Dear Eleanor:


It’s me, Ingrid. I’m writing from my cell in Rothsfield. I’m sorry I haven’t been able to give you a call, but they restrict our phone access. And to be honest, I don’t even know where to start. I don’t know how to explain to someone like you how something like this could have happened to someone like me. You’ve been my best friend since we were five. You’ve known me longer than anyone but Mom. I hope that you—of all people—were shocked by the news that I’m capable of murder. Or maybe you—of all people—will be the least surprised, since you’re one of the only people who’s always known what it’s like inside my head.

I remember exactly when you first found out I could hear others’ thoughts. Or at least yours. We were six. Your Uncle Rodney had just taught us how to play Battleship, and I didn’t see the point of it. What kind of stupid game was this? So I kept sinking your ships with freakish precision, not yet aware that what happened in my own head—the onslaught of voices and feelings and stories—was just silence for everyone else. And when I told you I could read minds, you believed me, Eleanor. You believed me even though every adult started panic-reading about juvenile schizophrenia.

And then, when we were in high school and the fear of being different from others felt like a nail gun constantly poised at our temples, you were the one who helped me plan for the future. By that point, we’d both realized I was maybe the only one like me out there. Sometimes this depressed me. Sometimes the alienation and the suspicion of how others would treat me if they knew made my chest burn with rage. At fifteen I was diagnosed with panic attacks, but you and I knew these spells weren’t a manifestation of anxiety. There’s little to be anxious about when the world can’t get the slip on you. Instead, this was the first time I realized that the world was deeply unfair, and the more I tried to bury that understanding deep in my ribs, the more my chest burned.

I stayed afloat through high school with your help, by reframing the problem of my telepathy as an opportunity. I wanted to help people and do some good in the world. At first, we came up with the idea of me being a detective. You thought a mind-reading interrogator was just about the coolest career path a person could choose. But the problem was, how could I bring that evidence to court? How could I explain to the world what I knew? How I knew? There’s a reason Arthur Conan Doyle didn’t make Sherlock Holmes a mind-reading detective. It’s an impossible sell.

So instead, you reconnected me to your Uncle Rodney—ol’ Battleship Rodney, the bleeding-heart defense attorney who had an unrivaled passion for exonerating the innocent. We told him the truth about my telepathy skills. He demanded proof. We played a dumb animal guessing game, and I got so tired of it, by the end I’d just say the animal noise instead of the animal name. Quack, I’d say with a blasé bravado and a sip from Rodney’s hallmark gin and tonic. Quack, motherfuckers.

You know what happened next. He hired me. I’d sit in as a paralegal on his interviews with his potential clients. They all claimed innocence, but usually, it was obvious to me within minutes if they’d done it or not. Most lawyers care about money. Not Battleship Rodney. He cared about scruples. He wanted to defend genuinely innocent clients. All I had to do was shake or nod my head at Rodney, and for a decade, we all went to sleep with clean consciences, knowing we were helping the people no one else believed. Just like no one (except you) believed me when I swore the lady next door was a rampant racist. You know how it was.

There was only one time, towards the beginning of my career, when Rodney doubted me. I was present for his meeting with a potential client—a man named Jose, accused of killing two children down the street.

It was the first time I had no idea what was happening inside a client’s mind. Jose’s mind was like a radio dial caught between two stations. There were frenetic bursts of nothing in particular, separated by the steadfast repetition of a single phrase: “Wretch like me, wretch like me, wretch like me. …” There were so many track marks on his arms that he looked like a human dartboard.

Rodney exchanged a look with me, waiting for me to do my usual nod or shake. All I did was shrug. He dismissed Jose and waited for my explanation. “I didn’t get a clear read on this one,” I said. “If I had to guess, I’d say ‘guilty.’ Most innocent people wouldn’t describe themselves as a ‘wretch,’ would they?”

Rodney’s expression landed somewhere between confused and angry. “Don’t tell me you’re slipping,” he said, raising his eyebrows at me.

Please, Lord, let me be slipping, I thought.

Sure enough, Jose was found guilty during his trial, but you’ll hear more about that later.

