Notes on an execution, p.23
Notes on an Execution, page 23
No one seems to care. No one seems to understand how intent can change things. Of all the facts that brought you here, this one feels most important: that night came from your very core. You did not plan it or fantasize it. You only moved on the force of what you knew yourself to be. It should matter, the distance between your desire and your actions. It should matter that you wanted to love Jenny, or at least to learn how. You did not want to kill her.
Hazel
2012
There was no Summoning.
No lightning bolt zapped down her spine.
When it happened, Hazel was sorting laundry with the TV on mute. As she folded Alma’s school uniform, Luis’s boxer shorts, her own tattered bras, Hazel felt nothing. No heart-stopping pain, no flare of worry. She tucked Mattie’s socks into colorful little bundles as the television played an ad for a stationary bike. A sponge that washed itself. Auto insurance.
* * *
Hazel was crouched in the garden the next morning, her hands full of milkweed stems, when Luis appeared on the back porch. He was wearing his Saturday sweatpants and waving her phone in the air.
“Hazel,” he said. “Your mom’s called like six times.”
The dread was acerbic, her body’s primitive preparation. Her mother never called more than once—usually, she left a cheery voicemail. Her parents were getting old. Maybe someone had taken a fall. As she dialed her mother back, Hazel wiped her sweaty brow with a forearm. The ringing clicked into a gasping sob.
“Mom,” she begged, gut plunging. “Mom, please, what happened?”
“Oh, honey,” her mother heaved. “It’s Jenny. She’s dead.”
Hazel’s vision, half gone.
“Ansel. They have him in custody. She was at the apartment—a kitchen knife—”
Hazel did not recognize the wail that came from her own throat. It broke up and through her, visceral, a level of pain that had been waiting in her depths, unpossessed. Luis hovered as Hazel slumped to the burning wood of the porch. Her mother’s voice echoed tinny from the phone, which she’d hurled across the deck, now splayed ten feet away. Hazel stared at a spiderweb on the leg of the porch chair, grasping; the web was silky and translucent, a single fly swaddled motionless in the center.
Time warped. It stretched, faded. Morning churned into afternoon, stammering spurts of surreal minutes that constricted in Hazel’s throat like balloons. The body, Luis was saying on the phone with her father. An arrest. The hours passed, shell-shocked, incoherent.
The only person Hazel wished to call with the news was Jenny herself. Jenny would answer with a perky hello, chipper as she had been these last months in Texas. I met someone, she’d told Hazel, giddy. He’s a surgical nurse, and he’s so sweet. He cooks me dinner, we watch TV. You’ll meet him when you’re here. Hazel had been planning to visit with Alma for Thanksgiving—she’d booked the flights already. Now, she thought of Jenny’s earlobes, fuzzed and smooth. Her sister’s fingernails, ragged at the cuticles.
* * *
Grief was a hole. A portal to nothing. Grief was a walk so long Hazel forgot her own legs. It was a shock of blinding sun. A burst of remembering: sandals on pavement, a sleepy back seat, nails painted on the bathroom floor. Grief was a loneliness that felt like a planet.
* * *
Four days later, Hazel stood in her parents’ kitchen, surrounded by cold casserole dishes and distant voices. The afternoon had faded to a gloomy night, and the post-funeral reception was cast in the haze that had spread across everything, a scrim of white filmed over a pond.
Hazel had refused to wear black. She’d dug through the back of her closet instead, until she found the cotton dress she’d been gifted that long-ago Christmas. Heather gray to Jenny’s olive green. The service had been impersonal, almost offensively forgettable: Hazel had sat with her parents in the front pew of the church they’d attended maybe twice, while a priest made vague concessions to Jenny’s excellent character. Hazel had marched dutifully to the cemetery, where the coffin had been lowered slowly into the ground as the sky threatened release. Hours later, she still clenched the memorial program in her sweaty palm—a folded sheet of paper with Jenny’s photo plastered across the front, printed cheap in grayscale. Jenny perched on the edge of the living room couch, hands cupping her chin, her smile luminous, young and hopeful. On Jenny’s finger, that awful purple ring, winking coy at the camera.
“We can leave, if you want,” Luis said, a hand pressed to Hazel’s back as he passed her another paper cup of coffee.
