Pandora's Book

The man in the chair was scheduled to die by the end of the hour. His name was Earl Nyjack and he had tortured and murdered ten women, allegedly. He faced a nun, a cherry red landline telephone on a table behind her and a guard looking on from just above Sister Meredith’s right shoulder. His gaze took in the telephone, the guard and the only person sorry to see him die in the whole world, or at least this horrible room, all as one faraway backdrop.

All left Earl feeling stranded and alone and very aware that his body would soon double as his tomb. Then the body that carried him, that made him him or contained all of him at least, would be waste for much longer than it’d ever been a human body. All three others would continue to exist after tonight. The guard would return home to her spouse, the nun would sleep under the arch of St. Peter Clavier and even that obnoxious phone would keep on existing. He didn’t consider that none of that was permanent, either.

The lethal injection was supposed to feel like a white hot death roaring through your veins, but Earl already felt that way. He was terrified to die, which made his remaining time alive feel more like an unending crescendo of pain. He’d always hoped to fade away from life in the end, dimming and disappearing. To die so suddenly and leave behind a perfect, healthy body- would his soul curdle like a jug of cold milk thrown in boiling water? Could a soul get whiplash leaving behind a body in its prime? Would it sting eternally?

Earl watched his own manacled hands nervously pick each other, a bad habit he’d always had that was worse than ever. These days he couldn’t stop until he’d hit blood. “Aren’t you gonna ask if I did it?” Earl asked. He couldn’t avoid looking at her any longer. Sister Meredith’s old blue eyes reminded him of a city swimming pool, blue and clear and open to all.

“I know you didn’t, sweet”, the nun clucked in her thick Southern accent. Tears blotted out Earl’s vision and he dropped his chin to hide them. The tears only fell faster, racing down his shoes. “Good, that’d be a crummy topic to talk about my last hour on Earth” “You don’t know that.” She stuck out her tongue and raised her eyebrows, looking so young. “Maybe they’ll come get you in the next 5 minutes.” Earl’s laughter was rusty and out of practice, like a forgotten guitar’s first twang.

“Thank you Sister, for having me laughing my way to the end.”

“No one deserves this but ‘specially not you. Even if ya had done it, and that’d be a real hard pill to swallow but me and the Father’d work it out, well even if ya had done it ya’d still be deserving of dignity and the Lord’s grace. Now you know there’s a place in Heaven waiting for you, right?” “Yes’m”, he choked.

”Good. And Earl, you know I love you?” Earl’s gut was punched in; he couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard those words. “I love you too, Sister Mery.” The sister’s crepe paper hands were gentle and cool on his. She pried his hands apart as well as she could with the awkward chains. The guard protested at the contact. Sister Meredith shushed her.

“And you look in my eyes once they get you seated. You look in my eyes and you don’t look away and neither will I because I love you and when you look upon my love, know my love is the love of Jesus Christ who will be holding you so soon.”

“The girls’ families go’n be there, right? They hate me.”

Sister Meredith shushed him as she had the guard. “They were told justice is to hate you and they’re wounded so they believe it. They think they need this, but your death will only deepen their grief. No one benefits from another’s sufferance, not really.”

Earl’s sobs were barely contained. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand but only managed to hit himself in the face with the chains. Sister Meredith removed a hankie from thin air and dabbed at his wet cheeks. Earl didn’t dare stop her. He couldn’t bear for the nun to see him so torn, as though she’d thought about little else for the last six weeks.

“Seeing as we are unanimous in your innocence, was there anything else?”, Sister Meredith said, flicking the handkerchief back from where ever it had come from.

“Well yes, Sister.”

Sister Meredith waited a moment. He didn’t continue. “Alright, out with it”

“Is there lots of traffic in Heaven?”

Sister Meredith howled. She threw her head back like a wild pony, contorting with laughter and Earl felt freedom, as though he were anywhere else in the wide world. He gulped in her delight. Now the Sister was wiping her own eyes, riding hiccups of giggles.

“Oh Early,” her laughter stopped and didn’t return. “I really thought the reward money would save you. I thought someone would come out with a last minute miracle to clear this all up. I truly did.”

“Nah, Sister Mery, no chance. Twenty thousand dollars not enough to buy the truth. I been dead since they found me, only because I can’t afford innocence and the other guy can.”

Beneath bed sheets with nowhere to be is a womb-like tranquility. If no one else is home for weeks on end, nesting continues unchallenged, uninterrupted. Rest calcifies into inertia. A womb becomes a cage.

