or asleep or gone.”

  “How did you manage?”

  Splotches of pink sprang up on Raelynn Blackwell’s neck and spread up to her cheeks. “I ain’t proud of what I done sometimes,” she said. “I never was right in the head. Ma said it was because I was born with the cord tight around my neck. I tried to be good. In school I stuck up for the little kids when they were being bullied, and when I got teased about being slow at learning I didn’t even fight back. But it don’t matter. I think Ma was right, I was just born wrong.”

  “No one is born wrong.” Bernadette ached to reach across the table and hold Raelynn’s hands in hers.

  “I just hope they was all adopted. My baby brother, too.”

  “You don’t know what happened to them.”

  Raelynn shook her head. “It would be selfish of me to stir things up for them now. I just pray everything turned out good for them.”

  Tears stung Bernadette’s eyes. She couldn’t imagine what it would have been like to care for her brothers and sisters, like she did after her own mother died, and then have them snatched away, never to b
e seen again. Regis had already told her what happened to Raelynn after protective services intervened—how she escaped the sexual abuse of her mother’s boyfriends only to be sexually abused by the father in one foster home and the teenage son in another, how she kept running away, trying to find her siblings, until she finally gave up and escaped into alcohol and drugs, somehow managing to avoid the juvenile justice system, probably because no one cared enough to look for her—but the reality of it hadn’t hit her until now.

  “What about your mother?”

  “I asked Jesus, if he wants me to see her before I die, to bring her to me.”

  Raelynn Blackwell was a woman of faith, all right—in spite of a lifetime of evidence that would have convinced anyone else that a God of any kind had abandoned her. Bernadette, who had never seen such faith before, found herself in awe of it.

  “I’m sure he will,” she said in a soft voice. “I’m sure he will.”

  FOURTEEN

  The back of Marty’s head tapped against the rocking chair’s undulating pinewood carving, keeping time with the antique winged-back’s rhythmic creaking. He gripped the scratched and worn armrests upon which Bernie’s much-beloved Swedish-Norwegian grandmother had once rested her hands and tried his best to pay attention to what Bernie was saying. But his mind kept alternating between guilt—he should have told her his news long ago, but since it was too late for that, he should have at least told her as soon as she got home today—and exoneration—she had too much on her plate already, she was working so hard and was close, very close, to figuring it all out, so it wouldn’t be right to distract her now. He concluded that he should listen to her tell him what happened at Gatesville today, and then he would give her his news. He couldn’t live with himself any longer if he didn’t. It had to be done today, no matter what.

  “You should have seen the guard,” he heard her say. “He was this big, burly round-faced guy, don’t you know, just like you expect prison guards to look. He handed Raelynn his own handkerchief, and I swear I could see these big tears in his eyes. Like she was his friend or something. And just when I was thinking how this same man was going to put her back in a tiny cell and strip-search her after we left, Raelynn said, out of the blue—almost like she knew what I was thinking—‘they’re good, hardworking people, Mrs. Baker, they’re just doing their jobs.’”

  That caught Marty’s attention. It was just the diversion he needed. He stopped rocking and leaned forward, following the familiar and comfortable road to intellectualizing that lay in front of him.

  “Interesting question,” he said, “whether good people can participate in bad things and still remain good.”

  “You mean like me still thinking this is the right punishment?”

  “No, actually,” he said. “I was associating the death-row guard with Hitler’s Gestapo.”

  “Come on, Marty.”

  “Hear me out,” he said, allowing his thoughts a mind of their own, gladly succumbing to their demand for expression. “The comparison isn’t so far-fetched. As I tell my students, we can begin to fathom how good people can participate in bad deeds when we understand that Hitler’s soldiers who did their jobs by day were still loving fathers and husbands by night. Institutionalized evil relies on the cooperation and support of good people… or on good people turning a blind eye and doing nothing. Like the guard.”

  “This is different, Marty. The guard seemed to care for Raelynn. All I’m saying is that it seems like his job would be a lot easier if he didn’t.”

  He heard the irritation in her voice, and even though he felt bad about once again retreating into philosophy and leaving her to carry the emotional load for both of them, maybe today such avoidance could reasonably be justified.

  “Makes sense,” he agreed, but only half-heartedly.

  She nodded and he resumed his rocking, resigned to wait until she told him everything, determined not to interrupt anymore, not to spoil things for her.

  “Don’t tell Annamaria I said this,” she went on, “but I think Raelynn is a good person. She took good care of her younger brothers and sister.”

  “Like you.” He rubbed his chin and refrained from saying what he was thinking, that he was reminded of how crime victims sometimes identified with the aggressor as a way to cope with trauma. But of course he wasn’t suggesting anything like that about Bernie. She was his wife, not a mental-health case.

  “Sort of,” she said, “but when Mom died, I still had Dad. And the rest of us had each other. Raelynn lost her whole family.”

