My momma used to hum that nursery rhyme. She used to hum it a lot. And on days she was stressed, anxious, or short fused, she would even sing it with a high-pitched, haunting voice over and over again like a stuck record. It was the sound of my childhood. I hated that song.

I still remember the day I asked her why she loved it so. I wanted to know why two people climbing a hill and then falling off it was so important to her. Who was Jack? Who was Jill? She had looked at me stunned, as if surprised I had noticed and had paid attention to her humming and singing it all these years. Or was she shocked I didn’t know the answer to my question? Whatever it was, she studied me for several minutes before answering me.

“It was your father’s and my song. It reflects us. Our love we once shared.”

My mother never spoke of my father. I had never met him nor ever saw a picture. Whenever I asked about him, for stories describing who he was, my momma was quick to shut it down. She said he was ‘gone’ and that was the best answer I would ever get.

“A nursery rhyme?” I had asked. “That was your song?”

“Yes. It’s about two lovers who beat all the odds holding them down. They climb above it all, but only to be crushed again.”

“I don’t understand. Why do they have a pail of water?”

“A pail of water is a euphemism for having sex. For finally being in love and able to be together. But then Jack dies… and Jill soon follows.”

“They die?”

She nodded, appearing so deep in thought. “Yes, they both eventually die.”

* * *

The sound of the phone ringing in the middle of the night was never a good thing. It’s always the sound of bad news, an emergency, or even death. The shrill resonance cutting through the night’s air is like a town crier announcing impending doom.

My heart thumped against my chest as I reached for my cell phone sitting on the nightstand beside my bed. The number on the screen showed unknown, which only intensified my panic.

I cleared my throat, not wanting to sound as if I had been woken from a deep slumber and answered, “Hello?”

There was an operator’s voice on the other end. “This is a collect call for Demi Wayne from The Eastland Women’s Correction Facility. Would you like to accept the charges?” I had heard this question many times before.

“Yes, I will accept the charges.” I sat up in my bed and turned on the bedside lamp, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes.

A clicking sound was followed by, “Demi?”

“Hello.” I felt sick. I wanted to vomit. Her voice on the other end always made me feel ill, but tonight was worse. So much worse. I scanned my nightstand, wishing I still had the emergency pack of cigarettes I kept for an occasion such as this. Why the fuck did I decide to quit?

“How are you?” she asked.

What did she expect me to say? How was I supposed to be when I was getting a call from my mother in the middle of the night from a prison where she’d been incarcerated for the past six years? I needed a goddamn cigarette is how I was.

“Fine,” I lied.

“Have you been watching the news?”

“No.” Ever since my mother was arrested for blowing up a building and killing the five guards on that night’s duty, I avoided the media completely. I couldn’t take it. The pictures of her. The pictures of me. The pictures of us together and how the media would say I was a spitting image of my mother. They would say we looked like angels with our blonde hair and blue eyes, but then in the same sentence, say my mother had nothing but the devil inside of her. I didn’t want to look like her. I didn’t want to be the devil. I hated the media. I hated them all. I couldn’t handle all the awful things being said about my mother.

Demon.

Murderer.

Monster.

And they were all true. Everything they said was true.

There was a long pause of silence. “I’m calling to say goodbye,” she said with a wavering voice.

Bile built up in the back of my throat. “Goodbye?” We had already said our goodbyes when she was handcuffed and escorted off to prison. So what could she possibly mean by saying it again?

“I lost the final appeal.”

I remained silent. I struggled to comprehend the information being fed through the phone line. It was as if my body was protecting me from processing the words threatening to shatter my soul. Lost. Final.

“I’m being sentenced to death tomorrow. Lethal injection. The lawyer says today was my final attempt at overturning the guilty verdict. I lost again.”

Guilty.

The judge and jury had deemed her guilty.

She was guilty. She had placed the bomb in the building. She had killed those men. When she was asked why, she had said it was for the cause. The company housed in the building was testing against animals. She had been the judge and jury in that case, deciding that the experiments they were conducting deemed them worthy of being destroyed. ‘A cause,’ she had stated over and over. She was proud of her cause. She was proud of what she did. Not once did she say she was sorry. Not once did she glance over at the wives and families of the men she killed and beg for their forgiveness. Not once did she look at me and tell me she had made a huge mistake and wished she could take it all back. Not once did she show even an ounce of decency in her actions. When I had asked her why she would kill those innocent men, praying to God it was an accident, she simply shrugged and told me it was collateral damage. The price to pay for a bigger and better cause. So yes, what the media was saying about her was true.

Demon.

Murderer.

Monster.

My momma.

Yes.

