“He’s dead.” Terrence answered as if he had been rehearsing too.
“I know that. But—”
“You wrecked my car and ran off, you left him there and he died.”
“No, no, h-he was alive.” Sophia perched on the edge of the Papa Bear chair and hurried to explain. “A couple came, Dieter and Bea Phelps, they took him. They had a farm near where I went off the road. Mr. Phelps heard the crash. He came running and then his wife Bea—” Sophia faltered as a host of remembered sensations lifted quickly from the floor of her mind. The sound of Dylan’s screams, the sight of him, his head, face and neck, sheeted in blood. Bea Phelps rushing with him in her arms back to the house, her gentle, but ultimately fruitless, attempts to staunch the flow. “They took him to the hospital to get stitches,” Sophia said. “I couldn’t go. I—I’d been drinking and I’d t—taken pills—Dem—Demerol.”
“Yeah, the cops told me all that,” Terrence said.
“You talked to the police? Recently, you mean?”
“No, back when it happened. The Phelps did too. You’re in plenty of trouble, little girl.”
“No, I’m not. That was all—” She stopped. Some instinct warned she had best not say that Russ had taken care of it. “It’s been almost seven years,” she said instead.
“Doesn’t make a damn to the cops. The law’s the law. You were driving under the influence. You stank of booze. You were staggering, slurring your words. The Phelps told the cops they had to take the kid, that you weren’t in any shape to tend to him.”
“No! That isn’t true.” Sophia touches her temple, trying to think. She’d kept her distance, purposefully stayed on the other side of the Phelps’s big, homey kitchen, watching Bea, heart stumbling in panic, jealous of Bea’s tender expertise with Dylan. His shrieks had jarred Sophia’s brain, but Bea had been the soul of calm. She had ministered and crooned and walked Sophia’s baby as if nothing were amiss. Sophia had wanted to snatch Dylan from her; she had wanted him back. She had wanted to shout that he was hers. Her baby....
The Phelps had whispered to each other as they readied themselves and Dylan to go to the hospital. Sophia would be seen by a doctor too, they told her. They had spoken as if they thought Sophia would likely have to stay on as a patient, but she was not to worry, they said. They would care for Dylan in her absence. They promised they would. And she’d agreed, finally, because she could see what they were saying, that it would be for the best. Bea Phelps did not want to strike Dylan across his face when he cried. She did not want to pinch closed his tiny little nostrils or clap her hand over his howling mouth. Bea did not look as if she needed a Demerol.
But Sophia had needed nothing else.
That was all behind her though, she told Terrence. “I’m in school; I’m going to be a doctor. I’ve made a new life.”
Terrence snorted. “Yeah, and I can walk on water.”
“It’s true.”
“They waited for you. Did you know that? That old couple. They said you went to get the kid’s diaper bag and never came back. What happened? Did you pass out somewhere?”
Sophia closed her eyes. If she answered, she would cry. She would feel the terror of that day again in the pit of her stomach and the dumb blind hopelessness that had come later, after she made the decision to leave Dylan with the Phelps. She’d made up the excuse about retrieving the diaper bag so she could leave the house alone and once she was out of sight, she’d disappeared into the nearby woods. She had done it because she didn’t believe then that she could love Dylan the way Bea did; she didn’t think it was possible that she could look on him with such adoration. Sophia couldn’t recall ever having seen such tenderness of expression on anyone’s face before except in paintings of Mary with the baby Jesus.
She had thought it was right thing to do for Dylan. She had thought her mother would approve. But she had never once thought he would die. And she lived with that horror now. Every day. Every single awful day. But she would not share her remorse with Terrence. She would not give him that satisfaction. And when he asked again what had happened, she would only say, “It doesn’t matter anymore.”
He said, “Maybe not to you, but I know the cops are still interested. I told them I didn’t know squat, that I was in Spain when you took off. I told them when I got back here, you’d trashed my place.”
Sophia straightens. “I did not!”
