Sleep Toward Heaven Read online

  “What did it look like?” I say. “What was it like, for Henry?” I find that I am holding my breath.

  Karen begins to speak quickly. “I shot him and he fell,” she says. Her voice is dark. “He fell and looked at me. I watched him pass over. He knew and I knew. He closed his eyes. I saw…”

  “What?” I say. “What did you see?”

  Karen clutches her receiver. She swallows with difficulty. I can see the machine next to her, the morphine machine that the drunk woman at the bar went on about. “I can’t,” says Karen.

  “Karen,” I say. “Please tell me what you saw.”

  Her eyes are wide and confused. She is so close to death. “I saw his soul come up from him,” she says.

  “What did it look like?”

  She told me, but I already knew. “Like lightning,” she said.

  karen

  Karen wakes early on Saturday morning. She is disoriented, pulled from dreams of dark hallways, only the faint sound of guards’ voices to keep her company. Suddenly, she is afraid. She hates her life, the noise, the searches, the vomit smell, but what awaits her? Karen presses her lips together. Something bigger, she thinks, something silent, like snow. She has never seen snow. Of course, she has seen it in movies, but not for real. She has never tasted a snowflake, or skated on ice. She touches her book, remembers the words: that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

  Breakfast: cereal with warm milk. A guard comes to her. He is red-haired, tall with freckles and glasses. He looks away as he hands her a paper cup, and then walks quickly to his station. Karen holds it between her palms. It is hot, and she takes a sip: strong coffee, full of cream and sugar. Karen gulps it down. She almost cries with gratitude, and then thinks: the guards could have brought her good coffee any day, every day. Only on her last day did they bother.

  The other women are quiet all morning, ignoring the blaring television. This is hard on them, Karen knows. They have to stay.

  After lunch (sloppy joes, Karen is given two, and then a Hershey bar, which she eats and promptly throws up), they come for her. There is a special guard, who nobody knows, from Huntsville. With him is the guard named Hamm; Karen hears his voice in the hall. The gates sliding, metal on metal. She sits up.

  “Karen Lowens?”

  “Yes.”

  They open her cell, take her small box of things. “Can I say goodbye?” asks Karen as they chain her wrists and legs.

  “No,” says Hamm, but the other says, “Come on, Guy.”

  They take her arms, pull her up.

  “She’s supposed to have a wheelchair!” says Tiffany. She is getting hysterical. “She’s too weak to walk!”

  Hamm sticks his hand under Karen’s arm, holding her upright. “She’s just fine,” he says. Karen feels dizzy, and her knees give, but Hamm does not let her fall. The IV snakes from her arm, and the other guard wheels the machine from her cell.

  Tiffany is crying, gripping the bars, her straw-colored hair askew from sleeping. She has stopped painting her nails, stopped her sit-ups. She looks like a hundred other inmates, her splashy beauty drained away. “Oh my God,” she says. “Oh my God. Oh my God.”

  “Hey, hey,” says Karen. There are spots swimming in her vision.

  “God loves you. He loves you, Karen,” says Tiffany.

  Veronica is sitting on her bed, touching her permanent ink wedding ring with her thumb. “I’m next, aren’t I?” she says. Below her eyes are dark circles. It will be worst for Veronica, thinks Karen. She has false hopes. Veronica still dreams of sleeping next to a warm man, yearns for grass and the sound of birds.

  “It’s OK,” says Karen, lamely.

  “See you up there,” says Veronica. She stands and reaches for Karen’s hand, but Hamm jerks her away. The handcuff bites into her skin, and Karen cries out. Hamm’s cheap cologne fills Karen’s nostrils. He has combed his hair into a stiff wave for the cameras.

  “Guy, come on,” says the other guard. Hamm jerks her arm again. Karen grits her teeth, and is silent.

  The television is on, a soap opera. A man and a woman drink champagne by candlelight. Karen wants to say goodbye to Sharleen, but Sharleen is asleep. Her face is peaceful. “Goodbye,” says Karen.

  Sharleen’s eyes snap open. “Hey,” she says. “Goodbye.” Even Sharleen’s voice is weak.

  Samantha sings as they carry Karen out: So long, farewell, it’s time to say good-night!

