by Angela Pisel
“I’m sure you did everything right. You’re a great doctor.”
“I don’t think I made a mistake, but Carter and my dad said to protect myself and protect the practice. Don’t want to do anything to jeopardize my run for chief of surgery.”
He said “chief of surgery” sarcastically, making Sophie think his family wanted it way more than Thomas did.
“A lawsuit,” Thomas continued in a more reverent voice, “involving a child almost never comes out in the doctor’s favor, whether they did something wrong or not.”
“In other words—avoid a scandal?”
“Avoid a scandal,” Thomas repeated—empathically, but once again sarcastically. “You know my family—wouldn’t want to tarnish the family name. To quote my dad: ‘Sometimes it is better to make things go away than to let the whole world see your indignity.’” Sophie felt that comment right between the eyes.
On the edge of Thomas’s desk, posing behind a fragile piece of glass, sat two newlyweds. A seemingly happy couple, impeccably dressed, donning paper-white smiles. “You two have the world at your fingertips,” the photographer told them when they viewed their prints.
“I’m looking at our picture,” Thomas said, after Sophie had been silent for a little too long. “We might need to get it reframed. There’s a tiny crack in the glass.”
GRACE
Six minutes ago, Walter Mayberry died. I know the exact time of his death because Officer Jones turned on the TV in the dayroom and let those of us who wanted to watch the media coverage do so. No one did. Carmen clicked her overgrown nails on the metal table, complaining to Jada that the lack of vitamins in her “meal plan” was making her cuticles split. Roni riffled through an old Sports Illustrated and grunted ever so dramatically, as though the bite-fight between Holyfield and Tyson just happened.
At first I didn’t want to watch, either. I worried you were watching, and I didn’t want you to see what was about to happen. What was about to happen to me. But then curiosity, mixed with a good bit of anxiety, set in and I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen.
This is the first execution in South Carolina in many years. I guess that’s why there’s so much media attention, so much debate. The TV cameras panned the crowd. One man was holding a sign that read “Forget Injections, Use a Pickax.” Drops of painted red blood trailed from the last word. Others were standing in a circle, holding candles—praying his life would be spared, I guess.
I didn’t know Walter, but Officer Jones did. She had worked in the men’s unit before transferring to the women’s section of the prison. I’d heard about Walter, though—the Graveside Strangler. What terrible things he did to those innocent girls.
The TV station flashed their pictures throughout the coverage. I tried not to look, but I couldn’t help myself. School photos, I’m sure. One girl had braids tied with tiny black-and-white bows. She had a gap between her top two teeth. The other had long, wavy auburn hair, parted on the side and clipped with a gold barrette. She wore a forest-green cardigan.
Then a picture of thirty-four-year-old Walter Mayberry popped up on the screen. His face was dominated by cumbersome black, thick-rimmed glasses, the kind that covered your eyebrows and ended at the bottom of your nose—probably prison-issued, or all he could afford. Underneath the lenses, his gray eyes looked lost.
Walter told Officer Jones he wasn’t sure when the urges first started. His uncontrollable impulses to harm young girls who happened to be standing on their tiptoes, putting change into the vending machine while waiting at his dad’s garage.
He hated himself afterward, but the urges wouldn’t leave, no matter how hard he fought. His despicable acts played over and over in his mind; sometimes the thoughts excited him, but mainly they tortured him. His only relief came after he came to death row. His court-appointed psychiatrist fought to get him treatment.
Officer Jones said it was a new drug approved to treat paraphiliacs, or people who can’t control their sexual urges. After he received weekly injections for a couple months, his high levels of testosterone went down and his obsessive thoughts moved away. His tumultuous mind turned calm and peaceful.
I kept seeing the images of those girls in my mind. What horror their parents must be going through. They deserved justice, and I prayed they received peace.
The other part of me felt sorry for him. He was a victim, too. In no way did that make him innocent or make his crimes less horrendous. It did, though, help me to understand him better. He had to live with a monster every day, and it resided inside his head.
The television flickered on and off, but stayed on. The reporters were talking about how he’d spent his last day. The fried eggs he ate for breakfast and the grilled cheese he didn’t eat for lunch. His final meal, by choice, happened to be the same thing the rest of the inmates ate for dinner: beef stew with diced potatoes and carrots, cornbread, and an eight-ounce glass of watered-down sweet tea.
It was nights (or early mornings) like these that make me look around in a panic. How did I end up in here? I wasn’t mentally ill. I hadn’t harmed anyone. I had two parents who were crazy about me. When I walked into the room, my mom’s and dad’s faces lit up. I hope you saw the pleasure on my face when I looked at you.
Somewhere there’s a picture of me holding you right after you were born. It used to be framed on the table beside my bed. You had just opened your eyes and were giving me the once-over. I wasn’t sure if you were going to smile or cry, but then you reached up and wrapped your fingers around my finger as if to say, “Hey, you’re okay.” It was in that moment I knew I was meant to be your mom.
