by Jessica Pack
While changing into her pajamas, she found the class ring she’d put in her pocket earlier.
She lay down on the bed and held the ring above her while one group of mutants battled another group on the TV—she’d lost track of the storyline. She looked at the ring from every angle, as though she might have missed something. She knew some high school rings had the person’s signature engraved inside, but this one didn’t. Just the name STEVE printed into the thick metal on the outside band. All the same questions she’d had earlier came back to mind. Who was Steve? Why did Robbie have his ring? Why did she care so much?
After a few minutes, she got off the bed and set her laptop on the small table by the heating and air-conditioning unit. Part of the veneer was peeling up on one side. She imagined taking hold of the raised corner and pulling the layer off like duct tape.
Amanda connected to the free Internet on her third try—grateful she didn’t have to call the front desk for help—and then typed “Skyline High School” into the search bar. There were several Skyline High Schools across the country: Virginia, Utah, California, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina. She went to the website for each school in turn until she found the school that had a bear as the mascot and the color blue as one of its school colors. “Skyline High School in Decaturville, Tennessee,” she read out loud. She felt a tiny thrill of accomplishment for having discovered a clue. But none of her questions were answered. Robbie knew someone from Tennessee? Not just anyone, but Steve, number 76 on the football team who graduated in 1989?
How?
When?
Why had this Steve person given the ring to Robbie? Or had he not given it? Maybe Robbie had simply found the ring. Maybe he’d stolen it. She shook her head somewhat ruefully. Her son might be a murderer, but he was not a thief. How pathetic that the sentiment should give her comfort.
She read everything she could on the website about Skyline High School—recently renovated. Took second in state last year in both football and basketball. They had an excellent theater department, but of course that notice was at the bottom of the page, below all the sports. They were doing Bye Bye Birdie this spring. Amanda had helped with the school play every year at Jefferson.
So, how would she find number 76 from 1989? There were all kinds of privacy and protection policies for students—but did alumni fall into that same category? Could finding the information she needed be as simple as asking someone at Skyline High?
“Steve Jones?” she imagined the secretary saying. “Number seventy-six, sure I know him. My sister married his cousin’s neighbor.” Was Decaturville a town like that? Was she willing to talk to someone about the ring? Voice-to-voice over the phone? What had been a dislike for phone calls before had become almost a phobia since; these days text messages and instant messaging with her online students made communication so much easier. She often saved up the phone calls she needed to make to insurance companies and utilities for weeks until she would then have to spend a whole morning making call after call. She’d need a Xanax by the end.
Knowing she would never call the school, Amanda clicked on the e-mail address for the vice principal listed on the site and typed “Found class ring” into the subject line before she paused with her fingers hovering over the keyboard.
Sorting that last box had been cathartic. She’d chosen which aspects of Robbie’s life she would keep and which she wouldn’t, but she’d known everything. Every item in there had some connection to him—the little plastic ninja toys the kids got from the dentist office if they had no cavities. The progress report from the year he was in Mr. Burt’s class. A participation medal for cross-country. Everything fit into the portion of Robbie’s life back when Amanda woke him up for school each morning and told him for the third time to go to bed each night. Everything was familiar in one way or another, except this ring. Sending an e-mail felt like . . . not enough. Maybe the vice principal would e-mail back and say, “Send it here. We’ll get it to its owner.” Then Amanda would never know why Robbie had had the ring. There might be enough information on this ring that she could find the owner. She had his name, Steve. Probably short for Stephen. He’d have probably been born in 1970 or 1971 since he’d graduated in 1989. He played football, which meant he’d be on a team list somewhere. Maybe his name had been published in the paper. Resolving this tiny piece of a very large puzzle could be as simple as finding his last name and looking up his address. She would ask, “How did my son get this ring?” He would answer. The puzzle piece would snap into place and there would be no more mystery about it. It would be setting right something that was bothering her—maybe the only thing bothering her that could be set right.
On the other hand, she could imagine going on to her new life in Cincinnati and rediscovering this ring every few months like that proverbial pea under the stack of mattresses. The tiny rock in the toe of her shoe. Something left undone.
She closed the e-mail and typed “Distance between Cedar Rapids Iowa and Decaturville Tennessee” into the search bar. Five hundred and fifty miles from the Iowa interchange to Decaturville—was she seriously considering driving that far out of the way? All that instead of a single phone call? She imagined introducing herself over the phone to the owner of the ring and saying, “Hi, this is Amanda Mallorie. . . .”
“Mallorie?” he’d reply, like the hotel clerk had asked. “As in Robert Mallorie?”
She’d drive a thousand miles to avoid a phone call like that. Besides, there was no guarantee a phone call would work. She could easily get flustered and say things wrong. The more she thought about it, the more convinced she was that it wouldn’t work. She looked back at the web page. It wasn’t like Skyline High School was on the West Coast; there was a direct route to Decaturville from this hotel and it was mostly freeway. It was almost on the way, give or take several hundred miles. She leaned in and began typing again, a bubble of excitement catching hold of her.
