IT WAS TWO DAYS BEFORE Eliza found the piece of paper, tucked into the recycling bin, a drawing by Albie on the blank side. It was a sketch of Albie and Reba riding a bicycle built for two.
“Albie, why did you draw on”-she paused to think about what she wanted to call it-“Mommy’s letter?”
“I was in the TV room and I just had an idea and I didn’t want to go upstairs to get my paper and Daddy always says not to pull paper out of the tray in the computer that we should use scrap paper and I found this in his trash can-where it shouldn’t have been, anyway-and I thought it would be okay to draw on the back and then I put it in the recycling because I didn’t like it very much, the bicycle didn’t look right.”
The words came out in a rush, as if he might be punished. But, unlike Iso, there was no guile in Albie. Not yet.
“No, no, that’s okay.” She tried to think of a way to ask if he had read it, without suggesting he might have wanted to read it. “It must have seemed pretty unimportant, anyway. Just a lot of dull stuff.”
“It was in the trash,” Albie reminded her. “I thought it was a format letter.”
“A format-oh, a form letter. Yes, it is. Do you have any homework?”
“No,” Albie said with a sigh, genuinely disappointed. He wanted to be like Iso, loaded down with work in middle school, but he came home with only a few, easy assignments. “We’re working on multiplication tables and I already know my twelve times.”
“You can put a video in, then. If you like.”
Albie considered his mother’s offer, which was slightly out of the ordinary. Though Eliza didn’t limit the children’s television, she also didn’t propose it as a way to spend time. “I think I’ll play a game with Reba,” he said. He went into the long, rambling backyard. Almost too long, Eliza decided now, although the yard had been her favorite feature of the house. There were places along the back fence where Albie disappeared from her sight line. But he was with Reba, she reminded herself, and Reba was growing more confident every day, first growling at Barbara LaFortuny, now barking at the postman on his daily rounds. She had mentioned this to Peter, wondered at this clichéd verity. Why do dogs bark at postmen? “Because it works,” Peter said. “Every day, they bark, and every day, the postman retreats.”
She sat at the desk in the television room, positioning herself so she could see the yard. This letter was typed in a small, fussy font that had allowed Barbara LaFortuny to squeeze a lot of text onto the page. A form letter, Albie had thought, and he was right in a way. The writing was stilted, almost as if it had been translated from another language. Maybe Barbara LaFortuny was doing this without Walter’s knowledge. At any rate, Walter’s second letter seemed dry, airless, reminiscent of his droning recitations of what he would do to-for-certain women if they would just let him. Not sexual things, but nice things-holding open doors, sending flowers on ordinary days, remembering key anniversaries.
It would be nice to see you. Nice for me, of course, but also, I think, nice for you. I always liked you. I never hurt you, not on purpose.
Hurt, in Walter’s world, must be a euphemism for killed. He couldn’t honestly believe he hadn’t harmed her. He had said in his first letter that he wanted to make amends to her.
I think I am a different man from the one you knew. More educated. I have read quite a bit. I have thought about the person I was and I am no longer that person. I am genuinely remorseful for the pain I inflicted-on the girls, on their families. I have been here longer than anyone, by quite a bit. In fact, I am considered quite exceptional in that way. I don’t know if you kept up with me.
As if they were old friends, as if she might have searched for him on Facebook, or asked a mutual acquaintance for news of him. As if there were anything to keep up with. Getting a letter from Walter was like some exiled citizen of New Orleans getting a telegram signed “Katrina.” Hey, how are you? Do you ever think of me? Those were some crazy times, huh?
I don’t know if you have kept up with me, but there were some unusual circumstances in my trial. A juror came forward and admitted that they had discussions in the jury room that were strictly forbidden. One of the jurors was married to a lawyer, and she told everyone that I would never get the death penalty in Maryland-and I didn’t, but she couldn’t know that and shouldn’t have discussed it-so Virginia was the only place where I might reasonably be expected to be put to death. I won’t bore you with all the ins and outs of the law, but Virginia has formidable laws, and it is very hard to appeal here.
Remorseful, formidable. Walter was one of those people who believed that using big words would make him sound educated. She could imagine him poring over Reader’s Digest’s “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power.” Did they have Reader’s Digest in prison? Hey, they had Washingtonian.
Anyway, as a result of that and some other things, my appeals have dragged on much longer, with lots of ups and downs and ins and outs. I have been here twenty-two years. The next closest has been here only ten. I guess that makes me the Dean of Death Row.
Okay, she had to give Walter that: Dean of Death Row was kind of funny, and the one thing Walter had never shown any talent for was laughing at himself. He had changed a little if he could write a line like that.
Over the years, I admit I have thought about you often. When I saw your photo in the magazine, I was excited for you, but not surprised. I expected you to have the kind of life where you went to parties and got photographed. There was always a spark to you.
A spark, but not a shine. She remembered his truck slowing down as he drank in the eyeful that was Holly. “Look at the shine on that girl.”
But at the risk of giving offense, I have to say, I was surprised to hear from Barbara-she’s very good at research-that you have chosen not to have a career. Of course, I hold motherhood in the highest esteem and, if things had been different for me, I probably would be grateful if my own wife chose to put family first. But it’s not the future I envisioned for you.
With those words, that paragraph, Walter had given something far greater than offense. Hands shaking, Eliza fed the sheaf of paper into the shredder by Peter’s desk, facedown, so the image she saw sliding into the machine’s teeth was Albie and Reba on their bicycle built for two. Walter never touched this piece of paper, she reminded herself. He had dictated these words to Barbara. Perhaps these weren’t even his words, she thought. For all she knew, Barbara LaFortuny had created this entire drama. But, no, that was Walter’s voice, odd as it sounded this time.
Her paranoia far from abated, she emptied the shredder’s canister directly into the trash and then took the trash out to the garage, although shredded paper could go into the single-stream recycling bins provided by the county. If she could, she would have driven the garbage to the local dump, or burned it in a bon-fire on her lawn, although bonfires were illegal.
But even if she could have watched Walter’s words blacken and disappear in leaping flames, she could not erase the knowledge that she should have sussed out the moment she saw Barbara LaFortuny’s sinister little car following her down the street. Walter not only had learned where she lived, and what her husband did, and what she looked like. He knew she had children. He knew she had children and-far more crucial-he wanted her to be aware that he had that knowledge.
He wanted something from her. A visit, a call. He wanted something, and if she didn’t submit, he would find a way to use Iso and Albie to get it.