Life Detonated

by Murray Moran, Kathleen

  His face is a Dali or a Picasso face, off-center, the angles all wrong. Nothing matches up, one side sags, the other looks as though the skin has been stretched over a bumpy canvas.

  She complained that McTigue appeared at their parole board hearings and that thanks to him they had not gotten what she termed more favorable release dates. On one occasion, McTigue told the parole board that he was appearing on my behalf. She wrote that these appearances were damaging for her and Zvonko, that the parole examiners put a lot of weight on his statements.

  In the next letter, I found folded up in fours, a copy of McTigue’s letter to the Department of Justice, where he called her an “attractive and sympathetic” witness who was basically playing dumb. In it, he made a case for keeping her in prison, stating that if what Julie claimed in court was true then:

  She did not know the purpose of the several cast iron pots, packages of silly putty, wire, tape, and material purchased to manufacture the simulated and actual bombs.

  She did not know why her husband wired together sticks of silly putty, wire, batteries, etc. to form a body harness that was ultimately used to intimidate the passengers of flight 355.

  She was unaware that her husband had purchased TWA airline tickets under false names.

  She did not know that her husband had checked out flight 355 on Monday evening, September 6, 1976, and purchased one of the tickets while at the airport.

  She did not know that her husband possessed 60,000 leaflets dealing with an independent Croatia that he wanted to drop from the skyjacked aircraft while over France and Yugoslavia.

  She did not know of the note to the pilot demanding control of the aircraft, the multi-page political diatribe left in the locker for eventual publication in the world’s print media and the extortion note left in the locker—all typed in the apartment on a borrowed typewriter.

  She must not have known of the existence of eight sticks of dynamite, electric blasting caps, a large battery, wire, rolls of black tape, switches, and other bomb making paraphernalia that Zvonko Busic admits having in their apartment. And deteriorated dynamite gives off a sweet odor that causes headaches and that the nitroglycerin leaking from the cartridge forms beads that permeate and leak into adjacent areas.

  He reminded the parole board that she was part of a carefully crafted air piracy plan to jeopardize the lives of tens of thousands of innocent travelers. He urged them to set the longest possible date for parole and send a clear message that sorrow after the act does not qualify the terrorist for leniency or special treatment.

  Just so you know what kind of sadistic man he really is, Julie ended her letter. But I did not think the letter showed a sadistic nature. I thought McTigue, of whom I was very disappointed, had a persuasive and rational argument.

  It should not have surprised me, then, that the next letter asked if I would consider writing a letter on Zvonko’s behalf.

  It would be the most important letter he could have, if only to counteract the lies McTigue told regarding your support of his efforts against us. Because I love him and worry about him if he has to spend more years in prison, I naturally would consider a letter from you the biggest help he could possibly have. You’ve been so generous and kind to me, and I won’t ever forget it. It would’ve been really easy to be vindictive and vengeful.

  I kept the letter hidden in my office for days before I felt emboldened to write:

  I don’t forgive Zvonko, and will not consider writing on his behalf. Our correspondence has been helpful in allowing me to understand you and my own reaction to Brian’s death, but that doesn’t mean I will ever forgive him.

  She wrote back that while she respected my feelings, she was sad that he had to do his time in horrible prisons compared to the one that she was in, and that he could see no light at the end. I don’t wish to manipulate you in any way; that is the last thing I

  want . . . You of all people can understand what it means to love somebody with all your heart. She said that she had not told anyone but her parents that she had divorced him, but that she still loved him and considered him her best friend and confidant.

  Your letters must resurrect a lot of feelings that are painful to you. I hope you agree that it is still necessary to work through them. As I read your letters I feel as though you still want me to suffer. Well, I am still suffering . . . still in prison 12 years later, and have additionally experienced many, many hardships while here . . . what more could I possibly do that I haven’t already done to make amends for my participation? I guess I feel a little resentful, even though I know emotionally that you have every right to say what you feel.

  I am behind walls 24 hours a day. I work mornings in landscaping and afternoons I am in the computer class. I came to prison with a university degree, magna cum laude, and have had to take orders all these years from people who have never even read a book or had an original idea; in addition, many of them are unable to handle power, even though it is illusory power, and abuse it terribly. They try to strip us of our dignity, to demean us, to treat us like children or imbeciles or both, but luckily for me, I have been able to fight this depersonalization. I have remained my sassy, uncompromising self.

  I read the letter again, and then again, and her words made me feel sullied. I told myself this was the last letter, that I would not write to her again. And for a long time, I kept that promise.

  Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one’s life.

  — Kate Chopin, The Awakening

  Forgiveness

  We celebrated Gracie’s fiftieth birthday in New York, and for the first time in recent memory, the whole family came together: my mother in a wheelchair offering a toast to her suntanned daughter, Gracie’s son Matthew with his wife and child, and even Corky, who had asked me for the price of a plane ticket from Miami. Gracie and Billy stayed with us that weekend, and after everyone else went to bed, we stayed up late, talking about how wonderful it was to see the family, how it was amazing that we had thrived in the face of our Faile Street beginning, except Corky, who seemed to be unemployed and looked thin and pale despite his Miami address. Although Corky and Gracie lived within driving distance, they didn’t communicate. Gracie had grown from those dark days when Corky could still influence her. Now she had a granddaughter, whom she adored. She felt solid, stronger than I had seen her since I was a child.

