As Wide as the Sky

by Jessica Pack

  “Amanda,” he said, his tone a bit more serious as his thoughts turned to what had brought her here in the first place now that their odd meeting was coming to an end. She turned to face him and adjusted the strap of her purse on her shoulder. It hadn’t started raining yet and he hoped she would get some miles under her tires before the storm hit. “I told you that Steve had some trouble after high school.”

  Amanda’s expression became serious, as though she, too, had just now remembered the reason she’d come. She nodded.

  “He had a hard go of things for a while and it wasn’t just circumstances. Do you know what I mean?”

  Amanda pondered on that for a moment. “You mean that he’s responsible for the hard go of things.”

  Coach nodded. “I get the feeling that you want to find him for more than just returning that ring.”

  Amanda shook her head quickly. “I only want to return the ring, really.”

  “I just want to ask that you give him a chance to be more than he was.”

  Her cheeks flushed. “Oh, Coach, it’s really not like that.”

  “Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, but promise me that if you get the chance, you’ll give him a chance to be more than he was.”

  Amanda paused, then nodded. “Okay, I promise, but—”

  He put up his hand to stop the argument. Maybe he was a hopeless romantic now that his own sweetheart was gone, but it had felt right to speak his mind. He lowered his hand. “It was lovely meeting you, Amanda, and I wish you the very best on your journey. Tell Steve hi for me and ask him to stop by the next time he comes to see his mom.”

  She agreed, thanked him, and then went into the cold night. He watched until her brake lights disappeared and then closed the door and went back inside. Instead of turning on the TV, he sat in the silent house for a few minutes, reviewing the evening. He appreciated what Amanda had said, even the stuff she had been embarrassed about. He could afford to pay someone fifty bucks a week to straighten up, and he’d seen the expressions of people when they came to the house. Truth be told, he kind of liked that they could tell how broken up he was by the way the house was falling down around his ears, but that was pretty pathetic, wasn’t it?

  He picked up the cordless phone he always kept next to his chair. It was dead—when had he last used it? He went into the kitchen and picked up the corded phone from the cradle on the wall, then had to go through a stack of papers to find Darryl’s new cell number—his wife, Clara, had sent it with a card a few months ago when they moved into their new house; there was a picture of it on the same card. It was a mansion, but he ought to stop being so judgmental about that. Darryl was an attorney and being rich wasn’t a sin. He punched in the number and wished he didn’t feel so nervous.

  “Dad?”

  It unnerved him how people knew who was calling before they answered their phones these days.

  “Hey, Darryl, how are things?”

  “Things are . . . good, Dad. Everything okay?”

  He thought Coach was calling because something bad had happened. Coach deserved that.

  “Things are good here in Decatur,” Coach said. “But I was thinking of taking a little road trip—what are you guys up to next weekend? Would it throw you off if I dropped in to say hello?”

  Darryl was quiet for a few seconds and Coach tensed. What if Kate was, literally, what had kept them a family for so long? “I don’t mean to impose and understand if—”

  “Actually,” Darryl cut in, “would it be okay if we came down and saw you instead? Clara and I were just talking about it—the kids have that next Monday off, so we could come for a long weekend if you’ll have us.”

  Coach stared at a spot in the worn-out carpet, surprised at the way his throat got thick. “You want to come here?” He looked up from the filthy carpet to the piles of yet more newspapers in the corner and thought of the guest rooms upstairs that had become catchalls for anything he didn’t want to bother putting away.

  “If that’s all right,” Darryl said. “This job up here isn’t working out as well as we’d hoped and we’re exploring some options.”

  “You’re moving back?” The enthusiasm in his voice was as genuine as it had ever been.

  “Well, assuming I can join a firm down there, and we’ve got to sell this house and . . .” His voice trailed off in a way that spoke of being overwhelmed and anxious about the details. Coach had worked at the high school for nearly thirty years; he didn’t know what it took to pick up one life and set it down somewhere else.

