2.
The Georgia heat hummed. That and the sound of the cicadas filling the air made her bones vibrate. The window of the rental
car reflected a slender woman with dark hair, pale skin, and naturally dark lips. She had locked her valuables in the car,
knowing they’d be safer there.
She turned to face it.
The death house, it was called. Death row.
She had arrived before dawn into a muggy Atlanta, and driven an hour to this small town called Jackson. Steam uncoiled from
the ground, and the morning mist touched the concrete walls of the death house, with its locking metal door. There were no
windows.
All prisons were the same, she thought. There might be small differences in the degree of decay, or in the exact shade of
institutional white the walls were painted. She had noticed that the eggshell white varied by region, but maybe that was just
the light. Some prisons were in the wilderness and others in a desert, many were in small towns, but all were places where
we remaindered the dead and banished the rest, hoping they would die, too.
She walked up the sloping steps, worn down by so many heavy boots. Inside were the usual metal detector and correctional staff.
These, too, didn’t vary much. They were meaty men with tattooed arms and women with sunburned faces. They thumbed through
the folder she had brought, and examined her license.
In the concrete visiting room, her client waited behind a shield of safety glass. There was a small round hole through which she could talk, and she took the solitary seat, leaning close to the hole. But not too close.
“My name is Ruby Spencer,” she said by way of introduction. “Your attorney sent me.”
Mitchell Brown was an ethereal-looking man with light brown skin and soft brown eyes. His file said he’d had a birthday recently:
He was thirty-two, but death row had a way of blurring faces, turning them into water that was timeless.
He had been on death row for ten years. Ten years might not sound like a lot to some, but it was an eternity in these small
concrete rooms. It was the marvel of her life, how people survived what could not be survived.
Once, Ruby had crossed the country to visit a man waiting for death in a Texas prison, and the first thing he said when she
entered was You brought the outside in. For twenty years, that man had convinced himself there was no outside: He was already in the coffin. But there she was, smelling
like wind and rain.
“You’re the one they call the exonerator,” Mitchell said.
She was relieved that he had spoken. Some death row inmates became silent by this point. They couldn’t reconcile a world that
would execute an innocent person, so they lost all hope for humankind, including themselves. But most people couldn’t give
up hope. She knew that well herself. Even when it made no sense—even when logic argued against it, and your own spirit rebelled,
you still hoped.
“Do you want me to try?”
“Yes.”
Mitchell Brown’s case had wound down to its bitter end.
His attorneys had exhausted all appeals, post-conviction relief, and habeas.
All that was left was a governor who never granted clemency and a supreme court that seemed to take perverse pleasure in turning down last-minute appeals, even when there were questions of innocence.
Which Mitchell’s attorney said there were.
Ruby glanced at her watch. She was allowed thirty minutes. Time was already eating up the future, promising Mitchell a visit
to the plastic-covered gurney on the other side. Ruby was excruciatingly aware of time—how it passed so easily, and how our
decisions passed with it.
She opened the folder. The attorney had sent her the discovery the previous night, before she caught her flight. There were
over two thousand people on death row across the United States, and she couldn’t possibly keep up with them all.
“I read as much as I could on the plane,” she said, turning to a defense report. “Looks like you had some help—after the trial.
Good appellate attorney. The capital unit took over.”
What she was saying, of course, was that there was not much she could do. Mitchell’s case had already been handled: Attorneys
had already turned over every stone, hunted down every clue.
“Yeah. Some nice people,” he said.
What he meant was that they came and went, and no matter how much they cared, they disappeared. The same would be true of
her.
Unless she saved him, which she doubted she could.
She glanced up from the folder.
“It says here you’re from Oregon,” she said.
“Yeah. Chinook.”
Surprise washed over her. She’d expected him to say Portland, or one of the bigger cities. Not that tiny town, so small you
could throw a rock across it.
“My mother was from Chinook,” she said.
It was his turn to look surprised. It made him look alive.
“Really? I lived there with my grandpa. On the river. We used to fish. And catch smelts. They’re good fried, you know. With
cornmeal.”
She could hear a river she had never seen, feel the wind caress her cheek. Taste that crunch of fin.
The two of them looked at each other, and she thought, I’m looking at a dead man.
Mitchell Brown was slated for execution in two weeks.