Chapter 12 Peregrine Falcon #5
When, several weeks later, Felicity was sentenced to two consecutive terms of not less than twenty years each, I was not there.
I read the accounts and heard from Sally and others that she took it very well.
She was composed. Her impassive exterior was back in place.
Claire told me that she overheard Sam promise that he would come to see her right away to begin preparation for an appeal, but Felicity only thanked him and squeezed his forearm and wished him good luck before she turned away.
For the first time, I wondered if Felicity was actually mentally ill. Her composure wasn’t simply unusual; it was eerie. Facing
what she had to face, anyone else would have clutched for a lifeline, for any hope at all. Did her guilt so overwhelm her?
Was her sense of justice so acute?
I wrote Felicity two letters, one right after she went to prison, the other a few weeks later. This time, my letters were
not returned to me. One day, I received a letter from her. It was the only one she’d ever write to me from prison.
Dearest Reenie,
Thank you for the books. Your care and friendship mean a great deal to me. You have always been there. I know how hard all
this has been for you to understand. I will never forget you or how brave and good you are.
With love, Felicity
But I did not answer that letter.
I was confused.
A week went by as a question, one that had been in the water too long, washed up stinking on the shore of my consciousness.
It was livid and ugly: Was Felicity ever who I had believed her to be? And if she was, had she changed so profoundly that
no vestige of the girl she’d been was left?
When she first went to prison, I was in shock.
I couldn’t work the whole thing out. What was most on my mind was how horrified she must be, prison being worse by orders of magnitude than the eight often-empty cells at the Dane County jail.
I didn’t want her to feel abandoned. But had her crime erased my affection for her?
Certainly, it would not have been the case if the murders had been accidental.
But how did I feel about a cynical, pitiless plan?
And what kind of person was fine with having a murderer for a pen pal?
So I stopped writing.
Then, a week later, I saw Sam’s number on my phone screen, and my heart accelerated. At last. At last! But his text was only
to plead with me to write to Felicity. Felicity, Felicity, she was the one who really mattered to him. When I didn’t reply
to that text, he left me a phone message, which I listened to a dozen times—not for the content but to hear his voice say
my name. Felicity could not eat or sleep and was finally hospitalized again. She’d begun therapy, once a week when she was
in crisis, later once a month or less often. It seemed to be helping to a degree. He thought I would want to know.
Poor sensitive girl. If she had such a delicate character, she shouldn’t have murdered two people. And Sam sent not a word
about him and me. How I reacted then confuses me now.
I would learn later, from Claire through my mother, that Felicity was adjusting.
She still would not accept visits, even from Sam, but spoke to him on the phone a few times.
She sometimes answered Claire’s letters.
It would take many months, and so many things would have happened by then, before Claire would tell me in passing that Felicity had completed her degree in biology, testing out of many of the requirements.
She’d started a book group for her fellow prisoners and helped several women complete their GEDs.
Through a prison outreach program from the UW School of Medicine, she traveled to a clinic to have laser surgery so she no longer required eyeglasses.
She became a vegetarian, ate her meals alone, always, and, as time wore on, she was allowed to eat in her cell or in the library.
She was always in an individual cell. She found comfort in prayer, spending an hour every evening in the chapel.
Even the violent offenders and the stone crazies were compelled to respect her beauty and her reticence, Claire told me.
She was never hurt or assaulted. Felicity never told me any of these things, and by the time I learned them, they no longer really signified anything, in Felicity’s life or mine.
At first, when I was trying to forget her, I had to contend with the fact that, while Felicity might be out of my life, it
would take time to excavate her from my psyche. My obsession with Felicity, for let’s call it what it was, had towed me through
a silty strait spiked with guilt and admiration (and joy and joy). I couldn’t stop thinking of her in captivity, a bird of
bright plumage in a cage.
At first, I dreamed of her every night.
Then less often.
Finally, not at all.
Then, one night, long after, when all the other shoes had dropped and my life had taken a decisive new turning, I had a vivid
dream of Felicity, which would also, I would later decide, combine a kind of prophecy and a recovered memory.
She was standing outside, her arms thrust out and the sun spangling her dark hair. Around her head and along her arms, birds
swirled and alighted, as if they were joyful to be near her.
At that time, I didn’t know St. Francis of Assisi from Francis Ford Coppola. So I didn’t understand until much later that
this dream image of Felicity recalled the thirteenth-century Italian saint who was born the indulged son of a prosperous merchant
but who grew up to be a humble friar who called all creatures his brothers and sisters. He preached even to the birds, and
asked God to make him an instrument of His peace.
The next morning, I began to write to Felicity again, and I continued, every other day, a short letter or a long letter, letters
she did not answer but which were not returned to me.
What should I say? I wondered.
My generation really has no idea how to write letters.
There is generally no need. That was one of the things I mourned as a writer.
In grad school, I’d been assigned to read the correspondence of the great children’s editor Ursula Nordstrom, who worked with authors such as E.
B. White on classics like Charlotte’s Web.
Her notes to friends and business associates were so revealing, so funny and brilliant and insightful, and I knew that Nordstrom
was among the last generation of devout letter writers. Of course, people talked then too, but they didn’t have the Satanic
convenience of smartphones. What would anyone ever read from the most accomplished authors of my age? The collected text messages?
As time passed, and I became reconciled to the fact that this would be a one-sided effort, I began to treat the correspondence
as a kind of journal—for my benefit as well as Felicity’s. I wrote to her about my life, all that I was reading, what I was
writing, the people I met, and my family. I wrote to her about politics and the environment, about movies and music, about
fashion. I wrote to her about things we’d done and said long ago.
Through creating those letters, I unearthed my love for her, which was never really gone. There was still so much that I would
never understand, but I considered that perhaps there had been a good reason for what she had done, if she had done it at
all. Since I didn’t know how to tell her that in words—and it seemed a kind of dangerous thing to write to a convicted murderer,
I tried to show her. I am no artist, but (also paraphrasing St. Francis, who, unbeknownst to me, had advised doing a very
few things but doing them well . . . ) I decided to try to draw something for her. I kept working at it.
Prompted by my memory of the teenage Felicity crying as she tried to save a nest of orphaned birds, I kept at it until I could
make a passable image of the humblest of all birds—a sparrow. How powerful that choice would be, how large it would loom,
I had no idea.