  “I’ve sure missed you guys,” Coach said with rare vulnerability. “Hasn’t been the same since you left.” It hadn’t been the same since Kate died; that’s what he really meant. She’d been sick for a year, and yet it wasn’t until she was truly gone that life had lost all its color.

  Darryl was quiet again. “No, it hasn’t,” Darryl admitted.

  They sat in silence for a few seconds until Coach spoke. “I would love the family to come stay—I’ll have everything ready for you. Next Friday?” He’d hire a cleaning gal as soon as possible. Kate’s friend Dorothy would know someone, wouldn’t she? He’d have plenty of time to get those guest rooms cleared out.

  “Yeah,” Darryl said, sounding a tiny bit relieved. “We’ll see you Friday. Thanks, Dad.”

  19

  Amanda

  One day, sixteen hours, twenty minutes

  Amanda stopped for gas on her way out of Decaturville, surprised at how light she felt—how could she feel so good when Robbie was so dead? But helping Coach and sharing a meal had awakened something in her, as though another layer of her defenses had fallen and she was closer to the person she used to be than she’d been in a very long time. While filling up the tank, Amanda saw the boxes in the back seat and decided to finally get rid of the ones full of garbage. She drove around the back of the gas station, shifted into park, then looked about to make sure she was alone. When she was certain no one was watching, she threw the three boxes into the open Dumpster. She stared at the Dumpster for another minute. Did she feel anything, having gotten rid of those report cards and trophies and outdated electronics? Was her burden lighter now that she’d disposed of some of this minutia?

  With a sigh, she realized the burden had never been the boxes. They held the dregs, easy to discard. The coach had lifted some of her burden, though. She got back on the road and reviewed her time with him and what he’d told her about Steve Mathis. Coach seemed to think she had some . . . romantic intentions. She shook her head and felt her cheeks flush as they had when he’d said as much. Nothing could be further from the truth, but the coach’s assumption made her wonder if other people might assume the same thing. Melissa, perhaps, and even Steve himself. Some of her confidence waned as she practiced what she would say to him. Would getting his ring back resolve the awkwardness of her showing up out of the blue?

  Maybe Amanda could go to Cincinnati first, move into her condo, and then take the ring back over the border in a few weeks with Melissa as her sidekick. But bringing Melissa would interfere with the fresh start she wanted to make. Steve’s ring was connected to Robbie’s past and Amanda was trying to move forward. She had to return the ring before she could feel truly free. She rolled her eyes at her own dramatics, but she also confirmed her decision—she would return the ring on her way to Cincinnati; Florence was oddly right on her way. She would cross the border to Ohio without it.

  Her thoughts turned toward what she knew about Steve, or perhaps what she didn’t know. Coach Miller had said that Steve had a hard time after high school—what did that mean? Should she be worried? She sat with that thought for a minute, but realized that she wasn’t worried . . . which was odd; she worried about everything. But today, she’d driven through two states by herself, successfully asked for help from two strangers, and received it. She’d cleaned the kitchen for an old man she would never see again. For a woman who had come to view everything with skepticism, these events were of no small consequence. Kind of
like the ring. So small and yet it had held enough information that Amanda had tracked Steve Mathis down and was on her way to meet him. In the process, she was feeling strong again, self-assured, and capable. Of no small consequence, indeed. But it didn’t keep her from obsessing.

  Would he be home on a Saturday? Was he married? Coach Miller wouldn’t have encouraged her as he had if Steve were married, and it was only his name on the return address now safely stored in her phone’s notes. What if he had a live-in girlfriend? If Amanda showed up and he wasn’t there, would she leave the ring with her?

  Amanda’s thoughts suddenly stilled and her enthusiasm turned brittle. She had wanted the connection to Robbie that this ring held, but she hadn’t considered Steve’s reaction to the fact that mass murderer Robert Mallorie had possessed his school ring. Robbie had been all over the newspapers she’d seen these last two days—what if everything went horrible?

