I IM’ed Clare after I heard them pull away.
RU There?
R they gone?
2 C him.
Not U.
Not if I was going to hang.
I wouldn’t either.
Do U want me to com over?
Maybe.
R U doing the alone thing?
Rite now. Maybe later.
Actually, I fell asleep. The discussion with my folks had worn me out.
And when I woke up, it was dark and I could hear them talking in the kitchen. I went down, because I was starving, and took out some tortillas and melted cheese on them in the toaster oven. Then I sat down at the table. I knew they wouldn’t say anything to me unless I started it.
“So,” I said finally with a huge sigh, “how’d it go?”
My mother’s face was all rosy and young, and her hair curled around her face. “It was wonderful!” she said. “I mean that, Ronnie. It was terribly sad, but in a good way.”
They told me about the room where they met. It wasn’t like a regular visiting room, more like a living room, with a sofa and soft chairs. A guard brought in Scott Early, who was wearing handcuffs, and then the mediator, who brought cups of water and joked that he would have brought coffee and stuff. The first thing Scott Early did was give my parents a journal he’d copied on the machine in the institution’s library—the thoughts he’d written over the years. It started back when he was first battling with what he’d done, and then it went on later, when he could analyze his disease with what he knew about brain chemistry. Then he went on to his responsibility. He said the journal explained more than he ever could; he wasn’t good at speaking his feelings, like his wife.
“And then?”
“We took our turn to talk,” said my father. “We talked about our family and about that day, and the year after. He listened, and his face was so drawn and . . . awful, Ronnie. As if he were being whipped. Every time we’d stop, he’d say, ‘No, please go on. I need to hear this.’”
“He agreed to this mediation for us, not for him,” said my mother. “He said he was never going to get over what he’d done. For him, that wasn’t the point. He said he wanted to dedicate whatever time he had left on earth to trying to heal what he’d done to us. He said that what he’d done, he’d done to the whole world.”
“Nice of him,” I said, getting more tortillas.
My mother said, “Scott Early said that once his medication took hold, he had dreams. They were of that day. He was wearing only ragged underwear and walking across the lawn, but instead of slashing at your sisters, he was telling them not to play with the scythe, that it was dangerous. Then he was picking them up and throwing them up over his head, and they were laughing. And you came out and asked what he was doing, saying that he was a stranger and to leave the little girls alone. But you smiled. He asked for a drink of water and you gave him one, and he said it was the best water he’d ever drunk. He’d been so thirsty, his throat was like dust, but after he drank it, he felt strength. You threw him an old pair of pants. He wasn’t cold then. He thanked you and he left.”
“He’s just putting himself in a Bible story to make himself feel better. ‘I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was naked and you clothed me,’” I quoted.
“‘As you did to the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.’ Surely a murderer is the least of your brethren, Ronnie. It’s the same dream you had. Admit it,” my mother said. “Except the gun.”
I had to think about that, because basically she was right. It gave me the willies.
“Is that all?” I asked them.
No, it wasn’t. The mediator asked my parents to talk about their anger and about their memories of Ruth and Rebecca. He asked my father what he would have done if he had come home while Scott Early was there. My father said he would have shot him, if not to kill him, then to disable him. There was a lot of other stuff. The mediator asked Scott Early what remorse meant to him. They asked my family what repentance meant to them. They agreed that it meant you had to become a new person and that if the new person ever committed the sin again, then the repentance was void.
After that, Kelly, his wife, was let in. My mother hugged her, because, as Mama said, her agony was all over her face. She told them about the hate mail she got and how, at first, she wanted to leave Scott Early and run as far and as fast as she could, but that her marriage vows said in sickness and in health, and they didn’t mean just the physical kind. They had met when they were sixteen. She had known Scott Early almost half her life. She looked forward to every visit she had with him. But before her first visit, she was scared that she might not be able to hug him and hold him and be with him. She was afraid she might look at his hands and think of what he’d done. Kelly said it had to have been a different person—that this was why schizophrenics were once described as split personalities. She hoped she would be able to be truly loving to Scott Early. All she knew up to that first visit was that she would be able to be kind. She was trained to be kind, even with mentally ill people. She didn’t know if that would work when the mentally ill person was her own husband.
