Fiction: The pardon

"But she is looking down at you now from the world of truth. And she’s saying, Save his life."

By SHERRI MANDELL
The pardon (photo credit: AVI KATZ)
The pardon
(photo credit: AVI KATZ)
Eighty-two degrees in February in Delray, way before noon, two days before that bastard would be hung. The day after Valentine’s Day, 2010. A belated present. But they didn’t hang people anymore. She wished they would. She’d like to hear his neck bones crack, see his head thud off the gallows like a soccer ball kicked onto a muddy field.
The white gauzy curtains in the kitchen were closed. She didn’t want anybody looking in and feeling sorry for her. Or feeling happy for her. It was nobody’s business really.
The phone rang again. The stranger’s voice on the answering machine was high pitched, scratchy like the tag of a sweater rubbing against your neck. Every day for the past week, she had left the same message: “Hi Abby, I really don’t want to bother you but I’m calling from Israel. It’s two in the morning here. Rabbi Manning said I should call? My name is Serena Stern Weiss and I’m also a bereaved mother, so I understand your pain, and your difficult choice. I’d like to talk to you about your daughter.”
Ms. Serena Stern Weiss didn’t say that she wanted to speak about Molly’s killer, about asking the governor to pardon him.
But Abby knew. There’d been other Jews calling. The absolute nerve. What could they be thinking? There were a lot of good Jews, Abby knew.
God knows there were enough of them down here. They were good people and Molly had to get the rotten yolk.
Every day she was besieged with calls.
Even visits from rabbis, their tentative knuckles tap on the vanilla glass window of the front door. But this was the only call that came from a bereaved mother.
Abby sat at her kitchen table drinking hot chocolate. There were still four chairs around the breakfast table, as if everybody would return one day. Ever since the murder, even in summer, in 104 degrees in Delray Beach, Florida, Abby drank hot chocolate. For some reason she always felt cold. And it helped her remember her childhood in Michigan, ice skating on the frozen lake, coming home to hot chocolate with marshmallows steaming at the table, her socks wet and the air warm in the steamy kitchen, her mother at the stove, making dinner, probably her famous chicken dumpling soup.
The only thing on Abby’s round table now were salt and pepper shakers in the shape of an Amish farm couple, both of them plump and smiling, the woman with a black handkerchief over her hair. Abby had imagined her middle-aged like that. A couple, content with each other, not heavy but solid in their ways and shape. Gravity had not pulled them down so much as given them bulk in the world so they wouldn’t be knocked over by any storm. Their children would come home to visit, not one dead in the ground and the other an engineer in Germany of all places.
And now: she was skinny. No bacon for breakfast any more. She didn’t like to eat meat. Nothing too fatty. Nothing too hard.
She couldn’t spend so much time chewing, it was too much work. She could feel meat churning its way down her throat, sitting in her stomach like an unwanted guest.
She always had her hot chocolate in a white cup. There was something about a white cup that soothed her. And God knows there wasn’t much soothing in her life.
The phone rang again. She listened for the message on the machine, but the caller hung up, the clang of the disconnect amplified on the machine.
She’d dotted her i’s with flowers when she was in high school. She’d been that innocent, naïve. She’d studied literature, loved Yeats, especially his poem the Lake Isle at Innisfree.
She’d met her husband in the literature class where they studied that poem. She’d imagined her life would be calm like that, a small cabin of clay, noon a purple glow.
The phone rang again but she didn’t pick it up, and again there was no message. She knew that there was a big time difference between Florida and Israel. That woman should be in bed, sleeping, instead of calling her.
It could be that rabbi, the fat one with the toothy grin, who had had the nerve to ring her doorbell and push his way in, telling her that he was a man of God and wanted to talk about forgiveness. He wore a black suit jacket whose pocket bulged with a rolled up newspaper. He’d tried to give her a lollipop.
He was the candy man in the temple, he’d told her.
