Sleep Toward Heaven Read online

  The package from Ellen was a book called One Hundred Years of Solitude. Karen tried to read the book and understand why Ellen had given it to her, but could not. It was a long story about people far away. But Karen loved the beautiful paper cover. Alone in her cell, Karen traced the tree on the book, the hundreds of leaves, the boat hidden behind the leaves, the glorious angel, the birds, and the snake. The paper was brittle, and worn around the edges.

  The trial was a media frenzy, and went on and on. Women crying, saying: I was waiting for him all night and he never came home…and his wedding ring, oh his wedding ring was gone!…he had said we’d get married someday…my brother was the kindest man, loved dogs and animals…I told him not to take the job! I said, those highways are dangerous at night…

  How did they deal with the fact that their men had pulled over for a quickie? These kind men, these animal-loving men, who cut Karen and hit her and fucked her up the ass. Karen sat still as a statue. Rick pointed at her: Abused! Childhood trauma! Rape! Battery! Self-defense! Karen had become a string of exclamations. At night, the voices in the prison rang around her like gunshots.

  Karen did not see the papers, but she saw the TV. They called her the “Highway Honey,” showing old pictures of her shooting pool, posing for the camera. There was one home video Ellen had made, where Karen lifted her shirt and then laughed, her mouth open. They showed this video a hundred times, blocking out her nipples with a black line. They would slow down her laughter, her open mouth. They made her love menacing and mean. Karen lay awake at night wondering how the reporter had gotten Ellen’s video. Could Ellen have given it away?

  Rick fought. He was obsessed, his unruly hair, mismatched clothes. And when the jury announced its verdict—it was a skinny blonde with freckles, standing up straight in a blue dress—Rick was the one who crumpled, guilty, guilty, guilty ringing in his ears, while Karen remained still. He had expected better, and she had not.

  The beautiful woman, Celia Mills, was there the last day, the one whose husband Karen had watched die. Karen had seen her on television: her brown eyes and honey-colored hair. The reporters had a picture of the woman with her husband, somewhere on a beach. The couple was tanned, and the man, the Elvis man, was holding up a fish. The beautiful woman was laughing and clapping her hands.

  Celia Mills refused to take the stand, would not speak to reporters. But she had come to the courtroom that last day, and as they sentenced Karen to death, Celia Mills had gazed at Karen steadily. It was the same look her husband had fixed Karen with as he had died. A look of confusion, of disbelief.

  Rick came to see Karen periodically, this appeal, that chance, blah, blah, blah. Life went on outside the prison walls, and Rick tried to bring Karen pieces: a bottle of perfume, a magazine, peanut brittle.

  Karen doesn’t usually talk when Rick visits. She sits with the phone pressed to her ear, listening to his stories and nodding. His crazy hair has gone gray at the edges. Karen knows nothing about his life.

  When her meeting with Rick is over and she gets back to Death Row, Karen can feel excitement in the air. Jackie and Veronica are sitting on the patio, and Sharleen is in her cell. Karen realizes that Tiffany is missing.

  Jackie looks up from a House and Garden magazine. “Tiffany’s lawyer came,” she says. Karen’s heart stops. Is Tiffany going to be set free? Suddenly, Karen feels guilty for not believing in Tiffany, for thinking that Tiffany drowned her babies.

  “Maybe we’ll never see her again,” says Veronica. She does not look happy about the prospect.

  “She’s guilty as fuck.” This is Sharleen. She comes out of her cell and sinks into a chair. Her hair is growing straight up, and jutting out over her ears.

  “Don’t come near me,” says Jackie.

  “You know you want to kiss me,” says Sharleen, and then she begins to laugh. Jackie picks up her magazine and goes to her cell.

  “Is your attitude really necessary?” says Veronica.

  “Oh, are you the new Miss Manners? Miss Death Row Manners?” says Sharleen. She laughs. “How you gonna kill your new boyfriend from the inside, Veronica?” she says.

  “Shut your mouth,” says Veronica.

  “At least I admit what I did,” says Sharleen. “Not like the rest of you. At least I’m honest. I have dignity.”

  There was a silence. “I admitted it,” says Jackie, quietly. Karen cannot see her face.

