Chasing Forgiveness (15 page)

And in the silence that follows, I can hear that one scream of the aunt I'll never meet multiplied five times. “No!”

“My aunt, my sister, my cousins . . .”

This is too much to know. Too much to hear all at once. All of them. Nobody told me that. Why doesn't anybody ever tell me things? Now I know why Dad's father had a nervous breakdown. Has this been on my father's mind since before I was born? Every time he falls into a deep depression, every time he just sits there not talking to anyone, just staring out lost in his own thoughts? Is this what he's thinking about? Was he reliving the awful day his family died trying to save
him? How could anyone live with that weight? How could anyone not lose their mind?

“It's not your fault,” I tell him. But it doesn't matter what I say. I can see his eyes reflecting the dim light. I can't tell if he's crying, but I can see what he's feeling. He blames himself. He's always blamed himself.

“Of course it's not my fault,” he says quietly. “It just happened.” But even as he says it, I know he's still trying to convince himself.
If it weren't for me,
he's thinking,
they'd all still be alive.
I can almost hear it playing over and over in his mind, the same way I play that horrible night Mom died over in my mind. Stuff like that gets trapped in your head and just bounces back and forth and can't find a way out.
I should have died,
he's telling himself.
I should have died, too, Preston, and if I had, then the other things would not have happened.

“It's okay, Dad,” I want to tell him. “Terrible things happen to good people for no reason that we can figure out.” I want to tell him I understand,
because it happened to me.
I wasn't much older than you had been, Dad, when the awful thing happened to me, too.

But my lips won't move. I can't say a word.

I could ask him about Mom now. This would be the time. I could ask why he did it—what he was really thinking when he got the gun. What on God's earth could be so hard to bear that the only way to end the pain was to shut down his mind, go crazy, and take my mother's life?

If I asked him now, he would tell me, he wouldn't lie, I know that. And if he told me, I would understand—like I understood about his sister and his cousins and his aunt. I know that, too.

The words are on the edge of my lips, and my heart pounds knowing that I could finally, after three years, ask my father what has become the most important question in the world. I could ask him now.

But I don't have the guts.

I slip under my covers, ashamed that I can't speak. He stands up, thinking that I'm shrinking away from him, but then he leans forward and gives me an awkward hug. Somehow it's like we're back in the awful gray jail and the glass is still between us, and even as he hugs me, I feel like he's hugging me through glass.

He straightens himself up, turns, and slowly walks to the door.

I can't ask him about Mom, can I? I never
will
be able to do it, will I?

“Dad,” I say as he leaves the room, “I love you.” But the door closes behind him before he can hear.

Three weeks later Dad moves in with us.

“But I couldn't move in with you,” Dad protests when Grandma and Grandpa make their offer over Sunday dinner.

“Nonsense,” says Grandma. “You're here visiting the boys almost every day; we have the extra room. There's no reason why you shouldn't—it solves everyone's problems.”

“Maybe the boys could move in with me and my parents instead,” suggests Dad. Sometimes I feel like I don't have any say in it.

“And change schools in the middle of the year?” says Grandpa. “No. We're perfectly content to have you stay with us until you can get yourself an apartment nearby.”

Dad has a job now. A friend of his got him the job—the same friend who picked him up at the prison. So now Dad's a
manager at a paper company. But he still can't afford his own apartment. At least not one in
this
neighborhood.

“I just wouldn't feel right,” says Dad, “just moving in on you.”

“Well, if you want to be with the boys, there's not much of a choice, Danny,” says my grandpa, “because the boys are staying with us—whether you move in or not.”

And I begin to wonder what will happen when Dad does get his own apartment. What will Tyler and I be expected to do—where will we be expected to go? And I wonder if I'll have to take sides again, like I used to when Mom was alive.

•  •  •

On the first night that Dad stays with us, I hear a noise from his room. It's very soft and very muffled, but I still hear it.

