“The Jackson case,” Saffy says to Corinne. A feeling like hope pricks the base of her throat.
Saffy keeps her files stacked on the desk. They waver in piles, messy reminders—when she leans back in the rolling chair, shaking her computer’s mouse awake, the white light is comforting, an accusation she knows intimately.
The Jackson case waits, impatient, on her keyboard.
In the photo clipped to the top of the report, Tanisha Jackson is smiling. She is fourteen, her hair in braids, purple beads dangling. She stands in an overgrown backyard—elbows jostle for paper plates in the background. Tanisha has been missing for six days. They have a few promising leads: a teacher at her middle school with a sketchy alibi, a strange man with a scar on his cheek, passing through town. It is a matter, now, of sifting through facts until the truth comes winking to the surface, like gold in a pan. She studies the freckles that span Tanisha’s cheeks—Saffy believes that Tanisha is still alive. That vitality is possible even after trauma, that the path does not always lead to devastation. That not every girl must become a Girl.
The minutes stretch, blinking into hours. Saffy jots down notes, chips at the information. She will sit here until dawn. She will sit here until something shakes loose. She will sit here.
Hazel
Now
Hazel stands at the edge of the motel pool. The pool is drained and full of dead leaves, a smattering of plastic lawn chairs lying haphazard around the perimeter.
Hazel’s mother appears, fumbling with the key to her room. She has dressed up for the occasion. She wears a pantsuit dug straight out of the eighties, the shoulders too wide for her shrinking frame. She edges around the derelict swimming pool in a pair of chunky black pumps. As her mother comes closer, Hazel feels a mild suffocation—it could be the humidity, or that ill-fitting suit, or the thing her mother’s eyes do when they first catch sight of Hazel. They snag, widen. A brief flicker of hope cools into disappointment. In that bottomless millisecond, her mother sees two daughters. Hazel is always the wrong one.
A beige sedan pulls into the motel parking lot, and a woman with a haircut like a poodle approaches them. Linda, she says, as she shakes their hands, her French manicure crisp and bawdy. Linda is a representative from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Victim Services—she will drive them to the prison, but first, they have paperwork to review.
For months, Hazel’s mother has been feigning excitement. I can’t sleep, Hazel, not until I watch him fry. It has been seven years since Jenny’s death. Their father died of a heart attack just six months later, and her mother often refers to them as a unit, like they are together by choice, simply living elsewhere. They’ll be glad to hear it, she muttered, when Ansel’s sentence rippled through the courtroom. But it appears her mother’s bravado has evaporated—as Linda sits them down around a water-stained table, as she fans out the stack of paperwork, Hazel’s mother looks like she might blow away in the wind.
Linda reviews each page slowly. A description of the offender’s crime—As if we forgot, Hazel nearly spits—and an overview of the execution process. The evening’s schedule, like they are attending the theater. Ansel has invited two witnesses: his lawyer, and a name Hazel has never heard before. Beatrice Harrison.
What is the point of all this? Hazel wants to ask. Ostensibly, today is occurring for her own benefit. For Jenny, for their family, for some twisted form of recompense. But it feels backward. Almost like a gift to Ansel.
He gets the attention. He gets the media, the discourse, the carefully regulated procedure. Real punishment would look different, Hazel knows—like a lonely, epic nothing. A life sentence in a men’s prison, the years rotting as they pass. The long forgetting of his name. A heart attack or a slip in the shower, the sort of faceless death he deserves. Instead, Ansel has been given this noble sacrifice. Martyr status. Hazel feels guilty, complicit in the process. She sees the constant stream of Black men on the evening news, shot by police as they’re stopped for broken taillights, hauled into prison for carrying a pocketful of weed, and she tries feebly to teach her children about inequity, about institutional prejudice, about the poisonous history of this country’s justice system. She makes cardboard signs and marches through Burlington’s downtown, chanting for equality. She repeats these phrases to Alma, even as she knows: it is a privilege, to stand in front of the cameras. It is a privilege to be seen, to speak your last words into a microphone. Ansel gets the glorified title of serial killer, a phrase that seems to inspire a bizarre, primitive lust. Books and documentaries and dark tunnels on the internet. Crowds of women, captivated.