Seventy Times Seven by Alex Mar

Author:Alex Mar [Mar, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

As the months roll by, Paula leans harder on, grows closer to, her legal trio: Monica, Patti, Touchette. With Touchette, she has finally let down her guard. When her cell is occasionally without heat in the wintertime, he rubs her cold hands during his visits, and now she is crocheting a blanket to keep him warm. He becomes easily frustrated when journalists write things about Paula that he doesn’t like; in the middle of a particularly aggressive interview with her at the prison, he flew into a rage. Paula saw in him, in that moment, something very familiar: He has a temper, she thought, just like I do. And she realized that his anger had another dimension: the desire to protect her.

While Touchette begins preparing to take their appeal to the Indiana Supreme Court, Patti and Monica remain focused on keeping their client sane and steady. Monica found her a minister unaffiliated with IWP, who can come talk to her about the Bible, something Paula has longed for; and she found Paula a therapist, after nearly two years on death row without access to a mental health counselor who couldn’t be called to testify against her.

Monica has another dimension to her life now: she recently eloped, to the Caribbean, with a man she’d known for just a few months. She met Bob Hammerle through her work at the Public Defender Council. He had been a Marion County public defender too, since the mid-1970s, straight out of law school. Bob was forty-two (thirteen years older than Monica), and, unlike the Italian American girl from New Jersey, he was a real local—from Batesville, a very small, very white city an hour south of Indy. But they were both recovering Catholics who’d found religion in their work—attorneys known as crusaders, professionals who took their cases personally, large presences in the courtroom. And Monica was impressed when Bob began joining in talks with Paula on the phone and the occasional trip to IWP. He’d divorced young, and she had always sworn off marriage—the whole thing was impulsive. But each had a deep understanding of what drove the other, and he knew how to make her laugh really hard.

At the same time, Paula witnesses the toll Monica’s work has started taking on her, with her growing load of death-penalty cases. She has less time to visit the prison, and when she does, she can seem anxious; her skin has been breaking out. When Monica’s mood is up, Paula doesn’t talk about her own depression. She wants to see her friend happy, not spoil it. She finds a way to shake off the dark feelings herself.

Paula is still being penalized after a series of write-ups by the staff. Since the start of her incarceration, she’s regularly clashed with two guards in particular, and she claims she’s been “jumped” by staff four times; they say it’s been in response to her behavior. The write-ups have left Paula living an even more constricted life: she’s not

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.