It Occurs to Me That I Am America

by Richard Russo

  “You’re going to be deported unless we go to trial and a jury finds you innocent.”

  “I’m not innocent,” he said.

  “I misspoke. I meant ‘not guilty.’ There’s a difference.”

  “But I am guilty.”

  I changed tactics.

  “Son, do you have any family left in Paraguay?”

  “One uncle.”

  “You realize that if you get deported, you can never return to the United States. And if your parents and Maria visit you in Paraguay, they risk not being allowed back in.”

  “Yes.”

  “You understand all that?”

  “Yes.”

  “You understand you may never see them again, or at least not for a very, very long time, until the laws change.”

  “Yes.”

  “And this is still what you want to do?”

  “Yes.”

  I knew then the guilt he felt over Megan O’Hara’s death was asphyxiating. The obsessive images of the horrific impact and his panicked flight sucked the air out of all his thoughts. They filled his brain like a poisonous black cloud. He would never live again—no matter where—if he didn’t apologize. Deeply and sorrowfully.

  “Write the letter, then. I’ll give it to the prosecutor to give to her family. I can’t guarantee they’ll accept it. But I’ll try.”

  In my car I wrote down the words “This is the collateral consequence of the immigration debate. This is a real kid, a real family being broken up, not some abstract, shadowy menace.” I would use those words at his sentencing.

  • • •

  My grandfather was the oldest of eight siblings in Italy. He never returned for fear of being arrested. He never saw any of them again. I had never even considered the magnitude of that separation until I sat for a moment in the parking lot after leaving Frank Duarte.

  • • •

  I began to collect mitigating factors, preparing for either trial or sentencing. Frank, at twenty-two, the same age as Megan O’Hara, had been an altar boy and was now a youth minister in his church. He had no criminal record, not even a speeding ticket. He was in technical school to get a certificate in metal fabrication and welding, while already employed in the field. He had been steadily employed since age fourteen, the legal age for working papers in New Jersey, bussing tables and dishwashing in Ironbound restaurants.

  Though on different ends of the economic spectrum, he was filled with the same hopes and ambitions as Megan O’Hara.

  As I gathered more information, I pressed the state to drop the vehicular manslaughter charge. Frank told me he called 911 seconds after the accident. His phone records and county dispatch tapes proved it. Her friend also called. The prosecution narrative that “he left her there to die” wasn’t exactly true. The medical reports stated that her head injuries were so extensive and severe because she fell in front of his bumper. That’s why he thought he’d hit a dog. And then came the toxicology report.

  “I don’t want to make this ugly,” I told the prosecutors during a discovery conference. “Her family has suffered enough. But I’ll use it if I have to.”

  Even now, I’ll leave it at that, except to say that she did not make the decision to bolt across the street against a red light with a clear mind.

  The statement of her friend corroborated Frank’s account. He had the green light, and when his headlights appeared at the crest of the hill, she turned back to the curb. She tried to pull Megan with her, but Megan went forward. That’s when she stumbled. She admitted that both were intoxicated, clubbing in Manhattan until closing time.

  The lead prosecutor, Jack Hurley, had been a friend and respected adversary for twenty years.

  “Can we make ‘vehicular homicide’ go away?” I asked. “Otherwise the victim gets excoriated in court. Nobody wants that, Jack. It doesn’t bring her back. Neither does him sitting in prison for fifteen years.”

  “I’ll take it upstairs. And to the family,” he said. “But the kid is getting deported. Nothing I can do about it. ICE is breaking my balls on this. They want him gone. Like now.”

  “He’s prepared for that,” I said. “He knows what it means. He thinks it’s a punishment that fits the crime. I don’t agree, but what I think doesn’t matter.”

  “That’s the world we live in,” he said.

  I handed him Frank’s letter.

  “The kid wants to apologize. I read it. He begs for their forgiveness. It’s heartfelt. Unbelievably so,” I said. “I got choked up reading it.”

  • • •

  “There are two empty bedrooms, twelve miles apart. One is in Short Hills, where Megan O’Hara grew up before following the dreams that led her to Vassar and a life filled with determination to help the needy.

  “The other is in Newark’s Ironbound, where Frank Duarte lived with his family, pursuing the same American dream as all our ancestors.

  “One of the tragic ironies of this case is that Megan O’Hara was working to help people like Frank Duarte assimilate into our country.

  “But now their empty rooms are vaults of grief for two families. They are places of profound sorrow, filled with the memories, the love, the laughter, and the voices of two young people who are never coming home.

  “Your Honor, what follows is not an attempt to equate the losses suffered by the O’Haras and the Duartes. There is no comparison. Megan is dead, and Frank is not.”

  This was how I opened my statement to the court at Frank’s sentencing.

  A deal was struck, with the O’Haras’ permission. Frank would plead guilty to “leaving the scene” and receive a five-year suspended sentence. He would be deported, and if he tried to come back, the sentence would be imposed. And now he sat in court at the defense table in his orange prison jumpsuit with his family directly behind him and the O’Hara family across the gallery aisle. He had the right to have his handcuffs removed but refused.

