Sleep Toward Heaven Read online

  Henry, I thought immediately. That jackass ran a red light, I thought. How much money did I have for bail, I thought. “Miss Mills, I mean Mrs. Mills?” said the police officer, a young boy really, and something in his face made me drop the phone to the floor. Priscilla curled around my feet: she felt it, too.

  “There’s been an accident,” said the boy.

  An accident? It was no accident. It was a bloodbath. I had worn these espadrilles. In them, I had seen my husband dead, stretched out under a white sheet, his face the color of clay but his feet the same. His hands, the same.

  I put on the espadrilles, and then the loose dress I had been wearing with them. The last dress Henry had seen me in.

  My mother, who surprised me by flying in from Wisconsin for the execution, comes into my room and puts her hand on her hip. “It’s time to go,” she says. She looks old in the early morning light. We have a long drive ahead, from Austin to Huntsville, and my mother has packed a cooler with drinks and cookies, as if we were going on a picnic. The execution is at eleven.

  “It still amazes me that you live here,” says my mother, as we wind through the quiet streets of my neighborhood on the way to the freeway. “My daughter,” she says. “A Texan.” She laughs and then sighs.

  I suppose I am a Texan, now. I could have left when Henry died, but I have not. As we drive underneath the large oak trees, their roots a hundred years deep, I can begin to see shards of the life I have ahead of me: my quiet desk at the library, the slight chill of fall. My garden, my porch swing.

  My mother and I are silent for most of the drive. She puts her hand on the back of my neck, and does not ask me how I feel.

  Henry’s parents meet us at the House of Pancakes in Huntsville. By the time we arrive, it is too late to eat. Ursula is lit from within with fury. She wears a black dress and simple pumps. The ponytail that hangs down her back is almost entirely white now. The loss of her son is evident in every line on her face. My heart opens like a flower, and when she rises from the Formica table, I take her in my arms. Neither of us cry.

  Henry’s father has ordered a plate of pancakes, but has not taken a bite, not even poured the syrup. “Is it time?” he asks. His eyes are ringed with dark circles.

  “It’s time,” I say.

  At the prison, we are led into a dark, windowless room and to the front row of folding chairs. I have my mother on one side of me, and Ursula on the other. We lock our fingers together. I can see reporters in some of the back rows, and the drunk brunette doctor from the bar, talking to a large man. Around us, in the front row, I see the other victims’ families. Most of them look angry, and many seem filled with Ursula’s same fire. It seems a very long time that we stare at an empty gurney, waiting.

  “Do you think this will make it better?” I ask Ursula, and she clamps her lips together and shakes her head. It will never be better, she is saying with her eyes, and I know that she is right.

  My own mother is stroking my palm with her thumb. From time to time she looks over at me and makes a sound in the back of her throat. She is trying to imagine life without me.

  The reporters begin to grow restless as eleven o’clock comes and goes. Their voices murmur in the corners of the room. There is a collective sense that something is very wrong, but we know that all of Karen’s appeals have been denied. The clock on the wall ticks, and someone clears their throat. A woman begins to sob quietly.

  “What the hell is going on?” says Henry’s father. His voice is tight, a coiled spring.

  And finally, movement. The warden comes to the center of the room, in front of the gurney. She looks nervous, but holds her shoulders back. “Excuse me?” she says, and silence falls.

  “There has been an unforeseen turn of events,” she says. Her voice rings out in the quiet room. I can hear my own blood pumping, can feel the pulses of my mother and Ursula in my fingertips. It feels as if we have the same heartbeat. In between the beats, I hear the warden tell us that we cannot watch the execution of Karen Lowens, because Karen Lowens is already dead.

  franny

  After the announcement, Janice Gaddon let Franny into Karen’s cell. Karen’s body was there, of course, a large mound underneath the thin sheet. Franny closed her eyes. The cracked concrete tile; a dark, sweet smell.

  Franny could never know what Karen felt in her final moments, before she killed herself with the morphine. How did she find out the code to the machine? Franny hadn’t let her see it, she was sure.

  Rick had gone to see Karen in the late hours of the night. She had been alive, but woozy. He sat by her, prayed for her. Then he had gone to Franny, and in the waiting room, on a metal bench, they had held each other. They had not said a word, had cried and slept and cried again. Rick’s body was comforting and warm.

  In Karen’s cell, Franny realized that her hands were balled into fists. There was no sound in the room. Karen looked asleep. Her eyelids were thin as paper. I came into this world alone, and I’ve been alone since…and she had died alone. Franny swallowed tears. She took the sheet, cold as stone in her hand, and pulled it over Karen’s face.

  There would be questions, so many questions. They would look into every part of Franny’s care. They would think that she gave Karen the means with which to end her life. Strangely, none of this bothered Franny. In the end, she would be proven innocent—she had not done anything, after all—and her life would go on. She simply couldn’t control who would believe her, and who would not.

  Janice placed a hand on Franny’s arm. “Karen left this. She said it was for you,” she said. It was a tiger made of origami paper, orange and gold, its folds softened from touch. Franny closed her fingers around it. She walked with sure steps past the crowd outside Karen’s cell. Rick stood in the hallway, his face pale. Franny had let Karen go, had said goodbye, and was ready. Rick looked up, and Franny walked toward him.

  celia

  When I am home in Austin, and all my guests have gone, I take Priscilla and some supplies and I visit Henry. He is buried in a sunny graveyard, watched over by oak trees. It took a long time for me to come to him, and I suppose I was waiting for the sadness to end. But sadness isn’t something that ends, it just becomes less hard. It melts into an ache that is a part of you.