Dad is crying. He's crying the way I cry sometimes when I think about Mom. All alone in my room, I can bury it in my pillow so no one will come in and ask me what's wrong. That way I can keep it all to myself, and nobody can make me stop crying until I feel good and ready to. Maybe that's what Dad's doing, and maybe I should just let him alone. But I can't just sit here and listen to Dad cry.

I tiptoe out of my room and cross the hall to his. Grandma and Grandpa don't hear him; they're still downstairs watching TV—I can see the shifting blue light from the television hitting the banister, casting long shadows against the wall. They don't hear Dad. Tyler is asleep. It's only me.

Without knocking I open the door a crack and peer in.
Dad is sitting on his bed, his head in his hands. He's sniffling and quietly sobbing. He doesn't know I'm watching him.

I wonder if he is crying about Mom. I wonder if he cried about Mom after it happened. He cried about Tyler and me. He cried about what he had done, but did he ever cry about Mom? I didn't see him for months after it happened so I have no way of knowing . . . unless I ask him, and I'm not about to do that.

I open the door wider, and it creaks, giving me away, so I step in.

“You okay, Dad?” I ask.

“I'm fine, Preston,” he says, trying to put an end to his tears. “I'm just feeling kind of funny, that's all.”

“About what?”

Dad doesn't quite answer that. Maybe he doesn't know how to put it into words. He just sits there a bit longer, not saying anything.

“I don't deserve all this,” he finally says. “I don't know why I'm being given it; I don't deserve it.”

I figure he's talking about Grandma and Grandpa letting him live here, but somehow it goes beyond that, doesn't it? He doesn't deserve to be free. He doesn't deserve the fact that we still love him—that we can all turn away from what he did and forgive him. But Grandma has a good way of putting it. She says, “If the Lord can forgive mankind for killing His son, then surely we can forgive the man who killed our daughter.” The hard part is accepting it.

“Everyone's too good to me,” says Dad, drying his eyes. I go over to him and he gives me an awkward hug. I don't feel anywhere near as emotional as Dad does now, and I feel a bit weird about how he's acting. I can't see what the big deal is.

“I made an oath when I was in prison, you know,” he says. “I swore that when I got out—and if you still wanted me—I would spend my life making sure that I was the best dad I could ever be. I'm going to take you places, I'll buy you whatever you want. I know things can't be the way they used to be, but . . .”

“But they're going to be better,” I say.

He smiles and hugs me tightly, and no matter how old I am, when my dad hugs me, I can believe anything's possible.

•  •  •

But Tyler still doesn't quite get it.

And sometimes it makes me mad.

Not long after Dad moves in with us, we get a call from Tyler's teacher. I'm at track practice, so I don't know a thing about it until I get home. By then, things are in a sorry state. Grandpa's pacing back and forth in the living room. Grandma's gone off to speak with Tyler's teacher, and Tyler is in his room with the door closed.

The only bit of good luck about this situation is that Dad isn't home from work yet.

I ask Grandpa what happened, but all Grandpa says is, “Maybe you ought to talk to him. Your grandma and I talked to him, but I don't know if we're getting through.”

I know what they mean. Tyler is still Smiling Tyler. Even when he's not smiling he has this kind of glazed look in his eyes, and you don't know whether he's listening to you or thinking about yesterday's sports scores.

I go into his room. Tyler is lying on his bed, calmly throwing a ball into the air and catching it.

“You get into trouble at school?” I ask him. “You cheat on a test or something?”

“I just asked a question,” he says, never breaking the rhythm of the game of catch he's having with himself.

“What did you ask?”

“Just a question.”

“What kind of question makes Grandma have to run off to speak with your teacher?”

“Beats me,” says Tyler. “It was just a question.”

The ball goes up; the ball comes down. I'm losing my patience. “Why don't you tell me what you asked?”

“It was just a question,” he says, “that's all.” He hurls the ball harder. It hits the ceiling and comes back down hard against his chest. He grabs it and smashes it against the ceiling again.

