by Dave Eggers
I visited Hannah at the Murray Unit one bright, cloudless afternoon, when the warden granted her a few hours to speak with me. She was even slighter in person than I had expected, and as she related the events of the past five years in her soft voice, she looked hopelessly out of place in her white prison jumpsuit. Yet her life behind bars, however incongruous, has taken on its own rhythm. She is awakened every morning at 2:45 a.m., rarely sleeping well; the overhead light above her bed never shuts off, and announcements blare throughout the night over the loudspeaker. At 4 a.m., she reports to the laundry, where she folds shirts and hands out clean clothes to inmates. After her shift ends in the late morning, there are letters to write home, in which she tries to stay present in her children’s lives by choreographing what she can from a distance. “I plan their birthday parties from here,” she told me. “I pick out the games and I make the decorations, if I can.” She devotes most of her evenings to Bible studies, leading groups of inmates through careful examinations of Scripture. One of her favorite books to revisit is Ruth. “It’s about trusting God and seeing how he is a god of redemption and restoration,” she said.
As we sat across from each other in the dayroom, Hannah and I discussed her case and the anguish that had consumed her following Andrew’s death. “I spent many nights beating myself up over ‘Could I have done this or could I have done that?’” Hannah told me, staring at her hands. “I regret that I didn’t push harder from the beginning to find out what was wrong with him—that I believed his problems were just due to his previous abuse and neglect, and that, when I finally decided he needed to see a doctor about his pica, we didn’t get him in quicker.” When I pressed her to explain why she and Larry had not called 911, she leaned forward, as if pleading with me to understand. “Because we were not thinking we were in a life-or-death situation,” she insisted. “For us to go to [the clinic] was a lot faster than it would have been had we called, at that point.”
As we talked about Andrew, she had to stop several times to compose herself. “I’m supposed to be done crying,” she said apologetically at one point, brushing away tears. Despite all the pain, she told me that if she could do it over again, she would not change their decision to bring Andrew into their home. “It’s not even a consideration,” she said. “I wouldn’t give up that time we had with him and that he had with us.”
I asked Hannah if her faith had been shaken by Andrew’s loss and the suffering that she and her family had experienced. “There was a time when I questioned how God could allow this to happen,” she said. “But what I’ve realized is that I can trust his heart, even though I don’t understand his plan.” The reality that Hannah, who is 34, may spend the rest of her life in prison for capital murder—a sentence usually reserved for violent criminals who pose a continuing threat to society—is one she is still struggling to understand; even harder to grasp is the possibility that she might never be reunited with her children. “I miss everything,” she later wrote to me. “Good-night kisses, bedtime stories, playing in the yard, birthdays, loose teeth, Christmas plays . . . movie nights, waking up to their beautiful faces.” The Court of Criminal Appeals is currently reviewing her writ, which contends that the information about Andrew’s gastric contents are grounds for a new trial. The court, which could rule imminently or years from now, could send the case back to Judge Longoria for a hearing or—far less likely—overturn her conviction. Because the court has not been inclined to intercede so far, members of Calvary Chapel have begun a letter-writing campaign to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles in hopes of securing a pardon or a commutation.
Meanwhile, those who once pursued Hannah with such certainty have undergone their own trials. Detective Hess was put on administrative leave in 2008 after it came to light that he had disclosed confidential information to the suspect in an ongoing investigation for indecency with a child. Hess was allowed to return to the force and is now a patrol sergeant. And Eastwood was fired from the DA’s office in 2010. Then-district attorney Jimenez did not publicly disclose the reasons for the termination, but it occurred one week after Eastwood informed her superiors that she had been romantically involved in the past with a sex offender; she reported that she feared the information had been used by the offender’s defense attorney to get him probation in a criminal case. (A subsequent investigation by the attorney general’s office found that no crimes had been committed.)