  They take Karen into the hallway, past the guards seated at the desk, past the other inmates who scream and bang their bars. The din is unbelievable, they call her name again and again. This time it is “Karen! Karen!” and not her nickname. For this, Karen is thankful.

  While they fill out paperwork in the narrow hallway, Karen sits between two guards. One smells of coffee, the other of cologne. Their arms are hot against hers. Karen tries to think about the quiet earth, but there is noise everywhere: women’s hoarse voices, televisions, the guards’ whispers and occasional barking cries: “Hey! Watch it! I’m warning you, bitch.” Karen pushes the black button, and the morphine courses into her bloodstream.

  Karen knows that she will have a few seconds, after being led from the prison, but before being put in the van. A few precious seconds to turn her face to the sun, feel the air on her skin, and smell life outside the walls. As they pull her to her feet, and walk down the corridor, she waits.

  The doors bang open and it hits her at once: the bright sun, the screaming, signs held high, open mouths, fists rising heavenward. She closes her eyes, raises her face, feels the warmth, and then it is over. Hamm’s hard fingers push her head down and she is inside the van, the thick tinted windows sealing her off completely.

  She can see the town dimly once her eyes adjust to the van’s darkness. Through the back window she sees storefronts, Andy’s Home Cookin’, the Gatestown Motor Inn. She sees people going about their lives, carrying groceries, mowing the lawn. A boy with a dog on the end of a piece of twine, a woman with a baby in her arms, sitting on her porch, drinking lemonade. They have no idea that they are blessed.

  The drive to Huntsville takes five hours. The back of the van is quiet, and Karen closes her eyes, gives herself morphine from the machine, and feels the road beneath them, the bumps, the hissing of the air conditioner. The van smells new, like leather. The handcuffs make her wrists ache. Her mind is blank; she basks in the silence.

  The Huntsville Prison is huge and feels sinister, violent. As soon as they take Karen through the front gate, she feels it: death. Two hundred and six men—and one woman, Jackie—have been executed at Huntsville since 1976, some by electrocution, some by firing squad, some by lethal injection.

  Karen can smell the scorched hair. She can hear the gunshots ripping through flesh. She remembers reading about Stephen McCoy, who was not given enough drugs in his injection. He choked, began to spasm. A witness fainted. Karen can hear him in the hallways, his pain echoing in her ears. She begins to cough. Her lungs! They have no air. The burned taste of death fills her mouth.

  “Shut up, damnit,” says Hamm.

  “I can’t breathe,” says Karen. She begins to gasp.

  “It’s an act,” says Hamm. To the alarm of the guards around him, he lets go of Karen’s arm. She wobbles on her feet, coughing.

  “See?” says Hamm, and then Karen falls. She cannot breathe, she feels her legs collapse, her head hits the floor, and then everything goes black.

  franny

  When Franny came out of the bathroom, Rick’s was standing with a hand on the refrigerator, leaning against it. “Rick?” Franny stopped, her hair dripping, a towel wrapped around her.

  “Franny,” he said. “She’s collapsed.”

  “What?”

  “Karen. She’s unconscious. She couldn’t breathe—hit her head…”

  “Where is she?” Franny turned and ran back into the bathroom to gather her clothes.

  “The Medical Center at The Walls. As soon as they stabilize her, though, sh
e’ll go back to a cell.”

  “I’m going.” Franny pulled on her clothes. When she was dressed, she saw that Rick was holding his car keys.

  “Are you coming, Rick?” He shook his head.

  “I’m going to the governor. And I’m getting a goddamn stay. They can’t pull her out of a coma to kill her.”

  “They wouldn’t.”

  “Goddamn right,” said Rick. “Not if I have anything to do with it.”

  Franny drove to the prison with the radio off. She rolled down the window, and then rolled it back up. There were so many stoplights. When she hit her third, Franny screamed, “Come on, for God’s sake! Come on!” and then she began to cry. She chanted, “Come on come on come on…”

  Finally, she reached the Huntsville prison, and parked illegally. There was a throng of reporters and picketers outside the front door. “Let me through!” she screamed, and some people got out of her way.

