by Jessica Pack
In 2015—two years into Robbie’s incarceration and appeals process—Nebraska repealed its death penalty; they would no longer execute capital offenders. North Dakota had repealed its capital punishment years earlier. In between those two states was South Dakota, with its single-drug lethal injection and fast-track executions upon the request of the sentenced inmate. It didn’t matter that Robbie was mentally ill. He knew that what he was doing was against the law and had accepted that innocent people might be killed. He had planned his attack in detail, choosing a time he knew the mall would be busy—a Saturday afternoon two weeks before Christmas. If Robbie had committed his heinous crime a few hours north or a few hours south, he wouldn’t have died today.
Not that she wished Robbie’d had the presence of mind to commit his horrible crime in a state that would not kill him, but because . . . nothing. There was no sense to make of her thoughts. In four years she hadn’t come to grips with what had happened; why would she be able to now?
Amanda scanned the boxes full of things that represented the boy he was and the man he could have become and felt the anger rising for the second time today. He could have been a good man! He should have been a good man! All of this—she thought of the pain suffered by his victims, their families, the advocacy groups on every side of the debate, the judges, the courts, the people who had to read about what he did, Melissa, Paul, and their children, who would one day know what their uncle had done—all of this could have been prevented. Robbie could have made different choices and spared all of them. He could have spared her. But he hadn’t. Why? It was the single most common word associated with every thought Amanda had had about her son for four years. Why?
The anger left her shaky, like caffeine after months of abstaining. She felt buzzed, and yet she relished the strange alertness of this unfamiliar emotion. When she’d felt anger in the past, she’d immediately felt equal guilt. Maybe even fear that if she allowed herself to get too angry, she might push herself away from Robbie and later regret it. But there was nothing to push away from now. He was gone. And she was pissed.
She went back to the boxes with renewed energy, throwing away things she’d once expected she would cherish. The certificate he’d received for getting all As the second semester of his junior year of high school. The bridge he’d built out of toothpicks that took second place in the physics competition for holding the most weight before it broke. Maybe every item in these boxes had been garbage all along. Maybe he had been a monster from the start and she was as delusional as he had been. She pulled out one half of the plaster cast he’d had on his arm in sixth grade, and felt the anger pause. Robbie had been sledding with a friend and hit a tree. He’d gotten a concussion, a broken arm, and two broken ribs. The doctor had looked at the x-rays and shown Amanda where, but for a little more pressure, one of those broken ribs could have punctured his lung. At the time, she’d taken such comfort that he’d been spared; but for a bit more speed or her not being there to take him to the ER immediately, she could have lost her son that day. She stared at the dirty green cast scribbled with names and get well messages. What if he had died that day? She would have felt the heartbreaking loss every day from then to now, but she would have been spared the depths of pain these last few years had been steeped in. She choked on the realization of how much better the world at large would have been if he’d crushed his skull that day, or if that rib had gone through his lung and directly into his heart. She’d have never known what pain really was if he’d died in her arms that day. She’d have never wished her son had never been born.
She threw the cast away, shocked at her own thoughts. In desperation, she went back to the box, needing some sign that there had been a purpose in the years her son had lived between sixth grade and now. Was that what she was looking for in these boxes? Validation that Robbie’s life wasn’t wasted? Was all this emotion and confrontation a desperate search so she could be glad the cord had been safely removed from his neck on the day he was born? Was she frantically looking for proof that his life had meaning, to her if to no one else?
She found his school picture from ninth grade and felt some of the desperation settle into mere wavy lines instead of pitching points like those of a heart monitor. Robbie’s hair was overgrown in the picture, he had two zits on his chin, and he was wearing his favorite blue Star Wars shirt. He was giving a rather saucy grin to the camera, as though it were she standing behind it, telling him to smile. Confusion entered where anger and frenzy had been moments earlier. Was it really this boy who went to that mall? Her son whom she’d loved as well as she could? He always ordered the chocolate chip pancakes when they went to IHOP. When their neighbor’s dog was hit by a car, he’d cried himself to sleep. He’d been so very good once.
She picked up another photo—the team picture of the cross-country runners his senior year. He stood there with his tanned arms thrown over a teammate on either side and a genuine “show your teeth” smile. The photo was taken in the fall, with golds and reds of the turning trees serving as a backdrop. Who wouldn’t look at this picture and not think every kid there was going to make the world a better place? She put the pictures in her keeper box and went back to the sorting, her storm of anger diffused for a moment. It was okay for her to miss him, wasn’t it? Even after everything he’d done, could she still be a moral person and love her son? Could she be glad he’d been born and survived that sledding accident? And if she could be glad, if the powers that be approved that possibility, would she be glad? Would she just love the Robbie he’d been? Yet another question rose up to make her wince: Could she love her son and also be relieved he was dead?
Relieved.
Unburdened.
Free.
The thought pushed every bit of air from her lungs.