  “I have come to peace with God,” says Veronica, “and you listen good, Sharleen, I don’t give a shit about you.”

  Sharleen smiles. Her eyes are bright. “Join the club,” she says, and then she stands and goes back to her cell. Sharleen has received her execution date, Karen knows.

  “Dignity,” says Veronica, patting her hair. “Some Satan Killer is going to teach me about dignity?”

  “Yeah,” says Jackie. She comes back out to the table. Opens her magazine.

  “I have dignity,” says Veronica. “And I have it on the inside, where nobody can touch it.”

  “Yeah,” says Jackie. “Me too.”

  Karen opens her origami book and looks at the animals she can make with the sheets of paper: swans, peacocks, tigers. She tries to make a small hat, pressing the folds with her index finger. The hat comes out crooked, and Karen puts it under her pillow.

  When they hear footsteps in the hallway, the rattle of chains, Sharleen begins to laugh. “Guess you gonna see your Tiffany again,” she says. And she is right. Tiffany comes in, her cheeks flushed.

  “They’re going to do the DNA testing,” she says, before the guards unlock her ankle cuffs. “My lawyer got permission. The skin under my babies’ fingernails. They’ll find out whose it was. They’ll let me go home.” Her speech is rapid, strange. “This is great,” she says. “This is so great!”

  “I love you, hon,” says Dan when he calls the radio show that week. “I heard about the DNA. Bob told me. We’re gonna appeal as soon as the results are in. A few more weeks, honey. And I’ll make you enchiladas!” Tiffany sits by the radio with her knees hugged to her chest. She does not do any sit-ups, though. And she does not repaint her nails. Karen listens hard that night, and she isn’t sure, but she thinks that maybe, just maybe, Tiffany is crying.

  franny

  In the early morning, Gatestown seemed asleep. The sky was wide and filled with clouds. It hovered, blue and vast, over the yellow land. Franny looked out the window as her cab drove past the huge courthouse and down the town’s quiet streets (passing Poke-E-Jo’s Cellular and Guns, the Last Chance Saloon, Tippler’s Western Wear) and turned left toward the prison complex. The complex spread above the town like a fortress, rows of stucco buildings like concrete cakes with barbed wire trim.

  There were patchy, fenced-in yards where pale women hung their fingers in the fence holes and stared. They all wore gray uniforms, and they were numbered. Inside some of the fences were picnic tables and bright plastic jungle gyms. Franny shivered, thinking of the visiting children sliding down the dusty equipment, trying to pretend they weren’t surrounded by barbed wire and fences humming with electricity. In all the years she had lived in Gatestown, she had never been inside the prison.

  Mountain View Unit was at the very outskirts of the complex, surrounded by towers in which guards kept watch, their guns trained on the women, ready.

  At the gates to the prison, a startlingly young guard asked the cabbie to roll down Franny’s window, and then he checked her identification suspiciously. He was younger than Franny, and did not look familiar. He spoke into a walkie-talkie, and then told her to get out of the cab. Franny paid the driver.

  A tall man with pale eyes appeared from one of the prison doors and walked briskly to Franny. His blond hair was sculpted into a swooping ducktail hairdo and his pants were just short enough to expose the pale skin above his black socks.

  “Miss Wren?” The man’s voice was louder than necessary.

  “Yes.” She shut the cab door behind her, and it began to drive away.

  �
��I’m Guy Hamm, Sergeant of Correctional Officers. Welcome to Mountain View Unit. We’re all gonna miss Doc Wren.” Hamm’s hand was moist. He smelled like pancake syrup.

  “Thank you.” Franny cleared her throat. “As I said when I called, um, I’m just here to get my uncle’s things.”

  “Not much here besides the car.”

  Franny nodded.

  “I don’t need to come in then,” Franny said. “If you could just take me to the car. I have the key.”

  “Some people here would really like to talk to you,” said Hamm. He waited, and finally Franny shrugged her acquiescence.