“C’mon, it was a mess. Drugs and wine bottles, shit strung everywhere. Tell the truth. You ditched your kid and had yourself one hell of a celebration.” He laughed, a bark that mocked her, mocked their past. She’d been nothing to him. His little fool.
She bent her face into her hand. She really had no clear remembrance of how she’d even made her way back to the loft much less what she’d done when she arrived there. Drinking, swallowing pills, waking to find herself still alive and hating herself for it. She’d called the hospitals, too, screaming about Dylan. Mostly she’d been shouting at dead air after the nurses hung up on her. “It wasn’t like that,” she told Terrence. “I wasn’t celebrating.”
“I just wish I’d been there,” he said. “You were a little hellcat when you were drunk, a little party cat. I always liked you better loosened up.”
It was the smirk in his voice that infuriated Sophia, that made her blame him. “It’s your fault, you know. You’re the one who gave me the drugs in the first place.”
His voice turned ugly. “I knew you’d try and lay it off on me.”
She tucked her hand beneath the point of her bent elbow.
“You know what your problem is? You don’t know when to quit. That’s the difference between us. I know my limits.”
“Please, Terrence.” She cringed at the note of begging in her voice. “Just tell me if you know where Dylan is, where he’s—” Buried. The word stuck in her throat.
“My advice? Forget the kid, forget the Phelps, forget it all. Trust me, it’s for the best.”
“Why does everyone keep saying that?”
“Why? Jesus Christ, Sophia, because you stole my Jag and wrecked it? Because you left the scene? You left your kid and he died? That’s manslaughter, sweetheart. There’s no statute of limitations on manslaughter. They ever find you, you’ll go to jail.”
A tiny whimper sounded deep in Sophia’s throat.
He said, “I have to go.”
“Wait, Terrence, please! I’m to blame for how Dylan died, okay? If that’s what you want to hear, fine.” She would say anything, whatever it took. “Just tell me where he’s buried, the name of the cemetery.”
“Are you kidding me? I’m not telling you shit except don’t call me again.”
“If you think I’m so awful, why did you send the sweater back?”
“I don’t know. I bought it for the little guy, remember?”
“The day you took us to the zoo.”
“Maybe I wanted you to have it as a memento, a reminder that I wasn’t always the asshole you seem to think. We had some good times, Sophia. I took you and your kid in, gave you a home. Not every guy would do that.”
“You hurt me, broke my ribs, my collarbone. There are doctors who can verify what you did. I could tell that to the police.”
“Yeah? Well, I can tell them where to find you, little girl, whenever I want to. I’m keeping tabs on you. No matter what you do or where you go, I’ll always know how to get to you, how to sic the cops on you.”
“Are you threatening me?” Sophia stood up. Panic throbbed in her ears. “You can’t possibly know where I live.”
“Nineteen-seventeen Bolten Avenue, Houston, Texas. I can always find you,” he repeated. “Do you understand? Am I being clear enough?”
Sophia shouted no. She demanded Terrence tell her how he knew her address, but after several moments, she realized he’d hung up leaving her alone in a vacuum of frightened silence.
Chapter 26
Thursday, October 14, 1999 - 3 days remain
They never tell you in advance, but Ja
rrett knows they could take him any time, although the probability is that they’ll wait until Sunday. He’d like to believe he’s ready. He’s getting what he wants, after all. What he asked for. His goddamn wish to die.
Buy the farm.
Take the big dirt nap.
Cash in his chips.
Croak.
Inside of four days he’ll be ash. Gone to hell.
It’s hard to hook his mind around it. His head in his hands now feels twice the size that it should. He’d laugh, but he’s scared of the noise that’s accumulated in his chest, that it would come out sounding like a howl.
Terry Ray Cox said they took him to The Walls twenty-six hours before his first scheduled execution. The second time they took him three full days ahead of schedule, under heavier guard than usual, due to the fact that there’d been a recent escape from The Walls in Huntsville and everybody in the system was spooked. Even though they’d caught the guys, shooting one of them dead in a ditch. The last time they came for Terry was two days ago, twenty-two hours ahead of his date with the needle and this time he hasn’t come back.
