For obvious reasons, Sam had only learned these details much later. Even during the first month of her recovery, she could not retain the sequence of events. She had vague memories of Charlie sitting on her hospital bed repeating the story of their survival over and over again because Sam’s short-term memory was a sieve. Her eyes were still bandaged. She was blind, helpless. She would reach out for Charlie’s hand, slowly identify her voice, and continually ask the same questions.
Where am I? What happened? Why isn’t Gamma here?
Each time, dozens, perhaps over one hundred times, Charlie had answered.
You are in the hospital. You were shot in the head. Gamma was murdered.
Then Sam would fall asleep, or a certain number of minutes would pass, and she would reach out for Charlie, asking her again—
Where am I? What happened? Why isn’t Gamma here?
Gamma is dead. You are alive. Everything is going to be okay.
Sam had not considered for many years the emotional consequences of her thirteen-year-old sister having to tell and retell their story. She did know that after a while, Charlie’s tears had stopped. The emotion had abated, or at least managed to conceal itself. While Charlie exhibited no reluctance to talk about the events, she had begun to relay them at a remove. Not exactly as if everything had happened to someone else, but as if she wanted to make it clear that the tragedy had lost its grip on her.
The affect came across most clearly in the trial transcripts. At various times in Sam’s life, she had read the twelve hundred fifty-eight page document as an exercise in memory. This happened to me, then this happened to me, then this is how I managed to live.
Charlie’s testimony during the prosecutor’s examination was dry, more like a reporter narrating a story. This happened to Gamma. This happened to Sam. This is what Zachariah Culpepper tried to do. This is what Miss Heller said when she opened her back door.
Fortunately, Judith Heller’s testimony served to color between some of Charlie’s stark lines. On the stand, the woman had described her shock when she’d found a blood-covered, terrified little girl standing on her porch. Charlie had been shaking so hard that at first she could not speak. When she was finally inside, finally able to form words with her mouth, inexplicably, she had asked for a bowl of ice cream.
Miss Heller had not known what to do but comply while her father called the police. Nor did she know that the ice cream would make Charlie sick. She had served two bowls before Charlie ran to the toilet. It was only through the closed bathroom door that Charlie had told Miss Heller that she thought that her mother and sister were dead.
A loud squawking distracted Sam from her thoughts.
Laurens had hung up minutes ago, but Sam was still holding the phone. She put down the receiver. Her hand lingered.
Consider the etymology of the phrase “hang up the phone.”
The Huffington Post page automatically reloaded. The Alexander family was giving a live news conference.
Sam turned the sound down low. She watched the video. A man named Rick Fahey spoke on behalf of the family. She listened to his pleas for privacy, knowing they would fall on deaf ears. Sam supposed the one silver lining of being in a coma was that after being shot, she did not have to listen to endless speculation about her case on the news.
On the video, Fahey stared directly at the camera. He said, “That’s what Kelly Wilson is. A cold-blooded murderer.”
Fahey’s head turned. He exchanged a look with a man who could only be Ken Coin. Instead of his ill-fitting police uniform, Coin was wearing a shiny, navy blue suit. Sam knew that he was the current district attorney for Pikeville, but she wasn’t sure where she had obtained that information.
Regardless, the look between the two men confirmed the obvious, that this was going to be a death penalty case. That explained Rusty’s involvement. He had long been a vocal opponent of the death penalty. As a defense attorney, as someone who had been instrumental in the exonerations of convicted men, he believed that the chance for mistake was too high.
From the Culpepper trial transcripts, Sam knew that her father had spoken from the stand for almost a full hour, delivering a moving, impassioned plea to spare Zachariah Culpepper on the grounds that the state had no moral authority to take a life.
Charlie had argued just as forcefully for death.
Sam had fallen somewhere in the middle. She was at that point unable to clearly verbalize her thoughts. Her letter to the court had requested life in prison for Zachariah Culpepper. This was not a show of compassion. At the time, Sam was a resident of the Shepherd Spinal Center in Atlanta. The people who assisted her through the arduous months of recovery were professional and compassionate, but Sam had felt like a rabbit trapped in a snare.
She could not get in or out of bed without assistance.
She could not use the toilet without assistance.
She could not leave her room without assistance.
She could not eat when she wanted to eat, or consume what she wanted to eat.
Because her fingers could not navigate a button or zip, she could not wear the clothes that she wanted to wear.
Because she could not lace her sneakers, she was forced to wear ugly, Velcroed orthopedic shoes.
Washing herself, brushing her teeth, combing her hair, taking a walk, going outside into the sunlight or the rain, were all done at someone else’s pleasure.
Rusty, citing his high moral principles, had wanted the judge to give Zachariah Culpepper life in prison. Charlie, burning with a need for revenge, had wanted a sentence of death. Sam had asked that Zachariah Culpepper be sentenced to a long, wretched existence, deprived of any sense of self-determination, because she had learned first hand exactly what it felt like to be a prisoner.
Maybe they had all gotten their wish. Because of appeals and temporary reprieves and legal maneuverings, Zachariah Culpepper was currently one of the longest-serving inmates on Georgia’s death row.
