by Angela Pisel
“Maybe,” she teased.
After Mindy left, Max opened package after package of presents: crayons, markers, coloring books, and puzzles with bright colors and pieces that fell into place. Sophie laid down beside him in bed and read him a book about a man who lost his large purple shoe, and then another one about a caterpillar who refused to move, all with one eye on the door. Was his mother coming back?
“And the stubborn caterpillar started to shake as his twelve eyes dripped with fear. What is happening to me?” Sophie said in her best obstinate insect voice.
“You silly, Mommy,” Max said to her through his giggles. His tight arms were still wrapped around her when his real mom walked through the door.
GRACE
“You might feel a little sting,” the infirmary nurse said as she pinched my stitches with tweezers before cutting them out. “This looks great.”
She pulled out a black compact from her white coat pocket, opened it, and handed it to me. “Normally, on the outside”—she pointed the scissors off somewhere beyond the barbed wire—“a plastic surgeon would have been called in to take care of a cut this severe. You’re lucky our doctor is skilled with the sutures.”
I held the mirror up to my face and examined the thick, jagged line that now spilled down from my right eye. I thought of Roni and tried to feel grateful. I wiped off the brown powder from the outskirts of the mirror the best I could and took a closer look. The reflections from the television screen and the plastic-coated mirror in the beauty shop have been kind to me. Glass mirrors don’t lie, and I’m not finding the truth attractive.
I examined the rest of my features before she took my reality away. The black swimming pools under my eyes and the grooves now making their way across my forehead shocked me.
“This place has been hard on you.” She held her hand out for the compact.
“Your mirror is hard on me,” I responded. I don’t have the energy to tell her how I really feel.
“If it matters to you, I think you look pretty good for forty-nine.”
“Thanks.” I tried to smile. It did matter.
Beauty is only skin deep. I heard myself repeating to Sophie what my mother repeated to me. I felt stronger about that adage when my skin was thicker and my high cheekbones had color.
Paul always told me that when he walked into a room, he noticed me first. “It goes beyond your smoking-hot bod,” he’d say to me. “You have a gentle beauty that will never fade.”
I wish he could tell me that now. Whisper in my ears and hold me in his arms while I breathe in the fading smell of his cologne after a long day. Soak in his words assuring me my changing hair color and my invasive wrinkles meant I was full of wisdom even if they weren’t the lessons I’d have chosen to learn on my own.
“We won’t need to do any more wound care for this,” the nurse said. “I’ll see you . . .”
We both knew when we’d see each other again.
“I hope you have a nice Christmas.” I waved good-bye before the officers escorted me out the door.
Ms. Liz and Carmen sat at the table in the dayroom, talking as I made my way back to my cell. Jada sat alone in the corner away from the TV and kept her head down as I passed.
“Did you get your stitches out?” Ms. Liz asked as I shuffled by.
“Looks good as new, right?” I said to her. I still can’t say anything to Carmen.
I tried to peek into Roni’s cell as I passed by, but an officer prevented me. “Mind your own business,” he ordered.
She’d been in isolation for several days. I needed to apologize and tell her why I did what I did. Do I even understand what I did?
“Stand for count,” he yelled before he took my cuffs off.
Everyone was clearly visible except Roni.
The officers exchanged glances. The bigger of the two officers shouted, “Lock ’em down.”
Jada and Carmen walked briskly back to their cells. Ms. Liz stood at the side of the table and looked confused. I could tell she didn’t know what was going on.
The shorter officer locked my cell without undoing my feet or arm shackles. The door slammed shut before I had a chance to protest.
“We’ve got a hanger,” the officer shouted.
Within seconds, an announcement boomed over the row’s loudspeaker. Four more officers rushed through the cell block and convened outside Roni’s door.
I peered out my window, praying they were wrong. “Please, let her be okay,” I cried to God and everyone.
One officer stood at the door while three others entered. A twisted white sheet hung from the ceiling, Roni’s limp neck draped through it.
The officer cuffed her hands before he cut her loose. I couldn’t stand it anymore and turned away. “Why? Why?”
A gurney from the infirmary squeaked its way past my door. I looked again and saw them pick Roni’s floppy body off the floor. The sheet was still around her neck.
“Found a faint pulse,” I heard someone say as they pushed her past my cell and off death row.
SOPHIE
Sophie planned to drive as far as her fatigued body would let her so she could make it to Brookfield on Christmas Eve. Thomas called her as expected. “Please tell me what’s wrong,” followed by “What can I do to make you come back?”
She could give only vague answers like “I’m so sorry about this. I wanted to have a real conversation about this before I left, but then you got called in so quickly. You did everything right. I can’t tell you something of this magnitude over the phone.” She begged him to trust her, but had no idea why he possibly should.
She considered telling him she was pregnant, thinking that bit of news might soothe his discomfort and solidify a bond between them no amount of previous deception could break. But she wasn’t exactly sure if he’d be happy about the baby. The last time his partner’s wife delivered, Thomas had made some offhanded comment as he and Sophie left the maternity ward. “So glad,” he said while they stepped onto the crowded elevator, “that you and I don’t have any kids to tie us down.” She didn’t know, for Thomas, if the time would ever be right.
