Sleep Toward Heaven (23 page)

“She’s due to be executed tomorrow morning,” said a man in the corner of the room. Franny recognized him as Guy Hamm, the guard who had shown her around the prison. He was carrying a gun, and his blond hair was wavy and stiff.

“I know,” said Franny. She sat by Karen’s bedside, holding her hand. Everything she had thought about, worried over, tried to control, had come to this. Holding Karen’s hand. Franny was not even sure if she wanted Karen to open her eyes.

From time to time, Karen would writhe and moan, and Franny would program the machine to give Karen a bit more morphine. Franny knew the code by heart. Karen would sigh, and settle back down into her dreams. It would be so easy, thought Franny, to give Karen a high enough dose, to program the machine to give Karen enough morphine to die.

She heard monitors—doctors being paged—and smelled the uneaten meal a nurse had brought for Karen. There was still a chance the governor would issue a stay, and Franny waited. Hamm looked as if he were dozing off.

“Excuse me?” said Franny.

He jerked awake, reaching for his gun.

“I’ll be right back,” said Franny.

He nodded, blinking. Franny squeezed Karen’s hand.

There was no answer on Rick’s mobile phone. Franny bought a Twix bar and a cup of coffee and walked down the hallway back to Karen’s room. She turned the corner and saw the door to the Medical Center open. Two guards wheeled a gurney, an oxygen tank, and the morphine machine from the room. Franny saw dark hair against the white sheets on the gurney. “Wait!’ she cried. The men pushed the stretcher away from Franny, through the swinging doors at the opposite end of the hallway. Franny ran to them.

“What happened?” she asked a nurse, who was changing the sheets on the bed where Karen had been. The nurse flipped a clean sheet in the air, snapped it flat.

“She woke up,” said the nurse, tucking in the corners.

In the corner of the dark cell, Karen looked small. She lay on a cot, and the only sound was the morphine dripping through the IV into her arm. They had taken away the oxygen. When she heard the bars slide back, Karen opened her eyes. The orange fire was gone; they were dull and flat. “You can have ten minutes,” said the guard, a black man Franny did not recognize.

“Okay,” said Franny. She thought, Not if Rick can get to the governor. She sat at Karen’s side. “Karen, how are you?”

“Ready,” said Karen. “God knows I am ready right now.” Karen’s voice was weak, barely above a whisper. Franny nodded. “I was waiting for you,” said Karen.

All the strength was gone from her, Franny could see. The sores were like fire on her face, but it was more than that, more than the bones protruding through her skin. “That priest told me I would go to heaven,” said Karen. She coughed. “Heaven is sounding good about now.”

“No, Karen. Hold on,” said Franny. She was filled with the desire to do something, something to save Karen. To bring her strength in this horrible room that smelled of piss and dark corners.

Karen turned her head toward the ceiling. After a moment, she began to speak. “The worst part,” she said, and she was whispering, “is that everybody is going to watch me go.” She began to spit the words, as if they tasted bitter. “They’re going to put a diaper on me. I’ve been through everything,” she said. “I came out of everything and I found some dignity. Inside. When they stripped me and they put it in me—” She coughed, a long, wet cough. “They couldn’t touch it,” she said.

She looked at Franny. Franny nodded. “Now it’s going to come out of me,” said Karen. “And they’ll be watching, all them who tried to take it.” Franny thought desperately to find words. “Can you understand?”

“But Karen,” she began, in a voice that was pleading and wrong in her ears.

“Don’t talk,” said Karen. “Just tell me I can go.”

Franny closed her mouth.

The phone on the guard’s desk rang loudly, and Franny jumped. Karen closed her eyes. “Doctor?” said the guard. “It’s for you.”

“Hold on,” Franny said to Karen. “Just hold on, for me.” She touched Karen’s face, and it was cold.

Franny stood, walked to the cell door. The guard slid back the bars. Franny exited, and the guard closed the door behind her. Karen began to cough. The receiver was heavy in Franny’s hand. “This is Dr. Wren,” she said.

“Franny?”

“Rick. What’s happening?”

“I’m sorry, Franny. I’m so sorry.”

“No.”

“I’m sorry,” said Rick.

“Goddamn it, she only has a few days—maybe even a few hours! They can’t give her that?”

“No. Franny, I went and talked to him myself. It’s over.”