He continued to profess his innocence to anyone who would listen. He continued to claim that Charlie and Sam had colluded to frame him and his brother because he owed Rusty several thousand dollars in legal bills.
In retrospect, Sam should have argued for death.
She closed the browser on her computer.
She opened a blank email and sent apologies to her friend, begging off their birthday drinks tonight. She told Eldrin to hold her calls. She put on her reading glasses.
She returned her attention to the narrow plated pintle hinge.
When Sam looked up from her computer, darkness had turned her windows black. Eldrin was gone. The office was quiet. Not for the first time, she was alone on the floor.
She had also sat too long without moving. She performed some seated stretches. Her body was stiff, but eventually, determinedly, she was able to stand. She unfolded the collapsible cane she kept in her bottom desk drawer. She wrapped her scarf around her neck. She considered calling a car, but by the time one showed up, she could walk the six blocks home.
She regretted the decision the moment she stepped outside.
The wind off the river was cutting. Sam gripped the scarf in one hand. Her other hand held tight to the cane. Her briefcase and purse weighed down the crook of her arm. She should have waited for the car. She should have had drinks with her friend. She should have done a lot of things differently today.
The night doorman wished Sam happy birthday as she entered her building. She stopped to thank him, to ask after his children, but her leg ached too much to stand.
She rode up in the elevator alone.
She stared at her reflection in the back of the doors.
A solitary, white-haired figure stared back.
The doors slid open. Fosco rolled and stretched on the floor as Sam walked into the kitchen. She made herself eat some leftover Thai from Saturday night’s birthday dinner party. The barstool was uncomfortable. She sat on the edge, both feet on the floor. Pain spread up the side of her leg like a hot
blade splaying open the muscle.
She looked at the clock. Too early to go to bed. Too tired to concentrate on work. Too exhausted to read the new book she had received as a birthday present.
At her old apartment in Chelsea, she and Anton had eschewed television-watching. Sam stared at screens all day. There was only so much blue light that her eyes could take before a headache began to gnaw behind her eyes.
The new apartment had come with a large television already installed in the den. Sam had often found herself drawn to the dark room, one of those windowless boxes that builders called bonus spaces because they could not legally call them bedrooms.
Sam sat down on the couch. She placed an empty wine glass on the coffee table. Beside this, she put a bottle of 2011 Tenuta Poggio San Nicolò.
Anton’s favorite wine.
Fosco jumped into her lap. Sam absently scratched between his ears. She studied the elegant label on the wine bottle, the delicate scrollwork around the border, the simple red wax seal at the center.
The liquid inside might as well be poison.
Sam believed that it was wines like the San Nicolò that had killed her husband.
As Anton’s consultancy business had expanded, as Sam’s practice had grown, they were able to afford better things. Five-star hotels. First-class flights. Suites. Private tours. Fine dining. One of Anton’s lifelong passions was wine. He loved enjoying a glass at lunch, another glass, perhaps two, with dinner. The dry reds were his particular favorite. Occasionally, when Sam wasn’t around, he would accompany the drink with a cigar.
Anton’s doctors pointed to fate and perhaps the cigars, but Sam thought the high levels of tannin in the wines had killed him.
Esophageal cancer.
Less than two percent of all cancers were of this kind.
Tannin, a naturally occurring astringent, lends certain plants a defense against insects and predators. The chemical compound can be found in many fruits, berries and legumes. There are several real-world applications for tannoids. Vegetable and synthetic tannins are employed in leather-making. The pharmaceutical world frequently uses tannate salts in the production of antihistamines and antitussive medications.
In red wine, tannin acts as a structural component, a reaction from the skin of the grape making contact with the pips. Wines with higher levels of tannins age better than ones with lower levels, thus the more mature, the more expensive, the bottle, the higher the concentration of tannins.
Tannin also occurs naturally in tea, but the coagulating power can be neutralized by the proteins found in milk.
To Sam’s thinking, proteins and tannins were at the crux of Anton’s illness; particularly histatins, which are salivary proteins secreted by glands in the back of the tongue. The fluid contains antimicrobial and antifungal properties, but also plays a key role in wound closure.
This last function is perhaps the most vital. Cancer, after all, is the result of abnormal cell growth. If histatins don’t protect and repair the tissues lining the esophagus, then the DNA of the cells can become altered, and abnormal growth can begin.
Tannins are known to suppress the production of histatins in the mouth.
Every toast Anton made, every salut, had contributed to the malignancy growing inside the tissues lining his esophagus, spreading to his lymph nodes and finally into his organs.
At least that was Sam’s theory. As she had watched her beautiful, vibrant husband wither away over the course of two long years, she had clung to what appeared to be a tangible explanation—an x that had caused y. Anton had tested negative for oral HPV, a viral infection linked to roughly seventy percent of cancers of the head and neck. He was only an occasional smoker. He was not an alcoholic. There was no history of cancer in his immediate family.
Ergo, tannins.
To accept that fate had played any role in his sickness, that lightning had struck Sam not twice but three times, was beyond her intellectual and emotional capacity.
