Chasing Forgiveness

by Neal Shusterman

  In the living room, I am drawn to the portrait again. Mom’s eyes look down on me. They follow me as I cross the room—portraits do that. Her eyes will follow Dad when he crosses the room as well.

  I wonder how heavy the painting is. I wonder if we could take it down. Just for today.

  I ask Grandpa about it.

  “Don’t be silly, Preston,” Grandpa says. “Your father’s seen that picture a thousand times before.”

  But then Grandpa looks at the picture pensively, suddenly not so certain of how silly I am. He goes over to it, and, putting his hands on either side, he tests the weight of the heavy frame. He stands back and looks at it some more.

  “No,” he says. “We can’t start doing things like that. We can’t start hiding all of Megan’s pictures.”

  “Who’s hiding all of Megan’s pictures?” Grandma enters on the tail end of the conversation, figuring someone—probably me—is up to no good.

  “It’s just that Dad hasn’t seen a picture of Mom in almost three years.”

  Now it’s Grandma’s turn to stare at the portrait pensively.

  “Why don’t you go play with your brother, Preston?” says Grandpa. “Sitting around will just make the wait even longer.”

  I leave the room. As I steal a piece of pie from the kitchen, I hear Grandpa say, “Danny can’t hide from her face all of his life, Lorraine. I won’t help him do that.”

  • • •

  Tyler isn’t playing. He sits out front counting cars going by. “Thirty-two so far,” he says. “I bet Dad will be here before a hundred.” I sit next to him on the step.

  “What do you think he’ll be wearing?” asks Tyler. This is one of the more stupid questions he’s asked.

  “A dress,” I answer.

  Tyler laughs, and together we wait the hour until Dad’s scheduled arrival.

  Dad appears ten minutes early. The eighty-third car. It’s Grandpa Scott’s old Buick that Dad drives. Funny, but I was expecting Dad to drive his own car. I forgot that his car got sold even before he went on trial.

  I feel some tears bubbling up inside, so I try to make them go away, but I can’t. Dad doesn’t pull into the driveway—he parks across the street, then crosses to us. I can already see that he is crying, too. He was crying before he even got out of the car.

  He grabs both Tyler and me in an enormous three-way hug.

  “You were waiting outside for me,” he whispers through his tears as he hugs us. “I thought I wouldn’t be able to find the place, but . . . I never thought you’d be waiting outside for me.”

  And for a short moment, right in the middle of that hug, it seems like nothing else matters. It seems like the rest of the stuff just didn’t happen. But Dad can’t keep hugging us forever.

  • • •

  We hang the ornaments on the tree one by one. Dad looks at some of the fancier ones as we do. He’s looking at the ones from our old tree, I realize, but I don’t want to mention it to him. He sees that I notice, and he self-consciously hangs an ornament on the tree.

  Tyler and Grandma string popcorn and cranberries on thread. “It’s good to have you here, Danny,” she says.

  She and Grandpa hugged him and cried, too, when he stepped into the house.

  He must have felt like he had crossed into the Twilight Zone when he stepped over that threshold. He has never been here, and yet he must recognize it. His old furniture is in here, mixed in among Grandma and Grandpa’s, the way weird fragments of your life mix in your head at night, making those dreams that are too bizarre to remember. This whole house must be so familiar to him and at the same time so new.

  When the tree is finished Grandpa plugs in the lights, and we all stand back to admire the sight of the colored bulbs casting a rainbow of pine shadows across the walls. But Dad’s not looking there. He’s looking off toward the living room, where Mom’s eyes scrutinize him from the wall.

  • • •

  Dad takes Tyler and me shopping at the mall. Actually, we take him. He has no clothes to wear but the ones on his back, so his father gave him some money to buy new ones.

  In the crowded pre-Christmas department stores, we wait outside the fitting rooms to give him thumbs-up or thumbs-down on his wardrobe selections.

  He takes us out for pizza and eats it slowly, like a man savoring a gourmet meal.

