I read nothing that changed my mind about Higby or told me anything new about what happened on Byron Road after he and Josh Skooner slammed their cars into each other.
But the more I read, the more I saw the crash and shooting as a high-speed version of my own experience with Higby. This time, he skipped the interrogation and trial. He carried out the death penalty himself.
Nothing I could do would save Josh Skooner now.
And I still wondered if I was even managing to save myself. Or if I had a self to save.
Dr Patel seemed to think I did, though he had more optimism than I did. He seemed to think I could find my way back by seeing familiar people and places. A long shot, but I’d read and reread the websites on the Skooners, so I figured I would make searches for people I once knew.
I tried my old track coach.
After speaking at my trial as a character witness, Ernie Kagen visited me several times during my first four years in prison, and then he sent occasional notes. Until my last two years, he also sent Christmas cards that went heavy on Santa and the reindeer. I’d always wondered why he took interest in me after my arrest. In prison, I appreciated visits from anyone who lived outside, but even then I sensed that his interest in me came from a questionable source.
Online, I found an address for him on Nelson Street in the Murray Hill neighborhood – an hour by bus from the JNI office.
I sweated just thinking about making a visit. So I Googled the AMC Regency website. They were screening Mrs Doubtfire as part of the Afternoon Kids Classics Series.
‘See you tomorrow,’ I said to Jane and Hank, and I left the building, ran to the corner, and got on a bus. Forty-eight minutes later, it stopped at the Regency Mall. I kicked gravel across the parking lots again, then ran as light-footed as if I was skipping across tree roots in the woods behind the house where I grew up.
Inside, I went to the concession, where Cynthia stood behind the counter filling a drink cup for a man in a gray hoodie.
Standing next to her, the skinny teenager I’d seen when I came to watch Toy Story frowned. ‘Yes?’ he said.
‘Get lost,’ I said.
After Cynthia gave the man his change, she came over. She did her little fingertip wave and said, ‘Hi.’
‘Hi,’ I said, and asked, ‘Would you like to go out with me some time?’
She narrowed her eyes. ‘Some guys just ask me for extra butter on their popcorn.’
‘I’ll take popcorn too.’
‘I don’t know who you are,’ she said. ‘Why would I want to go out with you?’
I stepped backward without realizing it.
She laughed. ‘I’m kidding. Yeah, I would go out with you.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
I grinned through the movie and on the bus ride back to the motel. That night, I dreamed I was running free through the back woods, under the shade of pine trees and loblollies, cool even in the summer heat, because a boy could feel cool if he created his own wind. And then I floated on open water, the sunshine pricking the tips of waves as a breeze crossed over them. There was nothing more beautiful than sun sparkling on water.
I grinned again in the morning as I turned on the TV. But then a reporter said Bill Higby would walk out of jail before noon, free on his own recognizance. Higby had lied and lied. He would sooner see me die than admit to lying. Hank’s comment came back to me – I of all people should know that the system would never hold a cop like him accountable.
What goes up must come down. Hit the gas as hard as you like, because there’s a viaduct around every bend waiting to kiss you and crush your teeth.
So I stopped grinning. But I didn’t really fall, and I didn’t crash. Instead, I decided, when Higby got out, I would go to see him at his house as he’d come to see me at the Cardinal Motel. Coach Kagen could wait. Higby also was part of my past that needed revisiting. An overfamiliar part. A part that Dr Patel might advise me to bury under the weight of better memories and a good future. But I sensed that Higby would refuse to be buried. He would kick at the soil I dumped on him. He would claw through truckloads of stone until I dealt with him. Like a bad spirit, he needed killing if not placating.
EIGHT
When the blue that lined the muscles in Dad’s arms and neck receded into his skin, like a magic trick – when he broke the kitchen table, the clock radio, and the glass bowl that his mother gave him for a wedding gift, the last remnant – when he threatened to break Jared’s neck and mine – I ran out the back door and into the woods. I broke through the bramble, the branches and thorns raking my arms and face. My feet sank into the cushioning soil. The roots tangled like broken spider legs, like a web that a scared boy would break through as he ran from a father who loved but might kill him. I skipped over those roots, as if I was flying. Fear moved me – and one should never underestimate what fear can make a boy do. Fly even. Skip across a tangled earth where gravity is the least of our problems.
I disappeared into the woods. Disappeared. Like a magic trick. I ran fast and faster. At a certain speed, a body becomes invisible even to itself. At that speed, fear dissipates, and all that remains – aside from the dry film that scums the dish – is joy. A boy needs to run far into the woods to get to it. A boy needs to run fast. But when he tumbles and lies on the forest floor, legs throbbing, chest billowing, eyes almost blinded by tears and sweat, he sees joy in a sky that burns through the spaces between the tree branches. He sees it in the bark of trees that sway in the breeze. If he’s lying by a swamp, he sees it in the algae and the cypress trees that rise from the water like probings of life. If he digs into the soil with his fingers, he finds it in the worm. If night has fallen and he lies on the ground long enough, he sees it in the eyes of a long-toothed possum wandering toward the garbage that neighbors have put at the roadside for pickup.
