I Will Find You(3)

Cheryl, who had just finished her residency in general surgery, had a night shift in the transplant ward at Boston General. I was alone with Matthew. I started drinking. I’m not a big drinker and don’t handle spirits well, but in the past few months, with the strain on Cheryl and my marriage, I had found some, if not comfort, numb there. So I partook and I guess the drinks hit me hard and fast. In short, I drank too much and passed out, so instead of watching my child, instead of protecting my son, instead of making sure the doors were locked (they weren’t) or listening for an intruder or heck, instead of hearing a child scream in terror and/or agony, I was in a state the prosecutor at the trial mockingly called “snooze from booze.”

I don’t remember anything else until, of course, that smell.

I know what you’re thinking: Maybe he (meaning “I”) did do it. After all, the evidence against me was pretty overwhelming. I get that. It’s fair. I sometimes wonder about that too. You’d have to be truly blind or delusional not to consider that possibility, so let me tell you a quick story that I think relates to this: I once kicked Cheryl hard while we slept. I’d been having a nightmare that a giant raccoon was attacking our little dog, Laszlo, so in a sleep panic, I kicked the raccoon as hard as I could and ended up kicking Cheryl in the shin. It was oddly funny in hindsight, watching Cheryl try to keep a straight face as I defended my actions (“Would you have wanted me to let Laszlo get eaten by a raccoon?”), but my wonderful surgeon wife, a woman who loved Laszlo and all dogs, still seethed.

“Maybe,” Cheryl said to me, “subconsciously, you wanted to hurt me.”

She said that with a smile, so I didn’t think she meant it. But maybe she did. We forgot about it immediately and had a great day together. But I think about that a lot now. I was asleep and dreaming that night too. One kick isn’t a murder, but who knows, right? The murder weapon was a baseball bat. Mrs. Winslow, who had lived in the house behind our woods for forty years, saw me bury it. That was the kicker, though I wondered about that, about me being stupid enough to bury it so close to the scene, what with my fingerprints all over it. I wonder about a lot of things like that. For example, I had fallen asleep after a drink or two too many once or twice before—who hasn’t?—but never like this. Perhaps I’d been drugged, but by the time I was a viable suspect, it was too late to test for that. The local police, many of whom revered my father, were supportive at first. They looked into some bad people he’d put away, but that never felt right, not even to me. Dad had made enemies, sure, but that was a long time ago. Why would any of them kill a three-year-old boy for that kind of revenge? It didn’t add up. There were no signs of sexual assault or any other motive either, so really, when you add it all up, there was only one true viable suspect.

Me.

So maybe something like my raccoon-kick dream happened here. It’s not impossible. My attorney, Tom Florio, wanted to make an argument like that. My family, some of them anyway, believed that I should take that route too. Diminished capacity or some such defense. I had a history of sleepwalking and some of what could have been described as mental health issues, if you pushed the definition. I could use that, they reminded me.

But nah, I wouldn’t confess because, despite these rationales, I didn’t do it. I didn’t kill my son. I know I didn’t. I know. And yes, I know every perp says that.

Curly and I make the final turn. Briggs Penitentiary is done up in Early American Asphalt. Everything was a washed-out gray, a faded road after a rainstorm. I had gone from a three-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath Colonial, splashed in sunshine yellow with green shutters, decorated in earth tones and pine antiques, nicely situated on a three-quarter-acre lot in a cul-de-sac, to this. Doesn’t matter. Surroundings are irrelevant. Exteriors, you learn, are temporal and illusionary and thus meaningless.

There is a buzzing sound, and then Curly opens the door. Many prisons have updated visiting areas. Lower-risk inmates can sit at a table with their visitor or visitors with no partitions or barriers. I cannot. Here at Briggs we still have the bulletproof plexiglass. I sit on a metal stool bolted into the floor. My belly chain is loosened so that I can grab hold of the telephone. That is how visitors in the supermax communicate—via telephone and plexiglass.

The visitor isn’t my ex-wife Cheryl, though she looks like Cheryl.

It’s her sister, Rachel.

Rachel sits on the other side of the plexiglass, but I see her eyes widen when she takes me in. I almost smile at her reaction. I, her once beloved brother-in-law, the man with the offbeat sense of humor and the devil-may-care smile, have certainly changed in the past five years. I wonder what she notices first. The weight loss perhaps. Or more likely, the shattered facial bones that had not healed properly. It could be my ashen complexion, the slump from the once-athletic shoulders, the thinning and graying of my hair.

I sit down and peer at her through the plexiglass. I take hold of the phone and gesture that she should do the same. When Rachel lifts the phone to her ear, I speak.

“Why are you here?”

Rachel almost manages a smile. We were always close, Rachel and I. I liked spending time with her. She liked spending time with me. “Not much on pleasantries, I see.”

“Are you here to exchange pleasantries, Rachel?”

Whatever hint of a smile there was fades away. She shakes her head. “No.”

I wait. Rachel looks worn yet still beautiful. Her hair was still the same ash blonde as Cheryl’s, her eyes the same dark green. I shift on my stool and face her at an angle because it hurts to look directly at her.