I take the ball away from him, feeling my temper, which always hangs by a thread, begin to fray.

“Do I have to punch you out to get you to talk?”

“It was just a question!”
he screams, already in tears at the thought of being punched out. He's such a basket case sometimes. “Just leave me alone.”

Tyler rolls over and sobs, with no sign of stopping. I'll get nothing out of him, so I go ask Grandpa again.

Grandpa, who is still wandering aimlessly in the kitchen, seems not to want to tell me either, but finally he gives in.

“He asked his teacher,” says Grandpa, “if it's all right to kill someone.”

Just hearing the words, and knowing the fact that Tyler asked them, makes me furious, and afraid. What did he mean by asking that?

“Now they'll probably want him to go into therapy,” says Grandpa.

“He doesn't need therapy,” I tell him. “He needs to be straightened out.” And I head back off into his room to do just that.

“Preston!” says Grandpa, concerned that I might hurt him or something.

“I'm just gonna talk to him,” I tell Grandpa as I push my way back into Tyler's room.

Tyler is still sobbing on the bed, rolled halfway into a ball, facing the wall.

“It was just a question,”
says Tyler, between his sobs. I grab him, sit him up, and shake him.

“Where the heck do you get off asking a question like that?” But doing this only makes him sob harder, so I stop shaking him, and hold him firm. I know what I want to say to him. Maybe it's not what Grandpa wants to say, but it's what I
want to say. And if Grandpa were one of Danny Scott's sons, he would understand.

“Tyler,” I say, “look at me. Stop crying and look at me now!” Tyler listens. He holds down his sobs; his face fades from scarlet to pink.

“You are never to ask anything like that ever again to anyone, do you understand me? Do you understand?”

“Yes,” he mutters.

“You don't talk about Mom, and you don't talk about death, to your teachers or to Dad or to anyone. And what happened to Mom, now that Dad's back, you have to pretend like it never happened.”

“But it did happen.”

“I don't care!”
I tell him. “You pretend like it didn't. You want to think about Mom, fine. You think about her when you're in your room. You cry by yourself, but you never let Dad see it. And any other time, you do like I do; you push it way, way down inside you until you can't feel it anymore. You be a man.”

He's crying harder again; yet through his tears, I hear him whisper, “I miss her.”

I loosen my grip on Tyler's arms, and I slip my hands around his back, hugging him tightly. He needs this hug. He needs this hug like I needed Grandma's hand on the witness stand. “I do too, Tyler,” I whisper back.

“But I won't tell anyone,” he says. “I won't tell.”

Tyler and I are a team in no time at all. We learn all the ins and outs of life with Dad as quickly as we can: the knowledge of things to talk about and not talk about, the art of steering conversations away from certain topics. We run interference for my dad, because he needs protection. I know this. He needs protection from people and things around him.

•  •  •

We protect Dad from the television.

A news show comes on one night while Dad and I are stretched out on the couch in the den—a grisly story about a man who axed his family. Nothing like Dad, but still it's about murder, and it's about a family. If Dad sees it, he'll think about what happened to Mom—but the problem is I can't just change the channel, because if I change it, he'll know
why I did, and that would be just as bad as him seeing it. I look at the TV guide. There's nothing much else to watch, so changing the channel now would be a really suspicious thing to do.

I casually get up and find Tyler in the kitchen, trying without luck to spoon out some rock-hard ice cream that has been in the back of our freezer.

“You need help with math now,” I tell him quietly.

“Okay,” he says. He leaves the ice cream to thaw and goes up to Dad in the den. “Dad, I need help with my math,” he says. Dad is so eager to be of help that he jumps up and follows Tyler into his room.

“Math is easy, Tyler,” says Dad. “It's just a matter of patience.” Tyler finds his workbook and turns to a page in a unit they probably haven't even started on in school. He keeps Dad away from the TV for at least half an hour.