Impact (2 page)

The police asked my parents if they knew anyone named Tony. They didn't.

They asked me the same question. I went cold all over. I said they should talk to Shannon.

“Who's Shannon?” the cops said.

“She's a girl Mark was seeing. I heard someone say she used to go with a guy named Tony.”

The police talked to Shannon next. Shannon went to the same school as Mark and me, which is how I know what happened when the police talked to her. All the girls at school were talking about it after it happened.

The police asked Shannon if she knew anyone named Tony. One of the girls at my school said that Shannon's face went white when they asked her that. She told the police that her ex-boyfriend's name was Tony. Tony Lofredo. He didn't go to our school. In fact, Shannon said, she had transferred to our
school after she broke up with Tony. She told the police that Tony was the jealous type and that he wouldn't leave her alone. That's why she had changed schools. She described Tony to the police, and her description matched the description of one of the people that the pizza delivery guy had seen running out of the parking lot.

When my father heard that, I think he thought it would all go pretty fast. He thought the police would arrest Tony, and Tony would tell them who else had been with him. Then they'd go to court and that would be that.

Of course, it didn't happen that way. And it sure didn't happen fast.

“People thought highly of Mark,” my father says, standing up there in front of everyone, his hands trembling now as he continues to read without looking up. “His teachers liked him. His boss where he worked and his coworkers all liked him. The church was full for his funeral.”

The church
was
full for Mark's funeral. All my relatives were there. Our neighbors were
there, even the Mercers and their son Kyle, who lived two doors up from us. Kyle looked down at the ground most of the time.

All Mark's friends were there. So were his coworkers. Shannon was there, even though she had only gone out with Mark a couple of times. There were a whole bunch of girls with her, pressing in close to her, like if they didn't, she would fall over from grief. She cried a lot for someone who didn't know Mark all that well.

My mother cried through the whole service too. My father sat beside her, holding her hand and looking straight ahead. He didn't cry, but I bet he wanted to. I know I did.

After the funeral, everything was a blur for a while. My parents were a mess. My mother could hardly get up off the couch, but the house was filled with food. People kept bringing over casseroles and salads and pies. The house was full of crying too. Some days I'd get home from school and there would be my mother, crying in the kitchen, one of her friends with her, handing her tissue after tissue and listening to her weep.

My father talked to the police a lot. One time I heard him yelling into the phone that they knew it was this boy Tony, why didn't they just go ahead and arrest him? I guess he didn't like whatever the answer was because he slammed down the receiver and stormed out of the house. I don't know when he came back, but it was long after I'd gone to bed. I found him sprawled on the couch the next morning. My mother called the plant and told them that my father wouldn't be in to work that day.

My mother cried all day, but my father mostly went to work, and I went to school. It was the last place I wanted to be, but I went anyway. I thought at first that it would be better than being at home and listening to my mother cry all the time. But it wasn't. I have some good friends. They tried to do the right thing. They showed up to the funeral. They said they were sorry about what had happened to Mark. They said I must really miss him. But after the first couple of days, well, it wasn't
their
brother. If they thought about it, they could kind of imagine what I fel
like. But they didn't think about it, not every minute of every day like I did. Why should they? They for sure didn't find themselves slamming their fist into a wall like I did a couple of times. They didn't all of a sudden start to cry in the middle of a basketball game like I did. Mark was good at basketball. We used to shoot hoops out in the driveway, just the two of us. But there I was a few weeks after it happened, shooting hoops with my friends. One minute I was scooping the ball and shooting it. The next minute I was seeing Mark. And right after that I was crying. If you want to freak out a bunch of guys, stand in the middle of the basketball court holding the ball and cry. Trust me, that'll do it.

One day when I got home after school, my father was getting out of the car in the driveway. Right away I knew something was up. My father was on the day shift that week. He didn't usually get home until at least a half hour after I did. But here he was, thirty minutes ahead of schedule, getting out of the car.

“Did you get off early?” I said.

“Something like that,” he said. But I could tell by the look on his face that it wasn't anything like that at all.

I followed him into the house. He went straight through to the kitchen without taking off his work boots. That was another clue that something was going on. My father always took his boots off at the door. My mother insisted on it.

My mother was in the kitchen. I think she'd gone in there to start supper, but she wasn't cooking. She was standing at the kitchen sink, looking out the window into the backyard. She didn't seem to notice when my father and I came into the kitchen. She didn't turn around until my father went to her and put his hands on her shoulders and turned her around. Neither of us was surprised when we saw how red her eyes were and how wet her cheeks were.

My mother stared blankly at him. It was
hard to tell if she understood what he was saying.

“I talked to that police detective today,” my father said quietly. “They've made some arrests, Sara. They've arrested four boys for what happened to Mark.”

I felt my whole body tense up.

“Was one of them Tony Lofredo?” I asked.

My father nodded. “Tony Lofredo and two of his friends.”

Tears were streaming down my mother's face, but I couldn't tell if she was crying because she was glad that, finally, the police had arrested someone or because what my father had just told her was making her remember all over again what had happened to Mark. She pressed up against my father, and he wrapped his arms around her.

I thought about what my father had just said. “Tony Lofredo and
two
of his friends?” I said. “But you said the police arrested four people. Tony and his two friends—that only makes three.”

My father turned to look at me. “The fourth boy,” he said in a quiet voice. “It's Kyle Mercer.”

I felt sicker inside than I had ever felt.

“When we heard that the police had arrested the people who killed our son, we thought it would ease our pain. But it didn't,” my father says, reading. He looks up for the first time. He looks at my mother. I glance at her too. Her eyes are filled with tears, but she holds her head high.

