Notes on an Execution

There is less than an hour until Ansel’s transfer to the Walls Unit. The screaming has let up, and Ansel can hear Shawna walking past his cell. He thinks of how weak she is, a new widow with no sense of self. She believes that he’ll stay with her after his escape, though he has no such intentions.

Ansel mentally rehashes the plan. Shawna has broken into the transfer van intended to carry Ansel to the Walls Unit. She’s hidden a gun under the driver’s seat, which Ansel will use as leverage in his escape. He’ll run to Shawna’s trailer in the woods, where he will change clothes and dye his hair. Ansel knows he may be killed during the attempt, but anything is better than dying quietly by lethal injection.

With 35 minutes remaining, the prison warden shows up to check on Ansel. Ansel asks him to relay an apology to his witness. Ansel and the warden have a generally good relationship, but he recalls a time that the warden got under his skin almost a decade ago. Ansel had been discussing his Theory and the idea that each person has infinite potential alternate versions of their lives in which they made different choices. He argued that the existence of this multitude of realities means that no one is fully good or bad. In response, the warden asked where the women Ansel killed would be in an alternate universe where they had lived. He brushed off Ansel’s Theory as flimsy justification for his crimes.

With nine minutes left until the transfer, Ansel flashes back to the summer of 1990. In the few days after his first murder, the screaming vanishes, and Ansel wonders if this is what people call happiness. As time passes, however, the screaming returns. Ansel spends most nights at a local diner, where he flirts with Angela, a 16-year-old waitress. One night in July, Ansel ambushes Angela after her shift and kills her. He drags her body to the center of the woods and buries her next to his first victim. As he takes a bracelet from Angela’s body, he remembers Lavender slipping the locket around his neck and starts to cry.

In the present, Ansel produces Blue Harrison’s letter. He hides it under the waistband of his pants, but the photo is too big to hide, so he rips it into pieces and swallows it. This way, the Blue House will always be a part of him.

As he waits for the transfer team to arrive, Ansel contemplates the idea of multiple realities. He believes there’s a version of him who was never abandoned and never hurt others. Still, the most interesting version he can imagine is an Ansel who committed all the same crimes but was never caught.

The year is 1999. Saffy is 27 years old and working as an investigator for the New York State Police, under Sergeant Emilia Moretti. Though she is a skilled investigator, she faces prejudice from other cops for being an Indian woman.

The remains of three missing girls have just been found in a forest in upstate New York. Saffy attends the scene and interviews a witness. She recalls disappearances that took place nine years ago.

Saffy is a wild teenager in 1990, heavily involved in partying and drugs and disengaged from her life. She keeps in touch with her friends from the foster home, Kristen and Lila. Kristen leads a successful life, graduating from high school and holding down a steady job, but Lila has also fallen into drugs.

The first two girls to go missing are named Izzy Sanchez and Angela Meyer. One night as she watches TV Saffy sees an announcement about a third disappearance: Lila Maroney. Shaken out of her stupor, she goes to the local police station and asks to intern under Sergeant Moretti.

In 1999, Saffy meets with the medical examiner, who tells her that the girls were all strangled. Additionally, Izzy’s and Angela’s parents have reported items missing from their daughters’ bodies, a barrette from Izzy’s hair and a pearl bracelet from Angela’s wrist. As Lila has no parents, no one can say if anything was taken from her body. Saffy suspects that the killer took “trinkets” from his murder scenes.

As Saffy looks at the evidence board, she has a vision of Izzy in another world where she survived. She sees Izzy at 20, driving in the Adirondacks with a boy, happy.

Saffy tracks down a witness who was first interviewed in 1990, Olympia Fitzgerald. Olympia is the Dairy Queen coworker Ansel failed to sleep with. Saffy asks Olympia if she laughed at Ansel afterward, remembering her experience at Miss Gemma’s. She realizes that Ansel is a suspect and brings the lead to Sergeant Moretti, positing that “he kills in threes” (129). Moretti is doubtful and warns Saffy not to let emotions from the past influence her investigation.