*     *     *
The turning point in all this was when I was rear-ended in traffic on my way to work by some asshole without auto insurance. I made it to work the next day in a rental vehicle I didn’t have the money for—never mind the auto repairs if the insurance companies couldn’t work something out. I was physically at work, but mentally, I was ruminating about how to get the money to fix the car.

It was a Tuesday. I was at work in my little repurposed closet of an office when a man came down the hallway. We rarely had visitors, and this one seemed nervous. I ‘heard’ him fretting about how to tell me he knew about my powers even before I heard his loafers squeak on the tile floor.

The word telepathic made my shoulders jolt up a few inches. I slowly swiveled in my office chair and waited for the man to enter. He was a black man in a worn, red plaid suit. I tried to quickly come up with a way to preempt this guy and deny everything, but he jumped in before I had the plan straight in my head. “I’m friends with Rodney,” he said quickly, all in one breath. “Old college friends. We had some beers last night and I told him a sob story, and I got him to spill the beans about you. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.” A bead of sweat formed on his brow like he really was sorry to butt in like this.

I leaned forward in the office chair, trying to act nonchalant, but somehow my knees were trembling. My knees. Quack, motherfucker. “What kind of sob story?” I asked, voice wavering. “Who are you?”

“I’m Stewart Daniels. I work for a human rights nonprofit currently examining the consequences of capital punishment. We’re trying to push for a stay in executions in Texas, but we need something to bring to the governor. We have a few clients on death row right now. If we can prove that executions are inhumane—if we can document the suffering—we might be able to stave off future deaths.”

The blood drained from my face. A knot twisted in my stomach as I realized what Stewart might want from me. “And you’re here because …?”

“We want you to watch,” said Stewart, looking away uncomfortably. A bead of sweat now fell onto his collar. “Rather—listen. Take notes.”

“Executions? Of people who were never even my clients?” I clarified like he’d just suggested I gouge my own eyes out with broken eggshells.

He nodded. He knew I knew exactly what he’d meant.

“No,” I said emphatically. “Absolutely, unequivocally—no.”

He raised one eyebrow higher than the other, plaintively. “You could make a real difference. You could help us prevent so much suffering. Just name your price.”

At the word price, I thought about my wrecked car. At the words real difference, I thought about you, Eleanor. I thought of the career paths we envisioned for me when we were fourteen. And I—stupidly—thought maybe I was brave enough.

*     *     *
I honestly cannot tell you the next bit coherently. My memories of the four months that followed are fragments like a kaleidoscope of nightmare images.

The very first execution I witnessed was by firing squad. Yeah, firing squad. Any prisoner in Utah sentenced before 2004 can request it.

They seated the serial killer Edgar Stovell in a chair in the prison courtyard, hands bound behind his back. He had a black hood over his head. I trembled in the wings, terrified to witness a man die, to witness a man kill. Terrified to hear the sound of the shots, the sound of Edgar’s thoughts, the sound of the bullets slicing through September mist. As the hood shrouded his face, Edgar spoke to me. I know that’s not the right way to put it. He didn’t know he was speaking to me. But when you’re the only one who can hear, you don’t take that lightly.

Do you know what Edgar said to me, Eleanor? “I’m sorry, Dad. I’m sorry, Dad. Please be there to meet me. On the other side. Please be there. I’ve been all alone for twenty years, Pa.”

One of the guards said to himself: I have the blank. I know I have the blank. God promised to give me the blank.

“All alone for twenty years, Pa. I don’t want to die alone.” The bullet met his heart. For the first time, I didn’t hear thoughts. I heard an explosion. Edgar slumped, and I pitched forward, off balance, like someone had pushed me.

Died too quick in my opinion, thought the guy next to me, chewing on some tobacco dip. Shoulda missed by a couple a inches. Let him bleed out.

*     *     *
As it turns out, a firing squad was nothing. Try getting electrocuted. I witnessed it in Florida during a Midazolam shortage.

Spunky Bogart murdered his wife by tying her up and putting her in the oven. Spunky trembled when they strapped him into the chair. His fingers opened and closed around air. He thought about nothingness—his prediction of what the “afterlife” would be. Nothingness will be okay, thought Spunky, fingers twitching. I love to sleep. Nothingness will be the best sleep of my life.

