Notes on an Execution

by Danya Kukafka

You will not lay eyes on her until she appears in the witness box—seven years have passed since that Blue House summer. She must be different. But it does not matter how Blue has grown. To you, she is eternally sixteen. To you, Blue will always be that teenager at the hostess stand, thumbs poked through the holes in her sweatshirt sleeves.

There was no big event. No life-changing reveal. When you think about the Blue House now, the simplicity brings a sort of devastation: there was only comfort. There was only you, in the tall grass with Blue. She asked you questions about work, about school, about your favorite food as a child. She told you stories about her father, a man you came to know during those short bright weeks, a series of recounted memories. You could not believe that this girl was a result of the infant on the farmhouse floor, of the tragedy that had dogged you all these years. In her face, you found absolution.

The truth feels stupid, in the shadow of tonight. Heartbreakingly simple. You had not known, until the Blue House, what you were capable of becoming. It was fleeting, ethereal. It was tragically uncomplicated. At the Blue House, you were free.

Forgiveness is flimsy. Forgiveness is like a square of warm sun on the carpet. You’d like to curl up in it, feel its temporary comfort—but forgiveness will not change you. Forgiveness will not bring you back.

It’s okay to feel things, she liked to say with a laugh, and this always irritated you. But if you could go back now, you would clap your hands over hers, relish in the knobby warmth of Jenny’s fingers—the only person who dared to stand between the world and yourself. Please, you would beg. I’ll feel anything. Just show me how.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The sound of her heartbeat, miraculous in its magnification, expanding along the porcelain walls. This quiet, exquisite—this being, a wonder. Time stoppered, sublime.

She had spent her years chasing pointless violence, if only to prove it could not touch her. What a waste this hunt had been. What a disappointment. She had finally solved this epic mystery—touched the place where Ansel’s hurt had congealed—only to find his pain looked just like everyone else’s. The difference lay in what he chose to do with it.

“Saffy, wait.” Her own name was like a wound, oozing from his mouth.

From that moment forward, she would forget that tempting almost-world; there was only this, a brief and imperfect and singular reality. She would have to find a way to live it.

Blue, a girl with freckled cheeks. Blue, a name in vivid color. Blue, a feeling not quite sorrow—a blooming like grief, with its petals curled open.

The night was an open sore. The heart was an organ that beat on and on. The trees creaked their unanimous sorrow.

Give yourself a moment every day, Harmony had suggested once in group therapy. A single moment in which you are absolved of all responsibility. How much responsibility could a person hold, Lavender wondered. How much, before the overflow?

It seemed, then, that mothering did not have to be so rigid. There was no arc to it, no frame through which it ended or began. Mothering could be as simple as this: a woman and her very own blood, breathing in tandem through the darkest heart of night.

“He won’t be alone?” Lavender said. “He won’t be alone,” Blue told her. “I promise.” Lavender knew, then, that the world was a forgiving place. That every horror she had lived or caused could be balanced with such gutting kindness. It would be a tragedy, she thought—inhumane—if we were defined only by the things we left behind.

The irony: your child self led you here. So it was not you who told the story—instead, that little boy. He possessed you, in the indignity of the interrogation room, eleven years old with sorry doleful eyes. You spoke to make the little boy happy. You spoke to set him free. As you sealed your own fate, there seemed an exquisite pain in the knowledge. There would be no release.

Your mother’s breath was sour and sweet, like a dream interrupted halfway through.

It is a comfort to know that once, you were little enough to be cradled. Once, there was only wheatgrass and wonder, the earth turning ordinary beneath the train of your spine.

There would be no story, for these girls alone. There would be no vigil, no attention at all. They are relevant because of Ansel and the fascination the world has for men like him.

You don’t need to have it all. You only need to figure out how much is enough.