Redeeming Justice

by Jarrett Adams

  That is so touching, I think. The two of them together, connecting like old friends.

  Then a cloud of dread appears in my mind and parks itself over me.

  Uh-oh, I think. I believe I have just witnessed the first meeting of the mothers’ mafia.

  * * *

  —

  “We need to talk.”

  Four words you never want to hear from your boss.

  I follow Carol into her office, wondering if this has anything to do with Mel and his Academy Award–winning performance.

  “Shut the door.”

  The only words worse than those first four words.

  “Sit down,” Carol says.

  I sit. I accept Carol’s offer of a glass of water.

  “If I need to talk to you privately, I know I can find you here every night after everyone else has gone,” she says.

  “I like it here at night. Quiet. No distractions. I can get a lot done.”

  “I’m glad I’m not paying you by the hour.”

  I laugh, nervously.

  “So,” Carol says, settling into the couch. “We’re going to have a conversation, and it’s not going to be a short conversation.”

  “Okay—”

  I guzzle half the water.

  “Your mother and I have been talking.”

  “I know. I saw you two at the Christmas party.”

  “That’s when we started talking.”

  I jerk forward in my chair, nearly spill the rest of the water.

  “You’ve been in touch since?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “I had no idea.”

  “We see the same things. She sees them at home. I see them at work. We think—”

  I laugh. I have to.

  “Two mothers,” I say. “Two of the most powerful human beings on earth tag-teaming me.”

  Now Carol laughs.

  She settles on the couch, takes a moment.

  “Jarrett, you work at a million miles an hour. You never take breaks. You hardly ever go out. Your mother wanted you to take a break after you graduated from South Suburban, but you wouldn’t.”

  “I wanted to keep going year-round. I have a lot of catching up to do.”

  “But you’ve earned vacation time. You can take a day here and there. She says you don’t sleep. You get anxious. Sometimes you have a short fuse.”

  I go quiet.

  “I want to talk to you about therapy,” Carol says. “A lot of people go to therapy. It can be very helpful. I went to therapy.”

  “You did?”

  “I did. It’s not a bad thing. There’s no stigma about therapy.”

  “Maybe not in your neighborhood.”

  We both laugh at that.

  “You’ve gone through something unimaginable,” she says. “It would do you good to talk to somebody.”

  “This isn’t a job requirement, is it?”

  “It’s a strong suggestion.”

  “Sounds like a job requirement.”

  “Call it a mother’s wish.”

  “Which one?”

  “Both,” Carol says.

  I shake my head. I know I can’t win.

  She hands me a slip of paper with a list of names.

  “Here are three therapists. All excellent. I researched them. They’re all within walking distance of the office, and they’re all in network covered by our health insurance.”

  “Those copays though—”

  “I’ll reimburse them.”

  “But the time—”

  “One hour a week at most. I want you to take an hour away from work, here and there, anyway.”

  “For myself.”

  “That’s what you’d be doing. Taking an hour for yourself.”

  “Not exactly a vacation.”

  “Worth more than a vacation right now.”

  I lean back and sigh heavily.

  “Why do I think I don’t have a choice?”

  “You always have a choice. You know that. That’s how it works around here. I’ll never force you to do anything.”

  She smiles.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I don’t have a choice.”

  I take the paper from her, look over the three names.

  “Oh, by the way,” Carol says. “I want you to make an appointment for your foot.”

  “My mother told you about my foot?”

  “Yes. We think you broke it.”

  “What else have you two discussed?”

  “Oh, look at the time,” Carol says, abruptly standing.

  * * *

  —

  Two weeks later, I sit across from Peter, bearded, soft-spoken but direct, his eyes alive with intelligence, kindness, and laser focus. In some way, he reminds me of Pops. We’ve both done our homework. Peter knows my story. He’s read an article that appeared in the newspaper after I graduated from South Suburban. I’ve found out on the Internet that he has treated people who survived the Holocaust.

  Survivors of trauma, I think. Is that who I am?

  We start slow. I’m sure Peter senses my resistance to this whole idea. That’s not even accurate. I don’t want to be here at all. For starters, I’m not crazy. That’s why people go into therapy, right? I’ve felt crazy at times. But I’m tough, motivated, driven. I, too, am a survivor.

  To my surprise, Peter doesn’t ask me about prison at all. He asks about my family, my grandparents, my father, my brother, my aunts, my mother. He asks me what it was like growing up in my neighborhood. He gets me to talk about who I am, how I see myself, what I want to achieve. He probes and asks me to tell him what I have lost. I talk about my passion for school. The session flies by. I leave feeling worn out from talking so much. I don’t feel—different.

  The second and third sessions, he asks me about the night of the party, the stupid decision I made to go, the guilt I feel for destroying my mother’s life. Then I talk about prison. Peter watches me carefully, never dropping eye contact, his listening active, alive. When I describe an event from that night, or something significant that happened during my incarceration, he asks, “How did that make you feel?”

