GRACE
The police took “normal” away from me the moment they came rushing into William’s hospital room. They dragged me from his crib, while my helpless baby lay hooked up, struggling to breathe, needing his mother. I had been to doctor after doctor, but no one would listen to me when I tried to tell them something wasn’t right.
“Bradshaw, your attorney is here to see you.” An unfamiliar voice barked at me through the steel door and snapped me into the present.
Tuesdays were my usual lawyer days, not Thursdays, so the news couldn’t be good. I slid the pen inside my worn leather journal and tossed it on my cot. As I stood, the shooting pain in my back reminded me I was not sleeping at the Hilton.
The stark cold walls, the constant clamor of cursing and flushing toilets wasn't at all how I pictured my life. It was a stagnant existence, every day like the one before and the one after. As unjust as I know that to be, nothing I could do will change my situation or my reputation. The latter, as crazy as it seemed, still mattered most to me even after seventeen years. I would prefer not to be remembered as the monster the local newspapers dubbed me, and especially not as a baby killer.
“Hurry up,” a new officer growled through the narrow horizontal opening in the door. “Give me both your hands.” His tone startled me, and I bit the inside corner of my lip, a nervous habit I’d tried and failed to break. This time I tasted blood.
I handled officer changes better than some on the row. Jada, I suspected, was right now sitting with her hands clasped around her legs, rocking back and forth like someone residing on a psych ward. She once told me when she was little she never knew who her “daddy” would be when she woke up in the morning. I pictured a four-year-old Jada peering around the corner in footsie pajamas, surveying the situation —praying whoever she might see at the breakfast table would be kind to her. A sanguine version in my mind, but Jada still panics, even more than the rest of us, when an untried voice gives her orders.
I placed my left arm through the slit and elevated my right shoulder a bit to get my other arm to cooperate. My limbs had gotten stiff and slow, and sitting in a cell all day didn’t help. The officer pulled my wrists together, snapping the cuffs tighter than necessary before he pushed my arms back through the hole and unlocked the cell door. “Your attorney is waiting on you.”
I avoided eye contact with him as he escorted me, kept my eyes on the floor counting the grey concrete slabs to keep calm. My count was interrupted when Roni started screaming.
“Keep it down,” the officer snapped, “or you won’t get a shower this week either.” I knew by the sharpness in his voice that he meant what he said.
“Ok, Cowboy,” Roni shouted back. “Ok.”
Cowboy spelled backwards is YOBWOC, and it stood for Young Obnoxious Bastards We Often Con, (one of the many useless things I’ve learned in prison). I don’t include myself in the “we” part of that acronym—I just do my best to get along—but Roni does. She’s the one in here I’ve tried to connect to the most, the one I’ve tried to help. Maybe it’s because she’s young enough to be my daughter, but for her own sometimes inexplicable reasons, Roni chooses to make trouble whenever she has a chance, or whenever she has no chance at all.
Only four of the seven cells in this wing of the prison were occupied on Death Row, but only outsiders called it that. Those who resided here called it Hotel Hell. On the inside, hope was something no one seemed to believe in except for me.
Mainly, I just missed the ordinary. The uncomplicated, taken-for-granted things like the sound of my husband’s house keys rattling the front door at exactly two minutes before six o’clock, or the buzzer on the duct-taped dryer door signaling a load of warm towels was ready to be folded; the gritty feel of the hot driveway on my bare feet as I walked to the mail box to raise the rusted red flag, or sitting in my cold minivan making sure the windows defrosted before driving my daughter to school. Or burying my face in the space between William’s chest and his rolled chin just to smell his sweet baby-powdered scent after he had a bath.
The officer squeezed my upper arm as he guided me through the vacant day room and buzzed us through one door and then another before we entered one of the attorney-client holding rooms. “Room” was a generous term, but at least it was bigger than my cell and offered some contact, meaning my attorney could shake my handcuffed hands if he so desired or slide a paper across the chipped Formica table without hitting glass.
Ben Taylor stood when I entered. He’d represented me for the past five years and had become one of the few non-institutionalized faces I saw. His face today didn’t look that good.
“Hello Grace, please take a seat.” I sat down with my feet and hands still cuffed.