‘We’re a family of extremes,’ Dad said.
‘What’s that mean?’ Jared asked. I couldn’t have been older than twelve.
‘I’ve told you how my father died?’ Dad said.
He had – often. Along with working as a salesman at a used boat dealer, Dad’s father played the French horn in a wedding band. One night, when Dad was sixteen years old, the van carrying the band from a Valentine’s Day party in southern Georgia skidded on an icy bridge.
‘The van burned,’ Dad said. ‘Everyone and everything inside it turned to ash – everyone but the girl who sang and everything but my father’s horn. The girl went through the windshield, and except for some cracked ribs and cuts on her face, she was fine. My father’s horn went through the windshield with her and landed on the roadside gravel. Everything else was twisted metal and cinders. The fire was so hot, they couldn’t identify the teeth.’ He looked at Jared and me to see if we understood the point. I didn’t. ‘Extremes,’ he said. ‘The police gave that horn to my mother, as if it would help us grieve. I always hated that horn.’
‘Do you think it’s strange that Mom also died in a car wreck?’ Jared asked.
‘It’s to be expected,’ Dad said. ‘In a family like ours.’
Jared told me later that night something I’d never heard before – that Mom had been with another man when she died. They were driving in his car. He said, ‘Who knows what they were doing when he veered into the truck.’
‘Liar,’ I said.
‘Ask Dad,’ he said.
‘Never.’
Months later, I found the French horn in the attic. When I dusted it off, the tuning slides, the valve levers, and the leadpipe looked like parts of a marvelous machine. I put my lips to the mouthpiece and blew. My breath made no sound – at least nothing like music. I brought the horn down to my bedroom anyway and hid it in my closet. When Dad went out or was working, I tried to make the horn sing. Then the music teacher at school announced she was starting a concert band. I snuck the horn to her classroom where she taught me enough notes to play the Star Wars theme song, ‘Across the Stars.’ Twice a week in after-school
practices, I rehearsed the song, and at night, when Dad was sleeping, I whistled it.
On the evening of the spring concert, I slipped out of the house.
Sitting in the dark auditorium before the lights came up, next to other kids with their flutes and trombones, I felt the same joy I felt while running through the woods or lying on the ground staring up through the tree branches.
Then it was my turn. When I blew into the French horn, I felt the music light up inside me.
I completed only four measures before I heard rumblings from the audience. But I focused on the mouthpiece and the valves and the brightness inside me. I played four more measures and then heard laughter – polite, uneasy, then unrestrained. I stopped playing, looked into the dark that hung over the audience, then played again. The laughter came harder. I stopped and started again. As I lurched through the notes, I strained to see beyond the lights that flooded the stage.
I saw him. Dad was dancing in the space between the stage and the front-row seats. I never learned how he found out about the concert. The audience thought he was hysterical. Their laughter seemed to energize him, and his dance became outlandish. Maybe the dancing and laughter would have broken another boy’s focus, but my lips found the mouthpiece again and I finished the song, missing no more notes than I did in the best of my practice sessions. When the song ended, the audience clapped, and Dad bowed twice before going back to his seat.
He’d come to hear me play an instrument that hurt him.
And he’d humiliated me.
I never hated him more than I hated him that night.
I never loved him more.
I looked for him at the end of the concert, but he’d already gone. So I walked home alone, and when I got there, I looked into his bedroom. He was lying face down on his bed. The next morning, he was still sleeping when I left for school. In the days that followed, neither of us mentioned the concert.
Then, during the summer, the French horn disappeared from my closet, and when I checked the attic, it wasn’t there either. Maybe Dad pawned it for drinking money. Maybe he dropped it in a dumpster. Maybe he disassembled the marvelous machine and buried the parts in the backyard. I never saw it again.
But during my three years on death row, I sometimes heard that French horn playing – more softly and truly than I ever learned to play it, as if Dad’s father was serenading me. The music might have come from my dissociative disorder, another version of the impulse that made me want to crawl out of my skin. But it gave me peace. Locked up between concrete walls for twenty-three hours a day, the other death row inmates and I existed apart from day and night and from time itself, except that every passing second rang like a bell reminding us that we’d moved a second closer to the needle that would kill us. Some of the men found religion, seeming to believe God cared more for sinners than saints, even sinners who’d raped and killed and would rape and kill again if they got the chance. Other men descended deep into the insanity that had put them on death row to begin with.
I clung to the edge. The weight of insanity tugged at me, and clouds of faith teased me. I was grateful when I heard the French horn soundtrack from Star Wars.
NINE
‘I lied,’ Cynthia said.
‘Yeah?’ We sat in front of Big Easy Cajun in the food court at the Regency Mall.
‘When you first asked me out, I said I didn’t know who you were. That wasn’t true. I saw you on TV – at the courthouse when they let you go.’
‘Does that scare you?’ I asked.
‘Should it? They say you didn’t do those things.’
‘It scares people anyway,’ I said.
‘Not me,’ she said.
Somewhere in the mall, a machine started rattling, jackhammering a floor or laying down a new one.