And now, a knock at the door, tentative and insistent at the same time. She got up and looked out the oblong window. It was him, the candy man. She wanted him to go away – but she was still a good girl, a former Brownie leader. Make new friends but keep the old, one is silver and the other gold. She opened the door.
He walked in, wiping his forehead with a white handkerchief he pulled from his pocket. She didn’t ask him to sit down but he sat anyway, as if gravity demanded that he not be upright for too long. He asked her for a cup of coffee. Then he asked her if she had a glass mug. “Because of our dietary laws,” he said. He pulled out a cherry lollipop from his pocket, the kind that changed to gum at the end, and offered it to her.
She grabbed it and pulled off the paper wrapping and sat with him at the maple table.
His spoon tinged against the glass mug.
She said, “Rabbi I know you are here in good faith.” She laughed, taking a lick of her lollipop. “Good faith. Very appropriate for a member of the clergy.” She wished that she could tell her pun to Sandra, her fellow English teacher who kept a year-long tan and painted her nails a deep violet color. Who wore a bikini even though she was 30 pounds overweight. The one friend who had stayed by her all of these long years.
But Abby had driven her away by not talking. After 17 years of sadness, she didn’t want to share it with anybody. She preferred to be alone. Finally, she’d taken early retirement from Delray High School.
And now her mornings had the discipline of prison – 6 to 7 walk, 7 to 9 breakfast and errands, 9 to 12 going on the Internet and looking at the stories of other dead children.
Reading them. Knowing she wasn’t alone.
“I know you are a woman of compassion,” he said, spooning a dainty teaspoon of sugar into his coffee. “And this man, Doug Day…” “The murderer, not the man,” she said.
She stood up and flipped the air-conditioner control down. It was too cool in the house.
“Is not of normal intelligence.”
“So? Stupid people can’t be murderers?” “You know what I mean,” he said softly, taking off his black glasses and wiping them with a napkin.
Yes, the Jews were a smart people and she had to get the retard.
“What good will come if the state kills him? You know in Judaism, we say that every person is a world. In fact, Rabbi Simcha Bunim used to say that a person should have two notes in his pockets: for me the world was created, and I am nothing but dust and ashes. We humans are so big and yet so vulnerable.”
The way he said vulnerable made her want to cry. She walked around the world as if she lived in a glass vase. No flowers. Just the constant possibility of shattering.
“A person can repent, can change his ways. That’s what Doug Day has been doing. He told me that he wrote you that letter, that he was sorry… we have to forgive him… in Judaism, there’s the concept of tshuva, of return, of repentance. We have to give Doug Day that opportunity.”
“We? There’s no we here. I can’t stand to hear his name. He should be called Doug Night. Doug dark of night. Doug evil night…” She would never pardon him. She’d worked 17 years to get the bastard to punishment. Death row was too good for him. Dismembering his organs would be too good for him. Throwing him in a pit with vipers was too good for him. Castration was too good for him.
“I know what you want, and there’s no way I will ask the governor for pardon. Not when we’ve gotten this far,” she said, taking another lick of her lollipop.
But there was something annoying her, like a sharp sliver of wood from a boardwalk on the bottom of her bare heel.
“You know, you could save him. You could be a savior. In the Mishna, the book of Jewish, um, law, it says that that a court that found a murderer guilty once every 70 years was called a killer court. We are that merciful. Your daughter, I’m sorry to say, is not coming back. God-willing you’ll be together in the world to come. But she is looking down at you now from the world of truth. And she’s saying, Save his life.”
“You’re so wrong. She’s saying, Let him die a thousand and one deaths. A million deaths. One isn’t enough for him.”
And to think that she had once been against capital punishment. When that English teacher at the University of Florida, Prof. Fine, with her mass of auburn curls, had asked them to write essays in freshman composition taking a stand for or against, she had dutifully written that it was not the state’s job to take a life away, only God could decide that.
“There’s a woman named Serena Stern Weiss who is trying to call you,” he said. “She lost her son to terror. She has what to say to you. We could call her now if you wish.”
