The Forgetting Time(98)
One day after a year or so had passed, they told him that he had a visitor.
He thought it must be his lawyer or his mom.
The guard brought him down the long hallway and into the room where the tables were.
When he saw who it was, he wanted to back up out of the room, but it was too late. She was sitting there, waiting for him. Her hair was grayer now than it had been in the hearing, but her face was the same, and her eyes turning to him looked like Tommy Crawford’s eyes when he was trying to decide whether or not he should go with him into the woods to practice shooting.
He wished he could hide under the table.
She picked up the phone on the other side of the heavy scuffed glass, so he did, too. “I got your letter,” she said.
He looked at her. He couldn’t think of any words to say.
He had written a letter about how sorry he was about what happened to Tommy. How he had liked Tommy and wished that Tommy was alive and he was dead. Everything he wrote was true. His lawyer had thought it might help if they went to court, but then they had plea-bargained, and he had sent the letter anyway, thinking the parents would never respond. Why would they?
“You said in the letter that you’re an alcoholic.” Her voice was low. She didn’t meet his gaze through the glass. “Is this true?”
“Mmm,” he mumbled. Then forced himself to say it. “Yes.” He was used to admitting it now, after all those AA meetings in prison.
“But you’re sober now?”
He nodded, then realized there was no way she could see him with her head bent down like that. “Yes.”
“Is that why it happened? Because you were drunk?” She was looking at her hands on the table in front of her.
He swallowed. His throat was dry. There was no water here. “No.”
“Then why?” She glanced up. Her eyes were sad, but they had no anger in them.
“It was an accident,” he said and saw that shadow of skepticism, that downward twitch of the lips, that had crossed so many faces since he had confessed. “But that’s not why,” he added. “It was because I was a coward. A coward and an idiot.” He bent his head, too. He looked down at their hands, the two long brown ones, the two stubby white ones with the nails half-chewed off.
She made a noise on the other end of the phone. He couldn’t tell what kind of noise it was.
“I’m sorry I killed your son,” he said into the phone. The words were garbled because his throat was so thick and so dry. He put his head down on his arms and hoped the guards didn’t think he was crying. He was, a little bit, but that was beside the point.
He felt she was waiting for him to say something else. He wasn’t sure what, and then he knew. He took the phone into the cradle of his arms and said the rest: “I know you can’t forgive me.”
Forgive. It wasn’t a word he had ever used before recently. Wanting forgiveness was a part of him now; he craved it like he craved alcohol.
There was a long silence.
“It’s funny,” she said at last, though there was nothing funny in the whole world, as far as Paul could tell. He looked up and her face was calm. “I’ve been thinking about that.” She spoke like a teacher, someone who knew something. “The Bible says ‘Forgive and you will be forgiven,’ … and the Buddhists, of course, believe that hatred only leads to further hatred and suffering. As for me—I don’t know. I know I don’t want to hold on to hatred anymore. I can’t.”
Her eyes lingered on his face, as if she was deciding whether or not he was hideous. It occurred to him that wanting forgiveness meant you had to give it, too. He knew he hadn’t forgiven his dad for some things. He couldn’t imagine doing that.
“Tommy’s teaching me, every day,” she continued, and he nearly fell right off his seat. How could Tommy be teaching her anything? “He’s forcing me to let go of him,” she said, “to surrender to the moment at hand. There’s joy there. If you can do it.”
He couldn’t believe she was sitting there talking about learning something from her dead son, talking about joy, to him. To him! Maybe he’d driven her crazy and he’d have that on his conscience, too.
“How is it here?” she asked quietly. “Is it bad?”
He couldn’t tell whether she wanted to hear that it was or it wasn’t.
“It’s what I deserve, I guess,” he said simply.
She didn’t dispute it, but she didn’t seem happy about it, either. “I’d like you to write me,” she said. “Will you do that? I want to know what it’s like in here and how you’re getting on. I want to know the truth.”
“Okay.” He thought that he would tell her, too, even if she was crazy. He could tell her all the things he’d been through here that he didn’t want his own mom to know about.
“So we’ve got ourselves a deal?” she said. He nodded. She stood up. She belted her coat tightly across her waist—she was thin, like something that could break in two seconds, and at the same time he felt that she was probably tougher than he could ever hope to be. She lifted her hand up to him and waved good-bye, a smile passing across her face, there and gone, so quick he wasn’t sure if he’d imagined it.
After the visit, he stabilized a bit. He stopped hating the feel of the scratchy uniform on his skin, and the way one moment slammed into the next moment with no room for wriggling free except for the novels he got out from the prison library and the GED class he was taking and the visits from his mom to see how he was doing. He wrote letters to Mrs. Crawford, telling her the truth. He woke every morning from a heavy, dreamless slumber, still surprised to find himself there.