Around them, neighbors gawked. Aunts and uncles hugged Hazel with spidery arms, murmuring apology. Most of these people had come purely for the spectacle—Hazel knew this was the worst and most interesting thing that had ever happened to their cul-de-sac, to her father’s colleagues, to the women from her mother’s swim aerobics class. They approached Hazel warily, a steady line. I’m sorry for your loss. The phrase felt blank and lifeless, like her loss was a cell phone left on the seat of a taxi.
“Soon,” Hazel said. “Give me a minute.”
In the muted chaos, no one noticed Hazel slipping out the front door.
Her ears rang with the sudden silence of the outside world. Hazel slid into her car, parked across the street because the driveway was full. The empty block was dim. A buggy, navy blue. From out here, the house looked like a television screen, playing a sad movie. A relief, to be alone. Hazel did not turn on the engine, only sat in the quiet, reveling, before she leaned over and opened the glove compartment.
It was still there. Just as heavy as she remembered. That cursed and miserable ring.
Just ten months ago, Hazel had dropped Jenny off at the airport—had seen her sister for the very last time. Now, she held the jewel in her palm as a simmering rage arrived, along with a memory she’d stowed away years ago: Ansel, the day he gifted Jenny this ring. Ansel, out in the moonlight, digging.
Hazel stumbled through her parents’ back gate, the purple ring glistening, beckoning her forward. The maple tree was just as Hazel had always known it, the branches like fatherly arms, reaching to comfort. Hazel paced circles around it—all those winters ago, she had seen Ansel from her bedroom, holding her dad’s shovel. She had convinced her teenage self that it had been a dream, but as Hazel trailed the base of the tree, it seemed crucial that she find the spot.
She crouched, squinted. Alert for the first time in days, Hazel stood over a patch of earth where the grass had been flattened, turned up bare. As Hazel pulled her father’s shovel off the wall of the garage, the plastic handle cold beneath her fingers, she knew it had not been a dream. She had seen Ansel out here, in the glow of the winter moon. He had been digging.
By the time Hazel’s shovel hit the little box, her nails were black with dirt. She flicked on her cell phone light, aimed it into the pit—she’d hit an old jewelry box of Jenny’s, plastic and unsentimental. The sort of clutter Jenny would never miss. Hazel brushed the soil away and tucked the box awkwardly beneath her dress, before pushing discreetly back into the house. Head down, she ducked for the stairs.
Her parents had recently renovated—they’d turned Hazel and Jenny’s old bedroom into a gym. When Hazel creaked the door open, she almost expected to see her ballet shoes hanging from hooks on the wall, makeup scattered across the surface of Jenny’s dresser. The smell of exercise equipment hit her instead, the metallic tang of the dumbbells her father never used. A treadmill sat in the center of the room and a series of workout DVDs were lined up beneath the static television. In the corner, Hazel could still see the imprints in the carpet where the feet of Jenny’s bed had dug in.
She sat on the edge of the treadmill, ran a hand along the track of unmoving vinyl. She let a wave of grief engulf her, then pass. Like when they were little, playing in the surf on the Nantucket shore. When you see a wave, you have to make a choice, Jenny had instructed, bossy as always. Either swim against it or ride it home.
The box in Hazel’s lap was caked in a sheet of dirt. She cleared it away, flecking soil onto the carpet as she clicked open the lid. There was no wave of recognition. No crush of nostalgia. The jewelry inside did not belong to Jenny. Hazel had never seen it before. A beaded barrette, and a small pearl bracelet.
Disappointment crashed down, a foamy burst. Luis would know what to do with the jewelry, the hole in the ground, the unanswerable questions. Hazel could only revel in the unfairness. The inescapability.
This was her story now. It would always be something that had happened to Jenny, and to Hazel, and she would be rewriting the narrative for the rest of her life, shaping it, defining it, hurling it against the wall. It would be years before she learned to inhabit a world without her sister, if such a thing were even possible. The magnitude of what she’d lost felt reckless, inexhaustible. She had not yet considered Ansel in any real way—she pushed the anger away when it nudged at her ribs, too immersed in the long swim through shock. This was not about him. It never had been. It seemed insane, almost laughable, that one person—Ansel, a single man, so deeply average—had created a chasm so colossal.