“I don’t want to talk to anybody, Rabbi. Just because she has a dead kid.” Molly was their love child. Molly the jolly. So very jolly.
Happy all the time, smiling. When they put her in the crib she sang to herself. She was always humming.
The rabbi said, “Abby, what was Molly like? Can you tell me about her?” She wanted to throw him out of the room. But nobody asked her anything about Molly anymore.
No, all the talk about Molly from the time that Doug Day had shot her with her own service revolver was about her death. Never anything about the life.
“How did she get interested in ecology and conservation? In wildlife?” he asked.
She took a deep breath, “You know Molly always loved animals. When she was a child, she loved lizards. You know how it is here. We have those iguanas that are always showing up on the patio. Or are they geckos? Anyway, she kept them and, of course, she loved salamanders. We’d go for hikes up the Coral Creek there and she loved catching them. And then she got a snake and we’d buy frozen baby mice to feed them. To me it was awful. But that was Molly. She loved reptiles and I never had a clue why. She had a turtle in the backyard. She had rabbits and a dog and a cat. That girl loved animals.”
“And she studied wildlife management at Miami U.?” “She got all As. Her professors loved her. She did field work in the Florida Keys. Whale watches. One summer she was an intern for the student conservation something. At Sunset Crater Monument in Arizona, in the visitor center. Some kind of volcano. The whole place was covered with ash she told us. She loved that job. She took kids on nature hikes and worked the seismometer; they were always measuring for earthquakes there.” Missing Molly was like walking on sharp stones barefoot, with the beach miles and miles away. You never got used to it.
The rabbi twisted his beard and then wrapped pieces of his side locks around his ears.
“And what did she do after she graduated?” “Well, first she worked in her father’s office.”
“He’s a doctor, right?” “A dermatologist. A good man but still a scumbag. Pardon my language. There’s no other way to put it.”
“Is he a good man?” She walked into her bedroom and opened the underwear drawer under the TV that was always on, her company, her noise. She needed a hum in her life to obliterate the silence.
She took out the picture and brought it back into the kitchen. It was her husband and his nurse, Jennifer. The two of them together, in the ice hotel in Sweden, smiling, raising drinks, as they sat bundled in fur coats at a bar of ice, a cloud of steam rising from their open mouths. The next picture was the two of them smiling on the plane, raising wine glasses, toasting their love. Abby hadn’t known anything about it, until she found the pictures in his briefcase.
He’d called her frigid when she didn’t want to make love after the murder, when all she wanted to do was find a way to keep hold of her daughter’s memory.
So cold you couldn’t touch the walls, so cold you had to sit in furs when you sat at the ice bar drinking your ice drink. And the beds. That was it: the beds. Sleeping on ice.
The rabbi leafed through the photos.
“What a terrible betrayal,” he said. “You’ve been through hell.” His bottom lip was much thicker than the top, which was almost totally hidden by his beard. “You know some people say that God only gives you what you can handle. But sometimes I think he gives people more than they can handle. That’s all I want to tell you. I admire your courage.”
She put down her lollipop stick. “You’d think that a death like that would have brought us together. But it didn’t. It pushed us, no, pulled us apart. Of course, there was…” she stopped talking.
“What?” “Blame.” She rubbed a perfect circle on the table with her pointer finger. “I thought he was to blame.”
“Why?” he asked.
“He encouraged her to take the job, even though he knew that she’d be driving around alone in the Glades. She was all alone. Just a girl.” Now she started crying. Just a girl. She didn’t allow herself to cry. And it felt so good now to cry.
“It’s OK to cry,” the rabbi said. That shut down her tears.
He said gently, “I have to be on my way. But I wanted to tell you that he has a mother, a mother like you. And she is suffering now. And you can stop her suffering. She knows that he’s not good but he’s retarded, excuse the term, and you can do something about it. Only you.”
“Enough, Rabbi. I don’t need any sermons and I don’t want you coming telling me to have mercy on a murderer. On my daughter’s murderer. Let’s say your daughter is murdered, shot with her own gun. How are you going to feel? Do you have a daughter?” “Yes.”