  She could not believe how many doors and gates stood between the inside of the prison and the outside. Hamm wrote their names in three different log books, checking for the exact time on his watch for each book. He unlocked metal doors, waved Franny through, and locked the doors again behind them. Armed guards stood at every turn. The prison smelled of disinfectant, urine, and hot dogs. “Corn dogs for lunch,” Hamm told her, pointing into the cafeteria. “But they take the sticks out,” he noted.

  As Franny and Hamm walked through the prison, Hamm gave a barking commentary: showers, work room, inmates, watch your back. It seemed as if the sliding bars never ended. The guards were baby-faced, so young. Franny shook her head. Surely there were people her age who were now guards. Or inmates. But she did not recognize anyone. She felt a familiar guilt: What if I had spent my life here? What would I have become?

  There were twelve hundred women in Mountain View Unit. Many yelled out when Franny walked past them. The noise was deafening. The women worked in steel cages, chained to chairs, pulling at piles of cotton. They showered in large rooms with drains in the center. They had scorched yards for exercise. Paths had been worn into the dirt around the edges of the fields. “They run in circles,” said Hamm, when they passed a window.

  The women’s cells were small and crowded. Some cells held four women: one slept on each cot and one slept on the floor underneath each cot, with a few inches to breathe. When Franny paused outside a cell where a very pregnant woman sobbed with her head in her hands, Hamm pulled Franny away. “Medical Center’s this way,” he said. “Want a soda?”

  “No, thank you,” said Franny. She could not imagine Uncle Jack in this place.

  The Medical Center was clean and neat. Three nurses stood in a circle around a white desk. One had her elbows on the desk, listening to an animated story another was telling, her eyebrows lifted, her mouth ready to smile. When Hamm brought Franny into the room, the nurses stood up straight, looking guilty. Franny recognized one of them as Deborah, the red-haired woman from the hospital. Deborah came toward Franny, and Hamm picked up the phone on the desk. “Warden?” he said into the receiver. “She’s here.”

  “How are you?” said Deborah. “I guess that’s a stupid question,” she said.

  “Look,” said Franny, “I’m just here to get my uncle’s things. If you could tell me where his car is, I’ll be on my way.”

  Deborah’s face closed as if she’d been slapped.

  “The warden wants to have a word,” said one of the other nurses.

  Franny sighed and sat down on a folding chair. She heard footsteps, and looked up to see two guards coming into the Medical Center, holding a woman by the upper arms. The woman’s face was ashen. She was extremely thin, and where her head came out of her jumpsuit, Franny could see her collarbones in stark relief. “She’s sick again,” said one of the guards.

  “Jesus,” said a nurse. The woman looked at the floor, as if she were ashamed.

  “Put her on a cot in the back,” said the nurse. “I don’t know what else we can do.”

  Franny folded her arms over her chest, and watched as the guards dragged the woman to a back room, where they let her lie down, still shackled. “She’s HIV-positive?” said Franny. The nurse nodded. “Do they have meds for them here?”

  “We have them,” said the nurse, “but it’s hard to know who to give them to. The inmates don’t get tested regularly.”

  “She needs them, obviously,” said Franny, gesturing to the woman on the cot.

  “She’s on Death Row,” said the nurse. She added quickly, “But I’m sure she gets the medication she needs.”

  “Want a soda?” said Hamm, again. Franny did not answer.

  Franny had never thought of herself as sexist, but when the slender black woman in a blue uniform walked into the Medical Center it did not even occur to Franny that the woman could be the warden until she introduced herself. She walked straight to Franny, offering her a warm smile and a strong handshake. “I’m Warden Janice Gaddon,” she said.

  “Franny Wren.”

  “Dr. Wren, I can’t tell you how heartbroken we are about your uncle. I hope you know how much we relied on him.” Warden Gaddon shook her head sadly. “I can’t quite believe it,” she said.

  “Well,” said Franny, “I’m just here to get the car.”

  “Do you have a few minutes?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “My office is this way.” As she led Franny down the hallway, the warden left waves of silence in her wake. The inmates glanced down or said hello, quietly. Warden Gaddon looked straight at them and nodded a crisp reply. Her boots made a steady sound as she walked. Next to her, Franny felt young and weak.