  Amanda didn’t sleep well at the motel she checked into around ten o’clock. She and her bundle of firing nerves were wide-awake by five. She showered, fixed her hair, dressed in jeans and a pink button-up top, and went downstairs for a complimentary breakfast in the lobby while the morning news droned on in the background. The bagels were dry. Her spoonful of cereal stilled halfway to her mouth as Robbie’s picture filled the center of the television screen. Or, rather, Robert Mallorie’s picture did. An instant later she put the pieces of information together and realized that it was a news segment on the death penalty.

  As the most recent execution in the nation, Robert Mallorie was the current poster boy for the topic of capital punishment. Was it right? Was it wrong? Was it fair? Amanda felt every muscle in her body tense as she methodically went back to eating the breakfast she could no longer taste. Her eyes stayed glued to the television.

  “Protesters claim that allowing Robert Mallorie to choose not to file the appeals granted to him through the Constitution of the United States denied him his rights to a fair trial.” A young black man flashed onto the screen, dressed in a very lawyerish suit with a U.S. flag pin placed in the center of a yellow tie. “Mallorie is a perfect example of accelerated timeframes to execution that disallow the discovery of additional information and possible accomplices. Now that Mallorie’s execution has taken place, the opportunity we have to learn additional details about his crime or possible other crimes he committed prior to the Cotton Mall shooting has now been denied the American people. I don’t call that justice; no, I do not.”

  Amanda took another bite and chewed slowly. Suspicion that Robbie had committed other crimes wasn’t new—during his initial confession to the police he’d claimed to have robbed a dozen banks, killed a cop, and planted a bomb in Air Force One. He was in a state of florid psychosis at the time, unmedicated, high on some type of opiate and bloodlust, and reeling in the attention the police were giving him. Each of his claims was investigated and found to be unsubstantiated, but the possibilities that there could be some nugget of truth within his rambling continued to circulate and gave fodder to those who wanted to use his story as a way to press their personal agendas.

  Robbie had been restored to sanity by the time he was on the stand thirteen months later and tried to explain what it felt like to be in a state of psychosis—how real things seemed and how ideas became reality so quickly he’d forget they were ever ideas at all. He’d said it as a way to explain that he wasn’t in full control of himself when he went to the mall or when the police arrested him and he made his crazy confession. The prosecution, however, had pointed out that he’d taken the gun three weeks before the shooting, that he’d purchased the military-themed clothing in the days prior to the shooting, and had left a suicide note for his roommates in which he said he’d thought long and hard about what he had to do. “If innocent people must die to protect so many others, then they must die.” The prosecution claimed that if he were so aware of what psychosis was and could so clearly see the differences between psychotic and normal behavior, why would he knowingly go off the medication that kept it at bay?

  His attorneys had struggled to prove him mentally incompetent under the legal definition of the law due to his premeditation, and no one was surprised when the jury found him guilty. Not even Amanda. Horrified. Not surprised. Amanda thought of Robbie on the day of his sentencing, standing in front of the judge with a chain running from his cuffed hands to bound ankles. His head had been shaved and he was so raggedly thin. He had additional tattoos by then, and it seemed to her that he belonged to the prison now; it was marking him as property. How she’d wanted to hug him, to look into those big blue eyes and tell him that everything would be okay. Instead, she’d sat on the bench behind his attorney—Robbie hadn’t made eye contact with her when he came in—and sobbed as quietly as she could while he asked to be sentenced to death. “I deserve to die for what I’ve done, and the families of the people I killed deserve to know that I’ll never have the chance to hurt anyone ever again,” he’d said. “For the good of everyone, I should be given the death penalty.” Several people in the courtroom cheered and Amanda realized how alone she was. Everyone else watched with varying levels of acceptance of the inevitable and “right” decision. Only she seemed to feel the shards of the sentence pierce her skin and eyes and heart; only she felt the tragedy that at some point in the future, after her son was allowed to rot in prison, someone would kill him. And on that day, more people would cheer.

