Broken: A story of hope and forgiveness
Page 53
*****
On the other side of the glass, instinct told Thomas to get up and walk away, but something else was in charge at the moment. He had a puzzled expression on his face and something intangible kept his rump rooted to the chair as he fought the urge to leave. He arched his eyebrows then placed his elbows on the table, staring at Robert intently. He had only heard about the boy he almost killed. He had lain awake in bed many nights wondering if the boy was okay, whether he would ever recover from the accident. Every now and then he told himself that no injury was worth a man spending time in prison. His eyebrows relaxed as he realized that it was this conflict between compassion for Robert and his own selfish desire to be free that compelled him to stay.
He wanted to talk to Robert as much as Robert wanted to talk to him. He wanted answers, maybe even forgiveness.
He laughed nervously. “You heard?”
“Yeah, I heard.”
“Don’t worry,” he replied. “I’m not going anywhere. My attorney booked a Caribbean Cruise and needed another month to prepare. That’s all. It made me mad as you.”
“You’re kidding?”
“Afraid not. My competency is being evaluated so my attorney can spend six weeks in the Caribbean, but please don’t tell anyone I told you.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Yeah, it is. Instead of going to prison and being put in a room that’s made for humans, I’m stuck in this concrete box eating bad TV dinners for another two months.”
Robert snickered at the last comment, causing Thomas to frown and tense up. “It’s not funny, at least not for me.”
“Sorry. Actually, it’s something Grandpa said. He said you might want to stay in jail longer since the food was better.” Thomas’ tension released as he smiled, too.
The light-hearted moment almost led Robert to say he was sorry, but then he remembered why Thomas was behind the glass, a fresh throb of pain in his right shoulder punctuating this reality. Maybe an unpleasant concrete box is what you need, he considered. Then he remembered why he was there. “I’ve got to know something.”
“What?”
“Why’d you do it?”
Instinct again told Thomas to get up and leave, but he felt heavy, immobile, and unable to move his feet, let alone stand. It wasn’t the manacles that weighted him down. It was something else. Something he couldn’t put a finger on. Guilt, maybe? Yes, that was it. He knew he shouldn’t say a word, but something again compelled him to take this as far as possible. “I’m sorry.”
Robert didn’t know how to respond. He didn’t want Thomas to apologize. Not yet anyway. That meant that he would have to forgive him, and he wasn’t ready for that. He nodded but said nothing in response. He shut his eyes tight and shook his head side to side. He repeated, “Why’d you do it?”
“I don’t know.” He wanted to say, “I was drunk and don’t remember a thing, except for the thud against the front of the car. I thought I hit a deer, or dog, anything but you.” But he didn’t. That, at least, he knew would bite him back. The poor privileged college boy, who up to that moment in his life had everything going for him, would run back to the prosecutor and tell him everything. The prosecutor would then use his own unrepentant words against him at the sentencing. For a moment he even thought that maybe this was a trick. The state had no intention of honoring the plea and would use anyone, even its own victim, to weasel out of it.
Just as Robert was about to ask again, he said, “I’m a mess. I’ve been doing stupid things for a long time.” His eyes moistened. “I can’t explain any of it. All I can say is I’m sorry. If I could take back what happened, I would. But I can’t.”
Thomas dropped the phone, which fell off the edge of the cubicle desk and dangled from its aluminum-sheath covered cable just inches away from the floor. He buried his head in his hands and sobbed uncontrollably.
Robert sat silent. He was stunned that the man who had almost killed him had a heart. Sure, he knew it might be an act. He might be acting broken so the boy whose body he had broken would ask the judge to go light on him. But the sobbing seemed so real, so genuine. He felt a stirring in his heart, a compulsion to say something, the one thing the man sitting in front of him needed to hear. He tapped his handset on the glass, knowing that nothing he said into the phone would be heard as long as the handset on the other side kept dangling from the wall. Thomas finally looked up. Robert pointed his handset to the wall mount of Thomas’s. He responded by picking up his handset and then held it up to his ear.
“Do you believe in God?” Robert asked.
Thomas hadn’t heard a question like that since just before his grandmother died ten years before. “What?” he asked as the puzzled look he’d had when this conversation began returned to his face, but this time a wide-open mouth accompanied the arched eyebrows. He seemed genuinely shocked by this peculiar question.
“I said, ‘do you believe in God?’”
“I don’t know.”