Before I Sleep (16 page)

But the world was going crazy again, and he found himself watching it happen with a kind of detachment. His guards watched him constantly, afraid he might try to kill himself.

The thought never entered his mind. He wasn't afraid of Old Sparky. He heard death by electrocution could be painful, and sometimes the chair didn't work right, but he wasn't really worried about it. He was a sane man, after all, and it seemed to him that being electrocuted had to be a lot quicker than hanging himself, or stabbing himself with that little stub of pencil they let him have, and quicker was better, any way you looked at it.

Nor was he afraid of the pain. He'd stopped being afraid of pain in early childhood, when the whole world had been a haze of pain, both physical and emotional. Pain was something he could endure, and he figured there was no way that Old Sparky could be any worse than having your father burn you again and again with a hot iron.

What he was afraid of, really afraid of, was
dying.
Pain or no pain, he couldn't make it happen any sooner than it absolutely had to. Sometimes at night, when he lay sleepless on his cot, fear made his skin crawl as if a thousand bugs were running over him and he'd have to jump up and pace his shadowy cell. The daytime was easier, because there were a whole lot of things he could do to distract himself, but in the night there was nothing but the quailing of his mind and the companionship of death. Sometimes it was all he could do not to scream out that he didn't want to die.

It didn't help that the preacher told him he'd go to heaven where everything would be beautiful because he wasn't sure of that. He'd killed a man. He'd killed his
own father,
and not even in the deepest moments of self-examination had he been able to find any honest regret over that.

So he was an unrepentant sinner, and God was just another father who might torture him for eternity. Sometimes, in the dead of night, he even thought he could smell the approaching fire and brimstone.

But they still thought he might try to kill himself sooner anyway, and they never let him out of their sight for long. He wondered why they couldn't see the absurdity of it. He was sentenced to die, so it really should make no difference whether it was by his own hand or by theirs, but they evidently thought it made a great big difference. After all, if he killed himself, he would escape his punishment. That was such a crazy way to look at it that he was apparently the only person in the world sane enough to see it.

They wouldn't even let him see Carissa Stover alone. They were nice though. When he said he wanted to see her in his cell, they agreed, instead of insisting he go to one of the visiting rooms. He wondered if they understood his attachment to his cell. Probably not. They couldn't understand that it was the only home of his own he'd ever had. That it was as familiar and comfortable to him as their living rooms were to them. That he needed the security of his few possessions because he had nothing else in the world he could call his own.

Nor did he especially care whether they understood. All that mattered was that, within the limits set on them by his being a prisoner, they were doing their best to make his last few days on earth as pleasant as possible.

Except for the constant watching. He felt it starting to grate on his nerves, but he let go of the irritation. Life was definitely too short to let something so minor shadow his last hours.

He figured he'd been born to die young. It was his fate. Why else had all his appeals failed so swiftly when there were men here on death row who'd been awaiting execution for much longer? Hell, one of them had been here ever since John Otis had been eight years old.

Fate had carried him through the process faster than any of the rest of them, so he had decided it must be God's will, just retribution for his sin of patricide. But just or not, he ached for all the things he would never see, all the things he would never do, all the poems he would never write.

He loved life, though there had been little in his life to love. And now it had all come down to this, that a visit from a woman who had helped put him on death row should seem welcome, as wonderful as a present on Christmas morning.

He cleaned his cell, making sure it was spotless. It had been a long time since he'd had a visitor. Even his attorney had seemed to have forgotten he was still alive.

But Carissa Stover hadn't forgotten. He remembered her in the courtroom during his trial, a young, trim woman in a no-nonsense navy blue suit, with soft brown hair and wide hazel eyes that had kept darting his way as if she were looking for something. He'd always wondered what it was she wanted. Maybe she had expected him to sprout horns or start vomiting pea soup? Maybe she'd been scared of him? He didn't think so.

