Chasing Forgiveness (12 page)

He can say what he wants. Everything's better now.

My feet, my hands, have a mind of their own. A sound comes out of my mouth like an Indian war cry.

I'm okay. I'm okay.

Jimmy puts up his fists, but his fists are useless. I grab him with my hands and throw him to the ground. I dive on him, growling like an animal.

It doesn't bother me. I can just walk away.
I've said it over and over again until I can hear my head ringing.

People like that,
Jason always says,
don't deserve the time it takes to punch them out.

But here around me are my friends and classmates. They all heard it. And if they didn't know before, they know now—and my hands don't listen to me when I tell them to stop.

I smash Jimmy Sanders's head into the concrete again and again until I can hear his skull ringing.
It's over. It's been over for a year.
But if it's over, then why am I screaming? If it's over, then why can't I stop? Why can't I stop?

“Do your knees hurt?” asks Dr. Parker, my pediatrician. “Do you ever get pains in your legs?”

I shake my head no, figuring if there's anything wrong with my yearly checkup, I won't be able to stay in football.

“Hmm,” she says. “You've grown four inches since I last saw you. I thought you might have some growing pains. Guess not.”

I suppose I have grown a lot. It's not just my size either—it seems everything changes when you grow. Suddenly your bicycle seat is as high as it can go, and you can reach the shelf above the refrigerator, and you can't fit into your old bed.

And memories change, too. They get flattened out and stacked up like pizza boxes. If I reach in, I can pull out any memory I want—Mom, Dad,
Family Feud
. But in some
strange way, the memories are pressed down into pictures of a life that I can barely recognize. They seem like scenes from someone else's life.

Everything about me is changing. The doctor can see that. I'm no longer the little kid Mom used to bring in to see her with the flu or strep throat. I'm no longer that same frightened kid who had to hold Grandma's hand on the witness stand a year and a half ago.

“How old are you now, Preston?” asks Dr. Parker. “Fourteen?”

“Almost,” I tell her. Fourteen'll be a good age to be, I think. It will be a good time in my life to be fourteen, now that things are calm, stable, and normal.

She puts her icy stethoscope on my chest and tells me to breathe.

“Still in football and swimming?” she asks.

“Football and track,” I correct her. “A high-school coach told me that I'm almost ready for varsity in both sports, and I'm only in eighth grade!”

The doctor is impressed, but then catches sight of something and gently touches the skin around my eye, where she finds the last fading remnants of a black eye.

“How'd you get that?” she asks. “Football practice?”

“Naah,” I tell her. “It was a fight.”

She looks up at me with a troubled expression, then gets her penlight and points it into my eye, telling me to look at
the wall. She stares right into my eye, and for a moment, I get the feeling that she's looking clear into my brain to see what makes me tick.

“You get into a lot of fights?” she asks.

“No, not really,” I tell her. “Well, yeah, sort of,” I finally admit. “It's because I've got this competitive nature. I get angry really easily—but I only let loose when it's a good time to, you know? I'll beat the heck out of kids who pick on my friends. I'll nail kids who cheat or lie or steal. I don't start fights,” I tell her. “I just finish them—and I never pick on kids. I just defend them. I'm kind of like the school policeman.”

The doctor smiles and shakes her head the same way my principal does.

It's not up to you to administer justice,
the principal always tells me. But I always tell him right back that if it's not up to me, then who is it up to?

The doctor finishes looking in my eyes and gives me that concerned look again. It's like I'm back on the witness stand being questioned by the district attorney and I'm feeling guilty for telling the truth.

“It's not like I'm a bully,” I tell her. “I'm real sensitive, too—I mean I cry and stuff.”

She nods, but I'm not sure if she believes me. I
do
cry. I cry on Mom's birthday, all day. I cry on Thursdays in March. I cry on Christmas and New Year's and the Fourth of July and on any holiday that reminds me of her.

“I cry about as much as I fight,” I tell Dr. Parker, “so it all balances out.”