  “I almost forgot what good pizza tastes like,” he says. We talk about the usual stuff. School, the end of my football season, and the beginning of the track season. Tyler’s mean third-grade teacher. It’s all stuff he already knows, but we talk about it anyway. Besides this stuff, we don’t say too much to each other over dinner. I keep my mouth full of pizza to cover those tense silent moments with chewing.

  As I look at him, I begin to see him the way he must have seen our living room—very familiar, but also strange and new. Almost frightening. He’s been gone so long, it’s as if I don’t know who he is anymore. Maybe that’s why on his first day of freedom, we’ve already run out of things to say.

  • • •

  He stays late this first night. We sit in front of the tree, watching a boring Christmas special. Tyler falls asleep in his arms, and Grandpa lets Dad carry Tyler off to bed. I have to remind him which bedroom is Tyler’s.

  “You can visit the boys whenever you want, Danny,” says Grandpa after Tyler is snug in his bed. “Just let us know when you want to come over.”

  Before Dad leaves, he comes into my room just as I’m getting ready for bed. I can’t believe he’s really finally free—yet having him here doesn’t feel as good now as it did when he first hugged us at the door.

  “I guess you’re way too big to be tucked in,” he says.

  “Naah,” I say, then slip under the covers. “Tuck away.”

  He comes over to my bed, thinks about it, but doesn’t do it. He smiles at me. “No. I think maybe you are too old.”

  And then he just stands there.

  He must be thinking the same thing I am. What now? We’d been waiting so long for him to get out. Now that he is out, what happens next?

  He stands there for a moment, then says good night, but I don’t want him to go. Not like this. When he got here and he hugged us on the porch he wasn’t a stranger. But it seems like he’ll be leaving as one.

  It’s funny—when you’re little, you accept your parents for what they are: your parents. And you never give it a second thought. I really never knew anything about Mom until after she died and Grandma and Grandpa started talking about all the things she had done as a girl. Until then, she was just Mom. Dad was just Dad.

  But Dad’s not just plain Dad anymore.

  He can’t be, because just-plain-Dads don’t do what he did. And as I sit here on my bed, I realize that I don’t really know who he is. Besides the fact that he’s my father, I hardly know anything about him. That never seemed important before or even while he was in prison. But now it is.

  “What are you thinking about?” he asks me.

  “I’m just wondering what you’re thinking about,” I tell him.

  “Well,” he says, “I’m thinking about how last time I saw you in this bed, you took up half of it. Now your feet just about hang off the end!”

  I look at my feet. I can’t remember when they didn’t reach the end of the bed. Dad reaches over and turns out the light. In a moment he’ll be out the door.

  “Can I ask you a question, Dad?”

  “Sure,” he says.

  But what can I ask him? I want to ask him all about all the things that ever happened to him—everything he ever felt and thought and did, ’cause maybe then I could understand why.

  But where do you begin to ask that? And how could I ever lead up to asking that final question. Why?

  I think I know where to begin. It’s a question I always wanted to ask when I was younger—something I always knew was not to be discussed, so we never discussed it. Ever.

  “Dad,” I ask, “how old were you when your sister . . . you know .
. . drowned?”

  Dad casually grabs onto my bedpost, as if the question has shaken him but he’s trying hard not to show it.

  “I was really young, Preston,” he says. “I was nine.”

  I take a deep breath and force out the words. “Tell me what happened.”

  Dad doesn’t say anything. I can hear him breathing, but my eyes haven’t adjusted to the dark. I can’t see him yet.

  “Why do you want to know about that?” he asks in a near whisper.

  “Because I do,” I tell him. “I want to know what happened.”

  My eyes start to adjust, and I can see the edge of his hair lit by moonlight, but his face is dark, like an eclipse.

  “You might have nightmares,” he warns me. “I’ll tell you some other time.”

  “No . . . I’ll be fine.” I already have nightmares. What’s one more?

  Dad sighs and waits, hoping that I’ll say “never mind.” I almost do, but I keep my mouth shut.

