by Deeanne Gist
Her face is pale and swollen from crying. She looks like she has been crying for days, for weeks, for years, for decades and forever. Her eyes burn like lanterns toward me.
I hear it once more. The ring of a dial, and her aching, sad, terrified, miserable, pleading voice on the other line. “Donald? Donald? Is that you, Donald?”
I can hear my own voice, answering her. Why could I talk then? Why only in that moment? I can remember her boy next to me, cowering, covered in blood while the white curtain fluttered. Why did I do those terrible things to her child? Why could I talk only then?
Her eyes are painful holes, seeking answers.
The warden touches my arm. Hands press me until I am lying down. The narrow pad feels so much different than the cot I have known all these years. It is a relief to lie down after that long walk. My feet and knees hurt. The hands are pressing me firmly in place, and they are pulling up the canvas straps and cinching me in. One strap goes across my narrow chest, another over my thighs, another over my ankles, and even more cinch my hands and feet in place.
So many straps, and I want to tell them there is no need. I will not fight the vine.
In the reflection of the window, I see a skinny man with graying patchy hair spread like filaments around a gaunt face. That man is me, old before my time.
The warden lays a hand on my arm, a reassuring weight. His fingers are white with black hair on the knuckles.
The entire enchanted place has been locked down. The guards wait in their dark towers, rifles at their shoulders, calm silence around their hearts. The corpse valets wait in their cells. The yard is empty, the weight pile throwing black shadows. Far below us, the golden horses wait next to scorched cliffs, their heads cocked and listening for the falling thud that says another one of us has been taken. The small men have burrowed into their secret hiding places deep in the walls. They sit back on their haunches and hold their hammers in their clawlike hands. The crematorium oven waits, its fire kindled and creaking, and the flibber-gibbets come out to writhe on the basement floors.
The warden and the guards look toward the clock on the wall. Everyone is silent. The phone is silent. We are all silent. I am glad for this reprieve from all the noise inside my head.
I feel a prick. The doctor has inserted the IV. He quickly tapes it to my arm. Everything is happening so quickly. I look to the ceiling. There is a stain there. Which cellblock is that? Already I am losing my knowledge of this place, it is flowing from me like water. I want to turn and ask the warden, but I am afraid that even if I can speak at this last moment, he will say there are no cellblocks up there, and you’ve been wrong about everything you have ever thought or said or imagined. No, I will say, I knew this would happen, and it did. I didn’t imagine the milky tubes or the little men or that face burning toward me through the glass.
The warden is there above me. His face looks wrinkled and pouched. He is asking me something. “Do you have any last words, Arden?”
I shake my head. There never were any words for me.
The warden looks at the clock, and we all watch the last moments of my life drain away. This is interesting, I think. I know exactly when I will die. Someone is counting. The numbers become a jumble because I am waiting for that word, and it comes now. I watch as the warden presses the button.
ARMED.
“Ready?” the warden asks the doctor, who is watching the machine.
The last moments drain away. “Okay,” says the doctor.
The warden touches my arm. “Goodbye, Arden,” he says.
Goodbye, Warden.
The warden pushes the next button.
START.
The medicine is flowing. Everyone in the room straightens and sighs with relief, as if this is already over.
I turn my face to see Donald’s mom once more, to give her the pleasure of watching the life leave my eyes. I can see her eyes through the glass, burrowing into me, sending her hate into the medical vine strapped to my arm.
I want to tell her to pretend it never happened, that what I did to her son never happened. She should tell herself he died of leukemia or a tragic accident or any of the ways that children can die and their parents can pick themselves up and grieve and move on, their hearts full of hurt but healable. Not of what I did. No one ever heals from what I did. I want her to pretend that I never happened—I was an abortion that went undone. I want to tell her I wish I could take it all back, fold back into the womb, erase myself into a seed, make myself obsolete. Never have been, never was here, never did those terrible, horrible, heartbreaking things to her son.
The phone breaks, and the dial tone starts. “Donald? Is that you?”
She is crying. I can see the tears on her swollen cheeks.
FINISH.