“What’s your daughter’s name?” “Chaya.”
“How old is she?” “Nine.”
“Well how are you going to feel if a nice Christian man murders her, no matter what his IQ? How are you going to feel with Chaya dead, Rabbi? Your Chaya dead.”
“God forbid,” he said, taking his handkerchief out of his pocket and wiping his glistening forehead. “God forbid.”
He drummed the table with his fingers.
“Abby, you are a brave woman. A very brave woman. An aishet chayil, a valorous woman. And you should be blessed, God should help you to forgive.”
“That’s enough, Rabbi. Enough.”
“I hope that God gives you strength.”
He stood up. She closed the front door behind him.
She walked into her bedroom and lay down on her bed and watched the weather on TV. Always the weather as if there wasn’t anything else to talk about.
Now the phone rang again and she was so upset, she picked it up without thinking. “Hi, Abby.” The voice hung on the last syllable.
“It’s Serena Stern Weiss. I’m so happy I finally got to you. I’m sorry if I’ve been pestering you, but I just feel that we have a common bond and Rabbi Marcus told me about you. I’m so sorry about Molly’s death.
I looked at the newspaper articles and she seemed like such a beautiful girl. Such a loss. For nothing.”
“Her death was not for nothing,” said Abby.
“Don’t tell me it’s for nothing.” “Well that’s the way I feel about my son’s murder. He was on a bus, the 87, in Haifa, and a terrorist got on and exploded himself, and that was it.
Sixteen years old.” How could she tell this woman that she didn’t want to talk about her son’s death? She had enough with her own pain.
“And? Why you are calling?” “Rabbi Marcus wanted me to tell you to ask the governor to pardon the killer. But you know what. I’m not going to do that. I think the bastard should burn. Let them take off his fingers first. Let them torture him first. That’s what I wanted to tell you. Life just throws us the worst. And it’s never what we think will happen. I had no training for such crap.”
“Neither did I,” said Abby.
“You know other people can’t understand.”
“They can’t. They have no idea. ” “Don’t you hate it when people say I’m dying to do something?” Abby couldn’t help it. She laughed. “I’m dying to buy that white dress.” “Or how about this: I want to murder my husband I’m so mad at him.” They laughed together.
“So I say, skin the bastard before they kill him. Don’t even let him go there with clothes on. And a last meal – let him eat shit.”
“You’re right,” said Abby.
But as she said it, she realized there was something about the woman’s tone that worried her, the poison spikes of hate and bitterness. Was she as cold and bitter like this woman? “Don’t let anybody talk you into anything,” Sara Stern Weiss said. “You’ve suffered. Let his family suffer the way that you’ve suffered.
That’s all I wanted to tell you. I don’t blame you in the least. I have to go now,” she said.
“It’s four in the morning here. But I wanted to tell you. That rabbi doesn’t have a clue.”
Abby hung up the phone. She could save him. She could be a hero. Now that they were so close, the thought was tempting. She did not want to sound like Serena Stern Weiss.
She heard a bell ringing somewhere in the distance, like an ice cream truck or an old-fashioned teacher’s bell summoning the class. She went to the window. Her heart felt as if someone were hammering it with cold nails. Flakes of snow fluttered quickly through the air like static on an old-fashioned TV. Snow in Florida.
How could it be? She remembered the igloo she’d made once with Molly for a science fair, out of sugar cubes. The two of them at the kitchen table, paste clotting their hands. They’d looked it up in the encyclopedia: though the walls of the igloo were cold, the inside stayed warm.
Warm as Doug Day’s last meal: her lawyer had told her that he had requested French fries and a well-done steak.
She opened the door and stepped outside.
The white petals from the weeping cherry tree covered the grass, the wind still fierce, shaking the tree almost bare. What looked like the coldest snow was now a blanket of flowers. She lifted one and breathed it in. She felt the sun brush her forehead, her cheeks, her lips. From her neighbor’s pool, she heard the lapping of the water at the edges.