*
It takes her two and a half hours to get to Sterling Correctional Facility, the prison where Jacky Seever will live for the next fourteen months, until he’s put in an armored transport and taken south to the prison in Ca?on City, where he’ll be strapped to a bed in the middle of a room full of witnesses and injected with poison, and everyone will wait until he falls asleep and his heart rumbles to a stop. Sterling is east of Denver, a downward slope away from the mountains and onto the plains, where the land becomes nothing but scraggy bushes and yellow dirt, houses that hunker close to the ground and hold on with all their might. It’s colder out here, where the wind blows without breaking, although there’s less snow on the ground than in the city, only a dusting that blows across the interstate, whipping around in tiny ice tornadoes before disappearing. This place makes her eyeballs ache. It’s all that sky, she thinks, unending gray stretching from one side of the world to the other, with nothing to break up the monotony. She feels like she’s suffocating under all that sky, like a fishbowl has been turned over and plunked right on top of her head.
She’s been to a prison before, when she was fourteen. It was part of the “scared-straight” program her high school had, although there weren’t enough delinquent kids to take, so everyone went. Not one kid had tried to get out of it, because any excuse to cut class was a good one, even if it was to visit a prison, so everyone was separated, boys on one bus and girls on another, and they went their own ways. Sammie doesn’t remember much from the field trip, only that one of the girls started weeping when she was patted down, big gulping cries that echoed off the concrete walls. And she doesn’t remember much about the prisoners who spoke to them, except that they were pleasant and vaguely boring, not all that different from her own mother, and none of them had done anything all that exciting to end up behind bars, except one, who was small-boned and pretty, who didn’t seem all that much older than they were.
“I killed my husband,” the woman told them. She wasn’t nervous standing in front of the group of teens, but matter-of-fact. “I thought it was an accident, but they said it wasn’t.”
They, Sammie quickly figured out, was everyone else, everyone who wasn’t living inside the woman’s head.
“I did it with a knife,” the woman said, after someone asked how it’d happened. “He was asleep.”
Then they were taken to the prison’s cafeteria for lunch, where they were served macaroni and cheese, a green salad, and cartons of chocolate milk like they had at school.
“It’s not usually this good,” the husband-killer said. “They made a special lunch, just because you guys are here. Like we’re having a fucking party or something.”
*
The prison is not what she expects. She’s read about it, looked up photos of it online, but she isn’t prepared for how big it is, how empty it seems. That’s an illusion, she knows, because the place is full up with prisoners, too many of them, but they’re not out in the fenced yard, not in this snow and cold.
There are parking spots for visitors, and she pulls into one but keeps the engine running. Checks her hair. She’d had trouble choosing lipstick—the color a woman wears on her lips is important, like she tells customers at work. It can make your teeth white, your smile glow. Lipstick can change everything. She’d spent a long time picking through her bathroom drawer, looking at all the tubes, each color with its own name printed on the bottom. Lust. Sin. Defiance. Gorgeous. Perverted. They’re all sexual, tawdry. DTF. Down to fuck. There’s nothing called Intelligent or Brainiac. No Failure or Idiocy. Disgusting. Nothing like that. After a while, she slid the drawer shut, didn’t put on lipstick at all. But she wore good shoes—black flats with silver studding around the edges. Classic, expensive. They look nice, but they pinch around her toes. She has her leather purse, she’s wearing a brand-new blouse. It’s stupid, she thinks, to get all done-up to visit a man in prison, but she didn’t think blue jeans would do it. Seever had always noticed when women dressed nicely, and complimented them, and she wants this to go well.