  “It was a big family reunion,” he begins. “My parents and my sister and I all drove out to Arkansas where I was born. I hadn’t been there since I was five though, so I didn’t remember it much.

  “Anyway, we camped out about a mile away from a big river, and one of my aunts decided it might be nice to have a picnic down by the riverside. She took me, my sister, and my cousins down there for a picnic lunch.”

  I listen, and I try to imagine Dad being nine—as old as Tyler is now. I can’t picture it; all I can see is Tyler. He says, “We brought a bunch of inner tubes that were all pumped up, so we could sort of float down the river—I mean the river wasn’t wild or anything, there weren’t any rapids, so we figured it would be all right.

  “So all of us kids get out our inner tubes after lunch, and my sister and I are the first to start floating downstream. That’s when my tube starts to leak.”

  “Your tube?” I ask.

  Dad nods.

  “But you could swim, right?”

  “No, I couldn’t swim a stroke yet. So the air was leaking out of my tube fast, and the water we were drifting down to was getting rougher and deeper. I started to get scared.

  “Well, my aunt and cousins, who were still onshore, saw what was happening. I was losing air, and my sister, who couldn’t swim either, was floating farther and farther away. They all decided that, since they couldn’t swim well enough to come out and save us, they would grab onto a tree on the shore, and take hands, making a human rope. They would stretch themselves out to us.”

  “Did it work?”

  “No. The water was rougher than it looked, and their feet started to sink into the mud at the bottom. They couldn’t do it. And they went under one by one.

  “I remember my father telling me how he and my uncle could hear us all screaming a mile away. It sounded like the end of the world, he said, as they got in the car and drove over the hill. They were screaming themselves because they knew something terrible had happened.

  “Anyway, I don’t know how, but the water sort of pushed me to shore. And I lay there half alive until someone pumped the water out of my lungs.”

  Dad doesn’t say anything more. It’s as if he’s sitting there watching himself on the shore, almost lifeless, waiting for someone to save him.

  “And your sister drowned?” I ask.

  Dad looks up at me suddenly as if there were something I had missed.

  “They all drowned, Preston,” my father tells me. “All of them.”

  And in the silence that follows, I can hear that one scream of the aunt I’ll never meet multiplied five times. “No!”

  “My aunt, my sister, my cousins . . .”

  This is too much to know. Too much to hear all at once. All of them. Nobody told me that. Why doesn’t anybody ever tell me things? Now I know why Dad’s father had a nervous breakdown. Has this been on my father’s mind since before I was born? Every time he falls into a deep depression, every time he just sits there not talking to anyone, just staring out lost in his own thoughts? Is this what he’s thinking about? Was he reliving the awful day his family died trying to save him? How could anyone live with that weight? How could anyone not lose their mind?

  “It’s not your fault,” I tell him. But it doesn’t matter what I say. I can see his eyes reflecting the dim light. I can’t tell if he’s crying, but I can see what he’s feeling. He blames himself. He’s always blamed himself.

  “Of course it’s not my fault,” he says quietly. “It just happened.” But even as he says it, I know he’s still trying to convince himself. If it weren’t for me, he’s thinking, they’d all still be alive. I can almost hear it playing over and over in his mind, the same way I play that horrible night Mom died over in my mind. Stuff like that gets trapped in your head and just bounces back and forth and can’t find a way out. I should have died, he’s telling himself. I should have died, too, Preston, and if I had, then the other things would not have happened.

  “It’s okay, Dad,” I want to tell him. “Terrible things happen to good people for no reason that we can figure out.” I want to tell him I understand, because it happened to me. I wasn’t much older than you had been, Dad, when the awful thing happened to me, too.

  But my lips won’t move. I can’t say a word.

  I could ask him about Mom now. This would be the time. I could ask why he did it—what he was really thinking when he got the gun. What on God’s earth could be so hard to bear that the only way to end the pain was to shut down his mind, go crazy, and take my mother’s life?

  If I asked him now, he would tell me, he wouldn’t lie, I know that. And if he told me, I would understand—like I understood about his sister and his cousins and his aunt. I know that, too.