  That’s what shrinks always say, I think as I leave after my third session. I don’t know if this is working. I don’t feel any sort of change. I wonder if I should even continue. Then I picture what Carol and my mother would say if I quit. The last thing I want to do is incur the wrath of the mothers’ mafia. I’ll stick it out a few more weeks. See where it goes.

  The fourth session, Peter gets specific. He asks questions that trigger deep feelings, feelings that I have kept so buried I never knew they existed. At one point, Peter asks me, “Are you angry?”

  The very question angers me.

  “Yes. I’m angry.”

  “At whom?”

  I think about Rovaughn and Dimitri and young Black men in general and how being Black in our neighborhood—being Black in Chicago—defined us as criminals. The emotion bubbles up, churns inside me, threatens to boil over. I feel raw, revealed.

  “Mostly I’m angry at myself for what I did to my mother.”

  “That’s it,” Peter says. “I’m restricting you. Cutting you off.”

  “From what?”

  “I am not going to allow you to say one more time that going to that party ruined your mother’s life, that it was your fault.”

  “It was, though. My mother warned me constantly—”

  “Do you know how many teenagers lie to their parents and sneak out to parties? Do you know how many teenagers go to parties and drink and smoke weed—and have sex?”

  “They don’t get charged with rape because they’re Black. They don’t go through a system that ignores all justice along the way. The only way they see justice is if they can afford to b
uy it.”

  “You have a right to feel angry. You should feel angry.”

  “Oh, I’m angry.”

  “Good. And you’re dealing with it—by the work you’re doing and by going on to law school. But we’re not talking about your anger.”

  “We’re not?”

  “We’re talking about your guilt. That’s not an emotion. It’s a choice.”

  I pause. I feel tears welling up. I breathe, smother the tears.

  “You need to stop feeling that you have to pay your mother back. You know the only way you’ll pay her back?”

  I wait for him to answer his question.

  “I’m not answering the question for you,” he says, softly. “You have to.”

  “I don’t know the answer,” I say.

  “You do. Take a shot.”

  “I really don’t—”

  “Why are you here? Who sent you?”

  “My mother.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she’s worried about me. She’s worried about my mental state.”

  And then I whisper into the floor, “She wants me to be okay.”

  “So—?”

  “I guess—if I get healthy mentally, that’s how I pay her back.”

  “Congratulations,” Peter says.

  I don’t cry. I blink, and a feeling of relief comes over me.

  “I see.”

  I leave feeling wrung out. But beginning at that session, something clicks. I return to Peter’s office feeling both eager and filled with dread. What will I unearth this time? I take a deep breath and dive. I allow myself to feel, to confront, and to continue to see. He shows me how emotions work and how, for the last ten years, I have forced my mind to suppress them.

  “Your mind signals everything in your body,” he says. “Stress level, blood pressure, heart rate. Your brain triggers all that. You are putting a tremendous amount of pressure on yourself, especially on the idea that you have to catch up. You have to reconfigure your time frame. You cannot catch up overnight. You have to find a way to turn off that switch.”

  “Turn off the switch,” I say, taking that in.

  “When you went to prison, you were a kid. You had to turn on a switch to survive.”

  He’s right. I was on high alert all the time.

  “Now that you’re out, in order to heal yourself, you have to find a way to turn off that switch.”

  “It’s hard,” I say.

  “Very hard. Many people never do it.”

  “I had to turn it on in prison,” I say, “to desensitize myself.”

  “I know,” Peter says.

  “You see and experience things that aren’t normal, but they become normal because you see them every day, sometimes every hour. That’s your normal. I know segregation isn’t normal. It’s not healthy. It’s cruel. But to survive, I had to find a way to become healthy in isolation.”

  “That’s what you’re doing right now,” Peter says.

  He pauses.

  “You still have the mentality of surviving in a kind of isolation. Isolation has become your comfort zone. You’re still in isolation.”

  “How so?”

  “You isolate yourself in school and work. You think that’s how you’re going to catch up. Being in isolation and going at a thousand miles an hour.”

  “Well—”

  I start to object. Then I realize that is exactly what I am doing.

  “You’re right,” I say.

  “It’s different now. This is another life. You’re still operating on your old normal. You’ve still got that old switch turned on. You have to find a new switch.”

  “What is my new switch?”

  “I can’t tell you. I don’t know. Only you do. But you can’t find it until you turn the old one off.”

  This resonates.

  “And you know what happens when you always go at a thousand miles?”

  “You lose control,” I say.

  “And then?”

  “You crash.”

  * * *

  —

  I see Peter for the next two years, all through my time at Roosevelt. Gradually, I start to feel calmer, less anxious. I carry less guilt. I understand that part of why I keep living, working, and going to school at such an accelerated speed is that I see my mother and my aunts aging. I want to hurry so they can watch me graduate from college and go on to law school. It means so much to me. I will be the first in my mother’s and father’s line of succession to graduate from college. I want them to share that moment with me. I continue to drive myself hard. I study for the Law School Admission Test and do well enough to receive a scholarship to Loyola University Law School.