“Ben, how are you?” I was delaying, wanting to hear anything other than the news I feared he was about to give me.
“I’m fine.” His slight southern accent made whatever awful words he was about to tell me sound more tolerable. Most of the guard and many of the inmates here had come from all over. Ben’s soft tone reminded me of home.
“Have you found her?” I asked, hoping he would give me something to cling to.
“I’m sorry, Grace. My office still has not been able to get in touch with her.”
After all these years, I still woke in the morning with a sweat-soaked shirt stuck to my skin, dreaming about my daughter sitting alone at her dad’s funeral. Abandoned. I knew I couldn’t make my daughter forgive me, believe me, or even come to see me, but I wouldn’t stop hoping. I’d stopped calling many years ago, figuring the refusal of collect calls meant the expense was too much for her to handle. Eleven years, five months, and twenty-seven days separated me from the last time I’d heard her voice—the last time I’d heard anyone call me Mom. A word I’d never longed to hear until I did.
“That’s not why I’m here,” he said. “I am afraid we didn’t get the news we had hoped for. The court refused to hear the latest appeal.”
I dropped my head and tried not to make my attorney, my only believer, feel any worse than I knew he already did. Whatever hope I’d carried into the room had fled by the time I looked up.
My lawyer rubbed his forehead. “Grace, the judge has set your execution date.”
SOPHIE
Sophie knew she’d made mistakes. The kind of mistakes an “I’m sorry” wouldn’t erase and a “please understand” wouldn’t go far to repair. Not after all this time. The car in her driveway, her oversized lake house, and her bulging bank account made her life look perfect on the surface. By anyone else’s standards, she should be fulfilled, ecstatic, but…Maybe it was because she was turning thirty this year, but her heart seemed to be catching up with her deception and she hated that feeling.
She sat where she did every morning after Thomas left for work—with her coffee on the veranda off the master bedroom overlooking the lake. This spot helped quiet her mind and energize her for the day ahead. At least it usually did. But this October morning felt different somehow.
She set her mug down and snuggled as deep as she could into her chenille bathrobe. The sharp chill in the air caused her hands to shiver and she looked down at them, wishing she still had the red snowflake mittens she’d worn as a little girl. Holes on both of them, right at the tops of her palms under the first two fingers, from hours of raking leaves in her backyard, just so she could jump in and bury herself in the pile, counting the seconds until her dad would find her. Sophie, Sophie, come out wherever you are. After many minutes of pretending he had no idea where she was, her dad would fall into the pile on top of her. She felt like she’d never stop giggling. “You got me good this time, pumpkin,” he would say to her.
Sophie tried to recall the last time she’d actually done something like that just for the fun of it, or experienced some overpowering emotion other than the flat line she had grown accustomed to. She did feel happy when she laid her head on her husband Thomas and watched his chest rise up and down as he slept, or when she put together puzzles with children at the hospital, but those feelings were short-lived.
She shook her head, scolding herself for the psychoanalysis, and decided to push whatever these strange emotions were back to the unexamined place she kept in a carefully tucked away corner of her mind. She controlled her life now. No one could take that from her, not anymore.
Her thoughts were interrupted by her vibrating phone. Seven new emails, two new texts, and one missed call. Guess my walk down memory lane affected my hearing. One text from Thomas, one from Mindy, and a call from a number she did not recognize.
She was typing a reply to Thomas when Mindy’s text vibrated again. Not coming today, talk to you later, will still help with fundraiser.
She checked the clock on her phone. The time for figuring out her tangled lack of emotions had expired. She needed to get going.
###
Sophie hated Thursdays. Ever since they’d bought a house in West Lake several years ago, Thomas had insisted it would be good for her to get to know some of the other women in the neighborhood. Sophie resisted at first—faking end of the week migraines and even an ankle sprain—until Thomas noticed a pattern and forced the issue. “You’ve got to get out of this house and make some friends.”
After a few months, she finally gave in and started attending the monthly meetings the women called “the book club.” Sophie secretly called the women “the synthetics.” A room full of designer-dressed plastic ladies sitting around drinking margaritas while discussing the latest scandals lurking within their gated community. The books they were supposed to be reading never came up.
