Sheila Galvin set her cane against the side of the podium. She took a single sheet of paper out of her coat pocket and unfolded it and smoothed it flat, and Neal, in the second row, saw that it was lined paper, torn from a spiral notebook, with the little paper teeth along the left edge, and his whole body went still.
"Elijah would have been thirty-five in September," she said. "He wanted to be a physical therapist. He was going to transfer to Northeastern for the program. He had the application filled out on his desk the night he died; it's still in the drawer. He was the kind of boy who called me from his car in the parking lot of the Home Depot on his lunch break just to tell me a customer had been rude to him and he'd been nice anyway, so I'd be proud. That was who he was. He liked me to be proud."
She told them about him for some time. She told them about the stuffed dog he had slept with until he was eleven and denied ever having, and the way he had taught his sister to drive in the parking lot of the Westgate Mall on Sunday mornings, and the purple cardigan, which he had bought her for Mother's Day in 2011 with his first Home Depot paycheck, and which she had worn every day of the trial and had never been able to wear again after. She did not cry. Her voice did not rise. She read it all from the torn sheet, in the same level tone, and when she reached the bottom of it she turned the sheet over, and there was more on the back.
"I want to say something else," she said, "that isn't in the letter I sent the board. In August, my nephew wrote a letter to the Dwyers' house. He was twelve when Elijah died. He idolized Elijah. He's twenty-seven now and he's angry, and he's got reason, and he wrote a thing he shouldn't have written and mailed it without telling anybody, and I found out about it two weeks ago, when he told me." She looked up from the paper, across the room, at Neal. "I'm sorry for it, Sergeant. I'm sorry that it came to your door. I told him that a family that's been through what we've been through doesn't send letters like that to anybody. He's not here today. I asked him not to come."
Neal could not have spoken if the board had asked him to.
"But I'm not sorry for what's in it," Sheila Galvin said. "Not all of it. I wish your son would stay in there. I've wished it every day. I believe what Ms. Reddick told me over lunch, and I believe what she told this board, and I believe your son has done every single thing a man could do in there. And I still wish it. I don't know how to stop wishing it. I don't think I'm supposed to." She folded the sheet in half. "I'm asking the board to deny parole. I'm asking because I'm his mother and nobody else in this room is going to ask for Elijah, and somebody has to." She paused. "And, Sergeant Dwyer. I heard what you said. I'll think about it. That's all I can tell you. I'll think about it."
She took her cane. The advocate came and took her arm. Jada Galvin met them halfway up the aisle, and the three of them went back to the front row on the right and sat down, and Jada put her face against her mother's shoulder.
Attorney Raman closed in eight minutes. She was careful and precise and did not argue with Sheila Galvin; she thanked her. She asked the board to consider a parole to a long-term residential program after a step-down period in minimum security, with conditions, with no contact with the Galvin family, with continued work with South Shore Hospice if they would have him, and Neal saw Antoinette Reddick nod once, almost imperceptibly, at the end of the row.
Then Rosado said, "Mr. Dwyer, is there anything you'd like to say before we close?"