Sophie couldn’t judge him too harshly, because motherhood—well, the idea actually terrified her. What if I inherit my mother’s coping style? That fear had faded some when she met Max, a little more when she’d heard the sound of her baby’s developing heart shuddering inside her.
After miles of unanswered questions, Thomas finally stopped asking. He made her promise to call him as soon as she arrived and “keep in touch” as to when she’d be back.
“How can I explain this to my parents?” he asked before she hung up the phone. “My wife leaving me on Christmas.” His grief cut through the line.
“Tell them it’s my turn to make something right.”
He hung up the phone without saying good-bye.
Sophie rolled down all four car windows, begging the ice-cold December air to keep her awake. When it didn’t, she pulled her car off the interstate and onto an exit ramp about ninety minutes from Brookfield. Right off the exit, a green sign instructed cars to turn right for Lakeland State Penitentiary or left for gas, hotels, or if you wanted to eat at Cracker Barrel. A truck driver honked his horn after Sophie sat at the intersection long after the light turned green.
She fought the urge to turn right, drive to Lakeland, and stand outside the thick, twisted barbed wire, shouting: “Mom, please tell me what happened to William. I need to know how I should feel about you.”
After the truck driver blared his horn for the third time, Sophie turned left and pulled into the parking lot of a Holiday Inn she and her father had stayed at the evening of her mom’s conviction. This time the deserted parking lot had no reporters armed with bulky cameras and flashing bulbs posturing themselves to ask the first question. “Mr. Bradshaw, do you still believe your wife is innocent?” Her dad’s silv
er wedding band had pulled a piece of her hair as he shielded her from them.
“Why do these news people hate my mom?” she had asked him after they checked into their room. He didn’t have an answer. Sophie sat at the windowsill and watched a normal family swimming in the concrete pool while her dad locked himself in the bathroom. “Jump, Johnny,” a young mom instructed her toddler, his orange floaties secure around his arms. “Mommy will catch you.”
Her dad came out much later, after Sophie’s growling stomach had her pounding on the bathroom door. “Dad, I’m hungry. Let’s get Mom and go home.” She could hear him crying.
“In a minute, sweetheart,” he told her as he turned on the water in the small hotel bathroom sink. “We need to talk.”
Throughout the trial, her dad had tried to protect her. He kept the news off after school and shuffled her to stay with various members of the church during the two long weeks of her mom’s trial. An elderly neighbor filled in when the congregation wasn’t available.
Her dad believed, he later told her, that right after the jury deliberated he’d scoop his handcuffed wife off and whisk her home where she belonged—home, where he could protect her and she could be Sophie’s mother. They’d deal with William’s death as a family.
He never imagined the foreman of the jury would stand up and say, “In the matter of the people versus Grace Bradshaw, we the jury find the defendant guilty.” The judge had agreed: “Mrs. Bradshaw, you are an attention-seeking liar whose maternal instincts have gone awry.”
Later, at sentencing, the prosecutors hugged each other when the judge said, “Your premeditated actions were the ultimate act of betrayal and hereby warrant the death penalty.” They’d won a case. Her family had lost everything.
A sixth-grade Sophie sat beside her dad on a stained brown-and-coral comforter in room 330 at this very hotel while he robotically told her the news. “Your mom has to live at Lakeland now.”
Sophie pulled her suitcase through the desolate parking lot. When she checked in, she told the clerk at the front desk, “Any room but room three-thirty is fine.”
—
BEN TAYLOR HAD LEFT AN ENVELOPE on the front door of his office building. The note inside read: Sophie—Call me when you get here.
Sophie took off her brown leather gloves and pulled her phone from her coat pocket. No texts from Thomas. He was off today and tomorrow because she’d asked him to be so they could do some shopping and buy a tree. Last minute, but their Christmas Eve tradition. “You know we’ll eventually have to do this tree thing earlier when we have kids,” she’d said to him last Christmas.
“Ben. It’s Sophie.”
“Hi.” He sounded out of breath.
“I’m here. Outside your office.” The wind started to pick up, so she held the phone with her cheek and put her gloves back on.
“Did you keep any of your mom’s old files?”
“They should be at my parents’ house.” They were in the white cracked laundry basket pushed up against the wall in the laundry room. Newspaper articles and yellow legal pads buried under stacks of dirty towels and bed linens.
“I’ll meet you there in fifteen.” He hung up before she could protest. She hadn’t been inside that house in years. The thought of wall-climbing mold spores and the hefty cockroaches that probably resided there made her want to throw up. Old pizza boxes and dirty pots stuck with ramen noodles and Campbell’s tomato soup had cluttered the countertops the last time she’d locked the door. She hadn’t washed a dish the last semester of her senior year.
Ben was already sitting on the front porch swing when Sophie pulled into the driveway. He unlocked the front door while she walked up the cracked sidewalk. “I need your dad to fix this,” she could hear her mom say. “Someone’s going to twist an ankle.”
“You have a key?” she asked Ben after she slid her hand under the old mailbox and felt the spare key still stuck there.