Sophie didn’t exclude herself from that less-than-complimentary stereotype. On more than one occasion she’d presented herself to be something she was not. It wasn’t that the ladies hadn’t been nice to Sophie since she and Thomas moved into the neighborhood. Most had been welcoming, since the first day actually, when a few of them brought a large welcome basket of wine and cheese and left it by the front door. It had a note attached: Sorry we missed you! Dinner at the Parkers’ Friday night?
Before that first dinner at the Parker’s, she’d changed outfits three times, ran to the bathroom to throw-up twice, all before finally settling on a tweed blazer and dark blue jeans.
Mindy Parker (who happened to work at the same hospital as Thomas) had put Sophie at ease right away, and she and Sophie had developed somewhat of a friendship since that night. Maybe it was the way her house looked. Clean, but not perfect; functional, but not organized. Chocolate cookie crumbs and milk drops lingered on the kitchen counter and shouted Mindy was not trying to impress anyone. Sophie envied that attitude. Mindy always let her two-year-old twin girls say hello and goodnight to everyone before excusing herself to tuck them into bed.
Mindy’s friend Eva, however, wasn’t as genuine. Sophie could picture her as an 8th grader, pointing and whispering at an unfortunate misfit, unlucky enough to have inherited an older exiled siblings hand-me-downs. Sophie could feel Eva’s eyes scanning her fashion selection whenever she walked into a room, and she always seemed a little too interested when Thomas told a story. Sophie wasn’t normally the jealous type, but something about Eva’s smile when she looked at him made her more than a little uncomfortable.
While Thomas socialized with all of the husbands they had met in the neighborhood on occasion to play tennis or a round of golf, Mindy was the only relationship Sophie had cared to foster outside of the book club and other cursory social events. Even that friendship had gotten only so deep. The less people knew about her the better.
###
All the usual “book club” cars were present and accounted for when Sophie pulled her Land Rover behind Eva’s brand-new red BMW. She could see Eva and three other women (all of whose names escaped Sophie) walking in, chatting with fast and flippy hand movements, and whispering about something Sophie wasn’t quite sure she wanted to hear. Since no one ever seemed interested in discussing their assigned book, Sophie had turned the monthly meetings into planning events for her latest endeavor—a fund she had created for indigent children at St. John’s Hospital.
To raise money, she was planning a Secret Chef fundraiser that she described as: A soon-to-be annual wine and food tasting event that will boast the most culinary delectable dishes ever served in the south. The Chefs and their restaurants will “surprise” the highest bidders with sensational award packages sure to satisfy even the pickiest palates—or something along those lines. Sophie fine-tuned her pitch as she grabbed her laptop out of the back of her SUV.
“Did you hear about Stephen?” Eva said before she had a chance to set her bag down or take off her jacket. Sophie, not sure if Eva meant to include her, didn’t immediately respond.
“Did you hear me? Did you hear what’s going on with Stephen?”
Sophie didn’t want to appear out of the loop or give Eva the satisfaction of knowing about whatever was happening first quickly replied, “Yes, heard about it last night. Thomas told me. I can’t believe it.” A calculated response, since she had no idea what was going on with Stephen. But one thing she knew for sure––Eva loved to be the first to give details.
“Well, for those of you who don’t know…” Eva launched into the gossip without taking a breath. “Stephen moved out. Mindy is devastated, they just put in a pool and all. One bejeweled hand flipped her shiny hair over her shoulder. “I can’t totally blame him. Have you seen Mindy lately? Not exactly keeping herself up. Never met an ice-cream cone she didn’t like.”
All the ladies but Sophie laughed. She didn’t run to Mindy’s defense, but she didn’t laugh. Did she get credit for partial loyalty? She hadn’t talked to Mindy for a couple weeks and, granted, their conversations weren’t all that deep, but problems with Stephen—she had no idea.
“Ready to get started?” Kate, the hostess for the day said while narrowing her eyes in Eva’s direction. She handed Sophie a mimosa and then subtly motioned for her to turn the conversation away from Mindy’s personal life.
Sophie pulled out her laptop and began to go over the first item on her agenda.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Eva interjected immediately. “I hear you’re hiding something from us.”
Sophie pretended to check the wall for the nearest outlet praying that when she looked up Eva’s fake eyelashes would be batting in someone else’s direction.