  I missed Gracie terribly when she went home to Florida. I thought of how much my success in life was due to her love and understanding, and thought of the understanding I received from Julie. I realized that it had been almost a year since I stopped writing to Julie and I missed her too, I missed our letters, the excitement, and on a whim, I decided to write to her.

  I had written my rage until it began to feel limp and worn like a dress you’ve put on too many times. And when I started writing her again, I wasn’t writing about the rage anymore. I told myself that since she was divorced from Busic, and that he was the real terrorist, I could pick up the correspondence I missed. She seemed the last person left in that Brian stronghold, and I meant to keep Brian alive. When I began to write again, it was to someone who had shared an impossible history that no one else could understand.

  I told her about being ostracized from the bomb squad and from Charlie, the friend I thought would support me, and that although it had been over a decade, I still followed his career. When he received a promotion or his name was in the news, I wrote that it should have been Brian’s name in that story, Brian wearing those gold bars on his uniform. I wrote to her about the night Charlie came to my door, about the fugue-state I had lived in, and about those first years alone.

  For the first time, too, I opened up about how inadequate I felt as a mother. I told her about the time Chris ran away from me in the mall, and when the police found him, he answered no when asked if I was his mother. I told her about the time I drove to the hospi
tal twice in one week, once to have Keith’s wrist set in a cast, and then Chris’s elbow. I told her about Keith’s night terrors, times when he woke up screaming for his father and nothing I could say or do would make him feel better.

  I wrote about leaving the doctoral program to take care of my premature baby and about how at the time I felt I had lost my direction, the momentum of reading for my orals and meeting with my committee, but that there didn’t seem to be time to return to the all-consuming doctoral program. I told her about accepting a job at Suffolk Community College, where I taught writing and literature, a job I had come to love, but mourned the lost opportunity to add PhD to my name.

  She was someone I could brag to about my athletic sons, how adorable Kaitlin was. I could complain to her about Keith sneaking a girlfriend into his bedroom, spending Christmas Eve in the hospital with Kaitlin after bronchitis closed her airways, Chris falling off his bike and breaking his clavicle. She had no children, and as long as McTigue kept vigil to keep her in prison, she would stay behind bars and probably never would have them. Yet she wrote of practical ways to handle these everyday challenges. We fell into a rhythm that opened up for me stories of my childhood and of my life with Brian, and in some strange, hidden part of me, it felt right.

  I told her about starting what would be a nationwide organization, Survivors of the Shield. Ironic, since I had started SOS because of the devastating blow her actions had on our lives. I did not write how I had been born into poverty, among drug addicts and thieves and had risen to become a woman who could start non-profits and work toward a doctorate degree. I did not say how strange it was that she had been born with everything and had wound up in prison. But the fact of it made me feel strangely smug. It gave me that optimistic buoyant feeling that absolutely anything could happen.

  I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.

  — Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

  Saving Julie

  Gracie’s house on Fillmore Street in Clearwater was white clapboard with blue trim, the porch scattered with wind chimes and geraniums and cane rocking chairs. Inside, the furniture was spare, pale shades of aqua and peach, faded now, the windows shuttered against the bright Florida sun. Rings from glasses stained the coffee table, neglected ashtrays overflowed, and the air smelled of beer and cigarettes.

  “Sorry, Kat.” Gracie gave me a little smile. “I haven’t felt up to housekeeping.” Her hair had lost its shine, her ashen face poised on the threshold of whatever malady had taken hold. She waived her hand toward the room, the gesture causing the ash of her cigarette to fall onto the stained rug. The strap of her summer dress slid down her arm where I could see that prison scar, the one everyone thought the result of one of her car accidents.

  A profound sadness began to settle in my stomach, and I recalled that in the late 60s, Harry Banks sent Fiona Ryan and me to Ireland to meet with our manufacturers. We extended the trip to include Switzerland and Italy, and Gracie asked if she could come. I made the excuse that it was a work trip, and I couldn’t bring her along. But, of course, I could have. Harry would not have cared. That trip changed me, gave me perspective and insight and widened my dreams. Now I wish Gracie had been by my side, her own dreams broadened by the magnificence of the Sistine Chapel, Lake Lucerne, the vivid greens of Ireland. In all her life, Gracie had gotten only as far as Clearwater, a move she envisioned would finally make her happy.

  I sat on the sofa next to her. Kaitlin’s laughter floated in from the backyard where she was digging for worms with Billy, who promised to take her fishing.

  “Don’t worry about it. I’m just glad to be here,” I said. And I was glad, but the missed opportunities of Gracie’s life now seemed like a shield between us. I was the lucky one, the one who went to Europe, married a good guy, graduated college, while a father whose fists were his only means of communication had dashed her dreams.

  While we still talked most days, I often felt there was nothing to say, that small talk was a waste of time, that she made her decision to move to a place where she knew no one and where her sole companion was a man who loved his vodka. She didn’t want to hear about that from me.