  “Franny! Franny!” she heard a familiar voice. When she turned, it was Christopher from News 2, his microphone in front of her mouth. “Do you have any comments on your patient, Karen Lowens?” he said, motioning for the camera to tape her. Franny looked at him, shocked, and then turned away. But the other reporters had seen, and trailed her. She ran to the prison gate.

  “No visitors,” said a guard with a terrible complexion and startlingly kind eyes.

  “I am her doctor,” said Franny. “Let me inside. Now.”

  The guard looked up with surprise, and respect. “Your name?” he said.

  “Dr. Wren,” said Franny, feeling proud to have the same name as Uncle Jack.

  Franny thought she was used to prisons, but The Walls was different. She shuddered as she walked down the rows of bellowing men, finally reaching the Medical Center.

  The nurse at the desk wore her hair in a purple band. “I’m here to see Karen Lowens,” said Franny, leaning on the counter to catch her breath.

  “No visitors,” said the nurse, not even looking up from her computer.

  “I’m not a visitor,” said Franny. After she opened her wallet, explained herself, the nurse let Franny pass.

  Karen was still unconscious, threaded with tubes and IV lines. Her face had a bluish tint, the skin pulled tight, eyes sunk deep in her skull. The chart said that she had experienced respiratory failure, collapsed, and hit her head on the floor. Her pneumonia was worse, her lungs filled with fluid.

  “Oh, Karen,” said Franny. “Hold on. Don’t leave me.”

  “She’s due to be executed tomorrow morning,” said a man in the corner of the room. Franny recognized him as Guy Hamm, the guard who had shown her around the prison. He was carrying a gun, and his blond hair was wavy and stiff.

  “I know,” said Franny. She sat by Karen’s bedside, holding her hand. Everything she had thought about, worried over, tried to control, had come to this. Holding Karen’s hand. Franny was not even sure if she wanted Karen to open her eyes.

  From time to time, Karen would writhe and moan, and Franny would program the machine to give Karen a bit more morphine. Franny knew the code by heart. Karen would sigh, and settle back down into her dreams. It would be so easy, thought Franny, to give Karen a high enough dose, to program the machine to give Karen enough morphine to die.

  She heard monitors—doctors being paged—and smelled the uneaten meal a nurse had brought for Karen. There was still a chance the governor would issue a stay, and Franny waited. Hamm looked as if he were dozing off.

  “Excuse me?” said Franny.

  He jerked awake, reaching for his gun.

  “I’ll be right back,” said Franny.

  He nodded, blinking. Franny squeezed Karen’s hand.

  There was no answer on Rick’s mobile phone. Franny bought a Twix bar and a cup of coffee and walked down the hallway back to Karen’s room. She turned the corner and saw the door to the Medical Center open. Two guards wheeled a gurney, an oxygen tank, and the morphine machine from the room. Franny saw dark hair against the white sheets on the gurney. “Wait!’ she cried. The men pushed the stretcher away from Franny, through the swinging doors at the opposite end of the hallway. Franny ran to them.

  “What happened?” she asked a nurse, who was changing the sheets on the bed where Karen had been. The nurse flipped a clean sheet in the air, snapped it flat.

  “She woke up,” said the nurse, tucking in the corners.

  In the corner of the dark cell, Karen looked small. She lay on a cot, and the only sound was the morphine dripping through the IV into her arm. They had taken away the oxygen. When she heard the bars slide back, Karen opened her eyes. The orange fire was gone; they were dull and flat. “You can have ten minutes,” said the guard, a black man Franny did not recognize.

  “Okay,” said Franny. She thought, Not if Rick can get to the governor. She sat at Karen’s side. “Karen, how are you?”

  “Ready,” said Karen. “God knows I am ready right now.” Karen’s voice was weak, barely above a whisper. Franny nodded. “I was waiting for you,” said Karen.

  All the strength was gone from her, Franny could see. The sores were like fire on her face, but it was more than that, more than the bones protruding through her skin. “That priest told me I would go to heaven,” said Karen. She coughed. “Heaven is sounding good about now.”

  “No, Karen. Hold on,” said Franny. She was filled with the desire to do something, something to save Karen. To bring her strength in this horrible room that smelled of piss and dark corners.