Fosco pressed his head into Sam’s arm. He had been Anton’s cat. There was likely some sort of Pavlovian reaction to the scent of the wine.
Sam gently set him aside as she moved to the edge of the couch. She poured a glass of wine that she would not drink for her husband that she could not see.
Then, she did what she had been avoiding since three this afternoon.
She turned on the television.
The woman who Sam would always think of as Miss Heller was standing outside the front entrance to the Dickerson County Hospital. Understandably, she looked devastated. Her long blondish gray hair was untamed, tendrils blowing wild in the wind. Her eyes were bloodshot. The thin line of her lips was almost the same color as her skin.
She said, “The tragedy of today cannot be erased by the death of another young woman.” She stopped. Her lips pressed together. Sam heard cameras clicking, reporters clearing their throats. Mrs. Pinkman’s voice remained strong. “I pray for the Alexander family. I pray for my husband’s soul. For my own salvation.” Again, she pressed together her lips. Tears glistened in her eyes. “But I also pray for the Wilson family. Because they have suffered today as much as any of us have suffered.” She looked directly into the camera, shoulders squared. “I forgive Kelly Wilson. I absolve her of this horrible tragedy. As Matthew says, ‘for if you forgive other people who have sinned against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you your sins.’”
The woman turned and walked back into the hospital. Guards blocked the doors to keep reporters from following her.
Sam let out a breath that had been held deep inside her chest.
The anchor came back onscreen. He was sitting at a desk with a panel of self-styled experts. Their words floated over Sam’s head as she pulled Fosco back into her lap.
A British friend of Sam’s had claimed that England had lost its stiff upper lip the day that Princess Diana had died. Overnight, a culture given to wry comments in lieu of emotion had turned into a weepy mess. The friend called this phenomenon yet another unwelcome Americanization—the Brits were constantly complaining about America, even as they greedily consumed American products and culture—and said that the public outpouring of grief over Diana’s death had forever altered the way that his people could acceptably respond to tragedy.
There was probably some truth to his theory, even the part about blaming America, but Sam believed the worst result of these seemingly unrelenting national tragedies was that a formula for recovery had emerged. The Boston Marathon attacks. San Bernardino. The Pulse Nightclub.
People were outraged. They were glued to their televisions, to their web pages, to their Facebook feeds. They vocally expressed sorrow, horror, fury, pain. They cried for change. They raised money. They demanded action.
And then they went back to their lives until the next one happened again.
Sam’s eyes flicked back to the television. The news anchor said, “We’re going to show the video from before. For viewers who are just tuning in, this is a re-enactment of the events that took place this morning in Pikeville, which is roughly two hours north of Atlanta.”
Sam watched the crude drawings awkwardly move across the screen—more of a simulation than a re-enactment.
The anchor began, “At approximately six fifty-five this morning, the alleged shooter, Kelly Rene Wilson, walked into the hallway.”
Sam watched the figure move to the center of the hallway.
A door opened. An old woman ducked as two bullets were fired.
Sam closed her eyes, but she listened.
Mr. Pinkman is shot. Lucy Alexander is shot. Two more figures enter the frame. Neither is identified by name. One male, the other female. The woman runs to Lucy Alexander. The man struggles with Kelly Wilson for the gun.
Sam opened her eyes. There was a bead of sweat on her forehead. She had gripped her hands so tightly that half-moon indentations cut into her palms.
Her cell phone started to ring. From the kitchen. Inside her purse.
Sam did not
move. She watched the television. The anchor was interviewing a bald man whose bow tie indicated he was likely involved in the psychiatric profession.
He said, “Generally, you find that these types of shooters are loners. They feel alienated, unloved. Often, they are bullied.”
Her phone stopped ringing.
Bow Tie continued, “The fact that the murderer in this instance is a woman—”
Sam turned off the television. The room faded to pitch-black, but she was used to maneuvering through the darkness. She checked to make sure Fosco was sleeping beside her. She tentatively reached out for the wine bottle and glass and took them into the kitchen, where the contents of both went down the sink.
Sam checked her phone. The call had come from an unknown number. Likely a telesalesman, though she’d had her number added to the do-not-call registry. Sam used her thumb to navigate the screens and block the number.
The phone vibrated in her hand, announcing a new email. She looked at the time. Hong Kong was open for business. If there was one constant in Sam’s life, it was the steady, unrelenting volume of work to be done.
She didn’t want to commit to retrieving her reading glasses unless there was an urgent message. She squinted, skimming down the list of new mails.
She left them all unopened.
Sam put the phone on the counter. She went about her nightly routine. She made sure all of Fosco’s water bowls were full. She turned off the lights, pressed the appropriate buttons to close the blinds, checked to make certain that the alarm had been set.
She went into the bathroom and brushed her teeth. She took her nightly regimen of pills. In the closet, she changed into her pajamas. There was a very good novel on her bedside table, but Sam was eager to rest, to put the day behind her, to wake up tomorrow with a fresh perspective.
She climbed into bed. Fosco appeared from nowhere. He took his place on the pillow next to her head. She took off her glasses. She turned off the light. She closed her eyes.