The medicine has started, and it is taking me higher. I feel my body relax. A yawn breaks my jaw. The warden’s eyes relax, and he lifts his hand off my arm so I can leave.
I can feel myself rising. My whole body is rising off the table and floating up through the air. I float through the ceiling and through walls and ceiling after ceiling as if the stones are dust and my body is spinning and rising and tumbling out of the room with the air.
Her eyes are following me as I float up higher and higher, and I am through the roof and above all the cellblocks and oh my, there is air out here. There is cold air and the flicker of moonlit stars. The air is so cold and so sweet that it hurts my lungs as I start to tumble through the darkness. I am tumbling up through the stars, and down below I can see the little room and her face turned up toward me, and around that I can see the guard towers and the walls and all the cellblocks.
I can see the row below and the men buried inside it, and I can see outside the prison walls. I can see the cold river that runs next to the place and the dark masses of the bushes. I can see the ribbon of the freeway and the roads that branch out like veins, dotted with lights, and I know these lights are the houses where people live.
I am going higher and higher, the walls and guard towers are getting smaller, and I see that the prison is set along fields and dark woods. I can smell fir and cedar and the night wind. I can see the river that connects to larger, darker rivers, and the smell of forests and clouds and stars and the rain and of fish to be born. The homes below string out like centers of pulsing warmth in a black canvas.
I am so high that I can see over the hills and into the mountains. A whole world stretches beyond this place: a world where life runs like steam engines and love crackles like leaves frosted with the dawn. A world where mothers lie with babies on flowered cotton sheets in the afternoon, where men hold their wives and put their faces against the cleft of life.
Just before I get too high, I see one little cabin tucked on the side of a blue-forested hill that overlooks a series of deep emerald lakes.
It is the cabin where the fallen priest and the lady live. He sleeps with her and says her name to her deep in the middle of the night, says it while he comes over and over into her. On this night, they are blissfully unaware of all that is happening. They stopped reading the newspapers months ago, stopped immersing themselves in the pain of others. They are going to decide what they want to do next. They do not see me high above them, tumbling in the night sky. They are curled in a white bed under a steep eave, readying for sleep, and he is raising his face to watch her drift away. He is seeing her as if for the first time, how relaxed she looks, as if her entire body has found forgiveness from pain.
She is murmuring something, a word that sounds like the most precious word of all, after someone’s name, and that word is the same as the one I wrote to her on the inside of my book: Love.
I look over past them and shoot like a diamond to see once again the walls that contained me.
Oh, this enchanted place.
This enchanted world.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank the following: Luppi, Dontonio, and Markel Denfeld Redden; Richard Pine; Gail Winston; Kirsty
Dunseath; Maya Ziv; Eliza Rothstein; Bill Hamilton; Nathaniel Jacks; Victoria Schoening; Ellen Rogers; Lane Borg; the staff of the Metropolitan Public Defenders Office; Bob and Laura Hicks; Stephanie Hunter; Mary Ellen Haugh Rubick; Nancy and Steve Rawley; Julie Shaw; Jimmy Scoville; Todd Grimson; Louis Pain; Randy and Amy Christensen; the performing arts communities of Portland and Ashland; Gary Norman; Deborah Lee-Thornby; Katherine Dunn; Edward Taub; Shirley Kishiyama; Marty Hughley; and most especially, her clients on the row.
About the Author
Rene Denfeld is an internationally bestselling author, journalist, mitigation specialist, and fact investigator in death penalty cases. She has written for the New York Times Magazine, the Oregonian, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, and is the author of four books, including the international bestseller The New Victorians: A Young Woman’s Challenge to the Old Feminist Order; Kill the Body, the Head Will Fall; and All God’s Children: Inside the Dark and Violent World of Street Families.
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Also by Rene Denfeld
NONFICTION
The New Victorians
Kill the Body, the Head Will Fall
All God’s Children
Credits
Cover design by Richard Ljoenes
Horses by Pavel Konovalov/Veer
Copyright
THE ENCHANTED. Copyright © 2014 by Rene Denfeld. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBN: 978-0-06-228550-8 (Hardcover)
EPUB Edition MARCH 2014 ISBN 9780062285522
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