“Probably both,” Rusty admitted. “Samantha, I will tell you something very important: there is value in forgiveness.”
Sam thought about the letters in her purse. She was not sure she wanted to know why her mother’s murderer, the man who had tried to rape her sister, who had stood by while Sam was shot in the head, was reaching out to Rusty. In truth, Sam was afraid that her father had forgiven him, and that she could never forgive Rusty for having given Zachariah Culpepper’s conscience a reprieve.
Rusty asked, “Have you ever been to an execution?”
“Why on earth would I attend an execution?”
Rusty stubbed out his cigarette. He slipped it into his pocket. He held out his arm to Sam. “Feel my pulse.” He saw her expression. “Humor your old man before you get back on a plane home.”
Sam pressed her fingers to the inside of his bony wrist. At first, she felt nothing but the thick line of his flexor carpi radialis. She moved her fingers around, then located the steady tap-tap-tap of blood pulsing through his veins.
She said, “Got it.”
“When a person is executed,” Rusty began. “You sit in the viewing area, and there’s the family down front and a pastor and a reporter and then on the other side, there’s you, the person who couldn’t stop any of this from happening.” Rusty put his hand over Sam’s. His skin was rough and dry. She realized that this was the first time she had touched her father in almost thirty years.
He continued, “They pull back the drape, and there he is, this human being, this living, breathing creature. Is he a monster? Perhaps he has done monstrous deeds. But now, he is strapped down in a bed. His arms and legs, his head, are pinned so that he cannot make eye contact with any one person. He’s staring up at the ceiling, where the tiles have been painted with white clouds and a blue sky. Cartoonish in nature, likely done by another inmate. This is the last thing this condemned man will ever see.”
Rusty pressed her fingers closer against his wrist. His heart rate had accelerated.
“So what you notice is that his chest is pumping as he tries to control his breath. And that’s when you feel it.” He tapped the top of her fingers. “Dum-dum. Dum-dum. You feel your own blood pumping through your body. You feel your own breath swishing in and out of your lungs.”
Without thinking, Sam had let her breathing match her father’s.
“Then they ask him for his last words, and he says something about forgiveness, or hoping his death brings the family peace, or that he is innocent, but his voice is shaking, because he knows this is it. The red phone on the wall will not ring. He will never see his mother again. He will never hold his child. This is it. His death is nigh.”
Sam pressed together her lips. She could not tell if her own heartbeat was matching the cadence of Rusty’s or if she had let herself again get wrapped up in his words.
He said, “The warden nods the go-ahead. There’s two men in the room. They each press separate buttons to deliver the drug cocktail. This is so no one knows for sure who killed him.” Rusty was silent for a few seconds, as if he was watching the buttons being pressed. “You get a taste in your mouth, like a chemical, like you can taste the thing that’s about to kill him. He tenses, and then slowly, surely, his muscles start to let go until he is completely, utterly without movement. And that’s when you start to feel it, this sensation of tiredness, as if the drug is going into your own veins. And your head starts to nod. You’re almost relieved, because you’ve been so tense the whole time, during the waiting time, and now it’s finally seconds from being over.” Rusty paused again. “Your heart slows. You feel your breaths start to taper off.”
Sam waited for the rest.
Rusty said nothing.
She asked, “And then?”
“And then it’s over.” He patted her hand. “That’s it. They shut the curtains. You leave the room. You get in your car. You go home. You have a drink. You brush your teeth. You go to bed, and you stare at the ceiling for the rest of your life the same way that condemned man stared at the ceiling tiles over his head.” He held tight to Sam’s hand. “This is what Zachariah Culpepper thinks about every second of his life, and he’ll keep thinking about it every day until he’s wheeled into that room and they open that curtain.”
Sam pulled away from him. The skin of her hand felt tight, as if she’d been singed. “Lenore told you that we found the letters.”
“I never was able to keep you girls out of my files.” He gripped the arms of his wheelchair. He looked into the distance. “He’s being punished. I know you wanted him to suffer. He is suffering. There is no need to pursue anything to do with that man. You need to go back to New York and forget about him. Live your life. That’s how you get your revenge.”
Sam shook her head. She should have seen this coming. She was infuriated with herself for always letting Rusty hide in her blind spot.
He said, “If you can’t do it for yourself, do it for your sister.”
“I’ve tried to help my sister. She doesn’t want it.”
Rusty grabbed her arm. “Listen to me, baby. You need to hear this, because it’s important.” He waited until she looked at him. “If you get Charlotte stirred up about Zachariah Culpepper right now, she will never, ever come back from the bad place that she’s in.”
“What does Zachariah think that you owe him?”
Rusty let her go. He sat back in his chair. “To borrow from Churchill, it is a riddle wrapped in a canard.”
“A canard is an unfounded rumor or fable.”
“Also, a winglike projection on an airplane. Or, in the French, duck.”
“Rusty,” Sam said. “He mails these letters to you, the same letter with the same message, the second Friday of every month.”
“Is that so?”
“You know it’s so,” Sam said. “It’s the same day you always call me.”
“I am glad to know you look forward to my phone calls.”
Sam shook her head. They both knew those were not her words. “Dad, why does he send you that same letter? What do you owe him?”
“I owe him nothing. On my life.” Rusty held up his right hand as if he was swearing on a Bible. “The police know about the letters. It’s just something he does. The miserable fuck has got an awful lot of time on his hands. It’s easy to keep to a regular schedule.”
“So there’s nothing behind the letters? He’s just an inmate on death row who feels you owe him something?”
“Men in that position often feel they are owed something.”
“Please don’t tell me there is value in forgiving him.”
“There is value in forgetting him,” Rusty clarified. “I have forgotten him so that I can move on with my life. My mind has rendered his existence immaterial; however, I will never forgive him for taking away my soulmate.”
Sam was tempted to roll her eyes.
“I loved your mother more than anything else on this earth. Every day with her was the best day of my life, even if we were screaming at each other at the top of our lungs.”