  The sad look on Bernie’s face made Marty wonder if she had crossed a threshold, had now moved to a place that was beyond his capacity to understand, much less to go to himself.

  “You’ve forgiven her,” he said. At least that much he could understand, or he thought he could.

  Bernie nodded. He leaned toward her and ran his fingers along the top of her hand, glad he’d heard her out. Now that she’d gotten to the place she’d worked so hard to get to, his news wouldn’t be a distraction.

  “So, that’s it,” he said.

  Bernie laid her hand on top of his. She looked thoughtful, as if there was more to be said. “I’m not sure. Regis keeps saying it’s a process. He says this work I’m doing is sloppy, sometimes very sloppy.”

  Marty felt deflated. What was she saying? Was she going back to Gatesville again? “So… what does that mean?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just want to be done with death.”

  Marty’s chest collapsed. “If only we could be,” he said. “If only we could be.”

  He grabbed the armrests of the rocking chair and pushed himself up, doing everything in his power to feign casualness so as not to expose the creeping panic he felt inside. He mumbled reassuring things: He had to go to the bathroom. He was going downstairs to get them something to eat. He’d be back in a few minutes. And then, with labored steps, he fled the room.

  ***

  Bernadette switched on the nightstand lamp and lay on the double bed. No wonder Marty needed a break. No doubt everything she’d told him about her meeting with Raelynn Blackwell had been a lot for him to absorb. She breathed in the pungent lemony smell of furniture polish and thought about how she always kept this room in pristine condition, even though it had yet to host a single guest. It had been a breakthrough for her to suggest that they talk in here today—so big a one, in fact, that she hadn’t stopped to consider how hard it might be for Marty to be in the room that used to be Veronica’s bedroom; as far as she knew, he’d never set foot in it since it had been redecorated. That was probably another reason he needed a break.

  She glanced at the green and tan striped bedspread. It matched the rest of the color scheme so perfectly that even Annamaria had commented on how sophisticated a guest room they had created. But never once had Bernadette ever considered it anyone’s room but Veronica’s. It didn’t matter that the once-purple ceiling with glow-in-the-dark stars was now a neutral off-white. Or that the hot pink walls Veronica had loved—the hotter the better—were now a stylish pale green. Or that her posters—Madonna with flying red corkscrew curls, the Spice Girls in hot and energetic poses, and Ricky Martin dressed all in black in what Veronica called his “most extreme to-die-for-sexy attitude”—had long ago been replaced by scenes of the Texas Hill Country.

  Veronica’s antique cedar chest stood in the corner shimmering like a living thing now in the last rays of the day’s sun. Nine years ago they’d locked their dead daughter’s most precious things in the chest, where they had remained locked up ever since. The chest evoked Veronica’s presence for Bernadette—just what she needed today.

  “I think I’ve forgiven her now,” she whispered.

  For a fleeting second, she saw the glow-in-the-dark stars back on the ceiling, twinkling down at her. But when she blinked, they were gone, replaced by a sense of uneasiness about something Raelynn had said that day: “If Jesus wants me to see Ma before I die, he will br
ing her to me.”

  But if Raelynn’s mother had made no attempt to contact her daughter before, why would she do so now? Raelynn was bound to be disappointed, and what would happen to her faith then? The question had barely formed in Bernadette’s mind when she knew what had to be done—and that she was the only one who would do it.

  ***

  Marty pressed his back against the kitchen counter. He’d meant to tell Bernie before, and now he would. He had to. Even if it placed an added burden on her. Even though it seemed like she was at some new critical juncture with Raelynn Blackwell. He’d withheld the news for far too long already. He knew Bernie wouldn’t take it well. And not just because what he had to tell her was difficult or she didn’t need more to worry about right now, but because the two of them had promised never to keep secrets from each other, and yet that’s just what he had done.

  He gave himself a few more minutes to think, to prepare, before going back upstairs. He told himself to be sure to give her time to react, to not expect her to understand or forgive him right away just because he felt bad about not telling her. But she would understand. Eventually, she would. She always did. Mostly, he told himself not to worry that she would fall apart again. Hadn’t she proven once and for all how strong she was by pulling herself together and finding the bravery and muscular courage to see things through with Raelynn Blackwell? He retrieved a couple of sodas from the refrigerator and put some snacks—slices of apple and pieces of sharp cheddar cheese, a cup of cashews—on a tray. He was ready, as ready as he was ever going to be.

  “There you are,” Bernie said as he walked back into the guest room.

  She threw her legs over the side of the bed and sat up. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, pausing to give himself a few minutes more to gather his courage.

  “So,” he said as he lowered himself into the rocking chair.

  “I know what to do next,” she said.

  To his dismay, Marty realized that Bernie had interpreted his hesitation as an invitation for her to continue with her story. He sat back in the chair and started rocking, not sure if he was glad for or dismayed by the delay, whether waiting a while longer would make it easier or harder for him to tell her.