With Love from the Inside Read online

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2016 by Angela Pisel

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  eBook ISBN: 9780698408432

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Pisel, Angela, author.

  Title: With love from the inside / Angela Pisel.

  Description: New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016008052 | ISBN 9780399176364

  Subjects: LCSH: Mothers and daughters—Fiction. | Women prisoners—Fiction. | Physicians’ spouses—Fiction. | Family secrets—Fiction. | Death row—Fiction. | South Carolina—Fiction. | Psychological fiction. | Domestic fiction.

  BISAC: FICTION / Contemporary Women. | FICTION / Legal. | FICTION / Family Life. GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3616.I867 W58 2016 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016008052

  p. cm.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  GRACE

  SOPHIE

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  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  To Greg and the four kids who share our home. You’re the reason I want to be there.

  GRACE

  The police took “normal” away from me the moment they came rushing into William’s hospital room. They dragged me from his crib while my helpless baby lay hooked up, struggling to breathe, needing his mother. I had been to doctor after doctor, but no one would listen to me when I tried to tell them something wasn’t right.

  “Bradshaw, your attorney is here to see you,” an unfamiliar voice barked at me through the steel door, and snapped me into the present.

  Tuesdays were my usual lawyer days, not Thursdays, so the news couldn’t be good. I slid the pen inside my worn leather journal and tossed it on my cot. As I stood, the shooting pain in my back reminded me I wasn’t sleeping at the Hilton.

  The stark, cold walls and the constant clamor of cursing and flushing toilets wasn’t at all how I’d pictured my life. It was a stagnant existence, every day like the one before and the one after. As unjust as I know that to be, nothing I could do will change my situation or my reputation. The latter, as crazy as it seemed, still mattered most to me even after seventeen years. I would prefer not to be remembered as the monster the local newspapers dubbed me, and especially not as a baby killer.

  “Hurry up,” a new officer growled through the narrow horizontal opening in the door. “Give me both your hands.” His tone startled me, and I bit the inside corner of my lip, a nervous habit I’d tried and failed to break. This time I tasted blood.

  I handled officer changes better than some on the row. Jada, I suspected, was right now sitting with her hands clasped around her legs, rocking back and forth like someone residing in a psych ward. She once told me that when she was little she never knew who her “daddy” would be when she woke up in the morning. I pictured a four-year-old Jada peering around the corner in footsie pajamas, surveying the situation—praying that whoever she might see at the breakfast table would be kind to her. A sanguine version in my mind, but Jada still panics, even more than the rest of us, when an untried voice gives her orders.

  I placed my left arm through the slit and elevated my right shoulder a bit to get my other arm to cooperate. My limbs had gotten stiff and slow, and sitting in a cell all day didn’t help. The officer pulled my wrists together, snapping the cuffs tighter than necessary before he pushed my arms back through the hole and unlocked the cell door. “Your attorney is waiting on you.”

  I avoided eye contact with him as he escorted me, kept my eyes on the floor, counting the gray concrete slabs to keep calm. My count was interrupted when Roni started screaming.

  “Keep it down,” the officer snapped, “or you won’t get a shower this week, either.” I knew by the sharpness in his voice that he meant what he said.

  “Okay, Cowboy,” Roni shouted back. “Okay.”

  Cowboy spelled backward is YOBWOC, and it stood for Young Obnoxious Bastards We Often Con (one of the many useless things I’ve learned in prison). I don’t include myself in the “we” part of that acronym—I just do my best to get along—but Roni does. She’s the one in here I’ve tried to connect to the most, the one I’ve tried to help. Maybe it’s because she’s young enough to be my daughter, but for her own sometimes inexplicable reasons, Roni chooses to make trouble whenever she has a chance, or whenever she has no chance at all.

  Only four of the seven cells in this wing of the prison were occupied on death row, but only outsiders called it that. Those who resided here called it the Hell Hotel. On the inside, hope was something no one seemed to believe in except me.

  Mainly, I just missed the ordinary. The uncomplicated, taken-for-granted things like the sound of my husband’s house keys rattling in the front door at exactly two minutes before six o’clock, or the buzzer on the duct-taped dryer signaling a load of warm to
wels was ready to be folded; the gritty feel of the hot driveway on my bare feet as I walked to the mailbox to raise the rusted red flag, or sitting in my cold minivan making sure the windows defrosted before driving my daughter to school. Or burying my face in the space between William’s chest and his rolled chin just to smell his sweet baby-powdered scent after he had a bath.