The following Sunday, Saffy visits the trailer park where Ansel lived in 1990. His old trailer is now occupied by a middle-aged man, distinctly not Ansel. Saffy throws herself into her work while the police captain pursues his key suspect, a man without a house named Nicholas Richards. Saffy grows increasingly suspicious of Ansel and learns all she can about his life. He attended Northern Vermont University but dropped out right before graduation. Saffy tracks down the name Jenny Fisk, a former girlfriend of Ansel’s, and calls Jenny into the station. When she arrives, Saffy notices Lila’s ring on Jenny’s finger. Jenny confirms that Ansel gave her the ring and asks if he did “something bad” but refuses to talk more about her ex-boyfriend.

On her way home, Saffy pulls a piece of paper from her pocket. On it is a scribbled address for a house in Vermont. Saffy drives to the house and sees Ansel in the driveway. Though she does not approach him, she’s powerfully moved as she remembers how she once felt about him. She reflects on other relationships she’s had since and wonders if all women instinctually carry “an ask, for suffering” (141).

Saffy returns to the precinct and tells Moretti that she found Ansel, but Moretti informs her that Nicholas Richards has just been arrested. When Saffy reacts angrily, the captain suspends her for two weeks.

Saffy spends her suspension alone, having nightmares about Lila. She pictures Lila at 27, alive, happy, and pregnant. When she returns to work, a weak case is being built against Nicholas Richards. On weekends Saffy drives to Vermont and spies on Ansel, watching him lead a seemingly normal life.

The warden arrives to initiate Ansel’s transfer. He leads Ansel outside and loads him into the van. With his foot, Ansel feels out a hard metal object under the driver’s seat. As he waits to reach a statue of Sam Houston, where he will initiate his escape, the scent of the summer air outside makes him remember the third girl he killed.

Ansel spotted her at a bar and hoped that killing again would bring him some temporary peace. He picked her out of the crowd and followed her outside. She recognized him, but he did not recognize her as Lila. He lunged at her and strangled her with a belt, then dragged her to the woods and buried her with the others. When he took the purple amethyst ring from her finger, he realized that she once lived with him at Miss Gemma’s, though he still couldn’t recall her name. As he stared at the ring, his Theory expanded to include the fact that “it’s not so hard, to be bad” (151).

After Ansel emerged from the woods, he stumbled into a local hospital and told the receptionist “I don’t want to be like this” (151). She fixed him with a fearful look he recognized from concerned adults throughout his life, and he realized that he was beyond help.

Ansel returns to the present. He is afraid but excited. He knows that he can be better than before. As the Sam Houston monument looms, he uses his foot to dislodge the metal object from beneath the seat. What slides out is not a pistol but the tip of a broken pair of jumper cables.

Ansel recalls that the night before, he teasingly asked Shawna, “What if I had done it?” (154). He was sure that, deep down, Shawna knew the truth, but when she reacted in disgust, he realized he had misread her. Now, he knows that there is no way out. Shawna is just another in a long line of women who have let him down.

The narrative shifts forward to 2002. Lavender is living on a women’s-only commune called Gentle Valley, nestled in the redwoods on the coast of Mendocino. She first found the commune 23 years ago, after a short stint as a stripper in San Diego.

Lavender has found a loving and supportive community at the commune and has opened up about her past. The women have banded together and hired a private investigator to investigate the whereabouts of her family. The PI’s report detailed Johnny’s death in an automobile accident in New York. It also contained information on Lavender’s children; Ansel is 29, working at a furniture store in Vermont. Baby Packer was adopted by a couple called the Harrisons and renamed Ellis. The women escort Lavender on a trip to San Francisco to meet Ellis’s adoptive mother Cheryl.

Lavender meets Cheryl, an elegant woman in her sixties. Cheryl tells her that Ellis is happy and successful, married, with a daughter named Blue. He and his wife Rachel own a diner in upstate New York called the Blue House. Cheryl begs Lavender not to disrupt Ellis’s life by contacting him, and she agrees. She asks about Ansel, but Cheryl retorts that Ansel was never their child.

As she leaves the meeting, Lavender is shaken by the depth of her “unbanishable” love for her children. At Gentle Valley, her friends comfort her with poetry and physical touch. When she is alone, she begins to compose a letter to Ansel, though she knows she will never send it.