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“If you’ll calm down,” she says, “I’ll go over the procedure for your release with you. ”
“My release?” Mark’s voice breaks and he chokes out a high, hysterical laugh. “It’s not a release. It’s a death sentence. Why don’t you call it what it is?”
“Well,” Victoria says, shutting the folder with a snap. “If you’re not going to be reasonable, it looks like we’re done here. We can try again tomorrow. ”
She moves toward the door. I stand to follow her, and Mark leans forward, his body stretching out of his chair, and snags my wrist. “Please,” he says. “Please help me. ”
I twist out of his grasp, the tiny hairs on my arm standing at attention. I know I should be reacting to the pain in his voice, but there’s something swimming in the depths of his eyes—a calculating slyness at odds with his boyish face—that makes my skin crawl.
Victoria holds the door open and I go out, breathing fast.
“Everything okay?” David asks.
“He grabbed her,” Victoria says. “But no harm done, right?”
I nod, crossing my arms across my chest and holding my elbows to still my shaking fingers. David goes into the room with Mark, and Victoria starts down the hall away from me. “Let’s take a quick break before the next one,” she says as she walks.
“He was right, you know,” I call after her. She turns and looks at me over her shoulder. “You were playing word games with him. It is a death sentence. ”
Victoria stares at me, runs her tongue over her front teeth. Her footsteps are fast and loud as she walks back to where I stand. “No, I wasn’t,” she says. “He’ll be alive when we release him. And if he’s half as smart as he thinks he is, he can figure out how to stay that way. ”
I shake my head. “You know that’s not true. He’ll die out there. No one deserves—”
“Do you know what he did?” Victoria asks me. Her voice is quiet but deadly sharp and accurate, each word like an arrow pointed home. “He raped a nine-year-old girl. Carved his name into her belly so she’d have a souvenir for the rest of her life. ”
My stomach flips, bile rising up in my throat. I turn my face away from her, toward the wall, remembering the look in his eyes when he touched my arm. I want to scrub my skin with hot water, rid myself of him so there’s no evidence left behind. I don’t let myself think of the little girl who will never be able to do the same.
Victoria leans closer. “What do you suggest we do with him, Ivy? Should we let him loose? Keep him here forever, feeding him during winters we can barely feed ourselves? Give him medicine that could go to innocent children instead?” She shoves Mark Laird’s folder against my chest. I take it with numb fingers. “Personally, I think he deserves worse. ”
I don’t look up, even after the door at the end of the hall swings shut behind her.
I walk home angry and don’t even know why. It’s not as if my father didn’t admit that a lot of the people put outside the fence have done horrible things. And Victoria’s right, maybe Mark does deserve worse than he’s getting. But I still feel lied to, like all the speeches my father gave me were supposed to end in easy answers, not more questions. It means sometimes things aren’t as simple as our fathers want us to believe. I hear Bishop’s words in my head and have to resist punching at nothing, screaming at the humid air pressing against the back of my neck. My throat feels raw and tight and I stalk along the deserted sidewalk with my fingernails biting into my palms, leaving the sounds of downtown behind me in the distance.
Bishop is in the kitchen when I get home, forming hamburger into patties at the counter. “Hi,” he calls as I throw my bag on the sofa. “How were the prisoners?”
I stand in the kitchen doorway, the same way he did on the second night after our wedding. In most of the ways that count, nothing has changed since then. We haven’t slept together or shared secrets together or done much of anything together, really. But in perhaps the most important way of all, everything’s altered since those first hesitant nights. Because by being the person I come home to, the person who asks me about my day and listens to my answers, Bishop’s become the constant my life revolves around. Even if most of the time we navigate so carefully we might as well be bombs trying not to explode, we are still always there, in each other’s paths. Just waiting for the moments we intersect.
“Awful,” I say. “We met with one who is going to be put out. A guy who hurt a little girl. ” Using euphemism to disguise horror. “But he still begged me to save him. ” My voice is high and tight. “He begged. ”
Bishop snorts. “I bet he did. ”
“That’s all you have to say? Don’t you care about what’s happening to people?”
Bishop flips on the faucet with his forearm, soaping up his hands. “To this guy?” he says. “Not really. The better question is, why do you?” He turns off the water and grabs a dishtowel from the oven door handle.
I huff out air. “I don’t. I mean, not him specifically. But we can’t put people out every time they do something wrong. It’s…barbaric. ”
“Look around, Ivy. The world we live in is barbaric. We just try to hide it with”—he flaps the dish towel toward the counter—“hamburgers on the grill and cute houses. And what’s the alternative? Would it be better to kill them in the electric chair, like they used to? Use up resources we don’t have keeping them alive?”
I roll my eyes. “Now you sound like Victoria. ”
“Victoria has a good point, then. ” Bishop steps closer to me, leans one hip against the counter. “Last winter we lost more than two hundred people, Ivy. Two hundred. Would you rather keep the guy you talked to today alive or one of those people?”
“That’s an unfair question and you know it! Not everyone who is put out has done something like what this guy did. Some people steal bread from the market or refuse to get married. I don’t think it’s a waste of resources to feed those people. We managed to feed them before they committed a crime. We should be able to feed them afterward. ”
“Okay,” Bishop says. “But what about the murderers and rapists? What do we do with them? Saying you want something different isn’t going to cut it. ” His face is as calm as ever, his eyes a thoughtful, liquid green.
“So what are you saying? If someone doesn’t have every single possible answer, it’s stupid to ask the question?” I wish he’d raise his voice so I’d have an excuse to raise mine, release some of this frustration that’s boiling at the base of my spine. I don’t worry any more about offending him or making him mad. He seems able to handle my recklessness with a level of composure my family never mastered.
Bishop doesn’t miss a beat. “No, of course not. But it’s not enough to want things to change without asking what they’re going to change into. ”
“That’s easy for you to say. The president’s son,” I taunt. “Did you ever even think about this stuff before I came along, or did you spend your days splashing around in the river, letting other people worry about justice and what’s right?”