Sleep Toward Heaven (19 page)

They hear her before they see her. She sings as they lead her to Death Row: Who will saaave your soul…Even Sharleen looks dumbfounded. They all came in crying, slumped, terrified. And here is this Beauty Queen, headed toward them, singing a teen ballad. (They have been allowed to watch the Grammy Awards. Though they know little about answering machines, e-mail, or cell phones, they are quite up-to-date on pop culture.)

The gates slide back, and holding up two guards as if they were her dates to a debutante ball, Samantha waltzes in. “Hey girls!” she cries. She is whippet-thin, twenty years old, with thick, curled hair. She has big lips and eyebrows that are plucked in a perfect arc. Her round breasts jut out from her jumpsuit, which she has unbuttoned to show her impressive cleavage. Her eyes are glittery.

“You better shut up, honey,” growls Sharleen. “If you know what’s good for you.”

“Well if it isn’t the Satan Killer,” says Samantha. “You look much cuter in person.”

The guards grab Samantha roughly, and throw her into Jackie’s cell. “Oh, goody,” she says, looking up underneath her thick lashes. “Television all damn day.” Her giggle is unnerving. When she was asked, in the beauty pageant, what the most important issue facing children in the world today is, she answered, “Life.”

Karen tries to close her ears. She is too tired to listen to the old courting routine. Everyone will want to be Samantha’s friend, or her worst enemy. Karen bets that Tiffany will win Samantha, but she doesn’t have the energy to watch the games. Luckily, the drugs keep Karen from staying awake for more than an hour at a stretch. She does not fall into sleep, but has visions: Ellen, her mother, the men she has killed. She cannot remember things, like what day it is, or what television show comes on at three.

Karen lies in bed, and pushes the black morphine button that brings her reprieve. She pushes it again and again. She imagines Dr. Wren’s boyish body, her slim hips and flat breasts. Karen imagines cradling Dr. Wren in her arms, her small head resting on Karen’s rib cage. They are not sexy visions. In them, Karen is not Dr. Wren’s lover, but her mother.

Rick Underwood calls every day, and they let Karen take the calls. “I’m working on this,” he says. He is writing letters, talking to the radio and television. When the guards’ attention lapses, Karen sees Rick on the news, begging for mercy.

“This woman is dying of AIDS,” he says. “And I beg the governor of this great state to let her die in peace.”

“Your T-cell is dropping,” says Dr. Wren one afternoon.

“Will I be gone soon?” says Karen.

Dr. Wren sighs. “I’m not going to lie to you, Karen,” she says. She stands close. Karen can smell her, an almond smell, a new kind of soap. Dr. Wren’s hair has grown longer, and her braid falls down her back. There is another smell, sharper. Karen breathes in. Booze. It is in Dr. Wren’s skin.

“Look, it doesn’t go uphill from here. But you still have time.”

Karen laughs bitterly. She pushes the black button, and the warmth comes in a rush.

Dr. Wren looks at her, looks into her eyes, as if deciding something. Oh, if Karen could only kiss her, those thin lips, taste Dr. Wren. She would taste like celery.

“Karen,” says Dr. Wren. “If you hold on…there are new drugs being researched…”

Karen nods.

“With these drugs,” says Dr. Wren, “you could have…” Dr. Wren’s voice fades as she says, “years.”

Karen feels bile rise in her throat. “What do you know?” she says. “What do you know about my life?”

Dr. Wren is silent. “I don’t,” she says quietly. “I don’t know anything about your life.”

“No. You don’t have any idea.” Karen’s eyes fill with tears. “It’s not just the disease. It’s everything. It’s so loud, all the time.” She pushes the button again, but nothing comes.

Dr. Wren has put her cool hands on Karen’s face, fingertips to cheekbones. She looks at Karen with a mixture of pity and love. Yes, love.

“My whole life has been bad,” says Karen. “Every day is worse. I’m going to a better place. A place where I have dignity, not searches, and needles.” She stops, her throat hot. “I deserve that,” she says.

“But what if there’s nothing?”

Karen looks into Dr. Wren’s fearful eyes. “Sometimes I can’t wait to die,” she says.

“You don’t mean that, Karen.”

“There is so much more than this world,” says Karen.

“I don’t know.”

“You’re so afraid,” says Karen. “Listen. Don’t be afraid.”

Karen watches Dr. Wren, daring her to look away. After a time, she does.