“Sophie, I am talking to you.” Eva shrilled the personal pronoun part of that sentence when Sophie failed to turn around. “We read the newspapers, you know?”
Sophie bent over to plug the cord into her already fully charged computer, her face feeling like it could melt off.
Do they know?
This moment, the one she feared the most, had played out in her mind a million times before. All with varying degrees of who finds out what first and when. How will she ever make them understand?
“For God sakes, Sophie. What’s wrong with you? You look like you chipped a tooth, or something. You should be proud of Thomas,” Eva continued, starting the hand flipping thing again. “The story was all over the newspapers this morning. Michael called me from his car to see if I’d seen it.”
“Thomas, in the newspaper?” Sophie braced herself against the side of wall, relieved her sinking sand stayed loyal for another day.
Eva let out an exaggerated sigh. “Your husband is operating on that little girl today. For Freeeeee! You know the one who got her face burned?”
Sophie vaguely remembered hearing the story on the news. Something about a six-year-old tripping over an electric skillet cord.
“I had no idea.” Sophie averted her eye batting and tried to hide the fact she hated it when Eva knew something about her husband that she didn’t.
“I knew his hands were created to do fine things,” Eva purred. “Don’t you agree?”
The implied familiarity made Sophie uneasy and annoyed. How would she know? Was she a patient of his? Sophie studied Eva’s plump red lips for signs of collagen.
“It’s nice to know you find Thomas’s hands attractive,” Kate butted in with a stiff smile, “but let’s get back to the reason we’re here.”
Eva started to backpedal, but Sophie cut her short. Using her mimosa as a microphone, she said, “Right, the fundraiser.” She tapped on the rim. “Is this thing on?”
“It may not be on, but it’s sure empty.” Kate grabbed the pitcher and filled Sophie’s glass to the top.
Sophie took a long sip and summoned the version of herself she wanted everyone else to see. After the mimosas started to kick in, she pulled out her three-ring binder filled with to-do lists and due dates and started handing out assignments.
GRACE
Grace Bradshaw, Laken State Penitentiary, Death Row. It’s how my mail—mostly legal correspondence from my in-and-out state-appointed attorneys—had been addressed for the past seventeen years. I knew, given my conviction and current occupancy in the ward where prisoners await execution, that this conversation had to happen at some point, but in all that time I’d been here, no one had actually been put to death.
The rumors about the governor must be true. The state was cleaning house, and they were beginning with me. The sound of something clinking together stopped my thoughts. My handcuffs. Ben heard it too and reached across the eroded coffee-stained table to stop my hands from shaking. Before he reached them, however, the officer standing guard snarled out a reminder of the limited-contact rule.
“Grace, I will not give up on you.” Ben’s voice lowered. He glanced over to see if the officer was watching before he put his hand under my chin. I noticed new lines on his forehead that had formed since the last time he’d visited.
“I promise I’ll find a way to help. I took your case because I believed you. Now that I have gotten to know you better, I’m certain you do not deserve to be here. You are not who they say you are.”
Who they say I am. I’d struggled with that sentence from the moment I’d been accused. Munchausen by proxy was how the prosecutor explained my crime. As in, one of those crazy mothers from horror movies that purposefully make their children sick for attention and sympathy. A catchy, devastating term that had made for quite the splashy headlines.
The twelve people of the jury sat stone-faced, fixated on every damaging word, while I remained motionless, trying to envision this monster he described. A depressed mother who never wanted a second child, a lonely pastor’s wife so crazed for attention she made her baby sick. His libretto—slow and deliberate, calculating but sincere—made William’s death seem like a series of events I plotted for some sick reason.
The man elected by the courts to represent the people never once set foot on my lattice-framed front porch, nor cared to ask me about the horror of losing a child.
He never witnessed me comfort a crying William in the way only my breast could. Never saw me pace around the family room, gently rocking my baby in my arms, praying he wouldn’t get sick again. He didn’t see me wet a towel to wipe the blood trailing down my daughter’s skinned knee, then remain by her side until the itsy bitsy spider made her giggle again. I may not have won any awards for parenting, but I loved my children as much as anyone.
