The boy they banged in today, he had stolen an eighty-seven-year-old woman’s purse, then raped and killed her. Disgusting. Walter could never understand someone like that, nor would he ever understand those that thought he should. The outside world saw the men in Sussex I as indistinguishable from one another, a clump of monsters and savages. But the fact that their crimes fell into the same category didn’t make the men the same. Walter might not even be here if it weren’t for a stupid metal box found on the side of the road. Well, they had the kidnapping charge and the rape charge, but those could have been mitigated by a smart lawyer, not that he had a smart lawyer back then. He had one now, though, in Jefferson D. Blanding, who, he suspected, was actually named Jefferson Davis Blanding, after the president of the Confederacy, and had the bad sense to be ashamed of it. Not that Walter held Jefferson Davis in any esteem, and he would be the first to remind people that West Virginia seceded from Virginia rather than be part of the Confederacy. But no one’s responsible for his name.

One’s actions-yes. And no. He had done what they said he did. In a different system, he might have owned up to his crimes more readily. There was a part of him that would have liked to tell the whole story, although the catch was that he didn’t understand his own crimes until he’d had years to think about them. Here, in Sussex I, amid all the indignities, there was this one freedom, absent in the outside world. A man got to think. A lot. Walter had thought about what he had done, and he saw there was no way he could ever live outside prison. He belonged here. In fact, if he were scientifically inclined, he would want to find a way to extend prisoners’ lives so they could serve multiple life sentences. He owed Holly Tackett a life, he owed Maude Parrish a life. And, yes, he owed the other girls, too, but it wasn’t his fault that he had never confessed to those crimes. That was the system, refusing to make a deal, refusing to acknowledge that he had any power. Wipe out the death penalty and I’ll tell you everything, he had said more than once, but they wouldn’t even entertain the notion. Justice for the one-the rich girl, the doctor’s daughter-trumped justice for all. That wasn’t right.

The other thing that bothered him about his situation, as he chose to think of it, was that he didn’t understand what it meant, to be judged by a jury of one’s peers. He wasn’t fool enough to take it literally, to think that they had to find a dozen Walter Bowmans. Still, what was a peer? There had been women on his jury, for example, and with all due respect, he did not think women could really understand what he had decided was a temporary insanity, the bottled-up energy of a young man who knew he had something to offer, something of value, but couldn’t find anyone who understood that. Today, with the Internet, he’d have no problem finding a woman. As he understood it, based largely on advertisements he saw for dating services and articles he read in magazines, technology had brought back good old-fashioned wooing. He had been in such a rush, as a young man, anxious and urgent. Could women even understand that? Did they know what it was like to have an erection at the wrong time, or what it would be like not to have one at the right time? His hard-ons had been like a faulty check-engine light, the kind that popped up just because you didn’t screw the gas tank tight enough. Like the ladies who came into his father’s shop, all fluttery anxiety, he had worried that he would ignore them at his peril.

But even if a woman could understand such things, why did one’s peers judge a man? Shouldn’t his victims have the final say? Oh, he could imagine a prosecutor’s comeback for that. How convenient for a killer to want his victims to judge him. But there was Elizabeth. He hadn’t been lying when he said he felt the greatest guilt toward her. What he did to her-that was a betrayal. The others, he didn’t know them, they weren’t real to him. But Elizabeth had been his copilot, his running buddy. Charley to his Steinbeck.

The next time they talked, he resolved he would say “I’m sorry” first thing. No small talk, no edging into the conversation. He would say the words he had never been allowed to say to her, one on one, the words that had burned in his throat and his chest all these years. He had understood, of course, why he had never been allowed to speak to her, why even during her cross-examination he had been instructed to regard her with the blankest of faces, listening with sorrowful eyes that never quite met hers. Still, there had been a part of him that always felt it wasn’t such a strange thing to ask, a final good-bye, just the two of them, maybe in a room in the courthouse, an armed guard standing outside. He had known better than to ask, but that didn’t mean he knew not to want it. He still wanted it.

No, he had to blurt it out, straight and true: “I’m sorry.”

Then maybe she would finally say she was sorry, too.

Part III.IN MY HOUSE

Released 1985

Reached no. 7 on Billboard Hot 100 on February 16, 1985

Spent 22 weeks on Billboard Hot 100

25

“I’M SORRY.”

The words came so fast, tumbling out the moment the collect call was approved, that they were almost cut off. Eliza stared at the beige receiver in her hand, wondering if Walter had been speaking into space, if he was reaching the end of a long and breathless recitation.

It had been a week since his last call, although Eliza marked the passage of time as a week since the school had called. She hadn’t forgotten Walter; the telephone was there every morning, the first thing she saw. But it was Iso who dominated her waking hours. It had been a tiptoey time in their household, she and Peter trying to observe Iso without crowding her, attempting to judge if she was headed toward real trouble. When she made fun of Albie-was that bad, or typical sibling behavior? Should Eliza let that go, in hopes that it would satisfy whatever aggression Iso needed to express, or should she nip it in the bud?

Eliza’s parenting had always been natural and easy, largely uninformed by texts and experts. Even her parents, experts in their own right, had encouraged Eliza to find her own way as a mother. For years she had felt that her immersion in children’s literature had been better preparation than any parenting guide. There it was, all the fears and emotions and needs of childhood. When other mothers asked where she sought guidance, she often said, “Everything I know about parenting I learned from Ramona Quimby.” People thought she was being glib, but she felt those particular books, written from a child’s-eye view of the world, were indispensable. Inez once told Eliza she was a good mother because she had never forgotten what it was like to be a child. Like nursing mothers who squirt milk at the sound of any baby’s cry, Eliza could be catapulted into childhood by a tantrum or a plaintive whine. She remembered it vividly, perhaps because it was sharply fenced off in her mind. The before time, the Elizabeth time.

So while she could never forget Walter, embodied as he was by this bland, beige instrument-the phone of Damocles, Peter had taken to calling it-Iso was uppermost in her mind, Iso was the present, Iso was a situation that could be improved, changed, monitored. Walter was the past. And not her responsibility.

“ Elizabeth?”

“Yes, I’m here.”

“I’m sorry. Did you hear me say that? I’m sorry. I wanted to say it first thing, in case we get interrupted again.”

Oh lord, Eliza thought. I hope we don’t get interrupted again. She felt that her life had already reached its drama quotient for the next decade. Any more worries-a call from a neighbor that Reba had gotten out of the yard, even a rumble in the Subaru’s motor-might push her over the edge.