It was crazy at our house for the first day or two after the police arrested Tony Lofredo,
his two friends—whose names were Joey Karagiannis and Robert Teale—and Kyle Mercer. The media phoned—newspaper, radio, tv—and showed up at our door. They wanted to know what my parents thought about the arrests. They even asked me what I thought. After the first two days, my father unplugged the phone. He said anyone who needed to get in touch with him could call him on his cell phone. My father only gives out his cell phone number to close friends and to relatives.

Kyle Mercer went to the same school as me, so I couldn't get away from it there. Everyone was talking about what had happened. But it died down again fast, because after Kyle was arrested, they kept him locked up until the trial. They kept all four of them locked up.

Shannon disappeared from school. Someone said that her parents had decided to send her to a private school so she could get away from all the bad memories. At first that didn't make sense to me. She hadn't known Mark all that long. Then someone else told
me that she had transferred because she felt guilty. She thought that if she had never gone out with Mark, he would still be alive. Maybe that was true.

After a week had passed, all the excitement died down. I thought the trial would happen a couple of weeks or maybe a couple of months later. Was I ever wrong!

A date was set for a preliminary inquiry. It got pushed back and pushed back. In the meantime, we were supposed to get on with our lives.

The worst Christmas of my life came and went. My father didn't go out and buy a Christmas tree the way he usually did. My mother didn't make batches and batches of Christmas cookies the way she usually did. Neither of them did any Christmas shopping. They gave me money and told me I should treat myself to whatever I wanted, but I couldn't think of anything.

The new year came, and still nothing happened. I had trouble concentrating on my schoolwork. Basically, I just didn't care. I failed every subject but math, and I got a D in that.

My mother, who had a part-time job at a store, spent more and more of her time in bed. After a while, she stopped going to work. They fired her. One of my aunts finally took her to the doctor. She was diagnosed with depression, and the doctor put her on medication. As far as I could see, it didn't do much good. The same aunt, who was single and a registered nurse, moved in with us to look after my mother.

My father went to work every day—at least, I think he did. But he didn't come home every night. A few times when he didn't show up, my aunt called the police. The first time she called them, my aunt and I were up all night, worried about what had happened to him. The police brought him home first thing the next morning, right after they found him. He had passed out at Mark's grave, an empty bottle of scotch beside him. The next couple of times he didn't come home, she called the police again. But every time they found him in the same place. So after a while, she stopped calling them. Instead she would wake me up, if I were asleep, which mostly,
at night, I wasn't, and we would drive out to the cemetery together, load my father into the back of the car and bring him home. My aunt said it was a miracle that he managed to hang on to his job.

The street I live on is small—just two blocks long—and out of the way. It's a dead-end street where everyone knows everyone else because most people have lived there for a while and most people's kids play with most other people's kids and go to the same schools. It's the kind of street where, in summertime, everyone is out on their front porches or fooling around in their gardens or messing around with their tiny front lawns. People call across the street to each other. They wander up and down the street to gossip and exchange news. There's an annual beginning-of-summer street party. There's also an annual yard sale that everyone on the street participates in. “Everyone” includes my parents and Kyle Mercer's parents. Kyle's parents used to come over sometimes for beers and a barbecue—my father loved to invite the neighbors over, and everybody
would sit out back and talk and listen to music and dance on a long, hot summer night. Mark and I were never super-close to Kyle, but he used to hang out with us when we were young. All the kids on the street hung out together. When Kyle started to spend time with guys who were bad news, my mother listened to his mother complain about it. She told Kyle's mother it was probably just a phase. She said good parents raise good boys, and she was sure Kyle was going to be just fine.

At first people on the street said they didn't blame Kyle's parents for what had happened. But when it was finally time for the first beginning-of-summer street party since Mark had died, it looked like things had changed. Both my parents went to the party, although neither of them wanted to. My father had started going to aa meetings by then, mostly because my aunt was dragging him to them, and he didn't want to go to a party where everyone would be drinking. My mother wanted to stay in bed. But my aunt made her get up and get dressed and even put a little makeup on. She made me go too.

One by one, people went up to my parents. It was as if my parents had just come back from a long trip, which, in a way, they had. They hadn't had much to do with the neighbors in months and months. People came and talked to them and hugged my mother. Then someone looked up the street at the Mercers' house. Soon everyone stopped talking and looked at the house too. Everyone seemed tense.

Mr. and Mrs. Mercer had just come out onto their porch. They looked over at the party. Mr. Mercer had a case of beer in his hands. Mrs. Mercer was carrying a big tray covered with plastic wrap—food for the party.

They looked down where everyone was gathered around my parents. Mrs. Mercer looked at Mr. Mercer. She shook her head. He said something to her, but she shook her head again and went back into the house. After a few minutes, he followed her inside. Everybody seemed to relax again.

A month later, a For Sale sign went up on the Mercers' front lawn. By the end of the summer, they were gone.

“It has been so hard,” my father says. He finishes the page he has been reading and shuffles it to the bottom of the small pile of sheets he is holding. I can't believe he has written so much. My father works on an assembly line. He reads the newspaper, mainly the sports page, but I have never seen him read a book. I have never seen him write anything but a check. “We have been here for every single day of this trial. We have heard everything that was said.”

The trial started in January, nearly fifteen months after Mark was killed. In that time, my father stopped drinking, started again and then stopped again. By the first day of the trial, he had been sober for four straight months.

My mother stayed on antidepressants, but she didn't stay in bed. She got up and found another job at another store, a 24-hour grocery store this time. My aunt moved back to her own place.