The Enchanted (23 page)

I am led, shuffling, down the row. The cell York lived in holds a new man. The small men scatter in the walls, and I think they are taking messages to all corners of this place. The other men do not line up at their doors to watch me pass. There are no calls of “hey man” or “hail Odin” or “keep striding.” No brother-to-brother calls, no long-distance goodbyes.

The silence echoes down the long walk. I bow my head and listen to the silence, hear the shuffle of my paper slippers on the walk.

We get to the far end of the row, and slowly, we shuffle down past the office that once belonged to the priest. It is empty, but they say a new priest is coming. The warden says the new priest is young and eager and thinks he can change the world. He won't last long.

The fallen priest and the lady are gone. She took the priest away to the sound of rain in the blue forest, to the sound of laughter and lovemaking after dark.

The lady doesn't know it yet, but I have left something for her. It lies on my cot with a last request for the warden. I have asked him to send my copy of
The White Dawn
to her. I wrote a note on the inside jacket, just from me to her, written with that pencil stub. The note for the lady doesn't say much. Just one word.

It isn't far now.

The warden's face relaxes. The hand on my arm is reassuring and firm. I feel the grip of his fingers and marvel at the layers of feeling through my body just from those two dimples of flesh.

Suddenly, we are there. The door is open. The orange room is bare except for the table in the middle. Next to the bed is the machine. My eyes begin to swim a little. I see the milky tubes on the stand, the red buttons.

There is the old black phone on the wall.

I am not worried about the phone. It will not ring.

There is silence beyond the walls. No voices rise in defiance. No one has come to protest. No one has come to celebrate, either. There are some horrors too deep to contemplate. There are some acts that defy redemption or rage. We all just want to close our eyes to them and forget.

In the distance, I hear the sweetest sound of all. It is a bird singing. Maybe it is one of the soft-tufted night birds, come to say goodbye. It is the most beautiful thing I have heard in many years, prettier than bells, and I know this trip was worth it just to hear that sound. It almost hurts my ears, it is so lovely.

The bird trills and then falls silent. I savor the sound like I used to savor the sound of the lady's feet walking past my cell.

The warm reflection on the side of my face reminds me of the window. I raise my head. The heavy black curtains are opened so the audience can see. The witnesses are lined up in folding chairs in the other room.

That's when I see her. Donald's mom. She is sitting to the far right in the watching area, almost shrouded in darkness. She is much older than I remember from my first trial. She is wearing a pink cardigan that has seen better days. Her face is sagging, and her hair is gray. The last time I saw her, I was eighteen. She was a young mother then.

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.

About the author

Meet Rene Denfeld

About the book

A Letter to the Reader

Read on

Author's Picks

RENE DENFELD
was raised in Portland, Oregon, one of five children of a single mother. She grew up in poor, minority neighborhoods—her siblings are African American—and experienced hardship as well as joy.

On her own at age fifteen, Rene had a colorful life as a singer for punk bands—including opening for acts from Black Flag to Nirvana—and worked a variety of jobs. She began writing in her early twenties, when she was boxing by day and tending bar in a Portland punk club by night.

Rene's incisive, thoughtful, and courageous articles quickly sprang from smaller newspapers to major publications. Her groundbreaking work for the
New York Times Magazine
about the lives of cognitively impaired parents is still taught in college classes. She became a frequent contributor to the op-ed page of the
Philadelphia Inquirer,
where she examined cultural myths.

Rene was in her twenties when her first nonfiction book,
The New Victorians
(Warner, 1995), became an international bestseller. Two more nonfiction books followed. Her second book,
Kill The Body, The Head Will Fall
(Warner, 1997), explored issues of women and aggression. The third,
All God's Children
(PublicAffairs, 2007), was the result of years of investigation into homeless youth subcultures.

By 2008, Rene was the single mom of
three kids she had adopted from foster care. She needed a day job.

Rene had met death penalty investigators while researching her third book. She was fascinated with their work, which offered a chance to learn the truth about a person and their crime. She got licensed and didn't look back. Working with men and women facing execution inspired her first novel,
The Enchanted.

Rene continues to work on death penalty cases, as well as other cases, including political asylum for sex trafficking victims. She enjoys gardening, reading, and parenting. She continues to be a foster mom and volunteers with at-risk families. She takes great joy in helping others and believes the best way to find happiness and acceptance is to give it.