1.
My grandfather had a long white bone he called the talking bone. The rule was, if the talking bone came out, you had to be quiet so the bone could talk. I was scared of that talking bone. The scratches on its surface spoke of the crime of life. Its fat, knobbed ends told me it had once occupied a human, like me.
In later years, I would question that bone.Where did you come from, bone? Why were you in my house, as modest as it is, with the dusty vines climbing the cabin window, the view of the mighty river outside our door? Why did my grandfather clutch you when he could not sleep, and why is it that you spoke to him and not to me?
But now, in this place called, quite simply and perfectly, the death house, I am starting to understand the talking bone. It is talking to me, finally. After all these years. Across the states and miles and endless winds. The talking bone has something to say.
2.
The Georgia heat hummed. That and the sound of the cicadas filling the air made her bones vibrate. The window of the rental car reflected a slender woman with dark hair, pale skin, and naturally dark lips. She had locked her valuables in the car, knowing they’d be safer there.
She turned to face it.
The death house, it was called. Death row.
She had arrived before dawn into a muggy Atlanta, and driven an hour to this small town called Jackson. Steam uncoiled from the ground, and the morning mist touched the concrete walls of the death house, with its locking metal door. There were no windows.
All prisons were the same, she thought. There might be small differences in the degree of decay, or in the exact shade of institutional white the walls were painted. She had noticed that the eggshell white varied by region, but maybe that was just the light. Some prisons were in the wilderness and others in a desert, many were in small towns, but all were places where we remaindered the dead and banished the rest, hoping they would die, too.
She walked up the sloping steps, worn down by so many heavy boots. Inside were the usual metal detector and correctional staff. These, too, didn’t vary much. They were meaty men with tattooed arms and women with sunburned faces. They thumbed through the folder she had brought, and examined her license.
In the concrete visiting room, her client waited behind a shield ofsafety glass. There was a small round hole through which she could talk, and she took the solitary seat, leaning close to the hole. But not too close.
“My name is Ruby Spencer,” she said by way of introduction. “Your attorney sent me.”
Mitchell Brown was an ethereal-looking man with light brown skin and soft brown eyes. His file said he’d had a birthday recently: He was thirty-two, but death row had a way of blurring faces, turning them into water that was timeless.
He had been on death row for ten years. Ten years might not sound like a lot to some, but it was an eternity in these small concrete rooms. It was the marvel of her life, how people survived what could not be survived.
Once, Ruby had crossed the country to visit a man waiting for death in a Texas prison, and the first thing he said when she entered wasYou brought the outside in.For twenty years, that man had convinced himself there was no outside: He was already in the coffin. But there she was, smelling like wind and rain.
“You’re the one they call the exonerator,” Mitchell said.
She was relieved that he had spoken. Some death row inmates became silent by this point. They couldn’t reconcile a world that would execute an innocent person, so they lost all hope for humankind, including themselves. But most people couldn’t give up hope. She knew that well herself. Even when it made no sense—even when logic argued against it, and your own spirit rebelled, you still hoped.
“Do you want me to try?”
“Yes.”
Mitchell Brown’s case had wound down to its bitter end. His attorneys had exhausted all appeals, post-conviction relief, and habeas. All that was left was a governor who never granted clemency and a supremecourt that seemed to take perverse pleasure in turning down last-minute appeals, even when there were questions of innocence.
Which Mitchell’s attorney said there were.
Ruby glanced at her watch. She was allowed thirty minutes. Time was already eating up the future, promising Mitchell a visit to the plastic-covered gurney on the other side. Ruby was excruciatingly aware of time—how it passed so easily, and how our decisions passed with it.
She opened the folder. The attorney had sent her the discovery the previous night, before she caught her flight. There were over two thousand people on death row across the United States, and she couldn’t possibly keep up with them all.
“I read as much as I could on the plane,” she said, turning to a defense report. “Looks like you had some help—after the trial. Good appellate attorney. The capital unit took over.”
What she was saying, of course, was that there was not much she could do. Mitchell’s case had already been handled: Attorneys had already turned over every stone, hunted down every clue.
“Yeah. Some nice people,” he said.
What he meant was that they came and went, and no matter how much they cared, they disappeared. The same would be true of her.
Unless she saved him, which she doubted she could.
She glanced up from the folder.