Terry had described the ride over to Huntsville as a killer, the longest and shortest forty-five minutes of his life. Three quarters of an hour was how long the drive took once you got processed out of Terrell. It would be more like thirty minutes if you went the most direct route, but for security purposes, they always took the back roads.
“First, though, you get one of them strip searches,” Terry had said through the chink in the wall, “you know, lift your balls, spread your butt cheeks. Next you get trussed up like a fucking turkey, leg irons, cuffs, the works. Then they take you out and stuff you and your sack a worldly goods into this wire cage in the back of a van. And it is one hot mother, let me tell you. ‘Course, the posse sits up front in the A/C. And get ready ‘cause they’ll be laughing and cutting up. They could give a shit about you.
“If you can stop thinking,” Terry Ray had advised, “you’ll be okay. Shut off your brain and just look. After so long living inside here, trust me, you have totally forgot the outdoors, just seein’ life. Everything. Buildings. Traffic. So many colors. People going about their daily biz. Green trees blowin’ in the wind. Going across’t a bridge, seein’ a boat on the water....”
It was a blessing, Terry had said.
Jarrett thinks now how weird it is that he knew Terry Ray Cox all of one week and yet he knew his most private thoughts, his worst fears. He knew, for instance, that Terry had told the warden at The Walls on his number two trip over there that he would have to be carried into the death chamber, that he didn’t believe his legs would hold him.
“What did the warden say?” Jarrett asked.
“He thought maybe I was asking cuz I intended to cause trouble, but when I told him no, he said they’d do it however I wanted. He called me Mr. Cox. He was real respectful to me, not like a lot of these other assholes.”
Monday night, Terry’s last on death watch, Jarrett had lain awake listening to him pace. Listening to him talk to the cracks in the cell walls, his women ...“Now, now, Tina, don’t cry, my sweetheart ...There, there, Marilyn, my beauty ...Pray for me, darlin’s. Pray for ol’ Terry Ray....”
Jarrett drops off the edge of his bunk to the floor now and cranks out fifty push ups; he does another fifty. He keeps at it until his arms give out. By the time he sits up, he’s sweating and there’s a CO at his cell door telling him he’s got visitors.
o0o
They are talking about Thomas, the trouble he’s in, at least Grace is. She’s upset, gesturing, eyes snapping, although she isn’t looking at Cort or Jarrett. Jarrett’s trying to follow her, but she’s talking so fast. Thomas was released into her custody, she says and something about a hearing scheduled in a week.
“He’s this close,” she makes a space between her thumb and forefinger.
Jarrett stares at her through the cloudy Plexiglas. She seems faded, an indistinct image, but maybe it’s his vision that is blurred.
“Don’t you care?” she demands.
He makes the mistake of shrugging.
“He could go to prison?” Her voice slides up a scale; she clenches her teeth, takes a breath. “For a very long time.”
Cort’s hand rises and comes to rest on Grace’s bare forearm. Jarrett looks at that, at his brother’s rougher, work-worn hand on his wife’s paler-skinned arm. And he knows the feel of Grace’s flesh the same as if it were his hand there. He knows its smell, like sunshine and spring wind. He is desperate to hold her. If he could just once more bury his face in the hollow of her neck, rest his hands at her waist....
“Thomas might have seen jail time,” Cort is speaking, amending what Grace has said, “if Luke’s parents hadn’t had a change of heart.”
Jarrett looks at Cort.
“Luke admitted it was as much his idea as Thomas’s to get into his dad’s beer and take the car.”
“But Thomas was the driver?” Jarrett asks.
“Yeah.” Cort’s lips rumple into a sort of grin. “Remember that time we took Mom’s car after we went through that half pint of Wild Turkey?”
Jarrett laughs. “We found it in that phone booth by the basketball court.”
“You drove, remember? You were drunk off your ass.”
“Me? Are you saying you were sober? What were you? Like twelve, hanging out the window.”