The row was unusually quiet tonight. Carmen was humming our Sunday-morning chapel song Ms. Liz had taught her when she first was incarcerated here: Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling, calling for you and for me. See, on the portals, He’s waiting and watching. Calling, O sinner, come home. The rest of the row, like me, was probably praying tonight our dreams would be peaceful. I prayed you slept in perfect peace.
A few people remained, now kneeling in a circle with their candles lit. Would these same people be here to protest against me?
A long black hearse pulled out of the prison yard, followed by two police cars. Inside was the body of Walter Mayberry on the way to be buried in the prison cemetery, hidden down a gravel road behind a large covering of magnolia trees. According to the news, none of his family or his victims’ families attended his execution.
I returned to my room to write all of this to Sophie, and then I turned on my radio. I needed to listen to some music before I fell asleep. The station was full of static, and before I could turn if off I heard a man in a somber voice say, “The next scheduled execution in the state of South Carolina will take place on February fifteenth. Grace Bradshaw, you might remember, is the woman who murdered her infant son by repeatedly putting windshield-wiper fluid into his bottle.”
SOPHIE
Sophie didn’t sleep more than a half-hour at a time all night. Thomas’s words saturated her every thought and tainted her every perception. Avoid a scandal. Make it go away. Avoid a scandal. No matter how many times she spun the conversation with Thomas in her mind, a mother on death row always came out sounding scandalous.
The only bed and breakfast in town had five rooms, and they all smelled like cat litter. Mrs. Neiland, the owner, gave Sophie her pick of the place, since she was the first (and only, by the looks of things) guest to check in that night.
Eager to do something other than socialize with Mrs. Neiland, Sophie woke the next morning before daylight, put on her running clothes, and escaped out the side door. A jog could clear her head and give her an excuse to miss breakfast, which smelled like it wasn’t going to be any better quality than the rooms.
Thomas didn’t like Sophie running so early in the mornings. “You never know who’s roaming the streets before the crack of dawn,” he’d warn, when her insomnia led her
to lace up her sneakers before the sun came up. She knew he wouldn’t approve of this early-morning run, but the crime rate in Brookfield had to be nonexistent.
As far as she knew, the only violent crime committed in Brookfield had occurred in her own house. “Try and protect me from that, Thomas.” She smirked as she spoke the words out loud.
For the longest time, Sophie had actually believed her mom was innocent. Her dad told her time and again: “This is all a mistake. Your mom loved William. She never would have hurt him. Someday the truth will come out.”
He promised to save her mom and get her out of that horrible, scary place. A pledge he repeated to his wife and daughter every time they visited the prison. “I will find out what happened. Don’t give up, Gracie, please don’t give up”—his hands touching hers through the glass window separating them. “We will be at home soon, together, as a family.” Every word sounding less and less convincing as the years dragged by.
Sophie had believed her dad. After the dishes were washed and put away and her dad checked her homework, they both sifted through newspaper articles and court transcripts, organizing file folders that read Expert Defense Witnesses and New People to Interview. Each folder stuffed with regret and dollar signs. “It takes money to mount a good defense,” her dad told her as he looked through the old court cases, labs tests, and profiles of expert witnesses that he could never actually afford to hire.
“We can’t give up, Sophie. We can never give up,” he said to her as he lay in the hospital bed after his first round of chest pains led to open-heart surgery. Sophie, who was then a junior in high school, squeezed her dad’s hand and promised him she would continue to fight even if he was too weak to help her.
A few months later, the battle became hers. Around Sophie’s eighteenth birthday, she came home to find her father slumped over at the kitchen table, his heart finally stopped.
After his death, Sophie’s friends, especially Jillian, tried to get Sophie to “be a normal teenager” and go to the mall or at least to a drive-through. Every night after school, when other kids were applying to college or searching for prom dresses, Sophie was either visiting her mom in prison or searching for ways to get her out.
Close to Christmas of her senior year, Jillian gave Sophie a ride home after school. “I’m worried about you,” she said as she got out of the car and invited herself into Sophie’s living room. “You are so obsessed with getting your mom free, you’ve made yourself a prisoner.” She’d pointed to the dishes piled in the sink and the overflowing trash cans. “Locked up in this house, doing God knows what.”
“I’m trying to get my mom out of prison,” Sophie cried. Her voice escalated to a volume that startled even her.
“It’s Christmas. You’re here alone.” Jillian spoke softly, trying to calm her. “No tree, no lights. Nothing. Please come stay at my house.”
“Why, so you can lecture me? I get the ‘normal kid’ speech from neighbors when they feel well enough to check in on me.”
Jillian, who shared third lunch and always ordered the mean girls to scoot over so Sophie could sit by her, started to apologize. “I’m sorry. I have no idea what it’s like to have a mother in prison. Or, for that matter, to have a father who’s passed away, but Sophie”—she paused as if to weigh the consequences of what she was about to say—“someone has to tell you the truth.”
“The truth? I know the truth.” Her words hissed as they came out. “What are you talking about?”
Jillian pulled the coffee table close to the sofa and sat across from Sophie, their bare knees touching. “Your mom is sick. Sick in the head. She made William sick. She made him die.” Jillian tugged on her French braid, refusing to sugarcoat the truth any longer. “Everyone knows that but you.”