  “She was taken away in the most cruel and inexplicable way—the way parents dread when their children are little and impulsive and so admonish them repeatedly to ‘look both ways’ before crossing a street.

  “To say what happened that night is ‘every parent’s nightmare’ seems inadequate and cliché. It does not capture the anger, the depth of sadness, the imbedded memory loop, the sleepless nights and the restless days.

  “The O’Hara family lives with that every day—every second, every minute of every day. Frank Duarte understands this all too well. He lives with it, too. As you will hear from him in a few moments, he will serve a life sentence of guilt and shame and isolation—for what he didn’t do.

  “Your Honor, Frank Duarte panicked. He should have stopped. He should have stopped to help, even if to hold Megan O’Hara’s hand while her life slipped away. To bring her the comfort of a stranger. But he kept going. This is his cross to bear. This is his prison.”

  I detailed the good works done by both Megan and Frank. I did my best to bring her to life, and him, too, as a “real kid, with a real family.” I chose the words “collateral consequence of the immigration debate” rather than “victim” to not offend her family. There was only one victim here.

  Maria took the stand to testify on Frank’s behalf, and offered the O’Hara family “my family’s most sincere condolences and prayers that God gives you strength.”

  It was the first of many references to God, by both families, and truth be told, a believer could feel His presence in that courtroom, where so much loss, grief, and, eventually, forgiveness and mercy would come to bear.

  Father Ramon Suarez was next, and echoed Maria’s sincerity. He spoke of Frank’s remorse and contrition, as well as his service to the church.

  When it was Frank’s turn to speak, I instructed him to address only the judge. Instead, he turned to Megan’s family. With a trembling voice and tears streaming down his face, he said, “I took a life that was valuable to God. I ended the life of a very good person. Please know I, too, think of her every second of every day. Ple
ase know I have no life left in me because of this. I am hollowed out, and all I want now in my life is your forgiveness. I beg God for forgiveness. I beg you for your forgiveness.”

  At the moment he said the word “forgiveness,” James O’Hara, Megan’s father, gave him a slight, almost imperceptible nod.

  There were tears on both sides of the courtroom aisle already when Julie O’Hara, Megan’s mother, came forward to read the victim impact statement.

  She spoke of how their family “was as close as family could be” and how Megan was the center. She used words like “incalculable loss.” She mourned not only her daughter but the grandchildren she and her husband would never have. She spoke of phoning their other daughter to tell her that her only sister was gone. Of how “the shattering wails of grief” that followed haunt them still.

  And then she addressed Frank, whose head was bowed as he cried.

  “The God I believe in forgives you,” she said. “The God I believe in loves you. I am so sorry this has happened to us, and I’m sorry it has happened to you. But the God I believe in has a plan for us—and for you. We, and you, will be okay. We forgive you.”

  The magnitude and humanity of those words continue to resonate with me. They were equally stunning in their simplicity and kindness. There is hope for this world with people like the O’Haras in it. Compassion and empathy, if given a chance, can overpower all the noise of political posturing.

  • • •

  When the sentencing was over, Frank was led out of court to be processed for an immediate deportation flight to South America. He looked over his shoulder at his family as sheriff’s officers held him by each arm and escorted him out of the courtroom to the holding cell. The door shut behind them. That’s how they said good-bye. Eyes locked. Silent. Without so much as a touch.

  The O’Haras, too, watched him leave. I thought it was strange until the families began to file out. It was then that the mothers and fathers of the two lost children embraced one another. The O’Haras and Duartes held each other, sharing loss and grief, before going their separate ways, inextricably linked forever.

  MARK DI IONNO is a lifelong journalist and a Pulitzer Prize finalist in news commentary for his work on the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. His front-page columns regularly appear in the Star-Ledger, and its online partner, NJ.com. He began his career covering sports with the New York Post, where he helped break many significant stories, including baseball’s case against Pete Rose and the undoing of Mike Tyson. He is the author of several works of nonfiction and the debut novel The Last Newspaperman. His forthcoming novel, Gods of Wood and Stone, will be published by Touchstone/Simon & Schuster in July 2018. He is an adjunct professor of journalism at Rutgers University and a father of six children. He lives in New Jersey.

  ANNA DUNN

  * * *

  The Third Twin

  For as long as you can remember you have loved looking into shimmering surfaces. The tremble of juice in the glass clutched in Henry’s hand as your father ambled past you through the kitchen; the glassy look of love from the dog when tossed a bone; the waver of horizon as lightning touched down at the center of the pond. Tonight, it’s the spin of square light across the walls of a dance floor that has you dizzy. You’ve left the trappings of your body, your lonely brain dislocating with the gentle guidance of drugs and the possibility of touch.

  There is a woman dancing across from you. She leans toward you, through the fog, the one that’s emanating from the machine in the corner as well as the one that has taken up residency in your mind, and says her name is Lacuna. That it means lake, a chapter of a book never written, the hollow part of a bone. You move closer until your knuckles brush against each other’s.

  When the music stops you wander into the bathroom alone, peer at yourself in the smudged glass of the mirror, study the line of your chin, the way a soft blond mustache has appeared above your lip. Some mornings you pluck it, but secretly you feel proud of it. It makes you think how you have always been molting, attempting to cast off some part of yourself, your body, to transform into something other. Maybe not just one, maybe several others. There is a plurality deep inside you. You are, and in other ways you are not. You are beside your self. You have been trying to explain this to people but they don’t understand.

