Chasing Forgiveness (10 page)

“Does he hate Dad?” asks Tyler.

“How should I know?” I answer.

Tyler stands up and plants his foot against the wall in a slow-motion ninja kick. It leaves a big black footprint. “If Uncle Steve hates Dad, then I hate Uncle Steve.”

“You
can't
hate him,” I explain to Tyler. “He's your uncle—you have to love him, no matter what he thinks.”

“Well, then, I
do
love Uncle Steve,” says Tyler. “I love him, but I hate him, too.”

“You can't love
and
hate someone,” I explain to him.

“Why not?”

“Because that's just the way it is.”

Tyler plants another footprint on the wall, making a matching pair, and then he turns to me.

“You don't know everything,” he says.

I know the gray walls of the jailhouse now. They are my friends. In the frozen dribbles of paint, I can see sloppy, pockmarked faces escorting me down the long halls and through the “air lock” gates. The same faces stand peeling behind me and keep me company when I wait and wait to speak with my dad. If walls could talk, they would whisper “hello” and call me by name.

The talk at home is all about Dad's trial, but the talk is always over my head and behind my back, so I don't know too much. To me, Dad's trial hangs in front of us like the moon above the freeway. You can keep driving toward it, but it never seems to get any closer. It's supposed to happen soon, but nobody tells me when—and when it happens, Dad's entire life will be decided for him. Prison for a few years.
Prison for life. Could they even give him the death penalty? I don't ask anyone because I'm afraid of the answer.

“Are you scared about it?” I ask my dad on the smelly jailhouse phone that connects one side of the glass to the other.

Dad looks down. “A little,” he says.

“Don't be,” I tell him. “Grandma and Grandpa Pearson won't let you go to prison.”

“It's not up to them, Preston,” he says. He thinks for a moment, then says, in his fatherly lecture sort of way, “I did something wrong. And when you do something wrong, you have to pay.” He says it like he's trying to teach me not to steal candy from the store. Why does he try to make it seem so simple? Does he really think of it that way, or is it just that he thinks
I
think that way?

“I'm not Tyler, Dad,” I tell him. “You don't have to tell me about right and wrong. I'm twelve, remember?”

“You are, aren't you.” He turns his cheek, like I slapped him in his face. “I wish I could have been there for your birthday,” he told me. “Did you like the bike?”

“Yeah,” I say. I don't want to talk about my birthday. It wasn't much fun.

“Did Grandpa pick out a nice one?” he asks.

“Yeah,” I say. “A blue ten-speed. Grandpa has pictures.”

“Someday, Preston,” he tells me, “I'll get you a dirt bike—would you like that?”

“Yeah!” I say.

“The best one they make,” he tells me. “You can ride it all around town—show off to your friends at school. How does that sound?”

“Sounds great!”

“Maybe I'll get one, too,” he says. He looks through the glass, but he doesn't seem to see me. It's as if the glass is a window into some other time—years from now maybe. Open fields and dirt bikes. Him riding with me. Best friends, like we used to be. “Wouldn't that be something?” he says.

“Yeah, it would be.”

He puts up his hand to the glass and presses his fingers against it. It's kind of silly, but it's better than nothing. It's the closest thing to a hug we can get. I wonder who needs the hug more, him or me. I put my hand against his on the glass, holding it there like a high five, but I take my hand away before he does.

“When I get out, we can do stuff like that, Preston.”

But that's only
if
he gets out. For all I know, putting my hand against the glass is the closest I'll ever come to hugging him again.

“How soon could you get out?”

He takes his time answering. “It depends on the trial,” he says, and we both know what that means. It means he may never get out. The Talberts—Russ's parents—are testifying against him. Even though they told my grandparents to their faces that they love my dad, they're testifying against him,
telling how Dad tricked Mr. Talbert into lending him the gun.

Grandma and Grandpa are testifying
for
my dad. Dad's lawyer thinks that if they testify, explaining how they've known him since he was fifteen and know he's a good person—how they felt that both he and Mom were terribly disturbed, and that they still love him—then maybe a jury would let him off easy. But as much as I like the idea of Dad getting off, it still bothers me.

Just because he was disturbed and people still love him doesn't necessarily mean it's
right
for him to get out of jail. I'm sure lots of people in prison for life, or even on death row, were disturbed when they committed their crimes. I'm sure that most of them have people who love them, too. And the only difference is that this one happens to be my dad.

Tyler impatiently reaches up to grab the phone from me. He uses the
p
word, so I have to give it to him.

“I love you, Preston,” says my father before I hand over the phone.

“Yeah, Dad,” I say. “I love you, too.”

My secret room has no windows, so I don't know if it's dark yet. They say the days have started to get longer now that it's January, but I haven't seen it. The sun still sets by five. The days are getting colder—not cold enough for snow, but cold
enough to make you wish you didn't have to get out of bed. It's probably about five now. I study science while Jason organizes my entire baseball-card collection in some mysterious but brilliant filing system. Jason never seems to study. We're both good students, but he's a good student by nature. I, on the other hand, have to study my butt off. We sort of have a competition going—you know?—who can pull in higher grades. He always wins, but not by much.

Today science seems to bypass my brain completely. I sigh and slam down the textbook.

“What's your problem?” asks Jason.

“I've just been wondering something,” I tell him.

“About science?”

“No, about life, and God and stuff.”

“Oh, one of
those
questions,” he says rolling his eyes. “You think about God and stuff more than anyone I know our age.”

He's right about that, and I'm kind of glad about it. I guess it's because my grandparents are really strict about going to church and things like that. That must be the reason.

“I'm just wondering,” I tell him, “if someone helps a murderer get out of prison, do you think they're damned?”

Jason takes the question very seriously. He thinks about it, then answers me. He doesn't answer the question I actually asked—but instead answers the question I was afraid to ask.