  I walk in my graduation at Roosevelt University, wearing my cap, my gown, my Li’l Johnnie Cochran glasses, and a purple sash across my chest signifying that I have earned a bachelor’s degree with honors. I collect my diploma and smile at all the cameras and phones my family and friends point at me. I hold my diploma aloft like a championship trophy—which in a way it is—murmuring a silent thank-you to every angel who helped carry me here and walked by my side.

  19.

  So, What Are You Going to Do?

  We pull off the expressway, our summer intern Ricardo Arroyo and I, heading into a neighborhood of narrow streets, dirt patches instead of front yards, houses dark and crumbling, boarded up and abandoned.

  “Where are we?” Ricardo asks as I park on a street across from a foreboding, three-story weathered brick apartment complex.

  “Englewood,” I say.

  “Looks bleak. Depressed.”

  “It’s also dangerous. We’re going to serve our subpoenas and get out of here before we get shot at.”

  “In daylight?”

  “The light doesn’t matter. Just watch yourself.”

  Ricardo chuckles. “I come from a rough part of Boston. I know tough neighborhoods.”

  “Not like this,” I say.

  We get out of the car, and I lead Ricardo to the side of the apartment complex. Several young men conduct drug deals, a few in the shadows of the apartment’s entranceways, others right out in the open.

  “Open-air drug market,” I say.

  “Brazen,” Ricardo says.

  “You know the difference between crack and opioids? Choice. White kid gets strung out on opioids? That’s his addiction. Get him help. Black kid gets strung out on crack? That’s his choice. We got politicians up in arms because oxycodone has invaded their neighborhoods. Help. Save the suburbs. I don’t see politicians coming down here.”

  I shrug helplessly at the teenagers buying and selling crack right in front of us.

  Suddenly a kid no older than twelve buzzes by on a bicycle. He carries an automatic weapon slung over his shoulder.

  I can hear Ricardo’s breathing change, quicken.

  “He’s got an assault rifle,” he says.

  “Security,” I say.

  “He’s twelve.” Ricardo looks at me.

  “They start them young down here.”

  “Maybe we should go back to the car.”

  “Definitely. We serve and split.”

  We knock on a dozen doors in the apartment complex. Ricardo walks so close behind me he’s practically climbing up my back.

  As we head back to the car, I can’t help asking him, “Is this like Boston?”

  “No, man. This isn’t like any place.”

  * * *

  —

  Soon, a lawyer in our office brings me onto a case.

  Two Chicago police officers pull over Philip, our client, on a routine traffic violation. According to the police report, Philip bursts out of his car and starts running. The cops run after him, chase him through the streets, but Philip finds an extra gear and the cops lose
him. They return to the car, trace it back to Philip, and arrest him, an obese man in his fifties with breathing problems.

  “I want you on this case, Jarrett,” the lawyer in our office says. “There’s something about this Philip guy. I think he’s telling the truth.”

  “Meaning?”

  “He said he was nowhere near that car, that area. He says the cops arrested the wrong man.”

  I interview Philip, his girth filling up the interrogation room as I sit across from him.

  “Listen to me, man,” he says, mopping his face with a handkerchief. “I’m a grown man. I admit that when I was younger, I did some stupid stuff.”

  “We all did,” I say.

  “That’s over, man. I got a house and two daughters. I bought this car for my daughters to share. I always keep the keys in it. My daughters got these little boyfriends, you know? I make them keep in touch with me when they go out so I know how they’re getting around. I don’t know who those police was chasing, but it wasn’t me.”

  “Where were you that night?”

  “Home. I didn’t go out. Nobody came to see me.”

  “Let me look into this,” I say.

  After the debacle with Mel, the bank robber who played me with his performance, I have determined that I will go over every single piece of information until I’m absolutely sure of a client’s innocence. Triple sure. I dive into Philip’s paperwork as if I were studying for a final. I read all the transcripts and police reports, and then I listen to hours of police scanner recordings. I listen every day, all day, for two weeks straight. I don’t know exactly what I’m listening for, but I’ll know it when I hear it. The truth—if it’s there—will jump up and bite me.

  Two weeks in, I hear it.

  A time discrepancy.

  The police say they dispatched officers to Philip’s house two hours after they started chasing him, plenty of time for him to get home, change into his pajamas, and sleepily answer his door.

  But on the recording, the police dispatched officers to Philip’s house fifteen minutes after they started chasing him.

  When I interview Philip again, I go over the timeline.

  “Fifteen minutes?” he says, and roars with laughter. “Look at me. I’m fat. I’m out of shape. Do you think I can outrun anybody? Do you think I could sprint down some street, jump over a fence, come all the way back here to my house, take off my clothes, and throw on my pajamas in fifteen minutes? I’d be dead from a heart attack.”