I think about how Grandpa Wes puts it—he has his own way of saying how I balance out. He calls me The Lion and The Lamb.

I guess I could be a lion. I sort of have this mane of blond hair. I guess I could also be a lamb on account of the tight curls of light hair that have been springing up all over my arms and legs. What Grandpa really means, though, is my mood swings. It's funny how I go from one extreme to the other so quickly. My dad's like that, too, only worse. Sometimes I think about how much my dad and I are alike. And it troubles me. The doctor looks at my growth chart, then up at me, then at my chart again, but I don't think she's thinking about my height and weight.

“Ever been in therapy, Preston?” she asks. “Have you ever seen a counselor?” No matter how casual and offhand a tone she tries to use, the question comes out sounding calculated. Dr. Parker knew my mom. She knows what happened to her. In the times I've seen Dr. Parker since then, this is the first time she's come even close to bringing it up.

“Yeah,” I tell her, “I had therapy once.” I have to think hard to even remember it. It was sometime before my dad's trial. This psychologist saw Tyler and me once and couldn't find a single thing wrong with us.

“That was it?” asks Dr. Parker. “Just once?”

“Yeah,” I tell her, “he said I had less mental problems than most kids my age.”

She chuckles, closes my chart, then reaches in her pocket out of habit to hand me a lollipop, but thinks better of it. Then she looks at my eyes one more time—not like a doctor, but more like that psychologist had.

“So do I check out okay?” I ask her. “Is there anything the matter with me?”

“No, Preston,” she says, almost disappointed, “you're fine. I can't find a single thing wrong with you.”

•  •  •

On Sunday I go to church with Grandma, Grandpa, and Tyler, like I always do. We pray and thank God for this miracle he's made in our lives. The miracle that we're okay—that we didn't lose our minds. That Tyler and I didn't turn into bad kids who hate themselves and everything around them.

For the miracle that Dad will be coming home.

I grip my book of hymns a little hard as I think about that. And although my voice sings about walking in the garden with Jesus, I think about walking through the prison with Dad.

He spent a year in jail before his trial, a year of his sentence was suspended, and they took over a year off for good behavior. That left him a prison term of a little less than two years, and it's just about up. Two years. A pretty good deal for a guy who killed someone.

The prison he's in now is so low-security that there are
barely any fences—and without fences he's free enough to dream. He has all these wild plans that seem to race out of all the prison gates with nothing to hold them back.

“When I get out,” he says, “I'm gonna buy you that dirt bike I promised you.”

“When I get out, we're gonna go white-water rafting, just the three of us.”

“When I get out we're gonna drive cross-country. We're gonna see the Grand Canyon. We're gonna go sailing and skiing and camping. We'll go to next year's Super Bowl.”

My dad likes to dream. I don't know where he'll get the money to do it all, but he promises, and I believe him. His last promise was that he and Mom would get back together. He broke that promise in a big way. Now he owes me, and he knows it.

After we sing hymns and hear announcements, the offering box is passed around. I drop a respectable amount of last week's allowance into the box. Grandpa says I really don't have to, but it couldn't hurt.

I wonder if Dad's in his prison chapel, thanking God for miracles, too. He got awful godly there in prison. He seems to be right up there with Grandma and Grandpa now.

“You people,” my friend Jason says, “are like on a planet all your own with God—you talk about him so much.”

And when he says that, I simply tell him the truth. “You have to trust somebody,” I tell him. Trusting my parents didn't
do me much good, and my old friends deserted me when Mom died. But trusting in God seems to have worked so far.

But Tyler, of course, still doesn't quite get it, and in the middle of a hymn about the Lord's heavenly throne and the firmament of His power, Tyler asks the Question of the Week.

“Exactly where is God?” he asks. “Exactly where is heaven? How far away?”

I nudge him, but he asks again. “Where is heaven?”