So, I had no choice but to carry the shame for the both of us, and what a heavy weight it was. On my eighteenth birthday, I sat in the crowded courtroom and watched my mother stand with an aura of defiance and pride while the judge sentenced her to death for five counts of murder.

Happy Birthday to me.

“Demi?”

“Yes?” My voice cracked. I glanced around my bedroom at the piles of dirty clothes strewn about as my heart threatened to beat out of my chest. My room reflected my life. Dirty, neglected, disarrayed, shambles. My life was in chaos, and all I wanted right now was a fucking cigarette. This couldn’t be real. This couldn’t be real. This couldn’t be real… yet, it was.

“Did you hear what I said?”

“Yes.”

There was a long pause as darkness suffocated me. As darkness stabbed at my heart over and over. As darkness bludgeoned me to a bloody pulp. Darkness destroyed me as I sat there with the phone to my ear.

Dead man walking…

Correction.

Dead woman walking…

“It’s okay, Demi. I’m at peace. I finally get to be with your father.”

I said nothing as I struggled to breathe. The small room of my one-bedroom apartment shrank in size as the walls appeared to be closing in on me. I was trapped in this nightmare that I couldn’t elude. There was no escape from my life.

“Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down and broke his crown. And Jill came tumbling after,” she sang softly as she had done so many times in my youth. She paused, as if she were waiting for me to say something. As if wanting me to ask for clarification.

I wanted to scream for her to stop. I didn’t want to hear that awful nursery rhyme ever again. I wanted her to shut the fuck up! Yet, I didn’t want those to be my last words to her. No matter what, she didn’t deserve that. I didn’t want her to die hearing my cruel—but honest—words ringing in her ears. A daughter’s truth to a mother who had done her wrong… so very wrong. So, I remained silent. Silent like all the times I watched her and others meet in my living room planning to take down a government agency or corrupt company. These strangers plotting and planning in my childhood home all spoke as if they were the good guys, and everyone else were the villains. I had grown up to distrust our government due to all the conspiracy theories I heard growing up. I never questioned. I never disagreed. I never told a soul of their plans. I only remained silent as a good little girl would do.

“I’m proud. Your father died for his cause, and now I get to tumble down after him.”

I had finally learned all about my father after my mother was arrested. Not from my momma, but by the television. The media had informed me that my father—who I was simply told was ‘gone’—had died in a blaze of police gunfire when he refused to surrender after trying to blow up a nuclear power plant. He was a leader of a terrorist group. He had died that day, leaving behind a grieving widow and a three-month-old baby. I can still remember the news anchor who stared into the camera while video of my father played behind his profile. The anchorman’s gray hair, perfect suit and blue-striped tie, his firm, emotionless expression as he spoke into the camera were still so clear in my memory. Did he know that behind his head on the television screen was a gruesome image playing of a man losing his life as he was gunned down? A man who was my father? Did the news anchor have any idea there was a young woman watching her father—who she knew nothing about—for the first time while he died on old video footage? I often wonder if that news anchor had any idea a piece of me died that day. I had to meet my father, watch them describe my mother as the devil, and come to terms with the fact that I was nothing but an orphan with a dark and twisted family tree. I was a fool. Fooled by my past.

“When?” I asked, swallowing the lump in the back of my throat. “When do you die?”

“They said two o’clock tomorrow.”

Two o’clock.

Two o’clock and my mother would be dead.

How odd it must be to know the exact time you are going to die.

Was she afraid? I would be afraid.

The first hot tear fell from my eyes. “So this is it? The last time I get to talk to you?”

“Yes.”

“Momma…” The rest of the tears followed as I slipped into a deep hole. At that moment, I wanted to be a little girl with her mother’s soothing arms around her, comforting her, telling her it was all going to be okay. But nothing was going to be okay. Nothing at all.

“Promise me one thing,” she said. “Promise me you’ll find your Jack, and you will climb that hill. You deserve happiness and love. You deserve so much more than I was able to give you.” She cleared her throat. “I have to go now.”

Panic attacked. “Wait! Now?” Oh God! Was this the last time I would ever hear my mother’s voice? Would these be our last words? “Is there anything we can do? Can we hold it off a little bit longer? Maybe hire another lawyer? Get a new judge? Anything? There has to be something!” I felt as if I was hanging on a cliff by my fingertips and the weight of my body was just too much. I was about to fall into the abyss.

“No. The time has finally come. Just know that though you may not have agreed with my cause or what I did, I at least stayed true to myself. True to what your father and I believed in. All I ask is you stay true to yourself, Demi.”

“Momma…”

“Goodbye.”

With a short metallic click, the phone went dead, and Jill came tumbling after.