As the Overtons wait on the appellate courts, Larry goes about the task of raising their five children, while also trying to rebuild his business. (After his arrest, he lost most of his clients. “One woman said she didn’t want to work with a child killer,” Larry told me.) In his role as single dad, he is aided by his extended family and his many friends from Calvary Chapel, who pitch in to do cleaning, grocery shopping, laundry, and babysitting. A church member who homeschools her daughters educates the Overton children, using lesson plans Hannah sends her. (Haller, their next-door neighbor, has since moved to Houston.) The kids now range in age from four to twelve, and when I visited them late one afternoon, not long after I had seen Hannah, they seemed unencumbered by the tragedy that had engulfed their family. They were no different from other children their age: exuberant, funny, guileless. As Larry stood in the kitchen and peeled potatoes, the kids—excited to have a visitor—showed me around their house, pointing out their favorite hiding places and the plaster cast of their footprints in the hallway, which includes the letter A for Andrew. The absence of their mother and their late brother was quietly acknowledged. “This is where Andrew used to sleep,” Isaac told me softly as he led me into the boys’ room. “There have been a few tear-filled nights because one of the kids misses Andrew,” Larry told me later. “I remind them that the Lord loves him more than anyone could and he is with Him now and we will see him again someday.”
The kids took me out back, where they jumped on the trampoline and played hide-and-seek in the salt grass. Emma, the youngest, trailed behind them with a doll, occasionally running inside to bang on the piano. It was Emma whom Hannah was pregnant with when Andrew died, and she is the child Hannah knows least. When Emma took her first steps, Larry brought her to the parking lot outside the county jail so that Hannah could watch from her cell above.
Larry called out that dinner was ready, and we gathered inside around a rough-hewn oak table he had made years ago. Dinner was potato soup—“It’s good and filling, and it’s cheap,” Larry told me—which the kids dived into after saying grace. They chattered about an upcoming birthday party and discussed the merits of their favorite colors, finishing each other’s sentences between slurps of soup. Had Andrew sat among them, I realized, he would have been nine years old.
After dinner the kids settled down in front of the TV to watch a movie that was Isabel’s pick: a Japanese animated film that her brothers and sisters showed less enthusiasm for, fidgeting as they lay next to each other on the carpet. Before they headed to bed, Larry turned up the lights for their nightly devotions. Isaac read John 9 aloud while Larry helped him sound out the difficult words (“synagogue,” “Pharisees”). A short discussion followed about the passage, in which Jesus heals a blind man, and then Larry closed his Bible and said, “Okay, guys, let’s pray.” One by one, the kids spoke their prayers, each of which ended with the same wish.
“Dear God, thank you for the soup,” Isaac said, his head bowed, his eyes closed tightly. “And thanks for the movie, even though it was kind of weird. I pray that you will bring Mom home soon.”
JENNIFER EGAN
Black Box
FROM The New Yorker
JIM GAVIN
Bewildered Decisions in Times of Mercantile Terror
FROM The Paris Review
BOBBY’S OFFICE, for the time being, was the Berkeley Public Library. On a Thursday afternoon in August, with sunlight pouring through the arched windows of the reading room, he closed his book and quietly observed the homeless man sitting across from him. The man was bald and sunburned, and he had g
rimy strips of duct tape wrapped around his fingertips. With a chewed-up pencil in his hand, he scrawled notes in the margins of an old physics textbook that was crawling with ants. Bobby couldn’t take his eyes off the ants; he watched them moving in clusters across equations and diagrams, and it occurred to him that the ants were messengers, reading the book for this infernal professor, and when they were done they would crawl up the man’s arm and into his ear, burrowing directly into his brain.
Bobby hadn’t slept in two or three days.