She began to cry. “Stop it,” said Rick. “Franny, stop it.”

Franny swallowed. She handed the phone to the guard.

“Doctor,” said the guard. “Visiting hours are done. It’s time for you to go.”

“Let me say goodbye,” said Franny.

“Hurry it up, then.” He let her into the cell.

“Dr. Wren?” said Karen. “Please let me go now. I’m ready to go.”

“Yes,” said Franny. “I understand.” And standing there, watching the sick woman with the child’s eyes, Franny did understand. Karen was filled with grace. It shone through her broken body, and over her mistakes. Franny understood then that grace was not like a present. It could not be given, and it could not be taken away.

“Goodbye,” she said.

“Thank you,” said Karen. “Goodbye.”

“God bless you,” said Franny, and she nodded to the guard. He came and unlocked the gate. As she walked down the hallway, she could still hear Karen, breathing.

The woman who shot my husband is being executed today, and all I can think about is what to wear. I am aware this is a shallow concern, and yet there it is. A suit seems too respectful, and sweatpants don’t seem to allow for the gravity of the situation. Back in my house in Austin, I try on summer dresses, pantsuits, a pair of decent shorts. (The shorts are quickly thrown on the floor: I cannot wear sneakers or sandals to an execution.)

Shoes. I decide to start at the bottom. Slurping coffee that my mother has made, I survey the bottom of my closet. It is over a hundred degrees, which rules out anything leather. (Open-toed shoes, as well, are out. I don’t even want to think about what’s on the floor of the prison.) I get on my knees and shove things around. I am nude, fresh from the shower, where I both shampooed and conditioned my hair. I feel as if I’m going on a date. Or to a wedding. I begin to laugh. There is something very wrong with me.

At the back of the closet, I see them. The cotton espadrilles I had pulled on when I went to the hospital. I had been sitting on the porch swing, throwing a ball to Priscilla. The ball was covered with slobber and mud. I was barefoot, thinking of the beer Henry would bring me. I wasn’t thinking of Henry. Wasn’t thinking—not then—of his soft lips, his warm neck, the way he abandoned himself to sleep, spreading his limbs across the bed. I was thinking of beer.

The phone rang that night, and I went inside to answer it. I figured it was my mother or my friend Gina who always called with a crisis. (And who, it must be noted, dropped me like a hot potato when I had a crisis of my own.) But it wasn’t Gina. It was someone trying to win me back to AT&T phone service. He actually said that, and God knows how I remember, “We want to win you back.” Priscilla looked at me mournfully, the ball dropped at my feet. The front door was open, and while the man on the phone kept talking (emboldened by my silence, as they always are, looking for any moment to fill) I looked up and there was a police officer in my doorway.

Henry, I thought immediately. That jackass ran a red light, I thought. How much money did I have for bail, I thought. “Miss Mills, I mean Mrs. Mills?” said the police officer, a young boy really, and something in his face made me drop the phone to the floor. Priscilla curled around my feet: she felt it, too.

“There’s been an accident,” said the boy.

An accident? It was no accident. It was a bloodbath. I had worn these espadrilles. In them, I had seen my husband dead, stretched out under a white sheet, his face the color of clay but his feet the same. His hands, the same.

I put on the espadrilles, and then the loose dress I had been wearing with them. The last dress Henry had seen me in.

My mother, who surprised me by flying in from Wisconsin for the execution, comes into my room and puts her hand on her hip. “It’s time to go,” she says. She looks old in the early morning light. We have a long drive ahead, from Austin to Huntsville, and my mother has packed a cooler with drinks and cookies, as if we were going on a picnic. The execution is at eleven.

“It still amazes me that you live here,” says my mother, as we wind through the quiet streets of my neighborhood on the way to the freeway. “My daughter,” she says. “A Texan.” She laughs and then sighs.

I suppose I am a Texan, now. I could have left when Henry died, but I have not. As we drive underneath the large oak trees, their roots a hundred years deep, I can begin to see shards of the life I have ahead of me: my quiet desk at the library, the slight chill of fall. My garden, my porch swing.

My mother and I are silent for most of the drive. She puts her hand on the back of my neck, and does not ask me how I feel.

