As if they were old friends, as if she might have searched for him on Facebook, or asked a mutual acquaintance for news of him. As if there were anything to keep up with. Getting a letter from Walter was like some exiled citizen of New Orleans getting a telegram signed “Katrina.” Hey, how are you? Do you ever think of me? Those were some crazy times, huh?
I don’t know if you have kept up with me, but there were some unusual circumstances in my trial. A juror came forward and admitted that they had discussions in the jury room that were strictly forbidden. One of the jurors was married to a lawyer, and she told everyone that I would never get the death penalty in Maryland-and I didn’t, but she couldn’t know that and shouldn’t have discussed it-so Virginia was the only place where I might reasonably be expected to be put to death. I won’t bore you with all the ins and outs of the law, but Virginia has formidable laws, and it is very hard to appeal here.
Remorseful, formidable. Walter was one of those people who believed that using big words would make him sound educated. She could imagine him poring over Reader’s Digest’s “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power.” Did they have Reader’s Digest in prison? Hey, they had Washingtonian.
Anyway, as a result of that and some other things, my appeals have dragged on much longer, with lots of ups and downs and ins and outs. I have been here twenty-two years. The next closest has been here only ten. I guess that makes me the Dean of Death Row.
Okay, she had to give Walter that: Dean of Death Row was kind of funny, and the one thing Walter had never shown any talent for was laughing at himself. He had changed a little if he could write a line like that.
Over the years, I admit I have thought about you often. When I saw your photo in the magazine, I was excited for you, but not surprised. I expected you to have the kind of life where you went to parties and got photographed. There was always a spark to you.
A spark, but not a shine. She remembered his truck slowing down as he drank in the eyeful that was Holly. “Look at the shine on that girl.”
But at the risk of giving offense, I have to say, I was surprised to hear from Barbara-she’s very good at research-that you have chosen not to have a career. Of course, I hold motherhood in the highest esteem and, if things had been different for me, I probably would be grateful if my own wife chose to put family first. But it’s not the future I envisioned for you.
With those words, that paragraph, Walter had given something far greater than offense. Hands shaking, Eliza fed the sheaf of paper into the shredder by Peter’s desk, facedown, so the image she saw sliding into the machine’s teeth was Albie and Reba on their bicycle built for two. Walter never touched this piece of paper, she reminded herself. He had dictated these words to Barbara. Perhaps these weren’t even his words, she thought. For all she knew, Barbara LaFortuny had created this entire drama. But, no, that was Walter’s voice, odd as it sounded this time.
Her paranoia far from abated, she emptied the shredder’s canister directly into the trash and then took the trash out to the garage, although shredded paper could go into the single-stream recycling bins provided by the county. If she could, she would have driven the garbage to the local dump, or burned it in a bon-fire on her lawn, although bonfires were illegal.
But even if she could have watched Walter’s words blacken and disappear in leaping flames, she could not erase the knowledge that she should have sussed out the moment she saw Barbara LaFortuny’s sinister little car following her down the street. Walter not only had learned where she lived, and what her husband did, and what she looked like. He knew she had children. He knew she had children and-far more crucial-he wanted her to be aware that he had that knowledge.
He wanted something from her. A visit, a call. He wanted something, and if she didn’t submit, he would find a way to use Iso and Albie to get it.
18
1985
AS SEPTEMBER DRAGGED ON, Elizabeth began to petition Walter to let her attend school. He said he would take her request under advisement. That was his preferred term for anything she sought but obviously could not have-more clothes, dinners in restaurants, a call home, a friend. “I’ll take that under advisement,” he would say, and nothing would change.
“I won’t misbehave,” she said, knowing how doomed her request was, yet incapable of not trying. “I just want to go to school, study. Education matters to me. And you always say you think it’s important.”
“That’s good,” he said. “But I don’t see it working out. We’d have to settle down somewhere.”
“I’d like that,” she said, amending quickly, “I think you would like that.”
“Not in the cards, not right now. We’ve got to keep moving.”
“It’s illegal,” she said, “not to attend school if you’re under sixteen. So if someone sees you with me, they might stop, ask questions. It didn’t matter, at first, when it was summer. But now it’s fall.”
“Not quite, not by the calendar.”
But the weather was fall-like. Autumn had once been her favorite time of the year, the days full of promise, the nights cool and crisp. She always felt anything could happen in autumn. She liked the very word: autumn. She would head back to school with her new clothes-Vonnie was so hard on what she wore that Elizabeth had seldom been forced to endure hand-me-downs-her plastic pencil pouch full of reinforcements, her binder unsullied. She would be neater this year, better prepared. She would work for As instead of settling for Bs. Those dreams were usually worn down by Thanksgiving, but September and October were golden days.
“There are all sorts of reasons a fifteen-year-old girl might not be in school,” he said. “I can’t imagine anyone noticing. No one ever has.”
He was right. People didn’t seem to see them, her. Their eyes swept over her, by her, around her, but never made contact with her gaze, even as she silently screamed for them to see her, take note of her. Was it because he had cut her hair short and dyed it brown, meticulously keeping up with the roots, if not the cut. (“Nice’n Easy,” Walter had scoffed. “Maybe for some faggot beautician.”)
Sometimes, though, she saw women noticing Walter with tentative approval. But it was very brief. A waitress, a store clerk, would rake her eyes up and down him, draw him into conversation. Then, just as quickly, they would pull back, retreat. Elizabeth, who had read reams about the mistakes girls make with boys, wondered what kind of mistakes boys made. Walter was too…eager. No, that wasn’t the right word. He was polite, interested. He tried to draw them out. But women, grown-up women, moved away from him as if he smelled.
Elizabeth ’s request to go to school put a strange bug in Walter’s ear, and he decided that they would spend their evenings at various libraries, reading. He insisted on approving her choices, sometimes making her put back a novel and read a nonfiction book, although he never seemed to notice that the texts on history, science, and mathematics were much too simple for her. Walter usually read history or magazines about cars, but one day-Fredericksburg, Virginia, Elizabeth believed, although the places kept getting jumbled in her head-he found a pale green book called When the Beast Tames the Beauty: What Women Really Want and he began reading it with great interest.
Walter, it turned out, was not a particularly fast reader, and although they stayed in Fredericksburg for several days-he had found work with a private moving company, whose owner didn’t mind if Walter’s “little sister” tagged along-he managed to read only the first third of the book in the hours he had available.
But when they moved on at week’s end, Walter was dismayed to find that the next library didn’t have the book. And the library in the next town over had it on the noncirculating shelf, which required library patrons to sign for the book at the front desk, because it was a best seller. He made Elizabeth ask for it.