Sophie was speechless, deflated, like all the hope her dad had filled her with had run off with the words of a friend she assumed believed in her mother like she did.
“How can you say that? You know my mother. You went shopping with her. You saw all the times my mom took William to the doctor. You saw how much he cried. You of all people should know she wasn’t capable of hurting anyone.”
“Well, apparently she was. She hurt your brother. You heard the prosecutors. She had Munchausen.” Jillian’s once responsive eyes hardened.
Sophie clutched her stomach and turned away. “Can you please go? I need to be alone.”
“Fine, I’ll leave you alone,” Jillian replied. “But think about it—the description for Munchausen fits.”
—
SOPHIE RAN FASTER AND FASTER through the streets of Brookfield, but with every turn another bad memory or unwelcome thought invaded her. Her high school, out of session for the holidays, only reminded her of graduation. Alone.
While other seniors had thrown their hats and celebrated, Sophie kept her head down and her goals clear (Get my diploma and get out of here), but no matter how much she avoided others, she still couldn’t escape the stares and whispers, even from her teachers. That poor Bradshaw girl. What is she going to do now?
William would have been eighteen this year. A senior, graduating with his class in this exact place. Sophie wondered what he would have looked like, what he would have become.
The high school was within walking distance of her childhood home. The house she’d packed up and pushed away, vowing never to return and never look back. Her dad’s Ford Explorer weighed down by everything she could possibly fit into a college dorm room. Her clothes, a few linens, a bicycle, and William’s baby blanket—a faded blue-and-pink-and-yellow crocheted blanket now hidden in a JCPenney bag underneath the box preserving her wedding dress back at her house in West Lake.
Family pictures, dishes, and all her mom’s case files still resided at 365 North Prairie Street. At least, she assumed it was all still there, although she’d never been back. A few days after Jillian confronted her, she’d finally had the courage to power up her dad’s computer to take a closer look at all of the court documents.
She knew he always kept his password on a yellow sticky note locked in his desk drawer. When she couldn’t find the drawer key anywhere, she’d taken a hammer to the lock and beat it until the latch disassembled and dangled from the inside of the small drawer. Her heart had beat faster than it ever had as she entered the password, john832, into the box on the computer screen. A Bible verse, Sophie later figured out, which read: And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.
On that day, the truth did set her free. Instead of unwrapping presents on Christmas Day, she opened documents from Brookfield’s chief medical examiner: Cause of death: ethylene glycol poisoning. Police reports: bottle of windshield wiper fluid found in the Bradshaws’ garage. Toxicology reports: traces of ethylene glycol in bottle Grace Bradshaw last fed William with at the hospital. Notes from a court-appointed psychiatrist: mother who fits profile of someone suffering from Munchausen by proxy. Depressed mother who seeks attention from medical personnel by repeatedly making child sick.
Seeing these without her father there to immediately translate what she was reading, she realized that Jillian had been right. They were all right. The mean kids in the hallway who snickered at her when she passed—“Why didn’t your mom poison you?”—to the janitor after school who’d told her, “It doesn’t matter who you come from, you control your destiny.”
How could she have been so stupid? How could her dad have been so naïve? Her mom was guilty. Guilty of lying, of poisoning and killing her only son. Sophie’s brother. Had her mother wished she could kill her, too?
Sophie had turned off the computer, devastated. Furious at her dad for manipulating the facts, for dying, but most of all for making her believe.
—
SOPHIE THOUGHT ABOUT TURNING AROUND, or at least not looking at her old house when she ran by the church located at the corner of her street and not too far from her high school. But somethin
g inside her felt otherwise, and before she could stop herself, she turned and found herself standing in front of her childhood.
It looked exactly as she remembered, a modest Victorian-style two-story home with a cracked wraparound lattice-framed porch still needing a paint job. Chipped pieces of yellow paint hung for dear life to rotted wood, praying the next gust of wind would not send them on their way. Weeds and dandelions covered the sidewalk in front of the house and forcefully pushed their way through the broken concrete.
Sophie hadn’t set foot in the house since she locked the doors the summer before her freshman year of college. The city, she guessed, had been maintaining the lawn. She’d stopped paying those bills when she married Thomas and failed to leave a forwarding address.
I’m not sure I can do this, she thought to herself as she stood in the driveway of the property she once called home. The swing on the front porch was still in the same place, empty and unoccupied, as if waiting for its family. She pictured her mom sitting there, swinging, with a fresh glass of lemonade, watching for her to turn the corner on her way home from school. How was your day, sweetie? Any homework?
Her mom would be so sad to see the house run-down like this, she thought, as she contemplated whether or not to search for the spare key that used to be taped behind the wrought-iron mailbox that hung on the wall outside the front door.
A car horn dazed her before she could look for the key. “I’m glad I found you here, Mrs. Logan,” the woman from the law office shouted through her open car window. “I didn’t put two and two together until I was brushing my teeth this morning. Mr. Taylor would never forgive me if I let you get away.”