  Someone else was talking on the television now, and Amanda looked up to get a visual of the new voice—it was the same middle-aged white man who had started the segment and Amanda pulled back the top of her yogurt. Blueberry, Robbie’s favorite. “The cost of incarcerating death row inmates is atrociously high, adding the insult of higher taxes and bogged-down judicial processes to the injury already inflicted by the accused. If I had it my way, I would make execution mandatory within three years of a conviction.”

  The black man spoke again. “What about the staggering numbers of inmates who have been found innocent after years in prison? The overturned verdicts are unprecedented, and no one knows how many other innocent men and women are yet awaiting their own acquittal. With the progress that’s been made through DNA technology in recent years, one can’t help but wonder if future discoveries will increase our ability to acquit even more.”

  “But not every death row inmate is innocent,” the original commentator said. Amanda took a bite of her yogurt but found she couldn’t swallow it. “Mallorie confessed to his crimes and asked to be put to death, yet it still took almost four years for that to happen and cost the U.S. millions of dollars in the meantime—never mind that he was forced into the direct appeal even though he didn’t want it. That the execution happened at all is certainly worth celebration, that it happened faster than most death penalty cases is worthy of even greater acclaim, but that it took four years to kill the man after he murdered nine people in a matter of seconds is deplorable.”

  No longer able to eat, Amanda picked up her Styrofoam dishes and threw them away with the last of her breakfast. She tried to sort out her feelings on her way back to her room, but she’d been trying to do that for so long she didn’t know where her feelings began anymore. Her inability to be objective made her opinions meaningless anyway, because she was in the position no one else was—she was Robbie’s mother. No one else knew what that felt like. She didn’t want exceptions made for him. She didn’t want him free to hurt anyone else. She didn’t hate the judge or jury that had sentenced him or feel that anyone was wrong, but he’d been dead for forty-eight hours. When did his resting begin? When did hers?

  After packing her suitcase, she bundled up as much for comfort as for warmth and went out into the blustery morning. She drove straight through the rest of the way to Florence and arrived in the small town around 9:30 Saturday morning thanks to her GPS. She parked in front of a small condominium not so different from the one she would be living in soon. It was beige, the bottom half of the first floor brick, then stucco on the
top half. It matched half a dozen other condos on one side, and three on the other side—the garages must be attached to the back of each unit. There were a couple of feet of flower bed separating the dead brown lawn from the condo itself. Some of Mr. Mathis’s neighbors had made the most of this decorative opportunity, although their plants were dormant now. Mr. Mathis’s border looked very much like Coach Miller’s flower beds, tended once but neglected since. Two half circles of cement curbing made a circle halfway between the sidewalk and the porch. A tree had been planted inside the ring, but all the leaves were gone this time of year and so the stark branches added nothing to the overall ambiance, which was neither spectacular nor squalid. A gust of wind blew and the tree shuddered, but stayed remarkably steady despite the look of frailty. Amanda wondered if a leaf from that type of tree was in Robbie’s leaf book.

  Amanda pulled the ring from her pocket while the usual butterflies she felt when she had to interact with people invited a thousand of their friends to make chaos. High hopes, desperation, and an odd sense of nostalgia had sustained her through most of the journey, but only the satisfaction of accomplishment drew her up the walkway right now.

  The door was painted a shade darker than the beige stucco with a white frame and a gold knocker she knew from a glance was only for show—it was too small to make the resounding noise necessary for it to be better than Amanda’s knuckles. She knocked three times. Maybe Steve Mathis worked Saturdays. Would she have to come back another day?

  The creak of the door hinge pulled her out of her mixed hope and fear that no one was home. When the door swung open she closed her fist around the ring and then stared at the man framed in the doorway. The hair wasn’t blond and shaggy as it had been in the photograph. Instead, it was gray and sandy blond, not thinning, but cut short. His hair melded into a neatly trimmed beard and mustache, full gray under his chin. He looked respectable. The bulk of his football-player days had turned into an overall thickness. He smiled politely. “Can I help you?”