“Yes. Your mom asked me to change the locks and look after the place after it became evident . . .”
“That I wasn’t going to do it,” Sophie finished. “It’s okay. I left this part of my life behind me when I left for college. I never intended to come back.”
Ben held the screen door open for her. The place was neat and organized. It looked exactly like it had before her mother left. Sophie fought the urge to cry.
“How?” She turned to him.
“No offense, but the place was quite a mess after you left. When you stopped paying for the upkeep, the city made some complaints.”
Sophie walked over to the fireplace and stared at the mantel. It was full of framed photos of her holding newly born William, her dad grilling corn and pork chops on the Big Green Egg he received for Father’s Day, and her mom standing in front of the first three-tiered wedding cake she’d ever decorated. Sophie pulled down a plaque that read Suffer Well, for It Shapes Your Soul.
“When we couldn’t find you, your mom asked if I would hire someone to clean the place.”
Sophie looked down at the recently vacuumed brown shag carpet. Her dad had saved for months to buy her mom this carpet. In the corner of this room, under the now-outdated rug, was a heart that read Paul + Grace = Forever carved into the dented hardwood floors.
“My mom always made sure this place looked good.” Sophie ran her palm over the handmade draperies framing the windows in the living room. “Look at this silk fabric I found on sale,” she remembered hearing her mom say to her dad. “I negotiated with the saleslady and bought this for almost nothing.”
“No place like home,” Ben said.
A part of Sophie agreed. The other parts still needed to gather evidence.
“I had the housekeeper box up everything you left lying around. She said she put the boxes in one of the bedrooms. Shall we look?”
The house had only two bedrooms, so Sophie led the way to her parents’ room first. William’s crib, still assembled, stored box upon box of their lives’ paperwork.
“Let me get these,” Ben said, grabbing the first box of the stack. The housekeeper had written SCHOOL PAPERS ETC. on the lid. Ben put the box on her parents’ double bed and Sophie started sorting. Lying on top was some of her kindergarten artwork. A stick-figure girl with orange pigtails holding what Sophie thought was a kite. Written beneath in messy large print: I want a puppy!
Ben grabbed the next box, which read MISCELLANEOUS and opened the lid. On the top of the stack were unopened envelopes from Duke Power, water bills from the City of Brookfield, and various other ignored letters from Sophie’s days home alone.
“I guess these have been paid.” She smirked and tossed the envelopes back into the box.
“All taken care of,” he responded, pointing to the lights on in the room.
“My dad’s life insurance?”
Ben nodded.
“This looks like the right container,” Sophie said, pulling out some file folders that read TRIAL TRANSCRIPTS.
“Your phone call made me start thinking,” Ben said as Sophie moved the box over to the bed, “I have all the transcripts from the trial, all the depositions from their expert witnesses, but what I should be looking for is anything your dad might have discovered after your mom’s conviction.”
Sophie pulled all the papers out of the box. Three yellow legal pads filled the bottom. “This is what he worked on every night after dinner.” She handed them all to Ben.
“Why the change of heart?” Ben asked after he’d been flipping through the pages for a few minutes. “Why’d you call me?”
Sophie started to feel light-headed and stood up. “I think I’m going to go grab some water,” she murmured.
“I’d run that awhile before I’d drink it,” Ben said, following her into the kitchen. “The water’s on, but I’m not sure how good it’ll taste.
“You feeling okay?” he asked as they sat down
at the table.
“A little hungry, I guess.” She didn’t have an appetite at all, but that reason seemed easier than trying to explain how she really felt.
He dug into his coat pocket and offered her a peppermint.
“Thanks.” She unwrapped it and popped it into her mouth. “You must think I’m a real prize.” Sophie couldn’t look him in the eyes. Why does every moment have to be so hard?
Ben looked at her in silence and Sophie felt even sillier about being such a wreck every time she saw him. “How’s my mom?” Sophie asked him. She moved the mint around in her mouth while tracing the three overlapping water rings on the oak table. “Use a coaster, Sophie. This table cost your dad a lot of money.”
Sophie had made herself stop thinking about how her mother was doing a long time ago. She forced herself not to worry about whether her mom had enough blankets, or if she had money for snacks and stamps in her commissary account, justifying this callous decision by saying things to herself like, Who cares if she can buy a candy bar? William never tasted one.
Now, since the possibility of her mother’s wrongful conviction had crept back into her consciousness, so had the overtaking feeling of guilt. Even when she tried to occupy her thoughts with Max, or the fund-raiser, or Thomas, the feelings of failed responsibilities always lurked below the surface. Visions of her mom watching the other inmates eat microwaved popcorn in the dayroom, or her mom’s cold toes turning blue when the temperatures dropped because Sophie didn’t care enough to send her money to buy thicker socks.
Justice for William used to help her forget, but now . . . Sophie hadn’t fully processed that yet.
“She’s hanging in there. Never been one to give up.”
“Does she know you found me?”
“I haven’t told her yet. I didn’t know how, especially if you don’t want to see her?” The last part of the sentence was phrased more like a question. She felt him studying her face for clues.