“You can’t be serious! I’d be one of the last people he’d want to see.”
Bill removes my hand deliberately. He might as well have shoved me down.
“It isn’t my idea,” he says. “It’s his.”
“Doesn’t Terrell… hate me?”
“Terrell is not a hater, Tessa. Not bitter. He’s one of the most remarkable men I’ve ever met. He believes you have it the worst. For a long time, he said he could hear your weeping at night over the other sounds of Death Row. He says a prayer for you before he goes to sleep. He’s told me not to push you.”
Terrell has heard me crying on Death Row. I’m keeping him awake. I’m an echo in his head, like the Susans are in mine.
“Why in the hell didn’t you tell me this before?”
“There’s no human touch. Can you imagine that? Twenty-three hours a day in a tiny cage with a narrow slot for food. A tiny Plexiglas window that’s so high he has to ball up his mattress and stand on it to see out, for a fuzzy view of nothing. One hour a day to briskly walk around another small cage for exercise. Every second to think about dying. You know what he says is the worst part? More than the sounds of men screaming, or trying to choke themselves, or arguing over imaginary chess games, or incessantly tapping typewriters? The smell. The stench of fear and hopelessness oozing from five hundred men. Terrell never takes deep breaths on Death Row. He thinks he might suffocate or go insane if he does. I can’t swig a deep breath without thinking of Terrell. Why didn’t I tell you before, Tessa? Because you have enough to carry around.”
He taps the envelope I’m holding. “Read this.”
He doesn’t wave goodbye as he backs out of the driveway.
When I walk inside, Lucas is facing the door, leaning against the back of the couch, dragging on his beer. Waiting. “What’s wrong?” He’s already restacked the piles of clothes that toppled over, a Lucas-style apology. “What did he want?”
“Nothing important. I think I’m going to take a nap before I pick up Charlie.”
“You’re sleeping with him.” A statement, not a question.
“I’m going to take a nap.” I brush past him toward the hall.
“He could be using you, Tess.”
I close my bedroom door and slide down its back to the floor. Lucas is still calling after me. Tears prick at the corners of my eyes.
I run my nail under the flap of the envelope and pull out the tidy stack of court documents.
Bill might not think Tessie’s guilty. But I know she is.
September 1995
MR. LINCOLN: Tessie, would you say that you played unusual games as a child?
MS. CARTWRIGHT: I’m not sure what you mean.
MR. LINCOLN: Let me put it this way. You have a pretty big imagination, right?
MS. CARTWRIGHT: I guess so. Yes.
MR. LINCOLN: Did you ever play a game called Anne Boleyn?
MS. CARTWRIGHT: Yes.
MR. LINCOLN: Did you ever play a game called Amelia Earhart?
MS. CARTWRIGHT: Yes.
MR. LINCOLN: Did you ever play a game called Marie Antoinette? Did you lay your head on a tree stump and let someone pretend to lop off your head?
MR. VEGA: Your honor, once more, Mr. Lincoln’s questioning is simply designed to distract the jury from anything meaningful and from the man who sits in that chair on trial.
MR. LINCOLN: On the contrary, your honor, I’m trying to help the jury understand the environment where Tessa grew up. I find that very meaningful.
MR. VEGA: In that case, let me enter into the record that Tessa also played checkers, dolls, tea party, thumb wars, and Red Rover.
JUDGE WATERS: Mr. Vega, sit down. You’re bugging me. I’ll let you know when you’re bugging me, Mr. Lincoln, but you’re close.
MR. LINCOLN: Thank you, your honor. Tessa, would you like a drink of water before we continue?
MS. CARTWRIGHT: No.
MR. LINCOLN: Did you ever play Buried Treasure?
MS. CARTWRIGHT: Yes.
MR. LINCOLN: Did you ever play Jack the Ripper?
MR. VEGA: Your honor…
MS. CARTWRIGHT: Yes. No. We started the game but I didn’t like it.
MR. LINCOLN: We, meaning you and your best friend, Lydia Bell, whom you mentioned earlier?
MS. CARTWRIGHT: Yes. And my brother. And other kids in the neighborhood who were around. It was a super-hot day. A bunch of us were bored. But none of the girls wanted to be the victims after one of the boys brought out a ketchup bottle. Maybe it was Lydia. We decided to do a Kool-Aid stand instead.
MR. VEGA: Your honor, I used to dissect live tadpoles by the river when I was six.
What does that say about me? I’d like to remind him and the jury that Tessa is the victim here. It’s been a very long day for this witness already.
MR. LINCOLN: Mr. Vega, I have a really good answer for your tadpole question. But right now, I just want to note that Tessie’s childhood involved games about violent deaths, missing people, and buried objects. That art imitated life long before she was found in the grave. Why is that?
MR. VEGA: Jesus Christ, you are actually testifying. Are you calling what happened to Tessa “art”? Are you suggesting it was some kind of divine karma? You’re a son of a bitch.
JUDGE WATERS: Up here, boys.
19 days until the execution
Terrell and I are not breathing the same air. That’s the first thing I think. I wonder how many puckered lips of mothers and lovers have kissed the cloudy window that divides us.
The first thing I feel is shame. Until this moment, I’ve never really examined his face. Not in the courtroom when he was twenty feet away, not on the television when it blared our names like a celebrity marriage, not in a grainy image in the newspaper.
His eyes are bloodshot holes. His skin is shiny black paint. Pockmarked. A line drawn by a knife drizzles like milk down his chin. I stare at his scar and he stares at mine. More than a minute passes before he reaches for the phone on his side of the wall. He gestures for me to do the same.
I pick it up and press it hard against my ear so Terrell Darcy Goodwin can’t see my hand shaking. He sits in a tiny cubicle on the other side of the glass. The small vent above my head is pumping cold air and drying my throat into brittle paper.
“Billy said you’d come,” he says.
“Billy?” I croak out involuntarily.
“Yeah, he hates that. But somebody’s got to give him shit, don’t you think?”
Terrell, loosening me up. I attempt a smile.
“How did you get yours?” My fingernail raking my chin feels like the soft edge of a knife, the taunt before a killer draws blood.
“I got this scar by making the wrong friends when I was thirteen,” Terrell says easily. “I stepped off God’s path early on. Here I am.”
Two minutes in, the conversation already at God.
“Do you believe in our savior Jesus Christ?” he asks.
“Sometimes.”
“Well, Jesus and I’ve gotten real close in here. Jesus and I have plenty of time every day to chat about how I screwed up my life. How I screwed up my family’s life. My daughters, my son, my wife will all be paying the price for a night I got high again and didn’t know where I was.” His forehead is now almost touching the glass. “Look, it took guts for you to come here and we don’t have much time. I got something to say. I need to cross you off my list. You need to accept that my dying isn’t your fault. I don’t want to die being anybody’s burden, OK?”
“I shouldn’t have testified,” I protest. “I didn’t remember anything. I was just a prop. It was all hocus-pocus. The jury couldn’t look at me without seeing their daughters.”
“And the big black boogeyman who got her.” Astonishingly, he says this without rancor. “I had to let go of that years ago. It ate me alive. Every night, I hear the ones who’ve gone crazy. They chatter away to folks who aren’t there. That, or they’re so quiet for weeks you wonder if their brains just flew out of their heads and there’s a big hole there. I made up my mind not to go crazy like that. I meditate. Read the Bible and Mr. Martin Luther King. Play a lot of chess in my head. Work on my case. Write my kids.”