Hazel closed her eyes and wished the gym equipment away. She prayed desperately for a Summoning, but all she got was this: the reception clattering on downstairs, the pattering unfairness of her own ragged breath. It seemed that from now on, nothing would be a Summoning, or everything would be, depending how she saw it. Hazel was no longer one half of a whole, but instead the whole itself—a Summoning was not magic, or telepathy, or some freaky twin thing. Jenny was gone, and now their connection was as primal and elusive as the fluid in which they’d both been formed. It was cellular. It was infinite. Simply, it was memory.
Saffy
2012
When Saffy heard the news, she pictured Jenny’s collarbone. The hollow of Jenny’s throat, contracting as she inhaled, cigarette between her lips. How Jenny had looked, all those years ago outside the emergency room—like she’d known, somehow, where all of this was going.
Corinne called late on a Tuesday. Saffy was slumped on her living room couch, case files splayed obscene on the coffee table. In the time since Lawson’s suicide, the slog was insistent, pushing relentlessly on—more overdoses along the border, a body they’d caught from Troop C. The job didn’t care that her case had crumbled. The morning after Lawson’s trial date, Saffy picked up an extra-large coffee and got back to work.
Saffy answered the phone, swiping a trail of popcorn crumbs from the folds of her T-shirt.
“Captain.” Corinne’s voice was steady, efficient. “You should sit down for this.”
“Just tell me.”
“Jenny Fisk, from the 1990 case. The homicide squad down in Houston found her a few days ago. Multiple stab wounds. They brought the ex-husband in, but they didn’t have enough evidence to hold him. It’s your guy, Captain. Ansel Packer.”
The scent of burnt popcorn was suddenly nauseating, chemical and repulsive.
“I’m sorry,” Corinne said. “I know this isn’t a good time for—”
“Thank you, Sergeant.”
Saffy hung up.
Just a week ago, she had slept outside the Blue House. A week ago, she stood across from Blue and Rachel, told them things she’d never admitted to anyone. It had provided an easy relief, a cozy sense of pride—here was Blue, the same age as the others, alive and sunburnt in her faded plastic flip-flops. Guilt came, then horror. A drip, then a flood.
Saffy had not saved anyone.
* * *
The woman appeared on her stoop the next evening.
Saffy’s fingers were slick with marinade, from the chicken cutlets Kristen had adamantly delivered. A dusky forest haze filtered in through the window. The cicadas hummed, restless. Saffy wiped her hands on a paper towel and padded in her socks to the door.
The woman on the porch had hair cut short. A large mole dotted her cheek. Her face was like a wound, open, smarting. Saffy recognized her immediately: in the photo from the news reports, Jenny Fisk leaned forward on a couch, smiling easy. The obituary had run in the Burlington paper—survived by her parents and her twin sister.
“I’m sorry to bother you at home,” the woman said. “My name is Hazel Fisk. I, um, I found something. Sergeant Caldwell sent me, she said you’d want to see.”
Saffy led Hazel to the living room, where twilight seeped in mellow rays across the rug. Saffy did not realize how attentively, unconsciously, she had studied Jenny’s face—Hazel was the shadow imprint of her sister, warped in grief.
Hazel pulled a plastic bag from her purse and handed it over, explaining. Saffy clicked open the dirt-lined box, careful not to fingerprint—when she peered inside, her throat rushed with a melancholic regret. She should have felt relief. She should have felt satisfaction. She had been right all along. But as Saffy studied the trinkets, she felt only a long, stretching sorrow, the kind of probing sadness that seemed to seep, then absorb. It looked so small, so helpless, at the bottom of the plastic bag. Lila’s purple ring.
“That ring,” Hazel said. “He gave it to Jenny the same night I saw him digging in the yard. It’s connected to this jewelry, isn’t it?”
Saffy almost told her the truth. The trinkets, what they signified. It made a crooked sort of sense: Ansel had given Jenny the ring, then realized his own incrimination. He’d linked himself to the girls—he had to get rid of the rest. Or maybe it was something else, some psychological complexity Saffy couldn’t bother to guess. It didn’t matter. The shame burned up Saffy’s throat, and the words would not come.