And today he was going to ask her. The other lawyers had never really looked at him. The jury had never really looked at him. At times during the trial, he'd honestly believed he was invisible, except to Carissa Stover.

And depending on what she said today, he might even show her his poems. For now he tucked the book under his mattress, out of sight. If she had come just to get something sensational for her radio show, he wasn't going to let her see it, that was for sure. It was too private, too personal. After he was dead he wouldn't be able to hide it any longer, but while he was alive it was for him to say who could come into that private place.

Breakfast, eggs and grits, wouldn't settle in his stomach. He was nervous, he realized. It had been a long time since last he'd felt this nervous. Of course, this was the first time since the trial that he would come face-to-face with someone who had helped put him here.

Given that, he thought she must believe him to be some kind of monster, because only a monster would kill the only two people in the whole world who had really loved him.

So why was she coming to see him?

Then, with patience he had learned the hard way, he settled down to wait.

The guards were nice enough, Carey thought. They searched her thoroughly, but they let her take a microcassette recorder with her into John Otis's cell, after they checked it out. They'd probably search him from head to foot, and turn his cell inside out after she left, to make sure he hadn't managed to get something from her that he shouldn't have. She wondered if he'd gotten used to that indignity. If
anyone
could get used to it.

Seamus had hardly said a word to her since he picked her up yesterday. His silence had added to her uneasiness, making her wonder if he disapproved of this visit, then making her wonder why she should care. His opinion didn't matter anymore.

But he did that sometimes. She remembered all too well how he would go into these silent periods, brooding and saying nothing. It might have nothing at all to do with her, and everything to do with memories he had raked up on Friday night. They were certainly memories better left buried.

She was wearing navy blue slacks and a cool cotton blouse, and she refrained from looking into other cells as she passed. And, unlike the movies, no one called out anything to her as she passed by in the company of a guard. No one said anything at all. This building, crowded with people who were the dregs of society, felt as empty as a tomb. It was as if the eyes of ghosts were on her.

John Otis looked very much as she remembered him. He was slight, barely taller than she, with a face prematurely old. His light brown hair was cut very short, and his prison clothes bagged on his slender frame, as if he had lost weight, or as if they had nothing small enough to fit him.

His sleeves were short, and his arms still bore the scars of burns and lacerations from his childhood. From what she had read of his past, she imagined most of his body was covered with similar scars.

But his blue eyes were bright, almost childlike and warm as he smiled at her.

“I never expected to see you again,” he said. He didn't approach her, as if he thought she might be frightened of him. So she crossed the small space and offered to shake his hand.

He looked down at her hand, as if he had forgotten what the gesture meant, but then, almost hesitantly, he reached out and clasped her fingers.

“No touching,” the guard said from beyond the cell.

Carey stepped back and dropped her hand. Otis did the same. But she saw in his eyes that he appreciated the civilized gesture.

He pointed to the one chair. “You sit there. I'll sit on my bed.”

“Thank you.” She wondered if the chair was there just for her, or if he always had one.

She looked around, noting the worn Bible and the paperback copy of
A Tale of Two Cities.
There were also a couple of other books, and she leaned forward to see what they were.
Leaves of Grass
by Walt Whitman, and a Robert Frost anthology.

“I brought a tape recorder,” she told him. “Do you mind?”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“I just want to remember what we discuss without getting it all mixed up in my head.”

“You won't play it on the radio?”

“Not if you don't want me to.”

He nodded. “Okay. Turn it on.”

She did so, holding it in her hand facing him. “I'm sorry about the death warrant,” she said awkwardly.

He cocked his head. “Really? I thought you wanted this to happen.”

She shook her head. “No, I don't.”

“Why not? You prosecuted me.”

She could feel her cheeks heating. She didn't really want to get into this with him, because she couldn't see what good it would serve. She finally found something noncommittal to say. “I no longer support the death penalty.”

He nodded. “It's different when you know you're responsible, isn't it?”

She started, and stared at him, wondering if he was reading her mind.