  The words are on the edge of my lips, and my heart pounds knowing that I could finally, after three years, ask my father what has become the most important question in the world. I could ask him now.

  But I don’t have the guts.

  I slip under my covers, ashamed that I can’t speak. He stands up, thinking that I’m shrinking away from him, but then he leans forward and gives me an awkward hug. Somehow it’s like we’re back in the awful gray jail and the glass is still between us, and even as he hugs me, I feel like he’s hugging me through glass.

  He straightens himself up, turns, and slowly walks to the door.

  I can’t ask him about Mom, can I? I never will be able to do it, will I?

  “Dad,” I say as he leaves the room, “I love you.” But the door closes behind him before he can hear.

  18

  THE QUESTION OF THE WEEK

  January

  Three weeks later Dad moves in with us.

  “But I couldn’t move in with you,” Dad protests when Grandma and Grandpa make their offer over Sunday dinner.

  “Nonsense,” says Grandma. “You’re here visiting the boys almost every day; we have the extra room. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t—it solves everyone’s problems.”

  “Maybe the boys could move in with me and my parents instead,” suggests Dad. Sometimes I feel like I don’t have any say in it.

  “And change schools in the middle of the year?” says Grandpa. “No. We’re perfectly content to have you stay with us until you can get yourself an apartment nearby.”

  Dad has a job now. A friend of his got him the job—the same friend who picked him up at the prison. So now Dad’s a manager at a paper company. But he still can’t afford his own apartment. At least not one in this neighborhood.

  “I just wouldn’t feel right,” says Dad, “just moving in on you.”

  “Well, if you want to be with the boys, there’s not much of a choice, Danny,” says my grandpa, “because the boys are staying with us—whether you move in or not.”

  And I begin to wonder what will happen when Dad does get his own apartment. What will Tyler and I be expected to do—where will we be expected to go? And I wonder if I’ll have to take sides again, like I used to when Mom was alive.

  • •
•

  On the first night that Dad stays with us, I hear a noise from his room. It’s very soft and very muffled, but I still hear it.

  Dad is crying. He’s crying the way I cry sometimes when I think about Mom. All alone in my room, I can bury it in my pillow so no one will come in and ask me what’s wrong. That way I can keep it all to myself, and nobody can make me stop crying until I feel good and ready to. Maybe that’s what Dad’s doing, and maybe I should just let him alone. But I can’t just sit here and listen to Dad cry.

  I tiptoe out of my room and cross the hall to his. Grandma and Grandpa don’t hear him; they’re still downstairs watching TV—I can see the shifting blue light from the television hitting the banister, casting long shadows against the wall. They don’t hear Dad. Tyler is asleep. It’s only me.

  Without knocking I open the door a crack and peer in. Dad is sitting on his bed, his head in his hands. He’s sniffling and quietly sobbing. He doesn’t know I’m watching him.

  I wonder if he is crying about Mom. I wonder if he cried about Mom after it happened. He cried about Tyler and me. He cried about what he had done, but did he ever cry about Mom? I didn’t see him for months after it happened so I have no way of knowing . . . unless I ask him, and I’m not about to do that.

  I open the door wider, and it creaks, giving me away, so I step in.

  “You okay, Dad?” I ask.

  “I’m fine, Preston,” he says, trying to put an end to his tears. “I’m just feeling kind of funny, that’s all.”

  “About what?”

  Dad doesn’t quite answer that. Maybe he doesn’t know how to put it into words. He just sits there a bit longer, not saying anything.

  “I don’t deserve all this,” he finally says. “I don’t know why I’m being given it; I don’t deserve it.”

  I figure he’s talking about Grandma and Grandpa letting him live here, but somehow it goes beyond that, doesn’t it? He doesn’t deserve to be free. He doesn’t deserve the fact that we still love him—that we can all turn away from what he did and forgive him. But Grandma has a good way of putting it. She says, “If the Lord can forgive mankind for killing His son, then surely we can forgive the man who killed our daughter.” The hard part is accepting it.