  Karen turned her head toward the ceiling. After a moment, she began to speak. “The worst part,” she said, and she was whispering, “is that everybody is going to watch me go.” She began to spit the words, as if they tasted bitter. “They’re going to put a diaper on me. I’ve been through everything,” she said. “I came out of everything and I found some dignity. Inside. When they stripped me and they put it in me—” She coughed, a long, wet cough. “They couldn’t touch it,” she said.

  She looked at Franny. Franny nodded. “Now it’s going to come out of me,” said Karen. “And they’ll be watching, all them who tried to take it.” Franny thought desperately to find words. “Can you understand?”

  “But Karen,” she began, in a voice that was pleading and wrong in her ears.

  “Don’t talk,” said Karen. “Just tell me I can go.”

  Franny closed her mouth.

  The phone on the guard’s desk rang loudly, and Franny jumped. Karen closed her eyes. “Doctor?” said the guard. “It’s for you.”

  “Hold on,” Franny said to Karen. “Just hold on, for me.” She touched Karen’s face, and it was cold.

  Franny stood, walked to the cell door. The guard slid back the bars. Franny exited, and the guard closed the door behind her. Karen began to cough. The receiver was heavy in Franny’s hand. “This is Dr. Wren,” she said.

  “Franny?”

  “Rick. What’s happening?”

  “I’m sorry, Franny. I’m so sorry.”

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Rick.

  “Goddamn it, she only has a few days—maybe even a few hours! They can’t give her that?”

  “No. Franny, I went and talked to him myself. It’s over.”

  She began to cry. “Stop it,” said Rick. “Franny, stop it.”

  Franny swallowed. She handed the phone to the guard.

  “Doctor,” said the guard. “Visiting hours are done. It’s time for you to go.”

  “Let me say goodbye,” said Franny.

  “Hurry it up, then.” He let her into the cell.

  “Dr. Wren?” said Karen. “Please let me go now. I’m ready to go.”

  “Yes,” said Franny. “I understand.” And standing there, watching the sick woman with the child’s eyes, Franny did understand. Karen was filled with grace. It shone through her broken body, and over her mistakes. Franny understood then that grace was not like a present. It could not be given, and it could not be taken away.

  “Goodbye,” she
said.

  “Thank you,” said Karen. “Goodbye.”

  “God bless you,” said Franny, and she nodded to the guard. He came and unlocked the gate. As she walked down the hallway, she could still hear Karen, breathing.

  celia

  The woman who shot my husband is being executed today, and all I can think about is what to wear. I am aware this is a shallow concern, and yet there it is. A suit seems too respectful, and sweatpants don’t seem to allow for the gravity of the situation. Back in my house in Austin, I try on summer dresses, pantsuits, a pair of decent shorts. (The shorts are quickly thrown on the floor: I cannot wear sneakers or sandals to an execution.)

  Shoes. I decide to start at the bottom. Slurping coffee that my mother has made, I survey the bottom of my closet. It is over a hundred degrees, which rules out anything leather. (Open-toed shoes, as well, are out. I don’t even want to think about what’s on the floor of the prison.) I get on my knees and shove things around. I am nude, fresh from the shower, where I both shampooed and conditioned my hair. I feel as if I’m going on a date. Or to a wedding. I begin to laugh. There is something very wrong with me.

  At the back of the closet, I see them. The cotton espadrilles I had pulled on when I went to the hospital. I had been sitting on the porch swing, throwing a ball to Priscilla. The ball was covered with slobber and mud. I was barefoot, thinking of the beer Henry would bring me. I wasn’t thinking of Henry. Wasn’t thinking—not then—of his soft lips, his warm neck, the way he abandoned himself to sleep, spreading his limbs across the bed. I was thinking of beer.

  The phone rang that night, and I went inside to answer it. I figured it was my mother or my friend Gina who always called with a crisis. (And who, it must be noted, dropped me like a hot potato when I had a crisis of my own.) But it wasn’t Gina. It was someone trying to win me back to AT&T phone service. He actually said that, and God knows how I remember, “We want to win you back.” Priscilla looked at me mournfully, the ball dropped at my feet. The front door was open, and while the man on the phone kept talking (emboldened by my silence, as they always are, looking for any moment to fill) I looked up and there was a police officer in my doorway.