she will run away. She’s a scared little mouse.
Barbara knew from scared little mouses. Mice. She had been one, behind her cranky facade. She had skittered to her car in the morning, worried it wouldn’t start, skittered into the school, tried to teach history to bored seventh and eighth graders, skittered out of the Pimlico neighborhood at day’s end, cooked dinner, fretting over calories and fat and cholesterol. Graded papers in front of the television, usually falling asleep there. Rinse, lather, repeat.
Then she had awakened in the hospital, her face bandaged, twelve hours, a half day, lost to her. She had known even before they removed the dressing that the repair—she could not dignify it with the term surgery—had been botched. She could sense how lumpy the scar was, how large the stitches. They had not bothered to summon a plastic surgeon to the ER. That might have been another lawsuit, another arrow in her quill, but the hospital had been quick to remedy its work, and the result wasn’t bad. Her scar was like a ghost smile, a little happy face off to the side. “For Halloween,” she once told Walter, “I might go as both of the Greek masks that represent the theater.”
Yet it was in that moment—waking up, disoriented, unsure of the damage done—that Barbara realized she was no longer scared. This was before the settlement left her well fixed, before she even really knew what happened. But she understood this: She wasn’t scared anymore. She had almost died. She didn’t. There must be something she was supposed to do.
The first task she tackled was finding out everything about the boy who had sliced her face, following him through the system. Tuwan Jones was fourteen, a juvenile, and it was harder then to try juveniles as adults. Barbara didn’t have a problem with that, although she believed her assailant to be beyond rehabilitation. Someone, a parent or a relative, had killed that boy long ago. He was sent to the Hickey School, where he promptly became an escape artist, leaving at every chance, only to be flummoxed by the surrounding suburbs, so still and quiet. Tuwan could get out of Hickey, but not out of the neighborhood. He never got much farther than Harford Road, the main strip nearest the school. They called Barbara every time he escaped, a courtesy and probably a defensive measure against future lawsuits. Tuwan had no intention of coming after her. He didn’t even remember her. He was released from Hickey at the age of sixteen. By eighteen, he had finally managed to kill someone and was sent to Supermax in Baltimore City.
Perhaps another person would have taken this experience and resolved to prevent such tragedies, to help young men before they became assailants. But Barbara had been there already, on the front lines, and she had little confidence that she was the type of person who could change others. Instead, she became fixated on the idea of the death penalty. It was wrong to kill. Someone had tried to take her life from her, and failed. Given a chance to live, she had to become a better person. Not nicer, necessarily, but more confident, vigorous, even a little selfless. Perhaps men on death row could become better people, too, if only they could be spared execution.
And although Maryland had its share of interesting inmates, the best ones, the ones whose cases really deserved to be reconsidered, had all been taken. Barbara wanted an inmate more or less to herself, she wanted to champion someone that no one else thought worthwhile. She wanted to take a perceived monster and persuade the world that he was human.
Which is what led her to Walter, back in the 1990s, when his first execution had been set. She could not believe the bloodlust at the time, how keen people were to see him die. The man she saw in newspaper photographs and courtroom sketches looked gentle to her, resigned. Besides, it wasn’t immoral of him to challenge the state of Virginia’s right to execute him on jurisdictional grounds. “Loophole,” editorials snarled. “Technicality,” complained pundits. But Barbara, the former history teacher, knew that state lines were more than arbitrary markers on a map, that the United States were the united states, and if Holly Tackett had been killed in West Virginia, then Walter should have been tried there. That was no technicality. It was a cherished tenet of most conservatives, the right for states to make their