But Spunky’s body betrayed his real feelings as he vomited down his front, fingers still grasping at air, arms strapped down and shaking. Jesus—just die with some dignity, man, he said harshly to himself. But at the same moment, tears streamed down his cheeks behind his blindfold.

I can’t even meet someone’s eyes. I can’t even meet another human’s eyes one last time. And I won’t see it coming.

The technician pulled the lever. The smell of burning flesh still haunts my memories. I think it always will.

There was smoke in the execution chamber.

*     *     *
And now, you’ll see where this whole story is going. Do you remember Jose? Wretch like me Jose, who I advised Rodney not to take on if he wanted to keep his conscience clean?

Jose ended up with a state-appointed lawyer and a needle in the arm. And I was there to watch.

No one knows whether the sedative dose—the first drug in the three-drug lethal cocktail—is adequate.

Or at least no one knew.

Jose was strapped to a gurney and a nurse struggled to find his vein when inserting the IV.

Wretch like me, wretch like me, wretch like me, thought Jose.

They gave Jose his chance to say his last words, and with his eyes darting around the chamber, he said, “I shouldn’t have stopped to help. If it wasn’t for the cocaine, maybe I would have known not to stop at a crime scene. I know some of you are like me—you want to help people—but people, they don’t want to be helped. I don’t mean those kids. I mean everyone else. I mean everyone grown.” They waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. His toes twitched in the little disposable slippers they’d put him in.

A technician in scrubs—like some kind of doctor—like someone who’d taken an oath—approached a blinking machine. He pressed a button, and liquid began to flow through the tube connected to Jose’s arm.

A funnel of light appeared between me and Jose, and it wasn’t like anything I’d ever experienced before. Through that funnel, I saw the memory he held in his mind’s eye. He was riding his bike down a dirt road when he came upon two dying children—the children who were attacked by someone else. He hopped off the bike and cradled the dying boy, who was clutching his dead sister’s hand. And as he died, Jose—high on cocaine—held him and sang. Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.

The sodium thiopental didn’t knock Jose out, but in his mind, he clutched to the young boy’s hand. As the pancuronium bromide paralyzed his muscles and collapsed his lungs, he thought of his own child, nearly grown now.

I’m burning, thought Jose as the potassium chloride finally hit his veins. Burning.

I squeezed my eyes shut. My stomach churned and my throat tightened like the hangman had tied a noose there. Then the terror gave way to anger, and my chest burned with rage, just like it always had, just like Jose’s fiery veins. Rage that we are all stuck living in a world like this. My ribs threatened to cave in like a sinkhole.

In the name of self-preservation, I had to try to block out Jose. But the second I drowned out his screams, the thoughts of the others in the execution chamber came to my mind. It was then I was aware of the cheering inside the others’ heads. The victory. The perceived triumph of good over evil.

The guy sitting next to me in the witness theater worked for the media. He had a clipboard and he looked rich. His loafers were perfectly shiny. I looked over at him, desperate for an ally. Desperate for the eye contact that blindfolded prisoners don’t get. But instead, I saw his mouth curve up in a brief smirk. He lived like an animal, and now he gets to die like one.

I heard an explosion like the day Edgar Stovell died, and the heat in my chest roared like a raging fire. I’m told I swung my purse at the reporter, and once he was on the ground, my stiletto heel came down on his throat.

All I remember is the pool of blood beneath his head.

As Jose’s slow, tortuous death on the gurney dragged on, he distracted himself from the fire in his veins by silently singing “Amazing Grace.” As I watched the reporter die, with hands pulling me away from him, I joined in—out loud. I gave life to a dying man’s song. For a fleeting moment, Jose and I sang together: his internal, a voice only I could hear, mine filled with a righteousness no one would ever understand. Then suddenly, it all went silent.

Jose’s chest stopped moving up and down.

And now I write to you from Rothsfield. I wonder if I may end up on Death Row myself soon. I wonder if I may even have the chance to pick my execution method.

I am equipped to pick the least painful, but I wonder if it isn’t time for us to atone. All of us. Or like Jose said—all the grown folks who don’t want to be helped. I’ve seen what lies within us all, and maybe it’s time to refuse to turn away.

I may choose the chair.

I may let the flames burst forth from my head.

I will love you forever, this wretch like me—

Ingrid