“When is it happening?” Lavender asked, choking a bit. “The execution?”
“Next month,” Blue said. “We’ve kept in touch a bit. He asked me to witness.”
“Will you go?”
“I think so,” Blue said. She glanced around the dining room, the tables streaked with bleach, the looming chairs. She seemed to ponder. “I wrote back last week. I told him yes.”
“Why?” Lavender asked.
“I only knew the good person,” Blue said. “The person he could have been. Those other universes—I guess I want to honor them.”
“That’s generous,” Lavender said.
Blue only shrugged. “He’s family. Someone should be there, I think.”
“Wait, I’m sorry,” Lavender said. A sudden suffocation. “Don’t tell me any more. I don’t want to know the date. I don’t want to be waiting.”
Lavender reached into the pocket of her sweater: it was there like always, that tiny weight. In the yeasty dim, her mother’s locket looked shabby. Decrepit. In a matter of hours, Lavender would be home. She would let this quell, then fade. She would sink back into her days with Sunshine, and she would not ask Blue for any more details—Lavender would do the only thing possible to ensure her own survival. She would refuse to take custody.
“Will you take this with you?” Lavender asked.
Blue reached for the locket. She clasped it easy around her neck, the chain glistening along her collarbone. It was like sinking backward in time, Lavender thought. Like looking in a mirror at a younger self, glittering, golden. So blessedly unbroken.
“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.
18 Minutes
Every second is a year. Every second is your failure, every second is your lifeline. Every second goes to waste.
*
When you think of your confession now, you feel a burning incredulity—you cannot believe you said those things aloud.
Your lawyer tried vaguely to argue coercion, but your confession felt more physiological than that. A force, expelled. Saffron Singh was a bridge. A line drawn, an arrow pointed. When she took the pearl bracelet out of its evidence bag, when she slid the beaded barrette across the table, she took you back to those nights on the forest floor. Back to the Girls. Throughout those long teenage months, you carried the jewelry with you, loose in your pockets or on the dashboard of your car. It calmed you. The day you gave Jenny that ring—a thoughtless whim—you’d buried the rest in a panic. It was a shock to see those trinkets again, laid out like cadavers on a table.
Then, the song. Your old favorite. You remembered a fox, half decomposed. 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.
*
You have asked the chaplain not to return. You will see him in the execution room, and you cannot bear to spend your last sixteen minutes looking at his droopy, benevolent face. Alone, you pull your Theory from the floor. Gritty with dust, you reassemble the manuscript page by page—it looks unfinished in your hands, a disconnected series of digressions.
You wanted to talk about good and evil. You wanted to talk about the spectrum of morality. You wanted to talk, and you wanted someone to listen. You think of the men back at Polunsky—their hopeful chess moves, their hoarded photos, their sobs and moans in the middle of the night. A wash of embarrassment roils over you: Your Theory was supposed to make you different. It was supposed to make you special, better, more.
Now, the irony feels intolerably sharp. If you believe in the multiverse, you have to look at this:
You are seventeen years old, at the end of a long driveway. The first Girl appears, a doe in your headlights. You ease on the brakes, open the door. Do you need a ride? You wait at the curb until she’s safely inside. You are seventeen years old, sitting in that diner booth, nursing one last cup of coffee, working up the nerve to ask the waitress for her number. You are seventeen years old, in the crowd at that concert—when the last Girl offers you a cigarette, you take it. You smoke it down to the butt. You thank her. You go home.