As Hazel helps her mother into Linda’s car, which smells like saltine crackers and air freshener, she feels a magnified sense of helplessness. The dread curls in her gut, a dozing animal.
*
The building is made of stately red brick. Colonial, grandiose. It looks to Hazel like a courthouse or a suburban high school. She helps her mother through the imposing front door.
They are greeted by a somber crowd. The trauma support team, the emergency action staff, titles that flow through Hazel’s consciousness like water. The warden is square and stocky, his handshake clammy.
“How was your trip?” he asks.
Hazel’s throat is empty of answer. He gestures to the tub where she should place her shoes—the concrete is frigid beneath Hazel’s bare feet. The prison smells like linoleum, like dust and metal. They pass through the security scanner, Hazel’s mother’s hair puffing out of its bun in a wiry frizz, then down the hall to the support room, a dismal parade. Brightly colored office chairs surround a sterile wooden table.
“Water?” the warden asks. “Coffee?”
Hazel shakes her head no. The room echoes when the warden is gone, exaggerating her mother’s every shuddering breath. It will be okay, Hazel wants to reassure. It will be better, once all this is over. But such promises would feel false coming from her mouth, so Hazel only listens to the buzz of the overhead lights, the prison clatter muted through the heavy steel door. She hears the faint din of men. A far whoop, a husky laugh. She waits.
*
Alma woke up early this morning, to say goodbye before the flight. She padded downstairs in her pajamas and perched at the kitchen island while Hazel prepared her coffee for the car. Alma’s cheeks were imprinted in the pattern of her pillow, her dark hair pulled into a sloppy bun, tangled and spilling down her shoulders. Alma is fourteen now—she has a mouth full of shiny braces and constantly adjusts the straps of the training bra she doesn’t need. Before school, she spends twenty minutes in the bathroom trying to wrangle herself into some unnatural shape. When she laughs, her hand flies self-conscious to her mouth.
Are you going to be okay, Mom? Alma asked, handing over the sugar bowl.
I’ll be fine, sweetpea.
Aunt Jenny would be proud. Alma reddened, embarrassed by her own sentimentality. She’d be proud of how brave you are.
Hazel cupped her daughter’s cheek.
Hazel does not know if Jenny would be proud. In one version of the universe, Jenny’s grin is sardonic. Classic Hazel, Jenny says, with her signature eye roll. Making this all about you. In another, Jenny is relieved to have Hazel there, a body double, a stand-in duplicate. In yet another, Jenny is still alive, and she and Hazel wait in line for coffee—when Jenny turns to take Hazel’s order, she looks very much like someone new.
*
The warden returns to the conference room, followed by two men in button-up shirts. They take seats in the far corner, nodding vaguely in acknowledgment—they wear lanyards clipped to plastic badges.
Reporters.
Hazel does not like journalists. In the weeks after Ansel’s confession, they parked their vans on her curb, lingered on her lawn. They showed up at Luis’s office, at the ballet studio, and they even went once to Mattie’s daycare, cameras hefted onto their shoulders. They cornered Hazel outside the playground—Go away, she shrieked, as the other mothers ushered their toddlers away. Please, just leave us alone.
It has never been about Jenny. Jenny is not interesting. Men kill their ex-wives all the time.
It’s about the other girls.
The question, of course, is why. This is the reason the reporters still appear, shoving microphones in Hazel’s face, the reason Ansel is granted space in the newspapers. He is captivating. Fascinating. A national phenomenon. It is shocking—intriguing, someone told her once—to be so unpredictably bad. Why did he kill those girls as a teenager, then no one until Jenny, twenty years later? Why them? Why then?
Hazel cannot fathom a less interesting question. Of course, she is sorry for those girls, for their families. But the attention, that big question: it baffles her. It does not matter how Ansel felt. His pain is irrelevant, beyond the horizon of her consideration. It does not matter why he killed those girls, or Jenny. Hazel believes that a person can be evil, and nothing more. There are millions of men out there who want to hurt women—people seem to think that Ansel Packer is extraordinary, because he actually did.
*
The bathroom is lit fluorescent green.
Hazel curls over the sink, wheezing. She exhales, waits for the panic to slink away. The bathroom accosts. A mistake—she should not have come in here. Today, the mirror will not be kind.