Every anti–death penalty group had tried to court Amanda over the years, wanting her voice to join theirs. They wanted her to say that the state’s killing of her son was an act of depravity, that every life was precious and deserving of protection. Even his. She never returned the calls or answered the letters. Four different people had shown up on her doorstep to recruit her. She’d turned them away, threatening one particularly intense man that she would call the police if he didn’t leave, even though she wondered if the police would come to defend her. Each time she shut the door on those faces, she would rest her forehead against the painted wood and ask herself what she thought of the death penalty. Was it fair? Was it cruel? She’d never made up her mind. Even when she’d protested against Robbie’s being able to turn down his appeals, she didn’t know if she believed the death penalty was wrong. Was she horrified that her son had been killed by the state that collected her taxes? Undeniably. Did he deserve it? A simple yes or no was an insufficient answer. Robbie’s death seemed a form of mercy. An end place for the misery he’d invited into the world. For him. For the families of his victims. For her? Was she glad that Robbie was dead? The thought made her blood run cold and she focused, again, on the boxes.
She threw out the expulsion letter that had followed his dropping out from USF. His mental decline had been relatively rapid—less than two years between his first diagnosis and the shooting. She shuddered and turned back to the dwindling pile of what remained. Soon enough she’d cleared the floor space. She moved on her knees to the third box.
“Mrs. Mallorie?”
Amanda started and turned to look at the doorway where the moving company’s supervisor stood. It was shocking to be reminded that there was a whole group of men downstairs, and she felt an odd vulnerability about not having been aware of that every moment since she’d let them in. “Oh, hi,” she said, getting to her feet and standing in front of the boxes as though to hide the memories contained within them. Maybe she shouldn’t have written Robbie’s name on the box she was filling.
“My paperwork says you’re taking the fridge, but there’s a yellow sticker on it.” He lifted the clipboard in his hand.
“I’m not taking the fridge—sorry
for the confusion. It’s too big for my new place.” The kitchen in the Cincinnati condo was half the size of the one here. Everything in the condo was space-saving and efficient. Perfect for half a mother trying to figure out how to live her life again.
“Okay,” he said, smiling politely and nodding as he turned out of the room.
“Is everything else okay?” Amanda asked. “Are we on track with the space and time I estimated?” She’d have to pay extra if she took more than the fourteen square yards she’d committed to in the truck or the four hours she’d estimated it would take to load. She couldn’t afford more than the fourteen square yards and four hours.
“You might have overestimated the space, which would set you up for a refund except that one of the guys had to leave so it might take us a little longer. It should all even out, though.”
“He had to leave?” Amanda questioned, thinking of the hushed argument that had been taking place when she’d escaped upstairs. Her rib cage pulled in a bit.
The supervisor pretended to adjust the band of his watch. “Yeah, he, uh, I mean he just . . . I guess he knew Claire Whiterock’s family.”
Claire Whiterock.
Claire had been fourteen years old and hung out with her friends every Saturday at the Cotton Mall, flirting with boys and buying perfume and cheap jewelry with her babysitting money. Claire was part Sioux, beautiful, smart, and the only daughter of her parents, though she had three younger brothers. She’d been hit in the neck by one of the bullets Robbie fired from the upper concourse of the mall and bled to death while her friends scattered in an attempt to save their own lives. The newspaper said that her dark hair had drawn his fire, since he claimed to have come to the mall to kill Islamic extremists. Three victims were light-haired. Four months after the shooting, one of Claire’s friends who had been at the mall and watched from under the escalator as her friend died had hanged herself in her parents’ closet. The newspaper had called Valerie Simperton the tenth victim of Robert Mallorie, and on several occasions Amanda would wake up from a nightmare in which she discovered the girl’s body, only it was Melissa—not the Simper-tons’ daughter. All of the victims had invaded her dreams at one point or another, but Valerie Simperton was the one who came back over and over again. Perhaps because Valerie symbolized the burden left to the living, a burden that broke her months after the other bodies were cold in the ground.
The pain hadn’t stopped once Robbie was behind bars. He had dropped a rock into a pond and the ripples of terror continued. Continued. Continued. One of those ripples had taken the last of Valerie’s hope. One more innocent life ended. More parents shattered. More outrage. More heartbreak. It never stopped.
Perhaps Amanda also understood Valerie’s desire to escape more than she wanted to admit. Perhaps she envied it. How many nights had Amanda lain in bed, staring at the ceiling and wishing she could disappear? Become nothing, feel nothing, want and need nothing. She couldn’t count the occasions of those thoughts, yet she couldn’t give in to the temptation. Sometimes Amanda felt like the shoreline of that pond Robbie had dropped the rock into, trying to absorb those ripples, hoping that maybe if she gathered them in no one else would be hurt. Only, by the time the ripples reached the shore, they’d already passed through all that water.
Not all of Robbie’s victims died. Jaxon Blanchard was a paraplegic. Garth Harrington had been shot in the head and was now stuck in the mind of a ten-year-old. Christine Rocham had to learn how to walk again.
“Are you okay, Mrs. Mallorie?”
Amanda brought herself back to the present, realizing she’d been still and silent for several seconds while the moving company’s supervisor watched her. He had a look on his face that asked for absolution for making her uncomfortable.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, hating the inadequacies of language that made it impossible for her to truly express the depth of regret she felt for the pain still rippling through the lives of good people. “And I appreciate you and your crew very much—thank you for staying.”