There was also a direct route from Decaturville to Cincinnati, almost straight north and a little east. If she left early in the morning, she could reach Skyline High School tomorrow afternoon. She couldn’t plan much past that since she didn’t know what would happen once she tracked down Steve—he could live in New York now for all she knew—but she could probably learn his full name and do some more investigating. Maybe he still lived there. Maybe his family did. This was way out of her comfort zone, but she wouldn’t let herself look too close. One way or another, she could head to Ohio the next day—Saturday. It would put her just one day behind schedule, though that many miles on the road would be draining.
The bubble popped as the faces of Melissa and Lucy and Paul came to mind. They’d been waiting for her to join their lives for years. The thought stilled the air in the hotel room. Why could she not be the mother Melissa deserved? Didn’t she want to get on with her life?
Amanda gathered all her skittering energy together and called Melissa—the one person she didn’t dread talking to on the phone, though she still preferred e-mails and text messages. She needed a reality check, and her daughter was the only reality she had left.
“Hey, Mom,” Melissa said, an eagerness in her voice that clenched Amanda’s chest a little bit. Amanda was rarely the one who called.
“Hey, sweetie,” Amanda said, reaching forward and closing her laptop so that the colored route from Cedar Rapids to Decaturville wouldn’t distract her. “I decided to stay in Cedar Rapids tonight.” She began pacing back and forth across the hotel room in hopes of keeping her anxiety in check.
“Oh good, I didn’t like the idea of you driving in the dark.” Melissa sounded like the mother. “I can meet you at the condo whenever you get into town tomorrow. I’m so excited for you to see the place. It’s so cute!”
“I can’t thank you enough for doing all the legwork to set it up for me.” Amanda had been in such a fog these last months. Well, years, but especially these last months. When they’d announced Robbie’s execution would be in January it was as
if she’d stepped out of what life she had left and walked beside her own body as it went through the motions. When Melissa had heard, she’d called and asked her—again—to move to Cincinnati. Amanda had said, “Okay, but I don’t know where to start.”
“I’ll take care of everything,” Melissa had said, eagerness overflowing every word. “I’m just . . . Mom, I’m so excited to have you close. So excited!”
Excited? She’d been so excited for Amanda to come. And now Amanda was coming and Melissa was so excited to show her the condo. Amanda hadn’t cared enough about it to even look through all the photos when Melissa sent her the link.
“What if I came on Saturday instead?” Amanda said, stopping to pick at the pulled-up bit of veneer on the corner of the table.
Silence. “Saturday? Why?” That disappointed tone had settled into Melissa’s voice—tone was never an issue in text messages. That “Don’t you see me?” voice that broke Amanda’s heart. Yet not enough to change her mind.
Amanda told her about the ring.
“You want to track down some guy who graduated from some school in Tennessee thirty years ago?”
“Yeah,” Amanda said, as though not understanding Melissa’s confusion. “I do.”
“It doesn’t matter how Robbie got that ring, Mom.”
Amanda understood the anger in Melissa’s voice—Melissa had come second and Amanda had put Robbie first, but it was the only thing Amanda felt she could have done. She couldn’t have gone to Cincinnati and been whole as a mother and grandmother while Robbie was alive and alone in South Dakota. She believed she had saved Melissa from even heavier heartbreak by not trying to pretend otherwise.
Amanda wanted to believe that now, finally, she could get close to her daughter again; that they could reestablish the relationship they’d once had, and Amanda could offer the wholeness Melissa wanted from her. But was that a fair expectation? Was it realistic to think that anything Amanda did now could make up for what she hadn’t done these last years? How did she start? Where would they begin? Would Robbie remain between them even in death? The thought deepened her exhaustion. How was a mother supposed to act when her son was put on death row? Should she have been like Dwight—even Melissa to some extent—and removed herself? Should she have treated Robbie as already dead once the sentence was passed? Should she have lived as though that end had come already?
“I feel like I should go,” Amanda finally said, keeping her tone even and unrevealing. “I don’t have to log back into work until Tuesday morning, and my furniture won’t arrive for a couple of weeks.” She paused for a breath and a bit more vulnerability. “Over the last four years Robbie’s life has been on exhibit for the world and—”
“On exhibit for the world?” Melissa cut in with biting frustration. “What does that mean?”
For the first time in a long time, the merest hint of confrontation did not shut Amanda down. “It means that nothing was sacred anymore, nothing was just ours. His childhood has been combed through in hopes of finding a cause for what he did. His friends have betrayed him. Everyone in the world thinks they know Robert Mallorie—the murderer, the druggie, the psycho, the child killer, the pig. The—”
“Mom, stop,” Melissa said, instantly weary.
Amanda stopped. She took a breath. “Everyone thinks they know him, Mel, but they don’t. They don’t know my son. They don’t know your brother. They don’t know who Robbie was when his mind was calm and his heart was right.”
“Maybe that wasn’t ever really him,” Melissa said in a sad voice. “Maybe he was always a monster and we just didn’t know it.”
