Walter, however, had patience to burn. Too much, she sometimes thought. She wondered if prison had perverted his relationship with time, if he didn’t understand how little they had. Bureaucracies moved as nimbly as eighteen-wheelers, as Barbara knew from her years in the public school system. They needed time and space to turn this thing around, and yet Walter could not be more goddamn nonchalant.
She raised her right leg behind her, swung it down into pigeon pose, gloating a little at the openness of her hips. Some of the thinner women in the class looked absolutely constipated.
Or maybe Walter wanted the drama of everything happening at the last minute, which was truly harebrained. She had said as much, the last time they spoke: No drama, Walter. Then too much attention will be paid, and she will run away. She’s a scared little mouse.
Barbara knew from scared little mouses. Mice. She had been one, behind her cranky facade. She had skittered to her car in the morning, worried it wouldn’t start, skittered into the school, tried to teach history to bored seventh and eighth graders, skittered out of the Pimlico neighborhood at day’s end, cooked dinner, fretting over calories and fat and cholesterol. Graded papers in front of the television, usually falling asleep there. Rinse, lather, repeat.
Then she had awakened in the hospital, her face bandaged, twelve hours, a half day, lost to her. She had known even before they removed the dressing that the repair-she could not dignify it with the term surgery-had been botched. She could sense how lumpy the scar was, how large the stitches. They had not bothered to summon a plastic surgeon to the ER. That might have been another lawsuit, another arrow in her quill, but the hospital had been quick to remedy its work, and the result wasn’t bad. Her scar was like a ghost smile, a little happy face off to the side. “For Halloween,” she once told Walter, “I might go as both of the Greek masks that represent the theater.”
Yet it was in that moment-waking up, disoriented, unsure of the damage done-that Barbara realized she was no longer scared. This was before the settlement left her well fixed, before she even really knew what happened. But she understood this: She wasn’t scared anymore. She had almost died. She didn’t. There must be something she was supposed to do.
The first task she tackled was finding out everything about the boy who had sliced her face, following him through the system. Tuwan Jones was fourteen, a juvenile, and it was harder then to try juveniles as adults. Barbara didn’t have a problem with that, although she believed her assailant to be beyond rehabilitation. Someone, a parent or a relative, had killed that boy long ago. He was sent to the Hickey School, where he promptly became an escape artist, leaving at every chance, only to be flummoxed by the surrounding suburbs, so still and quiet. Tuwan could get out of Hickey, but not out of the neighborhood. He never got much farther than Harford Road, the main strip nearest the school. They called Barbara every time he escaped, a courtesy and probably a defensive measure against future lawsuits. Tuwan had no intention of coming after her. He didn’t even remember her. He was released from Hickey at the age of sixteen. By eighteen, he had finally managed to kill someone and was sent to Supermax in Baltimore City.
Perhaps another person would have taken this experience and resolved to prevent such tragedies, to help young men before they became assailants. But Barbara had been there already, on the front lines, and she had little confidence that she was the type of person who could change others. Instead, she became fixated on the idea of the death penalty. It was wrong to kill. Someone had tried to take her life from her, and failed. Given a chance to live, she had to become a better person. Not nicer, necessarily, but more confident, vigorous, even a little selfless. Perhaps men on death row could become better people, too, if only they could be spared execution.
And although Maryland had its share of interesting inmates, the best ones, the ones whose cases really deserved to be reconsidered, had all been taken. Barbara wanted an inmate more or less to herself, she wanted to champion someone that no one else thought worthwhile. She wanted to take a perceived monster and persuade the world that he was human.
Which is what led her to Walter, back in the 1990s, when his first execution had been set. She could not believe the bloodlust at the time, how keen people were to see him die. The man she saw in newspaper photographs and courtroom sketches looked gentle to her, resigned. Besides, it wasn’t immoral of him to challenge the state of Virginia ’s right to execute him on jurisdictional grounds. “Loophole,” editorials snarled. “Technicality,” complained pundits. But Barbara, the former history teacher, knew that state lines were more than arbitrary markers on a map, that the United States were the united states, and if Holly Tackett had been killed in West Virginia, then Walter should have been tried there. That was no technicality. It was a cherished tenet of most conservatives, the right for states to make their own laws, the insistence on less interference from the federal government. It was hypocritical for these same conservatives to claim that state lines didn’t matter when they wanted to kill someone.
She began writing Walter. He seemed skeptical of her at first. Other women had written him. “Crazy women,” he later told her. “They want a boyfriend. I can’t be somebody’s boyfriend in here. Where were these women when all I wanted was a girlfriend?”
She thought that was funny, even self-aware. Over time, she began to pull out bits and pieces of Walter’s life. The late-in-life parents, the coldness of his home, the consistent undermining by all those around him. She sent him an IQ test and he scored above average, although he admitted that he had never done well in school. Eventually, they began to talk about sex. Walter said his first sexual encounter was with a local girl who was sort of a for-barter prostitute; she had sex with men whose services she needed. He would go over to her house and help her with various tasks-putting up curtain rods, for example, or moving heavy furniture. But she was so businesslike about the arrangement that Walter never enjoyed it quite as much as he thought he should, didn’t really count it. “In a lot of ways, I was a virgin,” he said of the year he ended up on the run. He was, Barbara realized, hopelessly confused about sex and women.
“I’m not that man anymore,” he told her. “If I left here-I don’t know. But I’m not going to leave here, and I think that’s right. But that’s the thing that seems weird to me. They locked me up, and I’m a better person for it. Cured, even. I needed to be locked up, no doubt about it. But when they execute me, they’re going to kill the wrong Walter. The one they want to punish doesn’t exist anymore.”
Barbara was the only person who seemed to agree. Virginia was going to kill the wrong Walter, commit murder as surely as he had. The state had spent millions toward this goal, far more than it would have if it had just allowed Walter to be a lifer from the start.
She reclined on her mat. Barbara had caught an infection from using one of the center’s mats, or so she believed, and she now brought her own bright fuchsia one. It was the part of class she hated the most, the part where she was supposed to empty her mind. My mind does not empty, she wanted to protest.
Instead she lay on her back, counting the days. November 25. Under Walter’s 1-2-3 plan, he wouldn’t even broach his request to Eliza until the third time they spoke, and Barbara was unclear whether he was counting that first, truncated conversation. He might enjoy more phone privileges as the execution date came closer, but still-Barbara thought he should just blurt it out, let it stew in her mind.