When he comes into the kitchen he finds the lights off, the room empty. He crosses the tiles to the sink to wash his hands, and then he bends down and starts to splash handfuls and handfuls of cold water against his face. Finally, without unbending himself, he reaches up and turns the tap off, and then he just rests there, his elbows on the sink edge and his wet forehead in his fingertips.
After some time, he stands. He dries his face on his sleeve and looks around the dark room. He is tired, yet feels too jittery to sleep, and so he takes a seat at the kitchen table, where he sits in darkness, his hands in fists on the tabletop, his mind blank.
He hasn’t been there long when Nell comes into the room. She sits down across from him without turning on the light, but she says nothing. She just looks at him, and waits.
He meets her gaze. “He’s still alive,” he says.
There’s a pause. Then: “I don’t understand.” Nell says it slowly, cautiously, as if she were being tricked. “What do you mean, he’s still alive?”
Polly tells her in detail about the writhing and straining, the puffed lips, the whole ugly ordeal. “And then, after all that, they wanted to rewire the chair and try it again,” he says.
“But they didn’t?”
Polly shakes his head. “No,” he says.
“What stopped them?”
Polly takes a deep breath, looks at his hands on the table, then lowers them into his lap. “You can’t punish someone for the same crime twice. That’s double jeopardy. It’s not my opinion. It’s a right.”
Nell says nothing. She looks at him expectantly.
“But it was the governor who stopped it officially. Said it would appear in bad taste to put him back in the chair tonight.”
Nell frowns. “So what happens now?”
Polly takes another deep breath. “I expect they’ll try it again at a later date.”
Nell frowns, leaning forward again. “How can they? What about double jeopardy?”
Polly shakes his head in defeat. “It’d be a tough fight.”
“Well, can’t you try?”
Polly looks at his wife, dismayed. “I can’t. No. Maybe someone else can. Maybe someone else will. But I can’t.”
“Why on earth not?”
“Nell, I’m the elected district attorney. Willie’s prosecutor. I sought the chair in the first place.”
“So? Resign! You can do that. Fight the tough fight. Here’s your chance to make a difference!”
Polly looks at her seriously. “Nell,” he says. “If I did that, what do you think they’d do to Gabe?”
Nell does not respond. She blinks, presses a fist against her lips.
Polly reaches across the table for her hand. He looks at her searchingly, yearning to say something. But he doesn’t know how to express it, the swirling mess of guilt and gratefulness and love and fear and doubt spiraling through his body, so they sit there in the darkness, holding each other’s hands.