“How the heck should
I
know?” I tell him. “Do I look like God?” In the Bible they always talk about people rending their garments and gnashing their teeth. That's how I feel when Tyler asks me these questions. I nudge him really hard, and he bumps into Grandpa. Grandpa gently puts his large hand on Tyler's mop head, like the comforting hand of the Almighty, and it keeps him quiet until we're both dismissed to our Sunday-school groups.

•  •  •

“But where
is
heaven?”

Tyler spends half of his nights sleeping in the lower bunk of my bunk bed rather than in his own room. Usually I don't mind. Usually he stops asking dumb questions if I yell at him enough or pound his arm—but he's not letting up this time.

“Tyler,” I complain, “it's school tomorrow. Go to sleep, huh?”

But my clueless brother will not hear reason. “Are you closer to heaven than me because you're up high?” he asks. “Are you?”

I try to ignore him by focusing all of my attention on the ceiling, which is lit dimly by Tyler's Donald Duck night-light. He's almost nine, and he still needs that night-light. He'll always be Grandma's little boy.

I try to find interesting patterns in the textured ceiling, but all I find are trapezoids and rhombuses and a bunch of other things that I just know will be on tomorrow's math test. I rub my eyes, but the shapes are still there.

“Are you closer to heaven because you're up there?” demands Tyler, as if his life depended on the answer.

I sigh. “Maybe. I don't know.”

“Is it closer than the moon?”

“No,” I tell him, but then I stop and think about his question. And my answer. “Yes. Yes it is.”

“Good,” says Tyler, and with his question finally answered, he promptly falls asleep.

But I am left awake. My eyes are open wide, three feet above him. Closer to heaven? I don't know.

“Stupid questions!” I mumble to myself, but yet I can see why Tyler needs answers. How can such dumb questions have such important answers? Such
hard
answers?

I know that heaven is farther away than the farthest star, and yet it's just as close as the night breeze against my skin. Mom's that way, too.

I won't sleep much tonight now that I've started thinking about Mom, and I'm half mad at Tyler, but half glad he's
here, too, because the comforting sound of his easy, innocent breathing will keep me company. When I'm alone, I get caught up thinking about all the little things that could have been different and all the different lives I could have been living if, on that terrible Thursday, Mom had left the room, or sneezed, or turned around in time. Millions of different lives that I'm never going to lead. She'd be thirty-four now. Maybe she would have gotten back together with Dad in time, like Russ Talbert's parents did. Now no one will ever know.

The patterns on the ceiling are changing now. I can make out faces, but I don't want to see who it might be, so I close my eyes and think about Mom in heaven.

How close am I to her, really? I know the answer. I'm really just a breath away. Just a heartbeat. And the thought scares me so much that I thank God that Tyler's Donald Duck night-light is here to fight the shadows.

It scares me because sometimes I think about how close heaven really is, and how easy it would be to go there and be with Mom if I really wanted to. And sometimes I want to.

As I step out into the night, I can smell the aroma of dying fires coming from the neighborhood chimneys. It smells like Christmas. Judging by store displays, Christmas has already arrived. But since we're still eating leftover Thanksgiving turkey, I know it hasn't yet. Christmas is still a month away.

Dad's probably thinking about Christmas now. I think of him, sitting there in his minimum-security cell. I wonder if he's counting down the days until he's free, etching marks into the wall like prisoners always seem to do.

“Shh!” says Jason, even though I don't make a noise. Gently he slides his back door closed. It's a cold, still night. Cold for California anyway. There's a low-hanging mist, and dew on the grass that seeps through my sneakers, making my feet cold as I cross the lawn. A few more degrees and it could be frost.

It's three in the morning as we sneak out of Jason's house. His father sleeps like a log, and we'll be back before he even knows we're gone.

The homes on the street are all dark as we tiptoe off, afraid that the faintest noise could give us away. The night is so still, you can hear the freeway two miles away, like a fast-flowing river. Where are people driving to at three in the morning anyway?