He remembered cooking the first trout he had caught. He liked it with maple syrup, because it reminded him of campouts with his mom, on the shore of the river. She was the one who’d taught him how to fish. Charise liked the woods. She liked nature. She often went into the woods, acting like there was something there for her to find, though Grandfather had warned her to be careful.
Restless, Mitchell got up. For the first time in many years, the cell felt too small: He was aware of its edges. Wicked Willy, counting days till his death like they were cards in a deck, waiting for the joker to turn up, watched Mitchell carefully. Sometimes men went crazy in the last days. Mitchell would soon be placed on death watch, with two officers assigned to monitor him around the clock. Sometimes men tried to cheat the executioner. They tried to kill themselves, and this the state did not like. They wanted that power. They got to be gods in that moment.
“You okay, son?” Wicked Willy called. Usually the men on death row didn’t talk to each other. This was not the place for friendship. You didn’t make friends with dying men.
“I’m fine,” Mitchell said tersely.
Wicked Willy fell silent. They could hear an officer approaching, his rubber-soled shoes soft against the floor. He had heard the voices. Talking was not allowed.
The officer stopped outside Mitchell’s cell. He looked at Mitchell with some sympathy: It wouldn’t be long now, and Mitchell had been an all right guy. For a killer. It was a truism of the job, which the officers repeated to each other ad nauseam: Never forget who you are dealing with. One wrong move—a handshake through cell bars, for instance—and you could pay a very steep price. He had seen guards almost killed by a few inmates.
“You need something, Mitchell?” the officer asked, paying him the courtesy of using his name.
“Can I go outside?” Mitchell joked, but it was not a joke. He had not asked anything like this in ten years. He had been a compliant animal, and now he was bristling with fear and restless anger.
“Ha. No.”
“I want to go outside before I die!”
“Come on now.”
Wicked Willy came to the bars of his cell, too, and the officer was aware that he was between the two men. Even though they could not reach him, he stepped out of range. You just never knew. Sometimes men threw things from their cells. Shit and piss were not the worst of them. One guy had made a slingshot from a sheet and used it to drill a bolt from his cot at an officer. That officer had lost his eye.
“You don’t got much longer,” the officer said, trying to be nice. “Just hold on.”
“To what?” Mitchell asked.
He sat down on his narrow bunk, then got back up.
“I want the exonerator,” he said.
33.
“You don’t remember the man at all?” Ruby asked Mitchell, behind the smeared glass with its small round hole. She had shown up at dawn, and he had looked relieved to see her—relieved and almost shocked, as if he had wished her here.
The glass had fingerprints on it, as if men were pleading, and behind Mitchell, the chipped visiting room walls were carved with names of men who had been here before. She was pretty sure she saw blood, too.
He shook his head. Even if he somehow got out, she knew that the path from here to a future was more than rocky. It was like walking a tightrope across black space. That’s how one man she had exonerated explained it to her. One minute you are facing death in a way few people do: You know the very minute you will die. The next you are out, breathing fresh air. Only you don’t know if someone will come back and steal that air from you again. Every police car in your rearview window. Every knock on the door. Every voice behind you in the street...
Three days now, she thought.
She studied the man in front of her. Mitchell had passed through the death contemplation and was now in the death panic. It was a deep, existential panic. He looked unreal because he was facing the unreal.
“I don’t remember anything from that night,” Mitchell said, trying to collect himself and answer the question. “I never have. I remember going inside the bar, and drinking. Talking to people.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. It’s never made sense. It’s like I got amnesia.”
Ruby considered. Usually if someone had a blackout, their memory loss started with the drunkenness. But Mitchell seemed to be unable to remember what had happened before he got intoxicated.
Unless he was drunk by the time the man sat next to him. Which was certainly a possibility. It was also possible that the trauma of being beaten had wiped his memory clean.
“What can you tell me about the bar?” she asked. Sometimes this helped.
“Let’s see. It was close to the factory.” He looked pained, like he had spent many a long night on his bunk considering this. “Pinball machine or two. A jukebox, I think. Nice bartender, but I can’t tell you what he looked like. You know what I do remember? A song that was playing. It was that song by Steve Winwood. ‘Higher Love.’”
She heard it, then, in her head. They both heard it.