He looked around for another table, but the reading room was packed with the elderly and the unemployed. Some people seemed hard at work, or at least pleasantly engaged, but most were either asleep or staring out the windows, as if waiting for something. It felt more like a bus terminal than a library. Bobby wore a Cal T-shirt and a pair of boardshorts. He was trying to read a reference manual on patent law, but it was boring and his eyes kept slipping off the page. The hours were melting together. Last night, after Conan, he had fallen into a vortex of infomercials, and then, at some point, he snuck off with his roommate’s laptop and sent another pleading e-mail to his cousin, Nora. When the sun came up, he left his apartment in the Berkeley Flats and rode his bike up University Avenue. He ate breakfast at McDonald’s, and when he got to the library at nine o’clock, a crowd was already waiting to get inside. He struggled with his work all day—he kept taking long breaks to read magazines—but his lack of concentration, he knew, had more to do with excitement than fatigue. If anything, he worried that he was too awake.
It was three o’clock. Far up the hill, on campus, the tower bells were ringing. Bobby closed his eyes and listened. As a student, he had always loved the swirling bronze melody of the carillon. Ten years ago, he had gone to Cal on a swimming scholarship. He majored in business, pledged a fraternity, and flunked out his junior year.
“See you later,” he said, standing up and collecting his things, but the homeless man ignored him. In his own pungent way, this guy was a snob, and Bobby could respect that. It was a snobbery well earned. When he died alone in a gutter, in a puddle of his own piss, he would take with him a crazed and singular form of expertise. Bobby ran his fingers through his buzz cut. He wished he had a nice hat to doff, a bowler cap or fedora. He hated belonging to such a crude and hatless generation.
He sat down at a computer. His Yahoo! mailbox was filled, almost exclusively, with undeleted spam. Some day, Bobby imagined, a single pill would grow hair, restore virility, and consolidate debt, but until then the market was wide open and he still had a chance to capitalize on his terrible idea. With this in mind, he scrolled down and was relieved to find a response from Nora. He had been trying to reach her all week, to get her advice on how he should go about branding the Man Handle, but she wouldn’t answer her phone or reply to his emails. This happened sometimes. She was director of marketing for a company that sold investment-management software. When she was on the road, she closed ranks and forgot about everybody in her life who wasn’t a client or prospect. He would go weeks without hearing from her. Then she would come back to the city, haggard and lonely and claiming that she was sick of her job, that she was ready to meet a decent man and go into full suburban lockdown. Nora was tall and pale, and because of her stylish pixie haircut and listless expression men often asked her if she was a model. She had actually paid her way through college doing catalogue work, posing in cardigans next to duck ponds, but she liked to tell men that she was dying of consumption. Bobby and Nora had always shared a certain ghoulishness. At his father’s funeral, when they were both seniors in high school, she met him on the front steps of St. Bonaventure in Huntington Beach and said, “Your eulogy sucked.” They rode together from the church, passing a bottle of Jameson back and forth, and when they got to the gravesite Nora took off her heels and ran across the expansive lawn, scattering crows like a burst of black confetti.
Now and then she met a guy who appreciated these qualities in her, but it would never last. They either got frustrated with the demands of her career, or she got bored with them. Bobby despised most of the men she dated. She had a weakness for solvent hipsters—architects, creative directors at advertising agencies, and other lieutenants in the corduroy mafia. They all supported progressive causes, not in any active or financial way, but just in general, as they walked around the city in vintage Japanese tennis shoes. And yet, in some ways, Bobby understood the plight of these slender princelings. Nora had a unique gift for turning cold on people.
The last time he saw her was three months ago, in May, when she asked him to accompany her to Geneva Software’s Annual Client Appreciation Party. The latest staff restructuring had decimated marketing and direct sales, so her boss, Dave Grant, executive vice president and general manager of global accounts, had encouraged the survivors to bring guests, because the clients would feel more at ease in a full room. “There’s free food for you,” Nora told Bobby. “Just look presentable and keep me entertained.” He got a haircut, wore a gray suit that he found in a roommate’s closet, and in a hotel bar overlooking Union Square he shook hands with Nora’s colleagues, mostly men, who seemed weirdly impressed by the fact that Bobby was stuck doing plumbing work. He used to work summers with his dad, doing repair and remodel jobs, so he knew what he was doing most of the time, but he didn’t have a license and he was getting paid under the table by a shady house flipper in Castro Valley who had posted an ad on Craigslist. But still, the men from Geneva Software expressed wonder and delight, as if they were shaking hands with a sea captain or gunslinger. When Bobby asked what they did, most seemed vaguely ashamed that they were marketing associates or software engineers; in parting, they all shook his hand with a firmer grip than they did before.
