Freedom

She doesn't fight the death sentence.

*

The jury pronounces her guilty, and she fights that. She has a team of lawyers she'll never be able to pay and a family waiting in the rows of the courtroom, and she fights the verdict because she knows she's innocent. 

Her lawyers draw up all sort of fancy documents and drag the process on for months. She sees her two daughters once through a glass window, chained within an inch of her life. She isn't allowed to speak to them. Claire, the little one, presses a drawing against the glass. It's the four of them - two stick figure girls, a blob that must be her husband, and her. The stick that represents her is behind bars. Claire's never known her any other way. 

Her other daughter, the one that is old enough to grasp what's actually happening, doesn't bring anything. Penny watches, dull-eyed, through the glass and only moves when her father asks her if she's ready to leave. Then she shoots out of the visiting room like a bat out of hell. It's not an inaccurate description of this prison. 

Her lawyers ask for a mistrial, ask for evidence to be removed for being unfairly prejudicial, ask for everything under the moon but the moon itself, but nothing comes to fruition. When they're done with their delaying tactics, it's been seven months since the verdict and she's tired of this now. 

They go to the sentencing. She hasn't had a shower in four days, and her lawyers look furious about it, but she's never cared less in her life. She looks out at the courtroom, hopes to see her babies, but, of course, they aren't there. Her husband is, looking paler and thinner than she's ever seen before. His eyes pass right over her at first, and he does a double take when he registers that the frail figure in orange is his wife of eleven years. She's not offended by his surprise.

The judge isn't the same one that presided over her trial. Her lawyers make noise at that, but it's half-hearted protests at best and everyone knows it. The sentencing continues. 

The judge drones on about the facts presented at trial that led to the guilty verdict. She doesn't listen; she's been over the facts with her lawyers a thousand times in the past three years. 

She's been staring at the desk in front of her, tracing the wood grain with her eyes and marveling at how different it is from the cinder blocks that make up her cell when the junior lawyer shakes her arm. The judge has been calling her name. 

She tries to pay more attention. She sits and stands and listens to the judge sentence her to death, and she doesn't say a word the whole time. Her husband shouts from the crowd, screams about their children, their life together. The judge shouts back and the room spirals into chaos for a moment while everyone throws a fit at the announcement. Everyone but her and the families of the victims she didn't hurt seems to have something to say. 

It takes a minute, but order is restored and everyone is seated. 

Her lawyers stand to make one last plea, but she shoots out an arm and stops them. Everyone looks at her in surprise, but she makes eye contact with the judge and no one else. 

"There won't be any more stalling on our side," she announces to the room at large. The air is so still, like everyone is holding their breath to hear her speak. "I'm ready to face my sentence." 

A heartbeat of silence, and then the room explodes again. 

She's maintained her innocence for all these years. Through every interrogation, polygraph, testimony, and cross-examination, she has denied time and time again that she committed those heinous crimes. She wasn't lying - she really didn't do it - but she's tired now. 

She's tired of prison food and prison showers and daydreaming of leaving prison and nightmares of staying in prison for the rest of her life. She's tired of aching to hold her little girls and the soul-deep pain that shoots through her every time Penny refuses to take her phone calls. She's just tired. 

And what does she have to live for anyway? Years of fighting to stay the execution? Years of knowing that little Claire is getting closer and closer to being able to understand what happened to her mother? Years of asking for Penny on the phone those scarce times she actually gets a phone call, of her husband making excuses that really mean that Penny is so furious that she never wants to see her again? 

No. 

She fought while she had a chance. She gave it her all through the years of the trials, through every time she'd been called to take the stand.

She's done fighting. 

So she takes her sentencing to heart and fires her lawyers. She does her time on death row, orders the biggest, meanest steak they can find in the tri-county area for her last meal, and when the needle enters her arm, she is not afraid. 

No, she is not afraid; she's free.