M
id-August in Gatestown: wet thighs, pulsing pavement, heat that grabs you by the throat. Franny woke each morning with her hair plastered across her face. She dreamt of drowning, long dreams where her hair caught on coral or she found herself underneath a wooden dock, unable to find a place where the water ended and she could breathe.

She filled her tub with ice and cold water and spent her evenings reading naked, sucking ice cubes, crushing them with her teeth.

Oh God, it was hot. It was too hot to drink, too hot to eat. Every thought started with a promise and ended with heat: For dinner maybe I—oh fuck, it’s hot. Should I have married—Jesus, could it be any hotter? I need to do some laundry, but my skin is melting off my face it is so damn hot.

It must have been hot in her childhood, of course it had been. But Franny could not remember it being so ever-present, like smoke in her mind, taking up all the room. Franny was too hot to make lists, too hot to think clearly. Her happiest moments were in Uncle Jack’s Cadillac, driving, when the air-conditioning began to kick in.

One morning, before she opened her eyes, a memory came to her unbidden: the smell of paper and a faint breeze as her mother turned the pages of a new book. Her mother’s voice, her breath as she read to Franny, who lay with her cheek on her mother’s thigh. Heat, pressing down, and a moment of peace.

Franny sat up in bed. She could see the sun shimmering through her window. She thought of Karen in her dark cell. Franny ran her hand along her sheets, took a sip of the water she kept on the wooden bedside table. Perhaps reading to Karen could help her escape, at least for a few minutes. Franny picked up One Hundred Years of Solitude. The library book jacket was laminated and shiny. The pages were cream-colored, stained with age and light.

As Franny walked down the hallway of general inmates, she felt a sense of foreboding. She dealt with these women every day, and smelled the disinfectant, the sex on their skin. She had grown accustomed to the screams, the banging, but she felt scared all the same.

Her footsteps echoed, and Franny was again enveloped in memory, that rich coat: hiding underneath her sheets, reading with a flashlight, the noise of the television coming from downstairs. The sound of someone walking along the hallway to her room. Sheets pulled back with a rough movement, a face in the darkness. A flash of fear, then a calm. Uncle Jack’s face, assembled in shadow. He takes the book and the flashlight. But instead of spanking her, or turning off the light, he settles beside her on the bed, and begins to read aloud.

Franny moved briskly past the row of cells. The guards looked at her curiously, but let her pass. At the gate to Death Row, she signed a book—Dr. Wren, 8/17, 2:35pm—and the gate was opened, slid back by a guard, a slight woman with short blonde hair. How had she ended up here, as a guard in Mountain View Unit, waiting in a metal chair, hour after hour, for something terrible to happen? Franny looked at her familiar face—had they known each other as children?—but the woman looked at her impassively, and Franny turned away. She walked through the open gate, and stood on Death Row.

The prisoners looked up. There was the new one, Samantha, doing leg lifts in her cell, flipping through a TV Guide. She flashed a dazzling smile and waved like the Queen Mother, fingers cupped.

“Karen, your doctor’s here,” called a high-pitched voice: Tiffany. She looked so normal, reading a Bible propped up in bed. She twirled a strand of hair around her index finger. What was inside Tiffany that had driven her to take her children’s heads in her hands, to hold them underwater until they stopped struggling?

Behind the bars, Karen stood, brought her fingers up to grip the metal. She had been asleep. Her hair was matted and her eyes puffy, but she gazed at Franny with an openness, an earnestness that made Franny embarrassed. Karen’s bones had become visible, especially in her face, and her mouth was covered with sores. It was the end of the disease. The morphine canister hummed in the corner of Karen’s cell.

“I came to read to you,” said Franny.

Karen’s brow furrowed. “What?” she said.

“Just be still,” said Franny. She sat on a patio chair, and opened the book.

“Ellen’s book,” said Karen. She looked confused, but nodded, lay back down on her bed and closed her eyes.

Franny cleared her throat, and began to read.

H
ere I am, in the car, driving. I was watching the news when I heard about Karen Lowens’ final appeal. I told myself that I needed an ice cream cone, and that Priscilla needed to come along. She leapt into the jump seat, and I put the truck in reverse and backed out of the driveway. I rolled down the window, and told Mrs. Murphy, who was sitting on her front step, that I was just headed over to Amy’s Ice Cream. I sounded cheery, and indeed, I felt cheery. But there is a fine line between cheery and psychotic.

