Poor sensitive girl. If she had such a delicate character, she shouldn’t have murdered two people. And Sam sent not a word about him and me. How I reacted then confuses me now.
I would learn later, from Claire through my mother, that Felicity was adjusting. She still would not accept visits, even from Sam, but spoke to him on the phone a few times. She sometimes answered Claire’s letters. It would take many months, and so many things would have happened by then, before Claire would tell me in passing that Felicity had completed her degree in biology, testing out of many of the requirements. She’d started a book group for her fellow prisoners and helped several women complete their GEDs. Through a prison outreach program from the UW School of Medicine, she traveled to a clinic to have laser surgery so she no longer required eyeglasses. She became a vegetarian, ate her meals alone, always, and, as time wore on, she was allowed to eat in her cell or in the library. She was always in an individual cell.She found comfort in prayer, spending an hour every evening in the chapel. Even the violent offenders and the stone crazies were compelled to respect her beauty and her reticence, Claire told me. She was never hurt or assaulted. Felicity never told me any of these things, and by the time I learned them, they no longer really signified anything, in Felicity’s life or mine.
At first, when I was trying to forget her, I had to contend with the fact that, while Felicity might be out of my life, it would take time to excavate her from my psyche. My obsession with Felicity, for let’s call it what it was, had towed me through a silty strait spiked with guilt and admiration (and joy and joy). I couldn’t stop thinking of her in captivity, a bird of bright plumage in a cage.
At first, I dreamed of her every night.
Then less often.
Finally, not at all.
Then, one night, long after, when all the other shoes had dropped and my life had taken a decisive new turning, I had a vivid dream of Felicity, which would also, I would later decide, combine a kind of prophecy and a recovered memory.
She was standing outside, her arms thrust out and the sun spangling her dark hair. Around her head and along her arms, birds swirled and alighted, as if they were joyful to be near her.
At that time, I didn’t know St. Francis of Assisi from Francis Ford Coppola. So I didn’t understand until much later that this dream image of Felicity recalled the thirteenth-century Italian saint who was born the indulged son of a prosperous merchant but who grew up to be a humble friar who called all creatures his brothers and sisters. He preached even to the birds, and asked God to make him an instrument of His peace.
The next morning, I began to write to Felicity again, and I continued, every other day, a short letter or a long letter, letters she did not answer but which were not returned to me.
What should I say?I wondered.
My generation really has no idea how to write letters. There is generally no need. That was one of the things I mourned as a writer. In grad school, I’d been assigned to read the correspondence of the great children’s editor Ursula Nordstrom, who worked with authors such as E. B. White on classics likeCharlotte’s Web. Her notes to friends and business associates were so revealing, so funny and brilliant and insightful, and I knew that Nordstrom was among the last generation of devout letter writers. Of course, people talked then too, but they didn’t have the Satanic convenience of smartphones. What would anyone ever read from the most accomplished authors of my age? The collected text messages?
As time passed, and I became reconciled to the fact that this would be a one-sided effort, I began to treat the correspondence as a kind of journal—for my benefit as well as Felicity’s. I wrote to her about my life, all that I was reading, what I was writing, the people I met, and my family. I wrote to her about politics and the environment, about movies and music, about fashion. I wrote to her about things we’d done and said long ago.
Through creating those letters, I unearthed my love for her, which was never really gone. There was still so much that I would never understand, but I considered that perhaps there had been a good reason for what she had done, if she had done it at all. Since I didn’t know how to tell her that in words—and it seemed a kind of dangerous thing to write to a convicted murderer, I tried to show her. I am no artist, but (also paraphrasing St. Francis, who, unbeknownst to me, had advised doing a very few things but doing them well...) I decided to try to draw something for her. I kept working at it.
Prompted by my memory of the teenage Felicity crying as she tried to save a nest of orphaned birds, I kept at it until I could make a passable image of the humblest of all birds—a sparrow. How powerful that choice would be, how large it would loom, I had no idea.
Thirteen
Barn Swallow
Hirundo rustica.The vagabonds and acrobats of the air, barn swallows live much of their lives on the wing, drinking, feeding, courting, and even mating in midair. Aerobatic fliers, they perform twists, turns, swoops, and lunges, often just above the ground. They also face the longest journey of any bird on their annual winter sojourn from the Americas to the tropics, traveling in huge groups, up to six hundred miles a day, a pilgrimage that many say gave rise to the expression “snowbirds” to describe individuals who flee cold climates for sunny destinations. In African legend, swallows symbolize the need to start over. Shakespeare wrote that “True hope is swift, and flies with swallow’s wings.” But long before that, Aristotle warned, “One swallow does not make a summer, neither does one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.”
In the weeks after the trial, I set about making a new life for myself.
They (they, whoever they are!) say that it takes twenty-one days to get over a breakup.
I could not count the two weeks of the trial, when my guts literally rebelled every time I saw Sam. But after it was over, I tacked one of those little calendars from the bank on the wall next to my bed. I didn’t feel guilty about the tack; after all, itwas a box room and a pin hole. Then I began to mark off the days. By the time I reached sixteen, my body’s reaction to this loss had stabilized. I was no longer throwing up everything I ate. I still had fantasies in which Sam woke up and realized that he still loved me. I dreamed that he came to the door of my sister’s house with a huge bouquet of yellow roses.
He did not, of course.
With my research completed and the basic shape of the story in mind, I turned my interview notes in to the transcriber atFuchsiaso that I would be ready to write when the time came. I requested the transcripts. The trial had lasted not nearly as long as I’d expected so I still had the luxury of time and expenses. I’d always been a fast writer. The actual composing of the story would probably take no more than two weeks, perhaps less than that.
I did new kinds of research.
I looked up strategies for emotional renewal, although I’d always made fun of anything that smacked of “self-help.”
One particularly perky website suggested that the way to healing was to become your very best self. Learn new things. Develop new skills. Cultivate new sources for building your self-esteem. I’d already learned how to make a soufflé, even using Nell’s geriatric oven. I’d mastered the brown-butter chocolate chip cookies that would make me a star at any holiday gathering for the rest of my life. Joining a travel group might be something I’d consider when I was forty. A book club? That was a definite possibility; I would post something at the library and the independent bookstores. The thought of going on a dating website filled me with terror and disgust: I was still too reminded of what “dates” meant in the world of escorts.
What I did decide to do before anything else was to get in the best physical shape of my life.
Every long walk I pounded my way through would exhaustme past thinking. Every barre class I showed up for would banish Sam from my mind. I hiked for miles around Madison, circling the lake, rubbing blisters on my heels, trying to run a little and getting shin splints for my effort. I pedaled on my sister’s stationary bike and read all the books that I’d ignored when they were assigned in school. I studied the classic crime and mental health reportage of Truman Capote, Emmanuel Carrère, Calvin Trillin, Bill Lichtenstein, Joe McGinniss, and Janet Malcolm.
The reward was that I fell into bed at night and slept like a tired child. There were times when I even fell fast asleep during the day.
Despite all that exercise, I didn’t lose any weight, but I reasoned that muscle weighed more than fat, and, for the first time since I was an adolescent, I was seeing things on my body I hadn’t seen—like biceps.
