“That’s what you were doing the day he was murdered? Trying to get more money out of him? What happened, Rita? What really happened that morning?”
“Get away from me.” She says this because I’ve slipped in front of her, eased onto the coffee table so we’re face to face.
“Tell me the truth. Did you lose your temper?” I’ve seen Rita lose her temper. I’ve felt her temper. “You did, didn’t you?” I can see it in my mind-Rita exploding in front of Coach, grabbing the bat, swinging it. “You killed him. And you’re letting Jeremy take the blame.” Pieces fall together when I say this. “Is that why you didn’t tell anybody, even Raymond, that you went to the stable that morning? That you talked to Coach? That you-?”
“Shut up! I didn’t-!”
But it’s making sense now. “Jeremy saw you. He saw you kill Coach. And he’s trying to protect you! He’s covering up for you! That’s why he wouldn’t see me. He knows I’d get the truth out of him.”
“You’re as crazy as he is.” Rita shoves me, but I won’t give an inch. “Why would I kill Jay Jay?”
“How should I know why you do anything? Maybe you couldn’t stand Jeremy having another parent, a good parent, in his life. Maybe you killed him for that.”
“Don’t be a fool.” She takes another swig, a big one this time.
“You couldn’t stand for Jeremy to have a real parent, someone who was kind to him. Was it like that with my father, Rita? Were you glad when my father got killed too?” Those dreamlike images of my father shoot through my brain, too fast for me to tell whether they’re real or imagined. “Two fathers, two sudden deaths. Quite a coincidence… Or was it? Was it, Rita?”
She shrugs. “You’re talking crazy.”
“Rita, did you kill my father too?”
Rita raises her arm and aims the back of her hand toward me. I brace myself for a slap, but I don’t budge. She lowers her arm. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I remember.”
“You were three years old. You don’t remember nothing.”
“He was wearing a baseball cap. A red cap. And it was sunny.”
That makes her look up at me. “How did you…?”
“Tell me what really happened.”
“He was run over by a truck. How many times do I have to tell you?”
This is what she’s told me every time I’ve asked. But it’s not good enough now. I’m standing up to her. I want answers, real answers. “Why? How did it happen? Why would he be in the street? Did he run out in front of the truck?” I pause because the image is there. My father. Me. And Rita. Rita, her arms outstretched. Then I say it, what I think I’ve wanted to ask her my whole life. “Did you push him?”
Again, I think she’s going to hit me, but I don’t care. I don’t flinch, or duck, or scoot back to break the impact. “Did you kill him? Did you push my father in front of that truck because you were tired of him? Because he wouldn’t pay you anymore? Rita! Did you kill him too?”
“You crazy little-!” Her teeth are clenched. Her eyes are watering. She stands up, weaving from side to side. Then she leans forward and gets in my face. I smell her stale breath, the liquor like vomit in her mouth. “If anybody killed your father, it was you.”
I start to yell back at her, but I stop. I remember something-an image in black and white. They’re never in black and white. It’s blurry too. I think it must be cloudy, but then the day clears, and it’s sunny. I can see a tall, thin man in a baseball cap. The red cap is the only color in the scene. I’m looking up at him, and he seems like the tallest person in the world-in my world, at least. I walk away, laughing. The ground is dry and lumpy, and it’s hard to walk without tripping. The picture is joined by other images, one after the other, fast, like animation, a jagged film. A shaggy puppy dances around my feet, then dashes ahead of me. I laugh and run after it. There’s a curb, and I spread my arms to step down from the grass to the pavement. Cars are parked there, but I follow the puppy and go between them. Someone’s yelling at me from behind. It’s a game, so I keep going, chasing Puppy. I hear footsteps behind me and more shouts from Daddy, who lets me call him Daddy and wants Jeremy to do the same. I hear thunder from the street and screeching that makes me stop so I can cover my ears. The next thing I know, I am lifted off the ground, as if an angel has flown by and picked me up. Only instead of carrying me, the angel tosses me like a football. I land hard, and it hurts. I cry and scream because I’m scared now. People run at me, past me, into the street. The truck driver stumbles out of his cab. I see his face, looking like he’s just seen that angel and doesn’t know what to make of it. “I tried to stop! I tried to stop!” He says this over and over. And Rita is screaming, and I want her to quit, but she won’t. She keeps screaming and screaming and never stops.
I gasp for air. I’m sitting in the living room, staring at the empty couch. I am light-headed, and I think I’m going to be sick again.
Rita is right. I caused my father’s death.
What’s wrong with us? Are we all killers? Murderers? Is Rita? Is Jeremy?
Am I?
35
After the weekend, the prosecution takes two days to sum up its case and for Keller to give his closing argument. Chase and I sit through all the explanations. Keller brings in his whole team and puts on a grand finale. A short, chubby lab guy uses four-color art to reexplain diagrams of the blood evidence found at the scene and on the bat, in spite of whatever Jer did to wash it off. A gorgeous assistant prosecutor, with long black hair and a body that three of the jurors can’t stop staring at, sets up a miniature stable, complete with horses and a baseball bat, just to show the jury who stood where and what the prosecution has been claiming all along took place, that Jeremy Long willfully bludgeoned to death his father, John Johnson.
Life is as miserable out of court as it is in court. Rita and I aren’t speaking, which isn’t such a big loss. I’ve tried to put myself in her shoes and imagine what it might do to a person to see her husband crushed by a truck. She’s apologized for blurting out something she kept to herself all these years. In her own way, I guess, Rita has tried to take back what she said about me killing my father.
But T.J. was right. Some things you can’t take back.
And sometimes you can’t go back to the way things were. I saw T.J. again. He was standing on the sidewalk outside my house when I left for work Saturday morning. We stared at each other for a minute or two. He didn’t scare me this time, but I still found nothing to say to him. Finally, I kept walking, passing him without looking back.
“Hope?”
I stopped but I didn’t turn around. I waited, wanting him to say more. I yearned to hear the old T.J. and know he was still there. But he didn’t say anything else. So, after a few seconds, I walked off again. I didn’t stop until I got all the way to the Colonial. And when I looked back, I saw that T.J. hadn’t followed me.
But the worst is that something’s happening between Chase and me, and I don’t know what it is, unless he can sense that I killed my own father. Of course I haven’t told him. When he’s dropped me off after court, I haven’t asked him to stay, and he hasn’t asked me to go with him. Maybe we’re both just too tired.
I’ve thought about my father and what happened the day he was killed. I’ve gone over and over it enough to be as depressed as I’ve ever been. Then I started writing about everything to Jeremy. I wrote for him too, still in my chicken-scratch penmanship, pretending I was writing his fancy, swirling letters. We argued. “Jeremy,” I said, “I killed my own father!” And Jer said back, “You were three, Hope.” And I said, “But if I hadn’t run into the road, he wouldn’t have run after me. It was my fault!” “You were three,” Jeremy replied. “How much fault could you have had in you? You didn’t mean to hurt anybody.” We argued more, and finally Jeremy got in the last word: “Fault, schmalt. You’re forgiven because God says so. He’s got your back. He’s your father too, you know.” So even though he wasn’t really there, my brother got me through the worst of it.