  The warden signed another log book before walking through a gate, and then they reached a steel door. “Here it is,” said Warden Gaddon. She fit a key into the door and opened it. Cold air spilled over Franny. She realized for the first time that the rest of the prison was not air-conditioned.

  In marked contrast to the concrete walls and metal bars, Warden Gaddon’s office was carpeted and homey. There were framed pictures of children on the wall, and law books shared space with cooking magazines on the bookshelf. There was a coffee maker and a bowl of mints.

  “Coffee?” Franny nodded, and Warden Gaddon filled a cup. She sat down behind her desk, gesturing to the couch opposite. Franny sat.

  “How long do you think you’ll be in Gatestown?” said the warden.

  “I have no idea,” said Franny. “I really don’t know.”

  “Please let me know if you need anything, will you?”

  “Thanks.”

  “I can’t tell you how much I’ll miss Jack,” said Warden Gaddon, leaning back in her chair. “He was the only one who would come to work in a place like this. Most doctors…” She smiled wryly. “Most reputable doctors, anyway, wouldn’t touch this place with a ten-foot pole. Your uncle was a man who spent his whole life in Gatestown, and wanted to give back to the community. He told me so himself.” The warden’s gaze went to the window, and the field beyond it. Even here, there was no mountain view. “It was at a library fundraiser,” said the warden. “Your uncle bought me a beer and we talked for a while. I was new here, and having a tough time of it.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “I’m from Texas, but I never meant to end up as a warden, I can tell you that.”

  Franny nodded.

  “Women’s prisons are different. Frankly, I like the men’s better.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s something catty about the women. I don’t know. With the men, it’s very straightforward, but with the women there’s the…I guess you might say the cunning. Most women prisoners make me nervous.” Franny was intrigued. The warden continued, “The first time I had to supervise the showers here, something happened to me. I had supervised hundreds of showers, of course, but not at a women’s prison. Men’s bodies, it just never bothered me. The first time I saw the women, though, all naked in a row, it made me think of Auschwitz. It was chilling.” She paused, and then said, “My God, I’m sorry. We don’t even really know each other.”

  “No, I’m interested. How did you end up here?”

  “It’s a long story,” said the warden, but she did not continue. “Dr. Wren, I don’t know what we’re going to do without Jack.”

  “I know,” said Frann
y. There was a silence, and then the phone rang and the warden answered it. Her tone was markedly different: cold, stern. She looked at Franny and rolled her eyes. “No,” she said. “You tell him the rule is long pants and I don’t care if he has to go to Wal-Mart in Waco. What? All right, I’m coming.” She hung up the phone. “Problems at the front gate,” she said, standing. “Can I walk you out?” Franny stood.

  “Here’s my home phone,” said the warden, scribbling a number on the back of her card and handing it to Franny. “And call me Janice, please.” The warm voice was back, and Franny nodded.

  After Janice had escorted Franny back out through the astonishing number of gates and bars and to Uncle Jack’s Cadillac, Franny started the car and began to drive. Uncle Jack’s house was only a few miles from the prison, but she did not turn, drove right past the Motor Inn, past the Last Chance Saloon. The houses were mostly small and one-level. The car radio scanned from one country station to another. Flushed men and women watered their lawns and walked dogs. Everyone was sweating. Franny tried to recognize people, but no one looked familiar. It felt good to be driving. The air coming in the window smelled of grass.

  On the corner of Farm Road 116 and Oak Street, a blue building caught Franny’s eye: Gatestown Public Library. She pulled into a parking spot. The library was open, and Franny felt a small thrill. She and Uncle Jack had come to the library a hundred times.

  Franny pulled open the screen door, and then the wooden one. She peeked in. To her left, on mismatched recliners, two elderly men in Stetsons sat reading the paper. One looked up, “Come on in, honey,” he said. “They’re open.” Franny blushed and stepped inside.

  To her right, rows of colorful books lined the shelves. The sign above them said MYSTERIES. An elderly woman with white hair filed cards at a tall desk. Behind her, more shelves stretched into another room. The woman said, “Welcome to the Gatestown Public Library, dear.”

  “Hi,” said Franny. “Thanks.” She pretended to look at the mysteries.

  “You here for the Satan Killer?” asked one of the men.