“That's okay,” he said quietly. “You were just part of the system. If it wasn't you, it would have been somebody else.”

“That's a very generous view to take.”

He shrugged. “I've got nothing else to do anymore except take a philosophical attitude.”

She found herself starting to smile, and caught her breath when he smiled back. His smile seemed to light up his whole face.

“So what do you want?” he asked. “Do you want to know what it's like to have only a few weeks to live? I'm not sure my experience would be meaningful to anyone else. I might feel a whole lot worse about it if I were outside. Then I'd have a lot more to lose.”

She was taken aback, and hardly knew how to answer. “I suppose so.”

“Not that it's really so bad in here. My guards are nice. I don't have much to worry about. Nobody beats me up or anything. It could be a lot worse.”

And had been.
The unspoken words seemed to hang on the air. “I hear prison is awful.”

“Well, of course it is. There isn't any freedom. And sometimes things happen. But overall, I don't have much to complain about.”

As
compared to what? His childhood?
She supposed he wasn't the most objective judge of the horrors of prison life.

“Anyway,” he said, “I suppose you want to ask me if I did it, and want to know if I'm sorry for doing it.”

She nodded slowly, wondering why it was she seemed unable to take control of this interview.

“I said all I had to say about that before the trial,” he answered. “There's nothing more to say now. It's all decided.”

She sat there looking at him, and an understanding washed over her in icy waves. Shock held her rigid as she looked into his bright blue eyes. She couldn't say how she knew, but she knew as surely as if the message was written on his face. “You know who did it, don't you? And you're protecting someone.”

He shrugged. He might as well have agreed.

“My God,” she said, “why don't you speak up? It's still not too late!”

But he shook his head. And deep in the depths of his blue eyes, she saw the flicker of fear, the flicker of pain he would never admit.

“John, this isn't right!”

He ignored her. “You know, during the trial you kept looking at me. You were the only person who did. And I always felt there was something you wanted to say. Something you wanted to know. What was it?”

Lead had settled into her heart and stomach, and she could only stare and try to draw a deep breath. Finally, she managed to say, “I just found out.”

“Oh.” He nodded as if he understood, but admitted nothing at all.

She tried again. “I kept thinking that you wouldn't kill because of an argument. Everybody said you'd done it to your father, so you did it to your foster parents, but I didn't believe it. You killed your father to protect your brother. That's not the same thing at all.”

He smiled then, a quiet smile, as if he appreciated what she was saying, but he still didn't answer.

Finally, gathering her control, she began to steer the conversation, hoping that if she got him talking, she might get him to let slip something that would help him. The horror that had been riding her since she heard the death warrant was signed had dug its icy claws into every corner of her soul. She could not let this happen.

But John William Otis was not about to help her help him. Every time she tried to come back to the Kline murders, he turned the conversation elsewhere.

Time was getting short. Instead of trying to get him to talk about what
had
been, she decided to ask him about what
might
have been.

“If they let you out of here tomorrow, what would you do, John?”

He smiled, and a dreamy look seemed to come over his face. “I'd go to New England.”

“New England? Really? Why?”

“I've always wanted to go there. Ever since I read my first Robert Frost poem.”

“Which one is your favorite?”

He pointed to a paper hanging on the wall, attached there by a piece of tape. Rising, she went to look at it, and found a carefully hand-lettered version of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

Inexplicably feeling tears prickle her eyes, she read it aloud, her voice hushed, almost breaking as she read the last line: “And miles to go before I sleep.”

“It's beautiful, isn't it?” Otis said softly. “I always wanted to see snow. Sometimes I dream about it, but it's not the same, you know? It's not the same as feeling how cold it is. I wonder if it's as soft as they say, and what it's like to have a snowflake fall on your cheek. I wonder what a handful of it would feel like, and what would happen when I squeeze it. I'd like to lie down in it and make a snow angel. I saw that in a movie, making a snow angel.”