Pretty Girls

“I know.”

“Her stomach was branded with an X.”

“I know.”

Exactly like the second girl in Paul’s movies.

The one who looked like Anna Kilpatrick.

iv.

Do you remember that article you wrote for the school newspaper when Timothy McCorquodale was executed? He was sentenced to death in the 1970s for murdering a white girl he’d seen talking to a black man in a Midtown Atlanta bar. You were hard-­pressed to understand why a white girl talking to a black man engendered so much rage. I was both proud and hopeful that you didn’t understand this insipient sort of racism. Your mother and I gr

ew up during the last gasps of Jim Crow. We marched for equal rights, but that was easy to do when all of our friends and fellow students were marching right alongside us.

I remember talking to your mother about your article, in which you editorialized that while McCorquodale deserved to be punished, society did not have the right to put him to death. We were so proud of you for believing the things that we believed. We, too, shared your outrage at the thought of a man being electrocuted for kidnapping, raping, torturing, and eventually murdering a seventeen-­year-­old girl.

I was thinking about your article this morning when I drove to the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison. You might recall from your research on your story that this is the location of Georgia’s death row. I’m not sure why your article came into my mind as I drove through the front gate, and while I am still proud of you, I have understandably changed my mind about the death penalty. The only reservation I have now is that I feel the parents should be given the option of flipping the switch.

A few years after you disappeared, a postal worker named Ben Carver was sentenced to death for murdering six young men. (He is a homosexual, which, according to Huckleberry, means he is not attracted to murdering young women.) Rumors have it that Carver cannibalized some of his victims, but there was never a trial, so the more salacious details were not made public. I found Carver’s name in the sheriff’s file ten months ago, the fifth anniversary of your disappearance. The letter was written on Georgia Department of Corrections stationery and signed by the warden. He was informing the sheriff that Ben Carver, a death row inmate, had mentioned to one of the prison guards that he might have some information pertaining to your disappearance.

Huckleberry made a note that he followed up on the lead, but Carver told me himself that the sheriff never paid him a visit. Of course, I visited Ben Carver. In fact, I have been to the prison a total of forty-­eight times in the last ten months. I would visit him more, but death row inmates are only allowed visits once a week.

Sweetheart, I am sorry I haven’t told you about the visits until now, but please keep reading and maybe you will understand why.

On visiting day, Ben Carver and I sit across from each other like fish in a tank separated by a wire mesh between us. There are tiny holes in the mesh. The visiting room is loud. There are roughly eighty men on death row, and for many of them, their only contact with the outside world is their mothers. You can imagine that much emotion is on display. Ben Carver’s mother is too elderly to visit him anymore, so it’s just me he sees. I have to bend down and put my lips close to the metal, even though I can see the black grime from where thousands of mouths have been before mine.

AIDS, I think. Hepatitis B. Herpes. Influenza. Mononucleosis.

And still I put my mouth to the screen.

Carver is a charming man with a soft voice that makes you believe he is always confiding in you. He is courteous and attentive, which I wonder about, because is this his natural disposition, or has he read too many novels about Hannibal Lecter?

Regardless, he always expresses great concern for my well-­being. “You look tired today,” he’ll say, or, “Are you eating enough?” or, “You might want to talk to your barber about your hair.”

I know he flirts with me because he is lonely, just as I flirt back because I want to know what he knows.

So, we talk about everything but you.

He has almost perfect recall for movie dialogue. Casablanca. Gone With the Wind. Midnight Cowboy. Monty Python. Then there are the books he’s read—­most of the classics, Anne Rivers Siddons for the Atlanta connection, Barbara Cartland for romance, Neil Gaiman for fantasy. I have had more conversations about The Celestine Prophecy than I care to mention.

I do not tell your mother about these conversations, and not just because she thinks The Bridges of Madison County is sentimental tripe. She has held firm to her refusal to hear about what I call my extracurricular activities and what she calls my fruitless quest. Absent this subject, there is very little for us to talk about anymore. We can only rehash for so long old memories of agonizing camping trips and Tooth Fairy adventures and heated parent–teacher conferences. Your sisters have started their own lives. They have found their own friends, started to build their own families outside of us. Your mother has my (inferior) replacement and I have . . .

?

Can I admit to you that I am lonely? That every morning I wake up to a sparse, empty bedroom and stare up at a yellow popcorn ceiling and wonder if it’s worth it to get out of bed? That I can’t bear the thought of seeing my toothbrush standing alone without your mother’s? That I have two plates, two spoons, two forks, and two knives not because I need that many but because I could only find them in pairs? That I have lost my job? That I have finally lost your mother? That I have stopped asking your sisters to visit because every conversation feels like I am dragging them down underneath the ocean?