  • • •

  You walk out into the night for a cigarette you will regret. Not because of the molten damage to your lungs but because smoking guarantees a throbbing migraine in the morning. But you need to fumble with something, to do something with your hands, so you strike a match and take a sharp inhale. There are clouds over Central Square and the air has that clean cold smell to it and then the sky opens and you are standing under a streetlamp in the falling snow.

  You already are another, your mother says when you try to explain it. You are a twin.

  You have a real live double on the outside of your body; for most of your life he was there across the room from you, reflecting you, his very existence a taunt you had to learn to love. Even now, Henry is reflected in every mirror you look into. What you share and what you own: a forever-moving target. Henry hardly considers it; you can hardly bear it. You’ll be seeing Henry tomorrow; he’s asked you to help him knock on doors for one of his causes. This week it’s cystic fibrosis, last week it was fracking, next week polar bears or melting ice caps or Lou Gehrig’s disease, any incurable catastrophe. Sometimes it feels as though your brother was born guilty and running with every hopeless cause is his attempt to circumvent his pain. You agree to help him simply because, well, you’re used to doing things with him. What your mother doesn’t know and what you’ll never really say to her is that you have another double. You are not just the masculine woman people see when they look at you, the one who looks like Henry, but there is another brother, inside of you, a third twin.

  You think about returning to the dance floor but it’s late and the snow is piling up and your heart is drumming from the nicotine, and if you’re going to be honest your anxiety is also drumming from being close to someone else. Drinking helped, but walking is better, so you set off into the night, fast, over the river, up the hill until you are at the steps of your apartment. You take the dog out. She tries to bite the snow as it falls. In bed you open a book and close it. Turn the lights off. You think about how most nights feel like a kind of eclipse. You close your eyes and move into intervals of darkness, your sense of self a fracturing of form so that when you dream, you dream in pieces. You wake up late with nothing but the coming and going of night to ponder, get into your car, and go. The migraine is like an earth quaking inside your head. You knew better than to smoke that cigarette, but a little brain damage can also be a welcome distraction.

  The coffee at the union office has the taste of wet cardboard. The volunteer explains Henry is already out, knocking on doors, that he couldn’t wait for you but has picked a packet of houses for you.

  The first door you knock on: blinds flip open, a ghost-white naked torso leans against the windowpane. Opens the door. The man has a shaved head. Says he hasn’t been well. You try to maintain eye contact while also trying to make out if that is a swastika tattoo on his biceps. He doesn’t seem to register that you are a woman or a man, or at least that’s how you perceive his indifference. That’s as good as it gets these days. He says he won’t be donating. He’s been sick with . . . something else.

  The next address is at the end of a cul-de-sac off the main road. As you approach you notice a MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN bumper sticker on a Crown Vic parked in the driveway. Next to the door there is a wooden sign that reads: ERIC’S WAY. You glance at your sheet and notice the names don’t match—you are looking for someone named Daniel.

  You are about to knock on the door when you remember an old English fairy tale that was once read to you and Henry on a school outing. The story was of a woman engaged to a murderous man named Mr. Fox. Through every door of his house the woman passed there was this warning: BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BUT NOT TOO BOL
D. LEST THAT YOUR HEART’S BLOOD SHOULD RUN COLD. You had closed your eyes to listen and while you did a photographer snapped your picture for a local paper. You were in a red-and-white-striped shirt, your long hair twisted into braids. In the picture it looks like you are dreaming. You thought that with your eyes closed you looked more like a boy. You thought maybe if you were a boy you’d be safe. But then maybe you’d be vicious like the man in the story named Fox.

  You knock on the door and this time a small man answers, says, Hello. He reminds you of Rumpelstiltskin, like he’d be good at stomping around. He takes one look at you and asks you if you are looking for Henry. For some reason this worries you but you say, Yes. The man invites you in and there is your brother, Henry, sitting on the couch. He doesn’t seem glad to see you. There is sadness and an uncertainty in his eyes. He grips the clipboard on his lap. You look around the room. There is one black sneaker on a shelf beneath the television, on one of the walls several paintings of a thin young man with dark hair and doe-like eyes. A chessboard, mid-game, sits on the table but has the feeling of having never been touched. There is a woman in a rocking chair in a corner of the room, her plump hands rest over a pile of drab-colored yarn she has been knitting. You sit next to her and notice there are tears in her eyes. Eric, you learn, was the couple’s son, who died in a motorcycle accident years ago. This house was his and his parents now live here. The woman asks you if you’d like some sweet bread as her husband shows your brother posters for the benefit they hold for local schoolchildren in her dead son’s name. He told me he was too tired to play chess that day, the man says. I just don’t know what he was doing out on that road.

  You watch Henry out of the corner of your eye, the way you have since you were born, just minutes before him. He seems defeated. For all of his charitable work you’re not sure your brother has ever really listened to the stories people carry with them and tell him and here he is in a mausoleum of grief.