  The officer squeezed my upper arm as he guided me through the vacant dayroom and buzzed us through one door and then another before we entered one of the attorney-client holding rooms. Room was a generous term, but at least it was bigger than my cell and offered some contact, meaning my attorney could shake my handcuffed hands if he so desired or slide a paper across the chipped Formica table without hitting glass.

  Ben Taylor stood when I entered. He’d represented me for the past five years and had become one of the few noninstitutionalized faces I saw. His face today didn’t look that good.

  “Hello, Grace. Please take a seat.” I sat down with my feet and hands still cuffed.

  “Ben, how are you?” I was delaying, wanting to hear anything other than the news I feared he was about to give me.

  “I’m fine.” His slight southern accent made whatever awful words he was about to tell me sound more tolerable. Most of the guards and many of the inmates here had come from all over. Ben’s soft tone reminded me of home.

  “Have you found her?” I asked, hoping he would give me something to cling to.

  “I’m sorry, Grace. My office still has not been able to get in touch with her.”

  After all these years, I still woke in the morning with a sweat-soaked shirt stuck to my skin, dreaming about my daughter sitting alone at her dad’s funeral. Abandoned. I knew I couldn’t make my daughter forgive me, believe me, or even come to see me, but I wouldn’t stop hoping. I’d stopped calling many years ago, figuring the refusal of collect calls meant the expense was too much for her to handle. Eleven years, five months, and twenty-seven days separated me from the last time I’d heard her voice—the last time I’d heard anyone call me “Mom.” A word I’d never longed to hear until I did.

  “That’s not why I’m here,” he said. “I am afraid we didn’t get the news we had hoped for. The court refused to hear the latest appeal.”

  I dropped my head and tried not to make my attorney, my only believer, feel any worse than I knew he already felt. Whatever hope I’d carried into the room had fled by the time I looked up.

  My lawyer rubbed his forehead. “Grace, the judge has set your execution date.”

  SOPHIE

  Sophie knew she’d made mistakes. The kind of mistakes an “I’m sorry” wouldn’t erase and a “Please understand” wouldn’t go far to repair. Not after all this time. The car in her driveway, her oversize lake house, and her bulging bank account made her life look perfect on the surface. By anyone else’s standards, she should be fulfilled, ecstatic, but . . . maybe it was because she was turning thirty this year that her heart seemed to be catching up with her deception and she hated that feeling.

  She sat where she did every morning after Thomas left for work—with her coffee on the veranda off the master bedroom overlooking the lake. This spot helped quiet her mind and energize her for the day ahead. At least it usually did. But this October morning felt different somehow.

  She set her mug down and snuggled as deep as she could into her chenille bathrobe. The sharp chill in the air caused her hands to shiver and she looked down at them, wishing she still had the red snowflake mittens she’d worn as a little girl. Holes on both of them, right at the tops of her palms under the first two fingers, from hours of raking leaves in her backyard, just so she could jump in and bury herself in the pile, counting the seconds until her dad would find her. Sophie, Sophie, come out, wherever you are. After many minutes of pretending he had no idea where she was, her dad would fall into the pile on top of her. She felt like she’d never stop giggling. “You got me good this time, pumpkin,” he would say to her.

  Sophie tried to recall the last time she’d actually done something like that just for the fun of it, or experienced some overpowering emotion other than the flatline she had grown accustomed to. She did feel happy when she laid her head on her husband, Thomas, and watched his chest rise up and down as he slept, or when she put together puzzles with children at the hospital, but those feelings were short-lived.

  She shook her head, scolding herself for the psychoanalysis, and decided to push whatever these strange emotions were back to her hidden and unexamined places. She controlled her life now. No one could take that from her, not anymore.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by her vibrating phone. Seven new e-mails, two new texts, and one missed call. Guess my walk down memory lane affected my hearing. One text from Thomas, one from Mindy, and a call from a number she did not recognize.

  She was typing a reply to Thomas when Mindy’s text vibrated. Not coming today. talk to you later. will still help with fund-raiser.

  She checked the clock on her phone. The time for figuring out her tangled lack of emotions had expired. She needed to get going.

