She had already looked up Mary Baldwin, driver of the pink Mary Kay car. She had died of cirrhosis years ago. The cook sitting at the bar was dead, too, killed by a drunk driver while on his way to visit relatives in Mexico.
On the wall of Ruby’s apartment across the country, the flags waved, though there was no breeze. They were waiting: a thousand tiny cries in the dark. They wanted Ruby to come here, go there. Each man sheexonerated was an answer: this one didn’t kill her. But every missing woman she found led to a glorious reunion, even in the spirit world. They were the patchwork of her life. They were as rooted to the earth as a tree.
Back in the death house, Mitchell stood at the bars of his cell. The inmates called their cells rooms, perhaps for a semblance of normality. Mitchell was in room—cell—44, and the death row held two hundred cells. It was a hopeful number, Mitchell thought, that the state might be able to kill so many. But in truth, only about fifty or so inmates were housed here at a time. Of course, more came as others left. The only way there was to leave.
For ten years, he had lived in this tiny cell. He had come straight from court, those muddy days after his arrest, and then from the trial. He had never been in general population. From death row, it was hard to think general population even existed, though he knew, through the concrete walls, that it did. Outside this cell, this room, across an expanse of wet ground, was another prison, where thousands of men yelled and played ball in the yard and worked. In some prisons, the inmates raised crops, from the dangerous fruit to wheat and corn, and in others they ran massive fish farms—raising so much tilapia that it had come to be called slave fish by the incarcerated—but in this prison, the board of directors had devised an ingenious plan that they said saved on labor costs in the local towns. The inmates not on death row were sent to clean the parks, work on wildfire crews, maintain the roads, do construction, even take care of the governor’s mansion. If there was anyone working around Jackson, it was probably one of those inmates. Of course, since the costs were so low, the prison easily outbid any local contractors. Heck, itwasthe local contractor.
The death house was lucky to have cells with bars that allowed theimprisoned to view the hall. On some other death rows, Mitchell had heard from the staff, the inmates were housed behind locking metal doors with slots. He would have gone crazy without this limited view to the cell across the hall. In the decade he had been here, there had been three different men in that cell. One had met his maker naturally, dying of a stroke one night. This had greatly disappointed the family of his victim, who had been looking forward to his execution. The other had been executed a few years before.
The current occupant was an older guy who called himself Wicked Willy. He was grizzled and had cratered scars across his chest from having been shot in an argument over a craps game. At the moment, he was working out, which he did constantly—a hundred or more push-ups at a time. His muscles were blessed, even if his soul was condemned. That’s what he said.
When he wasn’t working out, Wicked Willy wrote letters. The men on the row were allowed as much paper as they wanted—which was an honest kindness—and most kept pen pals across the country. Being sentenced to death, Wicked Willy had joked, was like joining one of those newfangled online dating sites. You’re guaranteed to meet lots of pussy. But the chance of actually getting some? Not so much.
Mitchell didn’t like the pen pals. He thought most of them had bad reasons for writing to him. They wanted to pretend to themselves that they believed he was innocent, but that was a layer of lies on top of the truth: They thought he was guilty. They were titillated by the thought of his guilt and wanted to dance with death. It turned them on.
Not for him.
He dropped his hands from the bars. The cell wasn’t much bigger than a king-sized bed. The cot was narrow, but at least they kept it clean here. Every week the cells were turned, and trustees were allowed toclean. Besides the narrow cot cemented to the floor, there was a rusted sink, a lidless toilet, and a small writing desk. He was allowed five books at a time. That was the limit, because the cart only brought so many.
The first few years of his incarceration, Mitchell had been in what could only be described as shock. The prison doctor had visited him regularly, concerned. His heart rate was always high, his blood pressure off the charts, and yet his affect was slow, muted. They wanted to keep him healthy for death. The death row inmates got better medical care than most inmates. They got better food, better everything. It was a prestigious place to be inside a prison. Even the corrections officers treated them nicer. The worse the crime, the more the guy got treated like a celebrity. Because Mitchell had killed some white lady in a high-profile crime—or so they thought—they wanted to slaver at him, too, which he found repulsive, when he was finally able to think. So he turned away from others. From life.