  I have planted tomatoes on Henry’s grave. They look strange, amidst the roses and carnations, but they are what Henry would have wanted. They have become large and red. Today, I will pick two of them, and make a salad to bring to the christening of Sean and Jenny’s new baby, Alice. I am Alice’s godmother, and will hold her while the priest touches her forehead with cold water. I went to Sean and Jenny’s house a few weeks ago, and they opened the door, and I walked in.

  Priscilla lies next to me on the grass, and we think of things to tell Henry. I tell him about my new job at the hospital library. I let him know where we have been swimming and hiking that week and what I’ve tried to cook for dinner.

  I talk and talk to Henry, but he never comes to me again, not since that last night at the Gatestown Motor Inn Lounge. It’s as if I did what he asked of me, and he was able to leave. His lightning became a pale glow that I can still see if I concentrate on the night sky.

  I think it bothered him that so many people were going to watch Karen die. The moment we die is a private time, and Henry is the kind of person who would understand that. He came to me, in that crappy little bar in Gatestown, Texas. When the doctor went to the ladies’ room, leaving her purse on the table, Henry slid into her seat. His hair was a mess, and he looked as if he needed to shave. He told me to find the red notebook in her bag, to write down the code to the morphine machine. I did as he asked, wrote it in lipstick on a bar napkin and memorized it later. I didn’t know, of course, that the last time I would ever see Henry was on an orange barstool.

  And I didn’t quite know how it was all going to fall into place until I went to visit Karen. It’s not that Karen said she was sorry, and I don’t think I would have believed her if she had. But something
changed in me, and I realized that forgiving Karen was something I had to do for myself. It had nothing to do with her, in the end.

  She had clutched the receiver in the visiting room, and told me about watching Henry die. Her face was thin and wasted. I felt Henry’s hands on my hair, his fingers touching my scalp, readying me the way he had done when he first took me hiking on a steep trail. “You can do it,” he had told me, and he had been right.

  He stroked my hair, and Karen looked at me, and I had something to give her. It wasn’t anything that I had use for, but to her, it was everything. “Karen,” I said.

  “Yes?” Her voice, small in the receiver. Her hand, pressing on the glass.

  You can do it. I heard him, my beloved one.

  I pressed my own hand to the glass. The numbers to the machine lined up in my head. I opened my mouth.

  acknowledgments

  First and foremost, I would like to thank the women on both sides of prison walls who shared their stories with me. Sleep Toward Heaven was written to honor and illuminate their lives. Unending gratitude goes to my mentors, Joan Beattie, Bill Hagen, Jim Shepard, Chris Offutt, Kevin Canty, and Dierdre McNamer. Thank you, Debra Magpie Earling, for reaching to your bookshelf and finding William Stafford. William Kittredge, you showed me by example how to live as a writer. For my fellow writers Ann McGlinn, Joni Wallace, Clay Smith, Jill Marquis, Andrew Sean Greer, Aaron Q. Long, Ed Skoog, Stephen Morison, Woody Kipp, Dennis Hockman, Erica Olsen, Stephen Meyer, Maria Hong, Annie Hartnett, Rhian Ellis, J. Robert Lennon, Sheila Black, Emily Hovland, Dao Strom, Brett Hershey, Laurie Duncan, Andrew Spear, and Martin Wilson, as well as my friends Beth Howells, Jessica Goepfert, Cyndi Bohlin, Sage MacLeod, Dave Ruder, Ariel Anderson, Sarah Knight, Molly Rauch, Juli Berwald, Jaye Joseph, and Mary Maltbie, I am forever grateful. For supporting me during the winter spent writing this novel, I would like to thank the warm community of Ouray, Colorado, especially the Fairchilds, Muellers, Harts, Tisdales, and Williamses. Thank you, Barbara J. Zitwer. For publishing my short stories, I would like to thank Lee Klein of Eyeshot, Whitney Pastorek and Jeff Boison of Pindeldyboz, and M. M. M. Hayes of StoryQuarterly. I am lucky to work with Michelle Tessler, with whom I hope to share many sangrias, and the offices of Carlisle and Company. I am proud to be published by David Poindexter and the MacAdam/Cage team, who care so much about creating beautiful books. I am blessed to have as my friend and editor Anika Streitfeld, who possesses the rare skill of being both an exacting critic and a firecracker of enthusiasm. Thank you to my family; the Toans (and their stolen television); Bret, Laura, Trey, Rachael, Kit, Barbara, and Larry Meckel (and the Oak Street Writers’ Fellowship); Andrea, Gary, and the lovely Lorraine Ward; Isabelle Omeler; the Shaber family: Janice Doherty; Mary and Mark Liu; Peter and Brendan Westley. To my sisters and best friends, Sarah McKay and Liza Ward, thank you for always believing. My heart is for my husband, Tip, who makes every day a celebration. And my greatest thanks goes to my mother and my inspiration, the radiant Mary-Anne Westley.