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you have always believed that pity is the most offensive of feelings. Pity is destruction wearing a mask of sympathy. Pity strips you bare. Pity shrinks.
You are good at ignoring doubt, at focusing instead on anticipation, which feels like a physical creature resting in your lap.
You have been in this cell on A-Pod since you got your official date, and sometime before that, another inmate etched the words painstakingly into the concrete: We Are All Rabid. You smile every time you see it—it is so bizarre, so nonsensical, so unlike the other prison graffiti (mostly scripture and genitalia). There is a quiet truth to it that you would almost call hilarious, given the context.
You peel the tape from the corner of the photograph, careful not to rip. You sit on the bed, holding the photograph and the letter in your lap. Yes, you think. We Are All Rabid.
You do not know what the feeling is, when you look at the photograph. It cannot be love, because you have been tested—you don’t laugh at the right moments or flinch at the wrong ones. There are statistics. Something about emotional recognition, sympathy, pain. You don’t understand the kind of love you read about in books, and you like movies mostly for the study of them, the mastery of faces twisting into other faces. Anyway, no matter what they say you are capable of—it cannot be love, that would be neurologically impossible—looking at the photograph of the Blue House brings you there. To the
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Tell me what you’re feeling, Jenny would say. Give me your whole. But Shawna revels in the distance, the intoxicating unknown that sits always between two people. And now, she perches at the edge of the gap. It takes every ounce of self-control not to look up and confirm what you know: Shawna belongs to you.
The whole question is absurd, nearly lunatic—there is no line you cross over, no alarm you set off, no scale to weigh. The question, you have finally deduced, is not really about empathy. The question is how you can possibly be human. And yet. You lift your thumb to the light, examine it close. In that same fingerprint, it is inarguable and insistent: the faint, mouse-like tick of your own pulse.
There must have been a time, a reporter said to you once. A time before you were like this. If there ever was a time, you would like to remember it.
She was seventeen years old. She knew what it meant, to bring life into the world. The gravity. She knew that love could swaddle you tight, and also bruise. But until the time came, Lavender did not understand what it meant to walk away from a thing she’d grown from her own insides. * * *
Because Lavender knew, from the second she saw the baby, that she did not want this kind of love. It was too much. Too hungry. But it had been growing inside her all these months, and now it had fingers, toes. It was gulping oxygen.
This was how it always went, wasn’t it? All those women who’d come before her, in caves and tents and covered wagons. It was a wonder how she’d never given much thought to the ancient, timeless fact. Motherhood was, by nature, a thing you did alone.
I keep thinking about summer, when we hiked to the edge of the property, where the raspberries grow wild. Johnny fed the berries right into Ansel’s mouth, and Ansel’s hands stained red with the juice. They looked like a postcard of a happy family, and I felt so outside of myself, watching them play. Like a bird perched on a distant branch. Or one of Johnny’s rabbits, strung up by the legs.
It was like she’d held her own desire too long in the palm of her hand and it was now just an object, devoid of meaning, useless and taking up space.
I wonder about choices. How we resent them, and how we regret them—even as we watch them grow.
It was different this time—like she was not inside her own body, like the pain had consumed her and she was only there to spectate. Halfway through, Ansel flung himself over Lavender, his sticky palm pressed to her forehead with worry, and Lavender felt a primal bursting that brought her briefly back into herself: a swell of love so powerful and doomed, she was not sure she’d live through it.
She could not look at either of her sick, sniffling children. Ansel, with his strange monster face. The new baby, a bundle of warm skin that she couldn’t bear to touch without feeling like she’d catch some disease. What disease, she didn’t know. But it would trap her here.
Before Johnny lunged, she expected some nightmare version of him, a person she’d never seen. But no. In the milliseconds before the blow, Lavender looked at the same rugged man she had always known, and she thought, with a clarity that bordered on sympathy: You could have been anything, Johnny. You could have been anything but this.
Lavender huddled in the bed with the boys, vigilant and alert. She nursed the baby until he fell asleep—when Ansel withered hungry, Lavender shook her head in apology. Not enough milk. Ansel peered up at her with spindly wet lashes, the hollows around his eye sockets like those of a frightened little ghost.
The breeze was a gasp on her cheeks, the dewy air like a new kind of promise. Beyond, the fields were a morning yellow. Beyond, beyond. Beyond was a place Lavender could hardly remember. Beyond this room, beyond this house, there were mothers who cooked pot roast for their children. There were little boys who watched cartoons on Saturday mornings, innocent and unafraid. Buttered popcorn at the movie theater, boxed cereal, real toothpaste. There were televisions and newspapers and radios, schools and bars and coffee shops. Before she moved to the farmhouse, a man had landed on the moon—for all
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Lavender could not fathom forgiveness. But she would do this one thing—for the blue sunrise, that tantalizing beyond. For the world outside, which she was starting to fear her children would never see.
The steering wheel seemed so trivial, miniature in Johnny’s hands—they were going at least eighty miles an hour. She could have done it, veered them into oncoming traffic, or fast into the ditch on the side of the highway. Vaguely, this had been the idea. But the air smelled so fresh, the radio was humming, and it was a surprise when Lavender realized that she did not want to die.