“That’s not true,” Amanda said, reminded that her daughter was going through a process of her own. A process you could help with, said a voice from inside herself. “And you know it’s not.”
“I don’t know what I know,” Melissa said with a sigh. “I can hardly remember him before.”
“Then you need to try harder,” Amanda said, feeling like a mother. It relaxed her. She sensed that Melissa needed her. She took a breath and opened herself up a little wider. “All day today I have let myself remember Robbie and it’s been beautiful, Mel. Remember those handprints you two made in the driveway? Or that time we went to the Black Hills?”
Melissa was quiet and Amanda allowed the silence. “That was a fun trip,” Melissa said after a few moments had passed. Her voice had softened exactly as Amanda had hoped it would. “I so did not want to go—Mount Rushmore sounded like such a dumb trip—but we had a good time. Remember that machine that made eight pancakes at a time on that huge griddle at the campground?”
Amanda hadn’t remembered that until now, but she laughed, and they talked about that trip for the first time in years. Melissa didn’t remember the rock-bird story but thought maybe she would when she saw the rock. They could be close again, right? They could remember together and love Robbie together and find joy in each other and Melissa’s beautiful children. “I don’t know anything about this ring,” Amanda continued once the conversation cycled back to topic. “Everything else about Robbie and his life has been filleted and served to the world. They have devoured him.”
Melissa was quiet, and the warmth of their shared memories faded. “He killed nine people, Mom.”
Ten, Amanda thought, thinking of Valerie. “I know.” Amanda dropped her chin and felt the horror of it. Ten innocent people dead because of Robbie. Ten sets of parents forever grieving. Twelve other people maimed, injured, or forever disabled by his actions that day. Countless siblings, friends, teachers, aunts, uncles, and neighbors trapped in the tragic loss of someone who mattered to them; someone they loved and needed. Generations thwarted. Lives unlived. It was staggering to think of the ripples of pain Robert Mallorie was responsible for. Staggering. “And Robbie gave up ownership of his identity the day he went off his medication and let the crazy take over—I know that. But this ring . . . I don’t know anything about it. You don’t know anything about it. But someone—this Steve person—knows. I want to find this man and give him the ring in exchange for whatever memory of Robbie he can give me. I’m starving for good memories, Melissa. I want to do this before I start my new life in Cincinnati.”
“You don’t even know if this man still lives in Tennessee,” Melissa said. “You might be wasting your time even if you do find out who he is—he might live in Florida or Rhode Island.”
“You’re right.” Amanda nodded and started pacing again.
“And it might not be a good memory, Mom,” Melissa said softly. “It might be something really bad.”
“Yeah, I guess it might . . . but I don’t think it is.” Robbie as a teenager had been . . . whole. “I want to see if I can learn something about my son that no one else has stripped down and diagnosed and packaged up.”
“Are you sure this isn’t just an excuse to put off coming to Cincinnati?”
Amanda had worried about that, too, but hearing Melissa say it sounded different. “I do want to come,” Amanda said. “I’m ready to get my life back and be a grandma . . . I’ve missed you and I want to get to know little Lucy and this new grandbaby who’s on his way. I just need one more day.”
Another quiet stretched across the call. “I’ve missed you, too, Mom,” Melissa said in surrender. “And if you feel like you need to look for this guy, then go ahead and look. I won’t be mad.”
“Thank you,” Amanda said, not realizing until this moment that she had been asking for permission. She didn’t want to do anything that would widen the distance she and Melissa had to cross.
They were quiet again. “You know, Paul said something the other day. . . .”
“Yeah,” Amanda replied, wondering at the hesitation in Melissa’s voice.
“When his brother died—” She paused and Amanda thought about Paul’s older brother, killed in a car accident years ago. “He said that for years people would see him or one of his parents and stop them to share some memory they had of Brian. Old classmates, teachers, his T-b
all coach. So, the other night Paul and I were lying in bed and he said how sad it was that no one would do that for us. I mean, no one here even knows I’m Robbie’s sister.”
Amanda hunched slightly at the pain of that, but she said nothing.
“And other than that one article someone did on Paul when he first joined the faculty, no one’s made the connection between Robbie and me—the blessing of having a married name, I guess.”
Amanda managed a polite laugh, but she was somewhat offended by this. Even though she’d tried to get a credit card in a different name so that she, too, could hide a little bit better.
“But anyway,” Melissa continued. “We don’t get that, do we? No one is going to take me aside and share with me some sweet memory of Robbie. Even the good ones people have are tainted somehow.”
“Yeah,” Amanda said, nodding slowly. Over the years there were a few people who had tried to remind her of better days by doing the very thing Melissa was talking about—sharing some happy memory of Robbie. But they could never tell the story without their eyes showing the fear of who he’d become. Especially if the memory was perfectly ordinary. A project at school. A game they’d once played. She could see the ticker tape looping through their mind, demanding, “How could I have been so close to someone like that and not know?” And then there were plenty of people who said they did know. “Something was always off with that kid,” one of his cross-country teammates had said to a reporter. “He had cold eyes.” But he didn’t have cold eyes. Not back then.