She watched as his face relaxed. “We’ll get the work done as quickly as possible.” He began to turn and then paused before turning back. “Do you know if the media will be in Cincinnati when we unload?”
Amanda hadn’t considered that possibility. Surely the scrutiny was limited to South Dakota and would not follow her like a disembodied stain spreading to a new community it could darken. Surely two weeks from now the hounds and vultures would have found another carcass to pick apart, a new story to exploit so that they could pay for soccer practice and take-out pizza. “I sure hope not.”
The supervisor nodded and left, his boots thumping down the wooden stairs to the main level. Alone again, Amanda turned back to the single box that would account for the life of her son.
She didn’t blame the employee who’d left. She hoped he had a wife or mother or best friend he could go home and talk to. She hoped that confidante would put their hand on his arm and tell him how sorry they were for the resurrected pain. Amanda had had friends like that once. Soft places. They were all gone now, either by their choice or hers, but she could still remember what it was like to have people you trusted with your feelings. She hoped the employee took advantage of the gift and could work through this unexpected encounter with Robert Mallorie’s mother. That monster’s mother.
Amanda understood their hatred of Robert Mallorie. She hated him too. Sometimes she even imagined that Robert Mallorie had murdered her Robbie—swallowed him whole and then put on his face and his clothes as a disguise. Yet when Robert took his medications he was Robbie again, albeit an absentminded version who struggled to focus and sleep and never smiled. Then the frustrations would build and he’d go off his meds and feel like himself again. Since his delusions were reality for him, he would address that reality and try to fix the things happening there. That it wasn’t anyone else’s reality made sense to him because of his special power to hear the communications that regular people couldn’t. He’d once tried to explain it to Amanda during a visit at the prison when he was lucid and therefore accepting visitors—she hadn’t seen him for five weeks prior to this visit and asked him why he wouldn’t just stay on his meds. “It’s like all those books I read where someone has this superpower and doesn’t know it, then discovers that they aren’t ordinary after all. They’re special, blessed. That’s how I feel when I don’t take these meds, Mom, and even though right now I know that’s not true, it’s so . . . tempting to feel that way. I want so bad to feel good again. Does that make any sense?”
Of course it did, and she told him so, but she was disturbed by the light in his eyes when he’d talked about those powerful feelings. She had wondered how long he would stay on his medications this time before the temptation would have him sticking his pills in the mattress again.
When she’d come for her visit two weeks later, he’d been agitated. She’d asked if he was taking his meds and he told her it was none of her business before ranting against his attorneys and how they had royally screwed him over in his trial. When she came again two weeks after that, her visit was refused.
8
Tony
Three years, ten months, twenty-two days
The light turned yellow and Tony punched the gas instead of the brake. The light turned red before he reached the intersection, but he kept going, flipping the bird to the car that honked at him. He swerved between two other cars, got honked at again, and let out a string of expletives no one could hear but him.
“Just give me a reason!” he said to no one and pounded his fist on the steering wheel. Leone said he wouldn’t write him up for walking off the job—what a saint! He wasn’t going to pay him either, or at least that’s what he said. Tomorrow Tony would be in the office throwing a fit. They couldn’t expect him to move that woman!
He took a corner too fast and almost hit a kid on a bike. He laid on the horn as he passed by—the kid’s eyes were as wide as saucers. Tony slowed down. He forced himself to take a br
eath, but his heart kept racing. What if he’d hit that kid? He came to a full stop at the next stop sign and looked both ways before easing through the intersection. He managed to keep himself in check the rest of the way home, but just barely.
“Cherie!” he called as he threw open the door to their apartment a few minutes later. He slammed the door shut and then stormed toward the bedroom. She sat up in bed, blinking quickly as she pushed her frizzy black hair off her face.
“Wh-what’s the matter?”
“The lady we were moving today was Robert Mallorie’s mother!” He threw up his hands and turned back to the kitchen. Just as he’d expected, she got out of bed and followed him. She was still blinking as she leaned against the fridge, dressed in a tank top and pajama pants. She crossed her arms and rubbed the gooseflesh rising there.
“Robert Mallorie?” she repeated, still sounding half asleep.
“The dude who shot up the mall and killed Claire. The reason Valerie hanged herself. They finally killed him this morning, and so I guess his mama’s flying the coop. You should see her house.” He huffed. She lived in this nice suburban house and he was still kicking around apartments. That wasn’t right.
“Oh,” Cherie said, straightening up and swallowing. Finally, she understood. “Oh, wow, his mom?”
Tony grabbed a beer from the fridge, then scowled when he saw Cherie look at the clock on the microwave. It wasn’t quite ten in the morning, but come on. Robert Mallorie’s mom? If that didn’t justify a beer, nothing did. He started composing the raging Facebook post he’d write about it—he’d get tons of comments. As he pulled back the tab he turned back to Cherie, waiting for her reaction.
Cherie worked nights at a nursing home; she’d gotten home right before he’d left that morning. She looked tired, but what good was having a girlfriend if she wasn’t there for you? She shifted to lean her other shoulder on the wall. “So, you’re not working today.”