on the lead, but Carver told me himself that the sheriff never paid him a visit. Of course, I visited Ben Carver. In fact, I have been to the prison a total of forty-eight times in the last ten months. I would visit him more, but death-row inmates are only allowed visits once a week.
Sweetheart, I am sorry I haven’t told you about the visits until now, but please keep reading and maybe you will understand why.
On visiting day, Ben Carver and I sit across from each other like fish in a tank separated by a wire mesh between us. There are tiny holes in the mesh. The visiting room is loud. There are roughly eighty men on death row and for many of them, their only contact with the outside world is their mothers. You can imagine that much emotion is on display. Ben Carver’s mother is too elderly to visit him anymore, so it’s just me he sees. I have to bend down and put my lips close to the metal, even though I can see the black grime from where thousands of mouths have been before mine.
AIDS, I think. Hepatitis B. Herpes. Influenza. Mononucleosis.
And still I put my mouth to the screen.
Carver is a charming man with a soft voice. He is courteous and attentive, which I wonder about, because is this his natural disposition, or has he read too many novels about Hannibal Lecter?
Regardless, he always expresses great concern for my well-being. “You look tired today,” he’ll say, or, “Are you eating enough?” or, “You might want to talk to your barber about your hair.”
I know he flirts with me because he is lonely, just as I flirt back because I want to know what he knows.
So, we talk about everything but you.
He has almost perfect recall for movie dialogue. Casablanca. Gone with the Wind. Midnight Cowboy. Monty Python. Then there are the books he’s read—most of the classics, Anne Rivers Siddons for the Atlanta connection, Barbara Cartland for romance, Neil Gaiman for fantasy. I have had more conversations about The Celestine Prophecy than I care to mention.
I do not tell your mother about these conversations, and not just because she thinks The Bridges of Madison County is sentimental tripe. She has held firm to her refusal to hear about what I call my extracurricular activities and what she calls my fruitless quest. Absent this subject, there is very little for us to talk about anymore. We can only rehash for so long old memories of agonizing camping trips and Tooth Fairy adventures and heated parent–teacher conferences. Your sisters have started their own lives. They have found their own friends, started to build their own families outside of us. Your mother has my (inferior) replacement and I have? …
Can I admit to you that I am lonely? That every morning I wake up to a sparse, empty bedroom and stare up at a yellow popcorn ceiling and wonder if it’s worth it to get out of bed? That I can’t bear the thought of seeing my toothbrush standing alone without your mother’s? That I have two plates, two spoons, two forks, and two knives not because I need that many but because I could only find them in pairs? That I have lost my job? That I have finally lost your mother? That I have stopped asking your sisters to visit because every conversation feels like I am dragging them down underneath the ocean?
So maybe you can understand why discussing movies and literature with a convicted serial killer became such an important part of my life. Here is a reason to bathe. Here is a reason to put on shoes. Here is a reason to leave the house, drive the car, go somewhere else other than my one-bedroom apartment that feels as much like a prison cell as anything you could find at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison.
I know Ben is stringing me along, just like I know that I am letting myself be strung. It baffles me that the only times lately that I don’t think about you are the times I am debating Joyce with a likely cannibal. Isn’t the point of my visits to find out what Carver knows? To track down whatever rumor he has heard so that I can finally know what happened to you?
But I have this nagging feeling that he knows nothing about you.
And I have an even deeper nagging feeling that I do not care.