Nora introduced him to Dave Grant, who, despite being the boss, seemed nervous around her. “That fucker’s in love with you,” said Bobby, as soon as Dave left, and Nora feigned vomiting. They were having a great time. Someone handed Bobby a drink; someone else, mistaking him for a client, handed him a gift bag filled with coffee mugs and key chains emblazoned with the Geneva logo. He watched a stray red balloon wedge itself in the crystal arm of a chandelier. Bobby told Nora that he wanted a job with her company—“I have sales experience,” he reminded her, crushing a lime into his vodka—but then one of her company’s actual clients found her and said hello. Nora turned her back on Bobby and began speaking in tongues. Bobby heard the word functionality repeated over and over. She made no attempt to introduce Bobby, and for a long time he hovered behind her, feeling invisible. When the client finally left, she turned around like nothing had happened. Later, in the cab, Bobby screamed at her. “You literally turned your back on me.”
“It was client-appreciation night, not Bobby-appreciation night,” said Nora, offering him a sip from the bottle of champagne she had stolen on the way out. When they stopped at a light, he grabbed the champagne bottle and threw it out the window. It smashed against the curb, and for moment they both sat there in silence; then Bobby jumped out of the cab.
He hated Nora for a couple weeks, but kept hoping for her to call and apologize to him. When his cell phone got shut off, he checked his e-mail obsessively, but there was nothing. Since they were kids, growing up a few blocks from each other, they had always fought and made up, and the time in between was pure desolation. But he never heard from her, and he realized that he was being overly sensitive and a little self-righteous. He envied Nora’s ability to turn herself on and off, to indulge in vile misanthropy one minute and false pleasantry the next. This golden switch guaranteed her future. She had a great place in the Richmond, and on more than one occasion she had loaned him money, though both knew it was a donation. He didn’t have the on-off switch, and he understood now, with thrilling clarity, that Nora’s path to success—corporate, dignified, incremental—would never work for him. Bobby required a bonanza.
In the e-mail he sent last night, or early this morning, he told her he would be in the city tonight, ready to show her
the prototype. He encouraged her, only half joking, to bring along some of her venture-capital friends. The Man Handle, he explained, would appeal to the very men who had the power to invest in it. Indeed, it was a tool that no depraved capitalist could do without. He sketched out his business plan, which had evolved over the last few days from a few bullet points of satirical bombast to something that actually seemed plausible and real, and then he took some time to tell her how things had been going for him, personally, since they last spoke that night in the cab. In June, the house flipper had disappeared without paying Bobby for his last month of work. After that, he answered a Craigslist ad—“$$$$ Sales Pros Needed $$$$”—and got hired to sell ad space for an East Bay newspaper conglomerate. It was horrible, and he discovered, once again, how much he hated sales. At some point he stopped going to work, and by now he was pretty sure they had fired him. He was broke and the walls were closing in, but in this moment of darkness he had found inspiration. Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Man Handle: the thing pretty much marketed itself. However, his sudden lack of income and increase in free time was causing friction with his latest batch of roommates. The guy farthest down the hall, a programmer from Lahore, had caught Bobby using his laptop a few times, and Bobby knew that it was only a matter of time before the guy slit his throat with a bejeweled dagger. Looking back, it was a pretty macabre e-mail and it worried Bobby that her response was so short. Nora usually wrote back in a tone that was as equally paranoid and macabre, but this time she just said that if he was around, she could meet him for a drink in the city at eight o’clock, and she named her favorite Irish pub. Even worse, she had signed her name without the usual “love.”