  “It’s not good,” she said. Her lip trembled and her eyes welled up.

  Last week she had called to tell me the doctors diagnosed a brain tumor. She pressed the temples of her head. “The reason I’ve had such bad headaches.”

  I sat still for a moment, trying to absorb her words. “I’ll come down as soon as I can get a flight,” I told her. I parceled out my classes, put James in charge of the boys, took Kaitlin out of school, and paid too much for a ticket to Clearwater.

  Now I ran my hand over the rough fabric of her sofa. “You’ll pull through,” I said. And I believed it. Throughout her life, Gracie had been in a head-on collision followed by emergency heart surgery, survived a hit-and-run that shattered her hip, and had been stabbed and survived prison. Gracie, I believed, was invincible.

  Her bracelets tinkled together as she took a drag from her cigarette. The silver bangles reminded me of the handcuffs she had once worn, and I thought of Julie’s most recent letter, which I had tucked into my purse to read on the plane when only Kaitlin would be watching.

  Gracie drummed her fingers against her thigh and looked at me without seeing me. “I don’t know this time,” she said.

  “But didn’t you say the doctor could try to remove it?” That burning sensation in my stomach deepened.

  Gracie shrugged. “They could try. But I’m not sure I want them to.”

  I watched as she stared out at the scrubby lawn, and at her skinny husband with yellow teeth and fingertips, who was showing Kaitlin how to dig for bait. The thought hit me slowly: What was here for her? It felt so lonely. Gracie had been through her own hijackings. Addiction had hijacked her dreams, her relationships, her body.

  “I’ll stay with you,” I said quickly. Except staying with Gracie, helping her, meant leaving James alone. Kaitlin was in pre-school, I had the boys to ferry to sports and friends’ houses. I needed to teach my classes.

  Before Gracie could say yes or no, Kaitlin slammed the screen door, smiling happily, a pail of wiggly slime in her hand. Gracie’s eyes were brimming with tears as she lit another cigarette, and then the tears spilled down her cheeks.

  While she and Billy set out cold cuts for lunch, I walked around the small rooms with worn beige carpet and looked at memorabilia from Mickey Mantle’s in Manhattan and The Lobster Roll in Montauk. In the dining room, my mother’s old china cabinet held rows of old photographs in metal frames.

  It had been a long time since I’d seen a photo of Brian, and it startled me. Here he was, the man who shaped my life, sitting in a lawn chair in our backyard, beside my mother. She looked happy, a bottle of Budweiser and an ashtray on a small table next to her. Brian was looking at the camera out of shadowy eyes, his usual smile missing. It was one of the pictures that had been in the 1975 album, one of the ones my mother said she had disposed of.

  “Where did you get this photo?” I carried the frame into the kitchen and held it out for Gracie to see. It was obvious as her face paled that she had forgotten about it.

  “Oh, I found it while we were moving. It was in one of the shoeboxes of photos Mom had tucked away.” She tried to recover but the freckles stood out on her cheeks as she realized the gravity of my finding one of the few remaining photos of Brian.

  “So, she saved some of Brian’s pictures after all,” I said, my voice shaking, “even after she knew how angry I was, even after I asked her to move out, even after I told her how much his photos meant to me.”

  “I’m sorry, Kat,” Gracie said as she busied herself with scooping mustard into a little dish. “I thought it was a copy.”

  “I’d like to have it.” I took the bac
k off the frame. “Brian and Mom, 7/17/75,” it read in my own handwriting.

  __________

  On our last night there we sat on the porch. Traces of the day’s heat lingered while chimes kept rhythm with the breeze. It had turned dark. I could smell the Evening in Paris Gracie always wore, and the tip of her cigarette brightened and faded as she took a drag. The surgery was Wednesday, and Rose had agreed to come down. Rose was a nurse now. I knew it would be better if she were with Gracie on the day of surgery. I was afraid of losing her, afraid of having my heart broken. That night I wasn’t sure how to articulate what I felt about my sister, and so we watched the stars come out of a midnight sky and let our silence do the work.

  Looking at Gracie’s shadowy silhouette I thought about the ways she had influenced my life. She had not only been my sister, she was my champion, the one who took up the slack when my mother had no time, who brushed my hair and read to me, transformed words on the page into stories that only we two shared. When she dreamed of becoming a stewardess I shared her dream, crossed off the days with her. When she returned home after a failed marriage it was I who shared her room, and when she became hooked on drugs it was I who looked for her on deserted city streets. When she went to prison it was me to whom she wrote letters, often enclosing pictures she drew in art class. She told me what it was like to shoot heroin into her veins, the feeling of pure bliss that trumped everything else in the world, knowing I would never try it because of what it did to her. She called me Kat, and I let her even though I hated cats, because Gracie loved me.

  __________

  On the plane ride home, Kaitlin slept across my lap, and I watched the sunset from the air, a fiery orange ball descending, and thought of Julie. I was the only one whose appeal could override McTigue, who kept petitioning to keep the Busics behind bars. Maybe it was time. Maybe since I couldn’t help Gracie, I could at least get Julie out of the prison she had made for herself.