I'd Know You Anywhere Page 0,75

own laws, the insistence on less interference from the federal government. It was hypocritical for these same conservatives to claim that state lines didn’t matter when they wanted to kill someone.

She began writing Walter. He seemed skeptical of her at first. Other women had written him. “Crazy women,” he later told her. “They want a boyfriend. I can’t be somebody’s boyfriend in here. Where were these women when all I wanted was a girlfriend?”

She thought that was funny, even self-aware. Over time, she began to pull out bits and pieces of Walter’s life. The late-in-life parents, the coldness of his home, the consistent undermining by all those around him. She sent him an IQ test and he scored above average, although he admitted that he had never done well in school. Eventually, they began to talk about sex. Walter said his first sexual encounter was with a local girl who was sort of a for-barter prostitute; she had sex with men whose services she needed. He would go over to her house and help her with various tasks—putting up curtain rods, for example, or moving heavy furniture. But she was so businesslike about the arrangement that Walter never enjoyed it quite as much as he thought he should, didn’t really count it. “In a lot of ways, I was a virgin,” he said of the year he ended up on the run. He was, Barbara realized, hopelessly confused about sex and women.

“I’m not that man anymore,” he told her. “If I left here—I don’t know. But I’m not going to leave here, and I think that’s right. But that’s the thing that seems weird to me. They locked me up, and I’m a better person for it. Cured, even. I needed to be locked up, no doubt about it. But when they execute me, they’re going to kill the wrong Walter. The one they want to punish doesn’t exist anymore.”

Barbara was the only person who seemed to agree. Virginia was going to kill the wrong Walter, commit murder as surely as he had. The state had spent millions toward this goal, far more than it would have if it had just allowed Walter to be a lifer from the start.

She reclined on her mat. Barbara had caught an infection from using one of the center’s mats, or so she believed, and she now brought her own bright fuchsia one. It was the part of class she hated the most, the part where she was supposed to empty her mind. My mind does not empty, she wanted to protest.

Instead she lay on her back, counting the days. November 25. Under Walter’s 1-2-3 plan, he wouldn’t even broach his request to Eliza until the third time they spoke, and Barbara was unclear whether he was counting that first, truncated conversation. He might enjoy more phone privileges as the execution date came closer, but still—Barbara thought he should just blurt it out, let it stew in her mind.

“I know her better than you do,” Walter had said, which was infuriating. He seemed to think he was closer, in some ways, to this woman than he was to Barbara. You don’t know Eliza Benedict, she wanted to tell him. You know a girl, one who hasn’t existed for years. And you might not even have known her, as it turns out. Barbara didn’t like Eliza Benedict and would give anything if they didn’t need her. She had disliked her the first time she saw her, walking down the street with that ugly dog. She had resented her…calm. This was a woman who clearly had no problem relaxing. Barbara had wanted to yell at her from the car: “A man’s going to die because of your testimony. But he’s not the same man who committed those crimes. You are killing a ghost, a phantom. How do you sleep at night? How can you live with yourself? You probably want him to die, but no court would give him death for what he did to you.”

She muttered “Namaste” but didn’t bow her head to the teacher. Barbara rolled up her mat and rushed out into the world, her muscles supple and stretched, her mind seething. Forty-seven days. They had forty-seven days to get to the governor and petition for a commutation. Forty-seven days to break down a shoddy little story that had somehow managed to stand, all these years, a child’s rickety tree house that should have fallen to ruin long ago. Forty-seven days to pry