He spent two or three years in that twilight, he reflected now. Then attorneys started visiting. That was the other benefit of death row. If he had been an innocent man sentenced to life in prison, he would have been well and truly fucked, because no one gave a rat’s ass about those thousands of men—and women. The prisons were filled with innocents, or at least those with some plausible deniability, and plenty of nonviolent offenders, but no one was lining up to sign petitions for them, or raise money for their appeals. Once he was sentenced to death, Mitchell was promoted from riding in the germ-infested coach class where others were likely to pummel you over a dried bread heel to the first class of legal accommodations: endless appeals that were now, finally, it seemed, ending. It was a plush ride, sure, he thought. But one that always ended in the worst possible way.
He had been gifted some of the best attorneys of the region. They hadcome, smelling strongly of cologne that seeped through the round hole of the scratched visiting room glass, and slowly, he had awakened, because those attorneys instilled the first burning ember of his new life, which was hope. He was forced to participate because they asked questions. He answered, his voice rusty at first, but trying. Asked why the officers never took a booking photo—because it would have shown him beaten to snot—he answered truthfully:I don’t know.
For seven years, he had coasted on hope. The appeals failed. But there was always another appeal, a new attorney at the window. New cologne. Sometimes the old cologne. Young fresh clerks, the zeal of true belief in their eyes, who made grandiose promises—We’re going to get you free, Mitch—and then vanished without ever asking him if he liked to be called Mitch. He did not.
But then suddenly the process ended, and the final die was cast. No more appeals. It was over. This final attorney, Terrence, was more like an undertaker than an advocate. He was the man who was there when the plane went down.
And the exonerator.I found out there’s an investigator who specializes in these cases,Terrence had told him a few days before Ruby arrived.She agreed to come help out. Better late than never, right?
Mitchell wanted to tell him now,Maybe not.
You know what’s funny?Terrence had asked, trying to lighten the mood a bit in these last aching weeks.I was trying to figure out what else I could do—anything to try, you know? I heard this voice on the way to work the other morning. It was like someone talking to me. Not talking—showing. I got this word in my head:exonerator. I got to the office and made some calls and what do you know, there is a woman called by that name. Isn’t that something?
But Mitchell was not surprised.
13.
Ruby’s mother worked long, hard hours cleaning hotel rooms, which was despicable work, full of disgusting things. Desirée wore a little canvas apron that held the tools of her trade—sponges and scrubbers, dustcloths, and tweezers for hair clots—and as the day went on, the stuff she collected went into the empty pockets, so by nightfall she was a walking treasure chest.
From her earliest days, Ruby remembered, she’d reach for her mother, her calm, tired face so high above her, and Desirée would kneel—painfully, as the years went on—and show her, one by one, all the items she had collected from the rooms she had cleaned that day.
A bag of unopened candies (she was not so foolish as to eat any opened food, after all she had seen). A fancy candle, the wick still white and proud.Look, baby girl. Ever seen one of these? This is an Indian Head nickel. Here, a family left this,and into Ruby’s small, warm palm came her first yo-yo.
Every day started and ended with her mother, the beautiful Desirée, who left their room before dawn wearing her apron, some of the pockets aching with want, and dropped her with neighbors she never remembered because all she thought about was her mother, and by nightfall, Desirée brought the world home.
On Desirée’s rare days off, she and Ruby played. Desirée taught her to rub a balloon over her head to make her hair stand up,and she did the same, and then they stood in the middle of the room and pretended that the electricity would take them to the stars.
On other days, they walked to the downtown library. There were entire rooms full of books, and a children’s section with the kind of rugs kids like: soft and firm, with cheerful bright colors and patterns that make sense. Today, even the rattle of water in a ceramic sink in a dusty, airless bathroom could bring back memories of those days to Ruby.
They took grocery bags from the Piggly Wiggly, and Desirée let her daughter fill her bag with as many books as she wanted. In those days, the children’s stories were real stories, full of intrigue, death, and romance:Crazy Weatherby Charles McNichols,Where the Red Fern Growsby Wilson Rawls.
Ruby and Desirée walked home, talking, stopping for a hot dog at a stand, Ruby grimacing as her mother ate hers with mustard and kraut, and she would stand there, mesmerized, and watch her, her mother’s hair blowing against a sunlit sky, the striped cart umbrella behind her, the people passing in what felt like bright costumes to her, from straightlaced suits to bell bottoms, the skid row alcoholics begging for change, the street musicians banging drums on the corners.
“Do you want a bite of mine?” Desirée would tease, and the little girl would shake her head, quick, because she liked her dog plain, and had already finished it, in three bites.
It never occurred to her that her mother was still a child when Ruby was born, and that by the time she was eight, Desirée was only twenty-three.