‘So, what do you want to do?’ I asked.
She smiled as if I’d said something weird. ‘Let’s go someplace.’ The way she looked at me, I thought she would let me take her anywhere. She said, ‘Where do you wish you could go – if you could go anywhere right now?’
I could think only of the woods behind the house where I grew up. I said, ‘I like movies.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘If I could go anywhere, I would go someplace with ice. All ice. Walls of it. Nothing but ice.’
‘Why?’
She touched her thumbnail to her teeth. ‘I don’t know you well enough to tell. And anyway, it’s your turn. Where would you go if you could go anywhere?’
I would lie on a forest floor. Worms would crawl from the ground. The leaves on the branches above me would fold in the breeze. I said, ‘I would go with you to that place with ice.’
‘Nice one,’ she said. She leaned across the table. ‘Did they teach you to flirt in prison?’
‘You’re unusual,’ I said.
‘You are too.’
‘But you knew that already,’ I said. ‘From seeing me on TV.’
So she told me she lived with her parents in a house a mile from the beach. And she’d taken three courses toward an associate’s degree in respiratory care before deciding she needed a break. She’d worked full-time at the Cineplex for the past six months. A lot of guys asked her out while she was working – one or two a day at least. I was the first she said yes to.
‘Oh,’ I said.
‘You should feel flattered.’
‘I do.’
‘I said yes because you’re unusual,’ she said, ‘and I am too.’
Then we walked through the mall. It smelled of dust and plastic and whatever they sprayed through the vent system. The lights were dim, as if the mall managers were trying to save on electricity. A woman in exercise shorts and earphones speed-walked past us. Another woman, pushing a stroller with a crying baby, walked the other way. Then we were alone.
‘I come here sometimes when I get off work,’ Cynthia said.
It was a lonely place. ‘Why?’
She said, ‘Anything’s possible.’
‘More like a land of the dead.’
‘Anything can happen,’ she said again, and when we came to a brightly lighted jewelry store, she ducked inside. I followed her to a glass counter, where a man in a brown two-piece suit gave her an undertaker’s smile and glanced at her hand for a ring. ‘Yes?’ he said.
Cynthia looked at the necklaces in the display case, then leaned toward him and said, ‘I need a nipple ring. Something that hurts.’ She nodded at me. ‘So does he.’
If she was trying to shock the man, she failed. ‘The Piercing Pagoda is on the other side of the mall,’ he said. ‘You might try them.’
‘Thank you.’ She reached to shake his hand. ‘My name is Cynthia. Do you live here?’
He smiled. ‘At the mall? Sometimes it seems like it.’
‘Me too,’ she said cheerfully, and she headed for the exit.
‘Nice to meet you, Cynthia,’ the man said.
‘You see?’ she said, when we were out on the walkway. ‘When we’re here, we can be anyone we want.’
‘You were just making fun of him.’
She shook her head, skipped a few steps in front of me, and turned to face me. ‘I was making a world and inviting him into it.’ She turned and headed toward the JCPenney entrance. ‘Come on,’ she said.
She led me to the women’s clothing section, went to a rack of jackets, and took one with a zebra print, another with a jungle pattern, and a third with leopard spots. ‘Hold these.’ She put them in my arms. Then she went to a rack of pants and took every pair with a flower or an animal print. ‘These too,’ she said, and piled them on to the jackets.
‘What are you doing?’ I said.
‘If you don’t like the past, you still can have a good time,’ she said. ‘Eventually.’
‘Maybe we have different ideas of a good time.’
She picked up a leopard spotted hat with a black band and put it on my head. ‘What’s your idea of fun, Franky?’ she asked.
Before I could work out an answer, a woman clerk an
d a security man rushed down an aisle. ‘Uh-oh,’ Cynthia said.
‘No, no, no,’ the woman clerk said to her. ‘Not again.’
‘Out,’ the security guard said, and pointed back toward the mall. ‘Now.’
A second clerk came from another aisle, as if she would tackle us.
Cynthia took the hat from my head and set it on a manikin. Then she ran for the exit. I dropped the clothes and ran after her.
She was waiting for me outside the Piercing Pagoda.
‘You’ve done this before?’ I said.
‘I told you, I come here sometimes after work. It’s better than going home.’
I looked up and down the empty walkway. ‘It’s kid stuff,’ I said. The dim light hung like a weight. ‘I want to leave now.’
She stared at me as if I’d disappointed her.
So I said, ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with you.’
‘OK,’ she said, and she headed toward the doors to the parking lot.
But as we passed the Vitamin World kiosk, she darted into it as if she couldn’t help herself.
‘Get the hell out of here,’ the clerk said, even before Cynthia opened her mouth.
She picked up a box of Ultra Man daily multi-vitamins and said to me, ‘This might be what you need.’ Then she asked, ‘Do you also have Ultra Woman? I’ve been feeling … what’s the opposite of “ultra”?’
‘You can leave, or I can call security,’ the clerk said.
‘Let’s go,’ I said.
She said, ‘Who forgot to take his Ultra Man today?’
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