The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace by Jeff Hobbs

the other side of this wall, attached to it, lived New Jersey’s death row inmates.
    If walking into Essex County the first time had felt to Jackie and Rob like a passage into purgatory, then the entryway to Trenton State was hell. A hundred Essex County Jails could fit into Trenton State. Through barred windows in the visitor hallways inside, they could glimpse the first inmate buildings across a concrete courtyard, six stories high and a hundred yards long and perforated by rows of tall, narrow window slits. They wondered how many six-by-eight cells could fit into that building, and how many more similar buildings there were, and which ­building—which cell—was now inhabited by Skeet. Fully contained from the surrounding neighborhood, which looked not unlike East Orange, the grounds had their own order, with buildings fanning out from a central security hub. The men who lived there followed a specific schedule, designed in accordance with rehabilitation guidelines of the time. Trenton State felt like a warped college campus, and it seemed that a person could not achieve a greater state of anonymity, of meaninglessness, than to become one of the nineteen hundred inmates. The visitors moved along slowly in a line to the point where Jackie stopped and let Rob see his father alone, as she would from now on, knowing that the long trip wouldn’t be worthwhile to her son if his conversations with his father were monitored. She would sit in the waiting area and try notto think about the smell, which even here in the far fringe of the facility was a mixture of sweat, garbage, food of far lesser grade than what she worked with at the hospital, blood, feces, rot, guilt, resignation—a smell akin to the monotonous inevitability of death.
    On the long drives back to Newark, often as dusk and then night fell, she’d talk to Rob about the week of school coming up, what Victor was doing tomorrow, and what was going on with the girl Rob had a crush on—everything but the man Rob had just seen. Rob would humor her, only rarely mentioning the various legal appeals that Skeet had slowly begun moving forward. Her son deeply, firmly believed that his father had been falsely accused by witnesses, set up by police, positioned to fail by the system, and wrongfully convicted by the jury. This Jackie knew and regretted, because she saw nothing more hopeless that her son could waste his ample mind worrying about than his father’s past or future. The past had happened; the future was literally locked in place. Neither could inform the present in any meaningful way. Her son, still such a boy complete with a boy’s terrible optimism, was not yet capable of understanding this kind of permanence, as Jackie did. Like many other aspects of their reality, she figured that her son would be best served by learning about this on his own, in good time.
    But still she dutifully took him to Trenton State, and these visits very much marked the passage of time during Rob’s middle school years. The transit, the arduous entry process, the waiting room, the interstate rest stop fast-food counters all added up to a singularly endless day for her—usually her only day off of the week. But to the boy, the actual time spent with Skeet must have seemed much too short. Each time Jackie parked on Chapman Street and entered the house afterward, she would feel relieved; no sooner could she experience that relief than Rob would ask when they could go back.
    â€œSoon,” she would tell him as she went to work making dinner. “Maybe in a couple weeks.”
    A few days would pass, and Rob would start talking about heading down to Trenton this coming Sunday, after church. Sometimes she would be able to put the next visit off for two weeks, three, but nevermore than four. Rob was persistent in almost everything he did, and visiting his father more than the rest. For all the toll they took on her, the prison visits seemed to