  —

  SOPHIE HATED THURSDAYS. Ever since they’d bought a house in West Lake several years ago, Thomas had insisted it would be good for her to get to know some of the other women in the neighborhood. Sophie resisted at first—faking end-of-the-week migraines and even an ankle sprain—until Thomas noticed a pattern and forced the issue. “You’ve got to get out of this house and make some friends.”

  After a few months, she finally gave in and started attending the monthly meetings the women called “the book club.” Sophie secretly called the women “the synthetics.” A roomful of designer-dressed plastic ladies sitting around drinking margaritas while discussing the latest scandals lurking within their gated community. The books they were supposed to be reading never came up.

  Sophie didn’t exclude herself from that less-than-complimentary stereotype. On more than one occasion she’d presented herself to be something she was not. It wasn’t that the ladies hadn’t been nice to Sophie since she and Thomas moved into the neighborhood. Most had been welcoming—since the first day, actually, when a few of them brought a large welcome basket of wine and cheese and left it by the front door. It had a note attached: Sorry we missed you! Dinner at the Parkers’ Friday night?

  Before that first dinner at the Parkers’, she’d changed outfits three times and ran to the bathroom to throw up twice, all before finally settling on a tweed blazer and dark blue jeans.

  Mindy Parker (who happened to work at the same hospital as Thomas) had put Sophie at ease right away, and she and Sophie had developed somewhat of a friendship since that night. Maybe it was the way her house looked. Clean, but not perfect; functional, but not organized. Chocolate cookie crumbs and milk drops lingered on the kitchen counter and shouted that Mindy was not trying to impress anyone. Sophie envied that attitude. Mindy always let her two-year-old twin girls say hello and good night to everyone before excusing herself to tuck them in to bed.

  Mindy’s friend Eva, however, wasn’t as genuine. Sophie could picture her as an eighth-grader, pointing and whispering at an unfortunate misfit unlucky enough to have inherited an older sibling’s hand-me-downs. Sophie could feel Eva’s eyes scanning her fashion selection whenever she walked into a room, and she always seemed a little too interested when Thomas told a story. Sophie wasn’t normally the jealous type, but something about Eva’s smile when she looked at him made her more than a little uncomfortable.

  While Thomas socialized with all of the husbands they had met in the neighborhood on occasion to play tennis or a round of golf, Mindy was the only relationship Sophie had cared to foster outside of the book club and other cursory social events. Even that friendship had gotten only so deep. The less people knew about her the better.

  —

  ALL THE USUAL “BOOK CLUB” cars were present and accounted for when Sophie pulled her Land
Rover behind Eva’s brand-new red BMW. She could see Eva and three other women (all of whose names escaped Sophie) walking in, chatting with fast and flippy hand movements, and whispering about something Sophie wasn’t quite sure she wanted to hear. Since no one ever seemed interested in discussing their assigned book, Sophie had turned the monthly meetings into planning events for her latest endeavor—a fund she had created for indigent children at St. John’s Hospital.

  To raise money, she was planning a Secret Chef fund-raiser that she described as: A soon-to-be-annual wine- and food-tasting event that will boast the most culinary delectable dishes ever served in the South. The chefs and their restaurants will “surprise” the highest bidders with sensational award packages sure to satisfy even the pickiest palates—or something along those lines. Sophie fine-tuned her pitch as she grabbed her laptop out of the back of her SUV.

  “Did you hear about Stephen?” Eva said, before she had a chance to set down her bag or take off her jacket. Sophie, not sure if Eva meant to include her, didn’t immediately respond.

  “Did you hear me? Did you hear what’s going on with Stephen?”

  Sophie didn’t want to appear to be out of the loop or to give Eva the satisfaction of knowing about whatever was happening first, so she quickly replied, “Yes, heard about it last night. Thomas told me. I can’t believe it.” A calculated response, since she had no idea what was going on with Stephen. But one thing she knew for sure—Eva loved to be the first to give details.

  “Well, for those of you who don’t know . . .” Eva launched into the gossip without taking a breath. “Stephen moved out. Mindy is devastated; they just put in a pool and all.” One bejeweled hand flipped her shiny hair over her shoulder. “I can’t totally blame him. Have you seen Mindy lately? Not exactly keeping herself up. Never met an ice-cream cone she didn’t like.”

  All the ladies but Sophie laughed. She didn’t run to Mindy’s defense, but she didn’t laugh. Did she get credit for partial loyalty? She hadn’t talked to Mindy for a couple weeks and, granted, their conversations weren’t all that deep, but problems with Stephen—she had no idea.