Henry’s parents meet us at the House of Pancakes in Huntsville. By the time we arrive, it is too late to eat. Ursula is lit from within with fury. She wears a black dress and simple pumps. The ponytail that hangs down her back is almost entirely white now. The loss of her son is evident in every line on her face. My heart opens like a flower, and when she rises from the Formica table, I take her in my arms. Neither of us cry.

Henry’s father has ordered a plate of pancakes, but has not taken a bite, not even poured the syrup. “Is it time?” he asks. His eyes are ringed with dark circles.

“It’s time,” I say.

At the prison, we are led into a dark, windowless room and to the front row of folding chairs. I have my mother on one side of me, and Ursula on the other. We lock our fingers together. I can see reporters in some of the back rows, and the drunk brunette doctor from the bar, talking to a large man. Around us, in the front row, I see the other victims’ families. Most of them look angry, and many seem filled with Ursula’s same fire. It seems a very long time that we stare at an empty gurney, waiting.

“Do you think this will make it better?” I ask Ursula, and she clamps her lips together and shakes her head. It will never be better, she is saying with her eyes, and I know that she is right.

My own mother is stroking my palm with her thumb. From time to time she looks over at me and makes a sound in the back of her throat. She is trying to imagine life without me.

The reporters begin to grow restless as eleven o’clock comes and goes. Their voices murmur in the corners of the room. There is a collective sense that something is very wrong, but we know that all of Karen’s appeals have been denied. The clock on the wall ticks, and someone clears their throat. A woman begins to sob quietly.

“What the hell is going on?” says Henry’s father. His voice is tight, a coiled spring.

And finally, movement. The warden comes to the center of the room, in front of the gurney. She looks nervous, but holds her shoulders back. “Excuse me?” she says, and silence falls.

“There has been an unforeseen turn of events,” she says. Her voice rings out in the quiet room. I can hear my own blood pumping, can feel the pulses of my mother and Ursula in my fingertips. It feels as if we have the same heartbeat. In between the beats, I hear the warden tell us that we cannot watch the execution of Karen Lowens, because Karen Lowens is already dead.

A
fter the announcement, Janice Gaddon let Franny into Karen’s cell. Karen’s body was there, of course, a large mound underneath the thin sheet. Franny closed her eyes. The cracked concrete tile; a dark, sweet smell.

Franny could never know what Karen felt in her final moments, before she killed herself with the morphine. How did she find out the code to the machine? Franny hadn’t let her see it, she was sure.

Rick had gone to see Karen in the late hours of the night. She had been alive, but woozy. He sat by her, prayed for her. Then he had gone to Franny, and in the waiting room, on a metal bench, they had held each other. They had not said a word, had cried and slept and cried again. Rick’s body was comforting and warm.

In Karen’s cell, Franny realized that her hands were balled into fists. There was no sound in the room. Karen looked asleep. Her eyelids were thin as paper. I came into this world alone, and I’ve been alone since…and she had died alone. Franny swallowed tears. She took the sheet, cold as stone in her hand, and pulled it over Karen’s face.

There would be questions, so many questions. They would look into every part of Franny’s care. They would think that she gave Karen the means with which to end her life. Strangely, none of this bothered Franny. In the end, she would be proven innocent—she had not done anything, after all—and her life would go on. She simply couldn’t control who would believe her, and who would not.

Janice placed a hand on Franny’s arm. “Karen left this. She said it was for you,” she said. It was a tiger made of origami paper, orange and gold, its folds softened from touch. Franny closed her fingers around it. She walked with sure steps past the crowd outside Karen’s cell. Rick stood in the hallway, his face pale. Franny had let Karen go, had said goodbye, and was ready. Rick looked up, and Franny walked toward him.

When I am home in Austin, and all my guests have gone, I take Priscilla and some supplies and I visit Henry. He is buried in a sunny graveyard, watched over by oak trees. It took a long time for me to come to him, and I suppose I was waiting for the sadness to end. But sadness isn’t something that ends, it just becomes less hard. It melts into an ache that is a part of you.

I have planted tomatoes on Henry’s grave. They look strange, amidst the roses and carnations, but they are what Henry would have wanted. They have become large and red. Today, I will pick two of them, and make a salad to bring to the christening of Sean and Jenny’s new baby, Alice. I am Alice’s godmother, and will hold her while the priest touches her forehead with cold water. I went to Sean and Jenny’s house a few weeks ago, and they opened the door, and I walked in.