Prologue
The Official Record
STATE OF GEORGIA v. CORINNE ANN BELLAMY Execution Protocol, Redfield State Prison Transcript of Proceedings, 7:02 p.m.
THE WARDEN: Ms. Bellamy, do you have any final words?
THE DEFENDANT:
[Pause.]
That is how the official transcript reads. A man named Gerald Pike, who has worked as a court reporter for twenty-two years and has never once asked to be reassigned to an execution, will type the pause with his left hand, bracketed and italicized, exactly as the style guide requires. He will count it. He always counts. A pause of four seconds is a pause. A pause of ten is a delay. Anything longer, the guide says, should be described rather than timed.
Corinne knows this, because she once studied exactly how a record is made.
She is lying on the gurney with her wrists strapped and her eyes on the ceiling. It is a drop ceiling, the kind in every dentist's office and every school she has ever been inside. Twelve tiles across. Nine deep. One has a brown water stain in the shape of a boot, and she has been looking at it for forty minutes, because it is easier than looking at the window on her left, where the witnesses are sitting in rows like people waiting for a bus.
She has not decided what to say.
That is not true. She decided a long time ago. What she has not decided is whether she can.
On the other side of the glass, a woman in a green cardigan has put her hand over her mouth. Corinne knows who she is. She has known her for ten years, and has not once, in the last six of them, been allowed to touch her. The woman is not looking at the gurney. She is looking at the court reporter's hands, which are resting above his keys, perfectly still.
She knows, Corinne thinks. She's watching him wait.
It is a small thing. It is the kind of thing you notice when you have been trained to notice what other people leave out. Everyone in this room has come to hear her. And the only person here whose job is to write down what she says is the one person in the building who will not be moved by it, because he cannot afford to be.
Her mouth is dry. Her tongue feels like paper.
She thinks of the girl at the kitchen table in a rented house on Dellwood Street, in a gray T-shirt, practicing a closing argument to an empty kitchen, a casebook open beside her. May it please the court. The girl had believed that if you followed the law, honestly, exactly, in the right order, then the law would hold.
She remembers that girl very well.
She is, Corinne thinks, the only one in the room who does not need to be forgiven.
"Ms. Bellamy," the warden says, more gently. "Take your time."
Gerald Pike's fingers do not move. A clock on the wall behind her, which she cannot see, passes the fourth second.
[Pause.]
The fifth.
She turns her head, as far as the strap will let her, and finds the woman in the cardigan on the other side of the glass, and the woman finds her. Neither of them blinks. And Corinne Bellamy, who has killed five men and was sentenced for all of them, opens her mouth to say the first thing she has said in her own defense since the day she was twenty-three years old.
Then, as the court reporter's hands begin, very slowly, to type, the transcript of her life starts again from the beginning.