The jury bought the prosecutor’s tale of how William became better in the care of others, but sick again when I alone cared for him. The man with a different colored paisley tie for every day of the three-week-long trial convinced twelve jurors of the culpability of one.
Who they say I am. I’d hoped the jury could see me as I was, sift through the fabrications and one misrepresented event. Instead…it was worse than I ever let myself imagine beforehand. How could twelve out of twelve people vote to have me killed? That thought still caused me panic.
“Five minutes.” The officer held up his spread hand.
“Grace,” Ben said softly, “I’m still trying to find her.”
“I know you are, but it is hard to find someone who doesn’t want to be found. I think I’m already dead to her.”
“I have someone searching university records, past addresses, things of that sort. Is it possible she might have changed her name?"
I had thought of all these possibilities, a thousand times, and still did not have an answer to give him. I shrugged.
“Promise me you’ll do one thing for me.” I tried to control the shake in my voice. “Give her my journal when I’m gone.”
###
“I’ll escort Bradshaw,” a familiar pleasant voice whispered to the other officer. I sat in a metal chair with my hands cuffed to a leather belt buckled around my waist. The restraints limited my physical movements, but my thoughts ran all over the place, trying to process the news I’d received from my attorney.
I looked up into kind green eyes and the face of Officer Jones. “I’m sorry,” Officer Jones said, a crease forming between her brows. “I know that wasn’t the news you were hoping to hear.”
In a more normal situation, like being told I could live twelve to fourteen months if the chemo worked, or finding out my husband of thirty-three years had died in a car accident, I would’ve fallen on her shoulder and sobbed until I had no tears left. Instead, I said nothing and gave her a small nod.
I get the feeling that Officer Jones likes me, or at least believes something good lives within me. We’ve never talked about my conviction because she already knew what I’d been accused of. Everyone did. My face, to hear some of the staff talk, used to be on every TV and radio station in the US and in Canada, until finally the coverage died down and moved on to some serial killer murdering prostitutes in Nevada.
Office Jones was one of the few female officers who worked on the row long before I arrived. I assumed she was in her late fifties, based on her seven grandkids, but I never dared to ask her personal questions. Instead, we covered generic carpool topics, like her plans for retirement: “Just 23 months and 15 days until this lady”—she would use both thumbs to point to herself—“is out of here.”
I never thought I’d be the one leaving first.
“This isn’t over yet. The governor can still stop this.” She helped me stand and steady myself, a task that proved harder than I’d thought. My legs wobbled.
The newly elected governor had run on the promise of swift justice. I wasn’t sure it was wise to hope for his help.
I attempted to look on the bright side: Wasn’t there some comfort in knowing the end of my story? A sense of control, perhaps, over writing my own obituary, filling in the exact date that comes after the hyphen. I could ballpark a pretty close time of death and maybe let people know about my state-run, graveside funeral. The problem was, I wasn’t sure who would come.
“Come on,” Officer Jones said, “keep your chin up. You’ve never been one to give up on anything. Fight for that daughter you’ve been telling me about. Sophie, right? Fight for Sophie.”
Hearing my daughter’s name spoken in a kind way by someone other than my attorney was more than I could handle. I dropped my head into my shackled hands and began to cry.
I didn’t speak with Officer Jones as she escorted me back. Instead, I did the only thing that calmed me when I couldn’t stand this place anymore. I let my mind go to six-year-old Sophie in high pigtails, front tooth missing and a Christmas morning smile, handing me a bottle of Sally Hansen’s Hard as Enamel purple glitter nail polish. Please, Mommy, can we use this sparkly one?
All the way back to my cell, I painted Sophie’s fingernails one by one, with perfect strokes, blowing each nail between the coats until they were dry and her hands looked perfect.
SOPHIE
She’d just finished lighting the last candle when Thomas walked through the side door leading in from their garage. His phone plastered to his ear, he was still giving the nurses orders: “Up her pain meds to what we discussed. Call me if her temperature is over 100.5.” He blew Sophie a kiss as soon as he saw her.
Eight forty-five in the evening seemed to be his usual time of arrival, rather than the exception these days. Sophie didn’t complain; when Thomas was home he made her feel like she was the only person in his busy world that mattered.
Pad Thai, spring rolls and sushi were arranged on coordinating black-and-red-and-yellow f
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