In the dim of her blanket cocoon, Dora Balnetti scrolled through the hellscape that was her current life. Headlines glared up. “MURDEROUS CEO ACQUITTED”, chimed Buzzfeed News. NBC added in, “DEATHS OF 10 WOMEN NOT LINKED TO TYCOON”. A text from a Tindr guy confirming she wasn’t that Balnetti and if so, did she want to check out the new deep fried sushi place?.”EMT NABBED AS SLASHER, NOT BILLIONAIRE”, was E! News’ contribution to the mishegas. Her father had just been acquitted of the bloodiest crime of the young century but all Dora felt was sick. A hard knot of dread lived in her stomach that she couldn’t consider.

She intended to silence the vibrations so her phone could damn her in relative peace but now she shut it off entirely. The blank screen was a relief. Suddenly her stomach went from patiently hungry to a ravenous void that could only potentially be silenced with a continental breakfast. She peeked out from underneath the blankets to call for the maid. Then she remembered the new maid quit during the trial. A small voice reminded her the maid’s had been quitting long before the trial ever started. Before the charges were brought against Dad, even. Today, like every other day, she ignored the voice. Dora rolled from under her sheets to start a plate of French toast. Prancing down painted tile stairs in her pajamas, she pushed away all the concerns of the last awful months.

Dora’s parents’ beige mansion perched atop a mountain, facing the ocean. Dora’s favorite part of the view wasn’t the waves rolling into the shores or the dolphins leaping over waves. She loved the unchanging dark water miles from shore. Boats would crest over the horizon or disappear into it, and those waters kept on waiting. She didn’t notice any of it today.

Golden bubbles of butter slid across the pan while she rummaged through a carousel of stale herbs for cinnamon sugar. Her glance wandered over the counter to the piano. Tucked under was the piano bench with the uneven leg. She’d stuffed a diary under the leg. That little black book was the last gift from Dad before this whole nightmare began. He’d given it to her so strangely, waiting until after dinner and presenting it behind her mother’s back as though it were an afterthought. Yet he’d made a point of taking Dora aside. He’d sequestered her from her family like a sheepdog, passed along the blank book and wished her the best only to drift behind, releasing her back into the flock.

Dora forgot the meal. She drifted over, somnambulatory and focused. She kicked the troublesome bench leg with the side of her foot. The book popped out. It was small, which didn’t matter since she'd never kept a diary or had the urge to start one. She’d doodled in the book aimlessly until using it to fix the bench. Now she picked it up and pressed her face to the cover, smelling it. Dora grew up knowing her father’s cologne but had memorized it since the trial. This smelled like him, plus the sharp cleanness of lemons.

She flipped through pages one-handedly and returned to cooking. Her doodles read as though they were ancient runes, both indecipherable and perhaps bearing the answer to it all- whatever it was. She flicked the fried bread onto a plate and clicked off the oven’s heaters. She placed the searing pan in the sink. Dishwater sizzled. She picked up a slice of too-hot French toast and passed it to her other hand, dropping the diary on the still-red cooker.

Dora Balnetti didn’t notice the smell of burning paper. Heat radiated through each page, singing the back cover. Writing emerged from the first page as though the book were cursed. The handwriting was too familiar. The list of ten women’s names was paler than the white of the page. Theresa recognized every single one from the headlines. Each name had a neat line through it- a bullet through a ghost. She grabbed the book off the stove and yelped, dropping it. Pages and pages of glowing floor plans, routes, schedules of daily routines fluttered, burning, to the kitchen floor.

Something hot rose in Dora’s throat. She shuffled backwards, away from the cooked book back. She galloped up the stairs back to her bedroom and powered back on her phone. Notifications rushed in. She called her older sister. Francine spoke to her for thirty one seconds to say that obviously Dora would be written out of the will if she ever brought that nutso shit up again and she had to leave, the spin instructor looked pissed.

Dora called the lawyer before she could think to regret it. Polly answered, even though it was a weekend.

Dora barely made sense. “I found something”, she finally panted.

The red phone rang. The guard answered and spoke calmly and quietly. Earl realized the telephone didn’t have any buttons to make calls. The guard held the phone to their shoulder to relay the information into Sister Meredith’s nearest ear. A wrinkle in her forehead grew darker and deeper as she listened.

“Earl, you’re not going to die today.” Earl’s heart pounded in his ears. “The district attorney was contacted this morning with evidence that proves your innocence. Actually, it came from the daughter of the other suspect.” Earl Nyjack’s jaw hung; his eyes struggled to recognize the heft of what she was saying. Relief tore through him like agony.

Even with the prospect of a future, Earl was so aware he could still die at any time because of anything. Maybe he’d made it through all of this just to have a blood clot in his brain. His life might stop just as suddenly as a lethal cocktail shot from a federally owned and operated needle. He felt like a beggar given a fortune entirely in pennies. Each one on its own seemed useless and frankly, a hassle. But the whole accumulated to be all he wanted and then some. How could he be as afraid of uncertainty as he’d just been a second ago of certainty? If every moment of life carried death, there was either no end to fear or no reason to keep believing the fear.