Ansel Packer, you repeat calmly. 999631.
Shawna’s uniform creaks as she bends to tie her shoe. The camera in the corner of your cell does not reach to the hall, and your painting is positioned perfectly. It comes in the slightest flash of white, nearly nonexistent: the flicker of paper, as Shawna’s note slips beneath the crack in your door, hiding seamlessly under the edge of your canvas.
*
Shawna believes in your innocence.
You could never do that, she whispered once, paused outside your cell on a long evening shift, shadows razoring across her cheeks. You could never.
*
She knows, of course, what they call you on 12 Building.
The Girly Killer.
The newspaper article was generous with the details: it ran after your first appeal, spreading the nickname across 12 Building like wildfire. The writer had lumped them all together, as though they were intentional, related. The Girls. The article used that word, the one you hate. Serial is something different—a label meant for men unlike you.
You could never. Shawna is certain, though you have never once claimed this for yourself. You prefer to let her talk in circles, to let the outrage take over: this is immeasurably easier than the questions. Do you feel bad? Are you sorry? You are never quite sure what this means. You feel bad, sure. More accurately, you wish you were not here. You don’t see how guilt helps anyone, but it has been the question for years now, all through your trial and your many fruitless appeals. Are you capable? they ask. Are you physically capable of feeling empathy?
You tuck Shawna’s note into the waistband of your pants and gaze up at the elephant on the ceiling. The elephant has a psychopath smile, alive in one moment, just an impression in the next. 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 is the story you know about yourself. There is the story everyone knows. As you pull Shawna’s note from your waistband, you wonder how that story became so distorted—how only your weakest moments matter now, how they expanded to devour everything else.
You hunch over, so the camera placed in the corner of your cell cannot catch the note. There, in Shawna’s trembly handwriting. Three words:
I did it.
Hope rushes in, a blinding white. It sears through every inch of you as the world cracks open, bleeds. You have eleven hours and sixteen minutes left, or maybe, with Shawna’s promise, you have a lifetime.
*
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.
Lavender
1973
If there was a before, it began with Lavender.
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.
*
“Tell me a story,” Lavender gasped, between contractions.
She was splayed out in the barn, on a blanket propped against a stack of hay. Johnny crouched over her with a lantern, his breath curling white in the frigid late-winter air.
“The baby,” Lavender said. “Tell me about the baby.”
It was becoming increasingly clear that the baby might actually kill her. Every contraction proved how horribly unprepared they were—despite all Johnny’s bravado and the passages he quoted from the medical textbooks his grandfather had left, neither of them knew much about childbirth. The books hadn’t mentioned this. The blood, apocalyptic. The pain, white-hot and sweat-soaked.
“He’ll grow up to be president,” Johnny said. “He’ll be a king.”
Lavender groaned. She could feel the baby’s head tearing at her skin, a grapefruit, half exited.
“You don’t know it’s a boy,” she panted. “Besides, there’s no such thing as kings anymore.”
She pushed until the walls of the barn went crimson. Her body felt full of glass shards—a jagged, inner twisting. When the next contraction came, Lavender sank into it, her throat breaking into a guttural scream.
“He’ll be good,” Johnny said. “He’ll be brave, and smart, and powerful. I can see his head, Lav, you have to keep pushing.”