She had known all along. For so many years, she had watched Jenny put on lipstick in the rearview, unload shopping bags from the trunk. She had known what Ansel was capable of, and she’d done nothing but observe. Saffy could not tell Hazel about the depth of her failure—already, Hazel looked at her with a blame that could be misread as heartbreak, particularly raw. Saffy knew this expression. Her mistakes lived between them, too permanent to acknowledge.
Saffy walked Hazel back out to her car, with thanks and a promise. She would do her best for Jenny. As the headlights bumped away, Saffy stood in the driveway, a cloud of evening bugs hovering over the pavement. The implications felt heavy, a shadow Saffy could not shake. That paralyzing what-if. What if she had never followed Ansel? If she had never meddled, if she had let him stay at the Blue House? What if Ansel’s time with the Harrisons had been simple, if his intentions had been pure all along? There was a world Saffy could not bear to consider—a world that was quickly consuming her own—in which Saffy had turned Ansel into exactly the monster she needed him to be.
* * *
They still came, the girls. They were older now, grown into themselves. They were mothers, travelers, amateur bakers. Fans of trashy television, fans of the Mets, regional women’s pinball champions. They were avid hikers and Sunday brunchers, a trio of karaoke queens, ice cream lovers, morning masturbators, hosts of legendary Halloween parties.
The possibilities stalked and haunted—the infinite number of lives they had not lived. Often, Saffy pictured Lila, stroking her swollen belly, pregnant for the third time, praying for a girl. A girl would be more vulnerable and also more cavernous. Imagine, Lila seemed to say, from the depths of Saffy’s subconscious. There were so many things a girl could be.
* * *
When Hazel’s headlights disappeared from the window, Saffy put the chicken back in the fridge and poured herself a bowl of Frosted Flakes. The trinkets sat in their box, looming from the counter. She flipped open her laptop, a beacon in the blackening kitchen. There was a flight to Houston early in the morning—she booked it quickly, then dialed Detective Rollins.
Detective Andrea Rollins was one of twelve women who made up the informal group, formed after the magazine profile published. Women in Blue: The Female Rise in Law Enforcement. Saffy had been photographed alongside Rollins and the others in an embarrassingly glossy spread—in the months that followed the article, they began a sardonic email chain where they riffed and complained, bounced the theories no one else would hear. Andrea Rollins was a senior detective with Houston homicide.
“Captain Singh,” Rollins sighed into the receiver. “It’s not looking good.”
“Who found her?”
“A nosy neighbor, just a few hours postmortem. The condo’s front door was hanging open. Neighbor saw a white pickup truck lingering on the street, CCTV turned up the license plate. By the time we tracked Ansel Packer down, he’d wiped the car seats clean and driven halfway across the state.”
“You couldn’t hold him?”
“The murder weapon is long gone. He could have ditched it anywhere. We tried fingerprinting, but he wiped down the doorknobs, everything. We threatened him pretty good. I don’t think he’ll leave the state. We’ve got his motel room under constant surveillance just in case.”
“Rollins, I’m coming down tomorrow. Packer is a suspect in an old case of mine, and I just found new evidence.”
Rollins let out a long, whistling breath. “Let me talk to my commander. I’ll see what we can do.”
“Send me your file,” Saffy said. “I want a confession.”
* * *
Detective Rollins was waiting at baggage claim—an elegant woman with curly hair, no makeup, and a ripened fatigue lurking in the round of her shoulders. As they sped down the scorching Texas highway, sirens blaring, Rollins filled Saffy in. Ansel Packer wouldn’t talk; he’d shut down completely. Her commander was skeptical but desperate. Saffy could have an hour with him.
Saffy studied the plains as they flicked by, parched and withering. A memory had arrived that morning, a relief in its innocence: Miss Gemma’s house, those oatmeal raisin cookies. Saffy recalled that day with painful lucidity—how the sugar had crumbled, white and aging in Kristen’s palm. How Ansel had believed those cookies could somehow equalize him, make up for the harm he’d done. Saffy thought about the cookies as Rollins toured her through the Houston Police Department, as she shook the commander’s hand. She thought about those cookies as she promised, once more, that New York would not interfere with their investigation, that Texas could have him, that she only wanted a confession for the girls, and their families. She thought about those cookies as she stepped into the blank, gloomy room.
