If Shep was present, he would speak up. He would serve a life sentence before letting Mike take the fall, because he is pure, unlike Mike, who is fighting with himself to do the right thing and wishing Shep were here to step in and take the choice away from him.
Mike’s throat is dry and tight. He says, ‘He is.’
The detectives are ready for this. They produce an application from Cal State L.A. and say, ‘Read.’
Mike reads question 11b, which is highlighted in yellow: ‘Have you ever been arrested for, convicted of, or forfeited collateral for any felony or Class A misdemeanor violation?’
They say, ‘That’s right. This won’t be done when you get out either. This is throwing away college. This is throwing away your future. Think it over.’
He is arraigned the next day and makes bail.
At home, as he heads up the walk, Mike sees Shep waiting in the bay window. They go out back, plunk down on the rotting swings.
Shep says, ‘No way. I’m going in and telling them.’
Mike says, ‘You go in, you’re not coming back out, Mr Two-Strikes-You’ve-Seen-Me-Play-Ball.’
Shep’s voice, for the first time in a long time, is loud. ‘I don’t care. This is your life. This is college. I’m going in.’
‘If you go in, I’ll never come visit you,’ Mike says. ‘I’ll never talk to you again for the rest of my life.’
Shep’s face changes, and for one awful instant Mike thinks he is going to cry.
As promised, receiving stolen property sticks. The judge is tired of kids like Mike, and he is assigned to six months in the Hall. The night before he is due to report, he asks for a moment alone in the bedroom. The others grant his last request. Shep’s face shows nothing, but Mike knows he is devastated to be left out with the others. Mike cleans up around his space, makes his little cot a last time, then pauses to take stock of the room. Resting on the long-broken air conditioner is one of Shep’s shoes, so big it looks like you could sleep in it. The drawers of the communal dresser tilt at all angles, the tracks long gone. There on the plastic stool is The rape of rat. He picks it up, runs his thumb across the tattered cover. Like the Saab, it seems to encompass everything he cannot have, everything he is not, everything he can never be. He reaches over and drops it into the trash can.
Dubronski is in the doorway; Mike thinks the asshole has WD-40ed the hinges for occasions such as this. Dubronski has been watching, but for once that fat bully face is not lit with schadenfreude. He pops a Jelly Belly for a sugar hit, plays with his pudgy hands. ‘Hey, Doe Boy, I just wanted to say, this sucks ass. I always thought if you could make it, hell, maybe we all were worth something.’
And that makes Mike’s insides crumble in a whole new way.
The Hall is tough, but not as violent as billed. Mike knows how to fight, so he doesn’t have to much. But it is hell – the hell of utter neglect. The others, his peers, represent every dirty part of himself that he never managed to scrub clean. He watches his back all the time and suffers from vigilance burnout, waking every five minutes, spinning circles down the corridors, keeping his back against the chain-link during yard time.
The third week he gets summoned to the head office, where the superintendent waits. She is not a warden. Just like he is not serving a ‘sentence’ but a ‘disposition’, and the hulking guards are called ‘counselors’. All those soft names don’t seem to make the time any less hard.
She asks, ‘How would you explain your state of mind, son?’
Mike says, ‘Scared straight.’
‘I understand you caught a bad rap. If you keep up the good behavior, I will make sure your time here is pleasant.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘I will do my best to get you an early release. In the meantime don’t make me look stupid.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘And when you’re out, don’t make me look stupid then either.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
A few days later, a pie-faced guard wakes him at two in the morning and mumbles the news: The Couch Mother is dead.
Details are scarce. The rest of the night, Mike sits on his turned-back sheets with his bare feet on the icy tile, a wall of static blotting out thought and feeling.
In a hushed morning phone call with Shep, Mike learns that she had a stroke on a rare trip to the bathroom and cracked her head open on the lip of the tub. She had a good heart, a strong heart to push blood through all that acreage. But still, all hearts have their limits.
Hearing Shep’s voice jars something loose in Mike’s chest, and he hangs up and walks down the hall to the bathroom and locks himself in a stall. He sits on the closed toilet, doubles over, and sobs three times in perfect silence, his eyes clenched, both hands clamped over his mouth.
She may not have seemed like much, but she was what he had.
He is allowed to attend the funeral. Two sheepish uniformed cops, Mike’s escorts, stand in the back of the airless chapel. As the service begins, the hearse from the previous funeral is still idling in the alley, visible through a side door, and the folks for the next one are waiting in the reception area. Mike walks the aisle, regards the refrigerator of a casket, and thinks, I failed you.
None of the foster kids will give a speech. The notion of ceremony, of formality, evades them all. Finally Shep gets up. Somber in an ill-fitting dress shirt, he takes the podium. His mouth is a stubborn line. Silence reigns.
‘She was there,’ he says, and steps down.
Though the by-the-hour pastor frowns, Mike knows that Shep means this as the highest compliment.
Nine weeks later Mike walks from the Hall with a bag of clothes and forty dollars from the state. Shep is waiting for him outside on the shoulder of the road, leaning against a dinged-up Camaro, arms crossed. Mike has no idea how Shep knew about the early release date; he just found out himself the morning before.
As Mike approaches, Shep tosses him the keys. ‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ Shep says.
‘Loyalty,’ Mike says. ‘And stamina.’
Over the next few months, he applies for a few real jobs, but that felony charge gets in his way, sitting there like a boulder in the middle of a canyon road. So he gets a job as a day laborer, working with prison-release guys twice his age, hauling soot out of firehouses. With his first paycheck, he hires a lawyer out of the yellow pages and has his juvenile record sealed. But he soon discovers that while prospective employers can’t see his file, they will always know that it is sealed. And what they imagine his transgressions to be, he gleans, is worse than the reality.
At a dingy downtown government office, he stands in line with a bunch of domestic-abuse victims to get his last name and Social Security number changed. He is assigned a fresh number and a fresh surname, this time of his own choosing. He is Michael Wingate, and he has no past, no history. He has a clean start.
He gets a proper job as a carpenter, and nights he presses shirts in a purgatory of a dry cleaner. He and Shep drift, riding separate undercurrents. It is natural, gradual. It goes unspoken.
One day he walks past the window at Blockbuster and sees her standing there between Drama and Comedy. He stops to gawk. The sight of this woman makes him hurt in the worst way; it makes him yearn. But he is too intimidated to go in and talk to her, so instead he goes home and lies awake all night, cursing his unexpected timidity.
For the next few weeks, he goes back to Blockbuster before work, on break, between jobs. She has to return the movie sometime – two days, right, then late fees? He grows convinced that she has sworn off rentals, that she leaves the house only at inopportune times, that she saw him in the window leering like a stalker and was frightened into moving.