Laura Lippman - I'd Know You Anywhere

Walter begged to differ.

He sighed, practiced some techniques recommended for insomnia—breathing, counting, emptying his mind, meditating with the mantra Barbara had supplied him—but he could tell that this was going to be one of those nights where he was destined to lie awake. Sometimes he wondered if a part of his mind was greedy for a few more hours of consciousness, if it was trying to grab every moment of wakefulness it could. It’s okay, buddy, he soothed his fretful subconscious. Don’t count me out yet. We might have years ahead of us, still . Funny, how hard it was to get two parts of his own mind to talk to each other.

November 25, the fretful half roared back. Less than two months. And you didn’t even get to talk to her today!

It’s okay, he said. It’s okay.

Walter was not the least bit perturbed that Elizabeth had needed to cut their conversation short. He assumed it was something serious—and definitely not a husband requiring a ride from the airport. Funny, how she still couldn’t lie for shit. Whatever it was, it was serious, but not scary-serious, not an injured child. He would have heard that in her voice. But something involving one of the children. What did children require that was serious, yet fell short of actual harm? He had no idea.

He had no doubt that Elizabeth was a good mother. But he was still disappointed that this was all Elizabeth’s life had amounted to, that this was what she had chosen to do with the great gift he had conferred on her. Ironic, he knew, because he was the one who was always advocating that women return to their natural roles. But he had never meant all women, just those women who took it too far, imagined themselves men. Fact was, he hadn’t always thought about Elizabeth as female, although he could understand why people were confused on that score.

The boy they banged in today, he had stolen an eighty-seven-year-old woman’s purse, then raped and killed her. Disgusting. Walter could never understand someone like that, nor would he ever understand those that thought he should. The outside world saw the men in Sussex I as indistinguishable from one another, a clump of monsters and savages. But the fact that their crimes fell into the same category didn’t make the men the same. Walter might not even be here if it weren’t for a stupid metal box found on the side of the road. Well, they had the kidnapping charge and the rape charge, but those could have been mitigated by a smart lawyer, not that he had a smart lawyer back then. He had one now, though, in Jefferson D. Blanding, who, he suspected, was actually named Jefferson Davis Blanding, after the president of the Confederacy, and had the bad sense to be ashamed of it. Not that Walter held Jefferson Davis in any esteem, and he would be the first to remind people that West Virginia seceded from Virginia rather than be part of the Confederacy. But no one’s responsible for his name.

One’s actions—yes. And no. He had done what they said he did. In a different system, he might have owned up to his crimes more readily. There was a part of him that would have liked to tell the whole story, although the catch was that he didn’t understand his own crimes until he’d had years to think about them. Here, in Sussex I, amid all the indignities, there was this one freedom, absent in the outside world. A man got to think. A lot. Walter had thought about what he had done, and he saw there was no way he could ever live outside prison. He belonged here. In fact, if he were scientifically inclined, he would want to find a way to extend prisoners’ lives so they could serve multiple life sentences. He owed Holly Tackett a life, he owed Maude Parrish a life. And, yes, he owed the other girls, too, but it wasn’t his fault that he had never confessed to those crimes. That was the system, refusing to make a deal, refusing to acknowledge that he had any power. Wipe out the death penalty and I’ll tell you everything, he had said more than once, but they wouldn’t even entertain the notion. Justice for the one—the rich girl, the doctor’s daughter—trumped justice for all. That wasn’t right.

The other thing that bothered him about his situation, as he chose to think of it, was that he didn’t understand what it meant, to be judged by a jury of one’s peers. He wasn’t fool enough to take it literally, to think that they had to find a dozen Walter Bowmans. Still, what was a peer ? There had been women on his jury, for example, and with all due respect, he did not think women could really understand what he had decided was a temporary insanity, the bottled-up energy of a young man who knew he had something to offer, something of value, but couldn’t find anyone who understood that. Today, with the Internet, he’d have no problem finding a woman. As he understood it, based largely on advertisements he saw for dating services and articles he read in magazines, technology had brought back good old-fashioned wooing. He had been in such a rush, as a young man, anxious and urgent. Could women even understand that? Did they know what it was like to have an erection at the wrong time, or what it would be like not to have one at the right time? His hard-ons had been like a faulty check-engine light, the kind that popped up just because you didn’t screw the gas tank tight enough. Like the ladies who came into his father’s shop, all fluttery anxiety, he had worried that he would ignore them at his peril.

But even if a woman could understand such things, why did one’s peers judge a man? Shouldn’t his victims have the final say? Oh, he could imagine a prosecutor’s comeback for that. How convenient for a killer to want his victims to judge him. But there was Elizabeth. He hadn’t been lying when he said he felt the greatest guilt toward her. What he did to her— that was a betrayal. The others, he didn’t know them, they weren’t real to him. But Elizabeth had been his copilot, his running buddy. Charley to his Steinbeck.

The next time they talked, he resolved he would say “I’m sorry” first thing. No small talk, no edging into the conversation. He would say the words he had never been allowed to say to her, one on one, the words that had burned in his throat and his chest all these years. He had understood, of course, why he had never been allowed to speak to her, why even during her cross-examination he had been instructed to regard her with the blankest of faces, listening with sorrowful eyes that never quite met hers. Still, there had been a part of him that always felt it wasn’t such a strange thing to ask, a final good-bye, just the two of them, maybe in a room in the courthouse, an armed guard standing outside. He had known better than to ask, but that didn’t mean he knew not to want it. He still wanted it.

No, he had to blurt it out, straight and true: “I’m sorry.”

Then maybe she would finally say she was sorry, too.

“I’M SORRY.”

The words came so fast, tumbling out the moment the collect call was approved, that they were almost cut off. Eliza stared at the beige receiver in her hand, wondering if Walter had been speaking into space, if he was reaching the end of a long and breathless recitation.

It had been a week since his last call, although Eliza marked the passage of time as a week since the school had called . She hadn’t forgotten Walter; the telephone was there every morning, the first thing she saw. But it was Iso who dominated her waking hours. It had been a tiptoey time in their household, she and Peter trying to observe Iso without crowding her, attempting to judge if she was headed toward real trouble. When she made fun of Albie—was that bad, or typical sibling behavior? Should Eliza let that go, in hopes that it would satisfy whatever aggression Iso needed to express, or should she nip it in the bud?