The knot of his spine, the breadth of his shoulders, the divot of tenderness between his ear and his skull. The difference, she thought, was as small as that. A patch of vulnerable skin. She wished that patch was the entirety of Johnny—it would have been so much easier, if he had just been good.
The fear raced, urgent. The fear had lived inside her so long, it had distilled into a new force entirely. It jumped, acidic, fresh and electrifying.
No little trinket—and no amount of love—could keep anyone safe.
If nothing else, Lavender had given them the gift of possibility. Her boys could touch it with their hands, the wide expanse of the world. Someday, Lavender hoped, her children would wade into the ocean. When they did, they would taste her. Lavender’s love, in a mouthful of salt.
Despite it all, you are thankful for the memory—for the sight of the sea, tumbling in the distance. It is possible, looking at the ocean, to believe it never ends.
You’ll never forget the look on Tina’s face when she saw what you had done. She met you at the Houston jail, before the trial and the sentencing. One of Tina’s assistants handed her the folder—the crime scene photos. Her face went ashen, and her gaze liquified into a shocked sympathy. You have since become accustomed to this display. You saw it on the judge. You saw it on the jury. You saw it on the courtroom audience, when the prosecution blew up those photos on a projector, magnifying the details to ten times their size. You don’t like to look at the photos. They are not how you remember it.
Sometimes you stand in front of the metal mirror in your dark white cell and you practice this face, twisting your own brow into a furrow, your eyes melting and sad. The look is horror. It is confusion. It is the worst kind of pity, a pity that despises itself.
When you swallow down the burst of laugh, it sears like smoke held too long in your throat.
No one is all bad. No one is all good. We live as equals in the murky gray between.
Your mother is the part of the Theory you have not yet figured out. We are all bad, and we are all good, and no one should be condemned to one or the other. But if good can be tainted with the bad that comes after, then where do you place it? How do you count it? How much is it really worth?
In most of your memories, your mother is gone. And before she is gone, always, she is leaving.
As the baby’s screaming begins—as your hands clap fruitlessly over your ears—you make the promise. It will not end here.
The first time you hurt someone, you were eleven years old, and you did not know the difference between pain and wanting.
Felix culpa. Saffy did not know what these words meant, but her mother had written them, and so she loved them.
She watched Ansel pick through the brambles, so studious and intent, and she thought how sad it was that a single bad thing could turn you into a story, a matter to be whispered about.
Love was a thing that could move you and change you, Saffy knew, a mysterious force that made you different and better and warmer and whole. A delicious smell. Familiar, untraceable. It made her hungry.
Why did he leave? Saffy had asked, careful, like her mother was a bird she might frighten from a branch.
Do you remember why I named you Saffron? It’s a flower. The most rare and precious flower, her mother said. The kind of flower that could start a war.
You’ll know it when you feel it, her mother said then. The right kind of love will eat you alive.
There was a fact about life that Saffy hated, then: how it took the bad things and settled them inside you. It didn’t matter that you were a person, and it didn’t matter what you wanted. The bad lived insistently in your blood, a part of you always, calling out like a magnet to the horror of the world.
We take care of ourselves, her mother had repeated. That face was Saffy’s favorite of her mother’s. Jaw set. Eyes like steel. Me and you, Saffy girl, her mother would say. We are warriors.
For the first time, Saffy hated herself. She hated herself with a profound sense of awareness, less like a girl and more like a woman—with fury, desperation, shame. It was the sort of hatred that lurked in the shallows, gnashing its jaws, the ugliest thing about being herself. She reached, cradling, and welcomed it in.
The screaming drowns. The screaming consumes. The screaming is like a flood—once it begins, you are stuck here, waiting in the ruin. The baby shrieks, blinded by some pain you cannot soothe, and time is a standstill, the terror painted directly across the walls of your skull. You know, from a lifetime of this place, that the screaming is a sound no one else can hear, that it is meant for you alone. Baby Packer has something to tell you, but he is too little for words.
What was going through your head? You genuinely don’t have an answer. You would explain it, if you could. Have you ever hurt so badly, you wish you could ask. Have you ever hurt so badly you lose every last trace of yourself?
Within the silver frame, Hazel and her sister were two little specks of molecule, growing together in this dark and primitive space. Her mother loved that photo, because you could see it even then, before either of them had ears or toenails. Two tiny webbed hands reaching out to each other, like deep-sea creatures in silent conversation. In every important second of Hazel’s life, she could hear the phantom sound of her sister’s heartbeat layered over her own, as if they were still suspended together in the womb. It was a familiar syncopation. The most comforting thump. And no matter how far
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Hazel was her real self when she danced—but she was more than that. She was feather, she was breath. She was an illusion, a mirage that answered only to music and memory. She flew.
There Jenny was, at the bottom of the stairs. When Hazel looked up from the complicated math of her crutches, Jenny was grinning, soft and expectant, those same sister eyes, that same sister mouth, Jenny’s whole sister self, waiting.
The awkwardness lingered in the air, mixed with something else. Something Hazel recognized, from all those years onstage—how the audience used to need her. Ansel had them hooked. Mesmerized.
There is no such thing as good or evil. Instead, we have memory and choice, and we all live at various points on the spectrum between. We are created by what has happened to us, combined with who we choose to be.