“I don't think you'll be damned if you testify for your father, Preston,” he says. “I don't see how you could be.”

Grandma doesn't want me to testify; she thinks it'll be too traumatic. Maybe it will be, but Dad's lawyer thinks I should because if Dad's found guilty of first-degree murder, “the judge will have no mercy.” He could be in prison for life, or worse.

“Preston's testimony,” the lawyer said, “could make all the difference in the world.” I haven't told Dad that I might testify. I don't have the guts to tell him that the rest of his life rests on my shoulders. But I think he already knows.

“If all you're doing,” says Jason, “is telling the truth, then I don't see how you could be damned.”

“But what if my dad doesn't deserve to go free?” I say.

“But what if he planned what he did ahead of time?”

“What if he was nuts when he did it?”

“But what if he knew exactly what he was doing?”

“But what if he really can't remember doing it, like he says?”

I give up. Jason plays Ping-Pong with words much better than I play Ping-Pong with paddles—and while I could always whip Russ Talbert on a table, Jason wins with words every time.

“Listen,” says Jason, “you know your dad; I don't. I mean, do you really think he'd ever kill anyone in cold blood?”

“No . . . but he did.”

Jason has no answer to that one. For once, I really wish he did.

“Maybe it wasn't really in cold blood,” I offer. “Maybe it was just in warm blood.”

“Maybe.”

I open my science book to an impossibly confused diagram of the insides of a frog. Tomorrow we dissect. I try to figure which is harder to understand: the impossible insides of a frog, or my father.

“Listen, the way I figure it, it's a coin toss,” says Jason. “Heads: your dad was nuts, is better now, and deserves a second chance. Or tails: he knew what he was doing, did it anyway, and deserves the worst. And since you really don't know whether it's heads or tails, you might as well testify, because all you'll be telling is the truth.”

“But he killed someone,” I say, slamming my book on the impossible frog. “What happens if he's set free because I testify?”

“Yeah,” says Jason, “but what happens if he gets the electric chair because you don't?”

Just the thought of it puts me in my own little electric chair for a split second, stopping my heart and starting it with a bang that pushes out on the insides of my chest. But hearing Jason put it so clearly, as he tends to do, makes my own choice very clear. It makes me realize that I have no choice. I have to testify.

“Mom must hate me by now,” I say, but Jason says nothing. Maybe he didn't hear me. Or maybe he just agrees.

The courtroom is not what I imagined. It doesn't look as clean as I thought it would. It doesn't look as old.

The room is empty as the bailiff leads me and my grandma down the aisle toward the judge. She has already testified. So has Grandpa. I'm the only one left. It's as if I'm walking into the middle of someone else's nightmare. I don't know what went on before I got here; I don't know what happens after I leave. It's been going on for weeks and may go on for weeks more. I try to tell myself that my tiny time on the stand is only a small, unimportant part of the whole trial, but as I walk into the courtroom, I can't help but feel that my tiny time on the stand
is
the whole trial.

The jury isn't here. Neither are the Talberts or anyone else.

Dad isn't here either. I asked for that. I couldn't testify in front of him. I can't even mention Mom in front of him. If he were here, I would just die right there on the witness stand. And so it's just me and the judge and Grandma.

But it's not, is it?

I know God is there, too. I know Mom is there. And I'm scared.

“Preston,” says the judge. “I want you to listen to each question carefully and answer to the best of your ability. Take as much time as you need—don't let anyone make you feel rushed.”

I nod my head quickly, like a scared rabbit. I'm glad no one else is here—I probably look real stupid. They'd probably laugh. All my friends would laugh. They'd laugh because I'm shaking. They'd laugh because my grandmother is on the other side of me holding my hand. The funny thing is, I need her to be there. I'd probably pass out or something if she wasn't. Does that make me a wimp?

I try to calm myself by thinking of good things. Football. My MVP trophy. I stood up there real proud and strong when I accepted that trophy. Why can't I do that now? Why? “This is for my mom,” I said when I got the trophy. It made Grandma and Grandpa cry. Why can't I stop shaking?

“Okay, Preston,” says Mr. Hendricks, Dad's lawyer, as he begins his questioning. I know what he's going to ask—we went over it before.

“Nothing to it,” Mr. Hendricks said when he was at our house the other day. “It's just like taking a test when you've been given all the answers.”

The trick, Mr. Hendricks explained, was to be
sure
of my answers and never go back on anything that I say. So we talked, and I thought back to everything that happened those weeks before Dad did what he did. I thought back, and I remembered a lot more than I thought I did. I remembered that day Dad and I rented the house by the beach—the one we never got to move into. How we visited the school I never got to go to. How he bought me that wetsuit I never got to
wear. I returned the wetsuit to the store after Mom died. I went to return the key to the owner of the house.

I remembered their last fight. Money. Mom buys too many clothes. We can't make the house payments. Dad only makes a few thousand dollars a month. Sounds like a lot to me, but compared to Aunt Jackie's ex-husband, it's nothing.

I remembered Mom yelling to Dad about me—how she just didn't have the patience for me anymore.

I remembered how she bragged about Weavin' Warren Sharp to my father, knowing that Dad was super-jealous and would make more of the whole thing than it probably was.

I remembered Dad talking to Mr. Talbert about his gun. That was even months before it happened—Dad wanted to buy a gun for Mom's protection when he wasn't home. He wanted the same gun Mr. Talbert had, and Dad went out shopping with him.

But Mom didn't want one. She was afraid of guns, so Dad never bought it.

And so, as I sit up on the witness stand, Mr. Hendricks asks me all the questions he said he would, and I answer them as best I can, even though I shake and even though my tongue doesn't want to move in my mouth.

If this is the easy stuff, I can't wait till the hard stuff.