“This is not some rite of passage.” Grace interrupts, heatedly. “Don’t dare say boys will be boys.”
“No.” Cort shoots a glance at Jarrett, a look between men.
“Luke or Thomas, either one could have been killed or crippled. When I think—” Grace sets down the phone; she presses her fingertips to her eyes.
“Don’t let her come anymore,” Jarrett says in a low voice. He holds Cort’s gaze. “Let this be the last time.”
“What?”
“I don’t want you here, okay?” He knows how it sounds, rough and mean, but he persists. “Tell the kids I love them. I love all of you and I’m sorry, so sorry, but— Gaaagh! Can’t you understand?” he shouts. “There’s nothing left to say! To do! What the fuck can I do? For my family? For you? Anyone? I’m dead, don’t you get it? Dead already. You have to let it go, let me go. Just please, God, let it be today.”
“It’s always the same with you.”
Jarrett looks at Grace, who has the phone back in her grip, who is white-faced and angry, as angry as Jarrett has ever seen her.
“Always about you,” she shouts, “always what you want, what you need God to do. What if your children want to see you? What if they decide after all that they want to say good-bye? What if it means closure for them? Do you expect me to say no? Daddy can’t take it? Daddy can’t stand it?”
Jarrett tilts his head back. Tears jam his throat.
“We’re scheduled to visit on Saturday,” Grace sounds very close to tears herself, “and again on Sunday before they—”
“We’re going to talk to the kids, Jarrett,” Cort says and his voice is uncertain. “We should—we should all be together one more time.”
Jarrett brings his chin level. “I don’t know how to do this.”
“Who does?” Cort keeps Jarrett’s gaze.
“I don’t want anyone at The Walls.”
“I don’t think you’re going to stop Blanca Salazar,” Cort begins.
Grace interrupts. “What about that other woman, the one who says she’s your mother. Hasn’t she said she’s coming?”
Jarrett says he can’t stop her anymore than he can Blanca. He thinks of the complication of his feelings about her, that his anger at L is lacerated by confusion, a terrible longing. He wants to know whether she is telling the truth even as he asks himself how it can matter. But what is worse is his need to believe in her, even to be held by her. At times, it will rise without warning and seize him with such force it chokes his breath. He has wondered what they would say to one another assuming they did meet. In her last letter, she had written, agai
n, about fear, how she’d let it consume her life, her energy. She had said that for her fear was like a giant mindless machine.
Have you ever thought how entire institutions are erected in the effort to combat fear? she had written. Think of it, the churches, the governments and hospitals, the prisons that are built all over the earth because we are afraid of illness, of death, of each other. What if we were not afraid? she had asked. Where would that leave the world in terms of politics, war, the economy? When I think how much business is done in defense of fear....
“Suppose she is your mother? I still don’t understand her desire to come,” Grace says. “What mother wants to see her own son die in such a—a— It’s morbid.”
“She doesn’t even know you,” Cort adds.
“She was afraid.” Jarrett feels moved to defend her. Like L, fear is something he knows about. In fact that bond might be thicker than blood. “The books she sent me.” Jarrett is looking at Grace now.
“What about them?”
“I’ve written letters in them to you and the kids. I want you to know so you won’t throw them out. If you want to read the letters, I mean.”
Grace is holding his eyes with her own and somehow it is as if they are alone in a room, in a space that contains only the two of them. And when she flattens her palm on the Plexiglas, he does the same and their history lives in her gaze, the vision of her once-love that is now something else. Not love, but not its opposite either.
“Don’t come back,” he whispers.
She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”
“Be happy,” he says. “Whatever it takes.”
She nods, biting her lips.
“Promise me. Say that you will.”
“Yes,” she says.
“Never think what happened had anything to do with you, with us. It was me. Do you understand? All me.”
She shakes her head, taking her hand away from the Plexiglas to shield her face that is sheeted in fresh tears.
Jarrett swallows. He looks for Cort and the gratitude he feels for the arm Cort slips around Grace’s shoulders burns his chest.
The Volunteer Page 23