So maybe you can understand why discussing movies and literature with a convicted serial killer became such an important part of my life. Here is a reason to bathe. Here is a reason to put on shoes. Here is a reason to leave the house, drive the car, go somewhere else other than my one-­bedroom apartment that feels as much like a prison cell as anything you could find at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison.

I know Ben is stringing me along, just like I know that I am letting myself be strung. It baffles me that the only times lately that I don’t think about you are the times I am debating Joyce with a likely cannibal. Isn’t the point of my visits to find out what Carver knows? To track down whatever rumor he has heard so that I can finally know what happened to you?

But I have this nagging feeling that he knows nothing about you.

And I have an even deeper nagging feeling that I do not care.

So this is what I do: I tell myself I am studying him. Is this the sort of man who took you? Was your abductor as kind to you in the beginning as Ben Carver is kind to me? Did he take you because he wanted you all to himself? Or did he take you because he wanted to hurt you?

Then I ask myself what would happen if that grimy metal mesh were taken away. What would a man like Ben Carver do to me if there were no guards posted, no barrier between us? Would he explicate Spenser’s Faerie Queene or would he cut me open and sample a sliver of my pancreas?

I realized today that I will never know the answer—­not because the scenario is impossible, but because I have been barred from visiting Ben Carver again. I immediately suspected the hand of Huckleberry, but the warden soon put me straight. It seemed only fitting. He was the man whose report had brought me to Ben Carver in the first place.

This is how it happened: instead of being herded into the waiting room for visitation, I was led down a long hallway by a plump guard who kept sucking his teeth. The sound echoed off the polished tiles on the floor. The hallways are long and wide in prison, likely so you can run but not hide. There are large fish-­eye mirrors at every corner. Video cameras follow your every move.

If only downtown Athens had been so secure, perhaps you would’ve come home to us.

The warden’s office was all cheap paneling and institutional green furnishings. As Ben would’ve said, “Think Cool Hand Luke.” Every surface was either metal or fake wood. The warden was fat with a buzz cut and rolls of flesh almost obscuring his collar. His white shirt was short-­sleeved and outfitted with a red and black clip-­on tie. He smoked a cigarette as he studied me across his desk. I sat in front of him holding a worn copy of Dr. Seuss’s You’re Only Old Once! A gift from Ben sent via the warden. The last communication Carver the Cannibal would have with me. He had revoked my visitation rights. I wasn’t allowed in the prison anymore.

“Dr. Carroll,” the warden said, his voice sounding like Foghorn Leghorn, “Ben Carver is a psychopath. He’s incapable of empathy or remorse. If you see something human in him, that’s only because he’s playing

the part.”

I flipped through the book. My hands were sweating. The pages stuck to my fingers. It’s hot in prison, no matter what time of year it is. It reeks of sweat and sewage and desperation from the men who are stacked in cells like chattel.

The warden said, “Obviously, Carver’s gotten out of you whatever he wanted. He’s finished with you. Don’t take it personally. Count yourself lucky that you got away unscathed.”

Unscathed.

I let the word roll around in my head. I said it aloud as I was escorted back down the long hall. I repeated it in the car as I sat with the book still clutched in my hands.

You’re Only Old Once! A Book for Obsolete Children was an adult picture book. Several years ago, you and your sisters had given me a copy of this same book on my birthday, because younger ­people always think it’s funny when older ­people get even older. I don’t recall ever telling Ben about the book, but it seemed like something I would’ve told him early on when I was trying to trap him into revealing a clue about you.

The conversation would’ve gone like this:

Ben: Tell me, Sam, what have you been reading lately?

Me: I found a book that Julia and the girls gave me for my birthday. You’re Only Old Once! by Dr. Seuss.

Ben: You know, my favorite birthday gift was when I was sixteen and my mother gave me my own set of keys to her car. What was your first car, Sam? I bet it was an old jalopy. You would’ve been pulling in the girls like crazy.

That was what he was like. He always changed the subject with flattery. He was usually more artful. It’s hard to describe how someone has manipulated you because you’re generally not aware of it when it’s happening. You don’t exactly take notes, is what I am saying.

I am sure that during my visits, Ben gathered far more information about me than the other way around. I have to admit that he was working at a level I did not even know existed. And he was a psychopath, I knew that, but he was an interesting psychopath, and he gave me something to do one day a week, every week, for ten months when my only other alternative was to cut open my wrists and watch the blood swirl down the bathtub drain.