On Wednesday, they begin to get ready for the Satan Killer, who is due to arrive after lunch. They order a lamp and a radio from the commissary, and charge them to Tiffany's account. Karen makes the bed in the empty cell with clean sheets. All the women on Death Row, who had been using the cell as a storage room, have removed their belongings to give the Satan Killer a fresh start.
Karen Lowens is on death row...the name the media gave her is Highway Honey, and she doesn't lie about it, she killed those men, all of them save two had picked her up for sex, and when they got rough, she killed them. The last man she killed, Henry Mills, was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. She's too burned out to feel anything, even regret, for she's being punished every day. Karen has full blown AIDS.
Celia Mills, Henry's widow is still having an impossible time of it, even five years later. Going through all of the steps of grief, she finds her anger, her bitterness, hard to control. As Karen's execution date looms closer, people try and pressure her into writing a letter, making a plea for mercy, but, as she says, "What it comes down to is this: If Karen Lowens lives, it means that Henry's life was not worth anything at all."
The final piece of the triangle is Dr. Franny Wren. We meet her at the funeral of a little girl she tried desperately to save, despite the fact the lead doctor on the case knew there was nothing more they could do. Filled with the regret that death brings, especially hard when the victim is so small, crushed by the feeling of responsibility, and caged by her engagement to Nat, it almost seems like the death of her Uncle, who raised her, is the last straw. Almost as an act of repentance, she takes over her Uncle's job as prison doctor, where she meets Karen, and tries once more to do the impossible.
Some books are pleasure, like good chocolate, but they don't really change you. You wouldn't trade reading them for anything, but all they give you are pleasant memories. Other books open doors, show you a facet, a place, a perspective, that you've never seen before. You come back from reading it immeasurably moved, and as you close the book you know you've been changed. This book is the latter. I was deeply drawn into each woman's story, each woman's place. I had never seen Death Row in such a way...the strange closeness these women: an aging lady whose addiction to marriage is second only to her addiction for feeding her husbands cyanide, a Charlie's Angel-look-a-like who swears someone else filled her children's sleep suits with stones and drowned them, an ex-hairdresser who hired someone to shoot her husband and children, and Karen, who's mother started selling her at the age of 12...outside the prison walls, these women would have had no context with which to communicate to each other, would never have given each other the time of day, but inside they share a closeness, proving the saying that death is the great equalizer. All the details, their privileges and their attitudes ring true. While it is hard to completely sympathize with Karen, it is impossible not to care for her, and not to wish that she would get the chance to die with dignity.
Franny's world is quite different...Nat, her fiancee, can't understand why she buries herself so in work and leaves no time for him, she feels trapped, and is unable to understand why he feels the way he does, why he can not see that her work is important. Her thoughts are mostly filled with regret over the little girl, over not spending more time with the man who raised her and who put her through school. Through her eyes we see Texas from the viewpoint of a woman who left, went to the big city (the biggest...she lived in New York) and now has returned, and long enough time has passed so that when she does cop to being from there, people rarely believe her. She wants to save Karen, in part, because I think she feels it would somehow earn her forgiveness for her past wrongs...which strangely weren't really wrongs at all. I also think she wants to save Karen because she is a good person, a person who wants to help, to heal.
Celia is, at least for me, the one we pity the most. She really has a hard time...she functions, going to her job at the library, reading catalogs and taking care of her dog, but she has cut herself off from everyone. She bears regrets, too. She wanted children. She wants her husband, with all his silliness and love and goodness back. I love her voice, sarcastic, straight forward, she doesn't moan when she mourns, she is bitter and angry, and it keeps her form getting weepy on us, even when her memories, her attempts to be normal, such as when she buys a bikini from a catalogue, make one's heart bleed a little for her. I found myself getting disgusted when a library patron comes in, all tired from being at a death penalty protest, and starts on her about Karen's upcoming execution.
My fellow reviewers are calling this book extraordinary, and they are right. There are some incredibly placed words in this book, every chapter, every paragraph is crafted with perfect care. There are three very distinct voices...and very distinct points of view, and each one is given the same amount of attention. Ward does not throw down the soap box and preach against or even for the death penalty, which would cheapen the experience, she tells each story with honesty and beauty, allowing us to decide within ourselves what is right.
Twenty four hours later, and I am still reeling over the experience of this book. It is a work of elegant prose.
Sleep Toward Heaven
Amanda Eyre-Ward