I drove innocently up my street and past Nopalito’s and Jovita’s, past the Happy Mexican Gas Mart. I turned on the radio and it was the Led Zeppelin that did it. I began to sing, and to ignore the nervous looks Priscilla was giving me. Eventually, she sighed and fell asleep in the back. By this point, we were way past Amy’s Ice Cream. We were on our way to Gatestown, Texas, and to Karen Lowens.

I am not quite sure what I have to say to this woman, or why I need to see her. In my mind, both Henry and Maureen beg me to turn around. My mother is packing her little outfits. (“What do they wear in Texas in the summer?” she called to ask me. I told her: eyeshadow.) Some lawyer named Rick Underwood is hoping that I’m writing a letter to the governor to beg for mercy. Hah!

Driving gives me time to think. The fact is that in the abstract, I do believe in mercy. I believe people with painful diseases should be able to end their lives. I believe people make mistakes, and that they should be given a chance to atone. But I also feel that something was taken away from me—every fucking thing, in fact—and that I deserve something back. It’s a simple equation, a word problem:

Celia Mills has one happy marriage, one mediocre job, one dog, and ten apples. If her husband is shot in a convenience store, what is Celia left with? Express your answer in numeric form.

What is the answer? What do I deserve? When a car blows a tire and a child is killed, the parents sue. The worth of their child’s life is defined in dollars. When an employee pinches another employee’s ass, that pinch is assigned a specific value in a lawsuit. What it comes down to is this: If Karen Lowens lives, it means that Henry’s life was not worth anything at all.

I stop in Georgetown, about a half-hour outside of Austin, for Priscilla to pee. Standing next to a pathetic patch of grass, hoping it will suffice, I feel incredibly tired. The problem in my equation is that if Karen Lowens dies, I don’t gain anything. Will it all be over then? Will I be able to move on with my life, and hope for another chance at a happy home filled with babies and juice boxes? Why would her death free me in any way? As Priscilla finally gets down to business, I decide I need a Big Gulp Coke.

I had wanted kids since the day I met Henry. He was a walking advertisement for a future dad. He loved toys, had a grin a mile wide, and liked to pretend he was various animals. (Calling me his “little armadillo,” for example, or “mousekin.”) Henry wanted to wait, though, until he had decided whether he could stick with programming instead of composing. He wanted to save money and then give himself one six-month blast of free time to see what he could come up with. After that, he promised, we could see about children. He didn’t want to be a father who had given up on any dreams. He was the sort who went full-force into anything he set his mind to.

So we waited. It made sense. Add that into the equation: the children we would never have. Henry, holding our baby—that too, was taken away.

After years of minutes and days and words, Karen has a week to live. It is Monday, August eighteenth. In five or six days, over the weekend, she will be taken to Huntsville, and then she will be executed. The HIV in her bloodstream has turned her body against itself, but none of that matters now, not even the unbelievable pain. Dr. Wren comes and ups the morphine.

Dr. Wren also reads to her, sitting outside her cell and crossing her long legs, resting one small shoe on the concrete. Karen does not listen to the words. Instead, she listens to Dr. Wren’s voice. She can hear the unhappiness trapped in Dr. Wren’s vowels, the fear between her syllables. But Dr. Wren keeps talking, giving Karen stories. Karen is still not sure why Ellen gave her this book, but she is glad for the solace it brings her now.

God gives Karen visions of heaven, telling her it is time. When she wakes some mornings, a bright light fills her eyes instead of the bars, the concrete floor, the guard’s sour face. When prison noises become too loud, God fills her ears with a soft, white noise.

On Monday, Rick Underwood comes to see Karen. The guards put her in a wheelchair—she is too weak to walk now—and bring her to the visiting room. “Oh God,” he says, when he sees her. “Oh, Karen, honey.”

“Rick,” says Karen. She tries to smile.

“Karen, I’m here with bad news,” says Rick. “Your appeal was denied.”

He says some other things, about faith, hope, heaven, et cetera. Karen closes her eyes and listens as his words swim around her. She knows it all, inside, where it matters. The words are cheap.

It hurts Karen to breathe, and to talk. She has thrush in her mouth; it has a yeasty taste. If she closes her eyes for too long, she can see the faces. They will surround her at the execution: the wives, Ellen, the living, the dead, watching her, waiting for her to be gone. Waiting for the chemicals to course through her brain, and burn her heart still.