The thought of all this love and attention focused on Scott Early made my mouth fill with saliva, the way it does when a person is nauseated and tries not to throw up.
At the end, the mediator asked if my parents wanted to exchange some gesture with Scott Early. They were afraid to. It was the moment when they had to stack their faith against his crime. But finally, my father reached out and held Scott Early’s forearm; and my mother took his hand. And they told him, We forgive you, in Becky’s and Ruthie’s names. He cried, and Kelly cried. He said he didn’t deserve their kindness. He asked if he could write to them, and they said he could.
“It was one of the most stunning moments of our lives,” Papa said, “because we meant it. We felt free. We felt as though the huge burden of our hatred, that I carried on my back all those nights I walked and walked, was lifted. Not the grief. But the anger. We saw through him, to the person he had been before.” They told me that the doctors were considering letting Scott Early out in a year or so, but that it would be our legal right to always know where he was, and in every neighborhood where he lived, the neighbors would be told what he had done.
I was thinking about how great it would be to get Christmas cards from my sisters’ killer. But I told them I was glad for them. I kissed them good night.
When I was back upstairs, listening to music quietly and trying to fall asleep again, I had a flash.
They hadn’t forgiven him in my name. I was free, but in another way. There were to come months of thoughts and plans that I made and put aside. But I guess that was when I decided.
Chapter Fourteen
I think every religion must have been started by a person who loved someone who died.
Even Heavenly Father must have grieved terribly for Jesus, His only son. He must mourn for Him even today. No matter how I try, I’ve never fully understood how a father could sacrifice his child for the sake of wicked people. If the Father had made the grave decision to atone for the sins of humanity, why wouldn’t He offer Himself as a sacrifice? Any other parent would have. There must be an answer. But I’ve never found one so far that makes sense of that first choice, to let Jesus die in agony and disgrace and to have to watch. That’s probably sacrilegious. But I know how barbaric it was to see something much quicker and more merciful happen to people I loved. And knowing what that was like, if I had the choice now, I honestly wouldn’t select my sisters for that fate to save myself or even to save the world. I know people still die all the time for ideals or allow their children to go to war. I knew that the founder of our church, Joseph Smith, suffered horribly as a little boy, with four operations on a lame leg and no anesthesia. When he got married, they lost baby after baby to diphtheria or typhoid or one of those old diseases we don’t get now. Everyone yearns for heaven, and nothing binds you to the hope of eternal life like that kind of defeat on eart
h. Maybe it’s not a defeat. Perhaps you must be divine to see the meaning. But as the mortal I am now, I know this much: When someone you love that much leaves you behind, so all at once, there isn’t as much of you left to die when your own time comes.
I’m sure of it, and that’s regardless of all the good that has been God’s gracious gift to me, in the face of my hardheaded foolishness. My mother would say that I ignored the magnificence of God’s plan for me, though she loves me all the same. But I’m not sure that what I did wasn’t part of that plan—for me—as what they did was part of the plan for my parents.
I look back and realize that Becky’s and Ruthie’s deaths really were like the eclipse I saw when I was six. For a while, everything else was blotted out. And then the sun returned, and the sun hadn’t changed; but we had. We were people who had lived in the darkness at noon and knew even the sun was something that wasn’t necessarily to be counted on. Their deaths were more profound than the sum of all our lives to that point. All crime victims think of their lives divided neatly into two segments. “Before” is always a summer day. If I have a sore throat and, even so, a double shift ahead of me, or have a sore back—when I’ve said, “One, two, three, lift,” and the other two people holding the sheet were looking out the window—or if my life seems to want more love or work than I can give in the hours that make up a day, I sink back. I tumble back, and it is a windy summer day. I know that it seems sunnier to me now than it did when I thought it was just an ordinary part of a not particularly dramatic childhood. Memory is a trickster. And yet.
Suddenly I am back there, with Becky and Ruthie up in front of me on Ruby, clumping down the path, then all of us jumping down to splash in the creek. Becky is trying to catch the little sunfish in her two hands.
I suppose what made it worse for me that last year at home was my certainty that no one except me seemed to recognize that the eclipse changed everything. It was not just because my mother was wearing maternity jeans and dancing to Marvin Gaye while cooking and tickling Rafe and sprucing up the house—things I’d longed to see for years—but because my parents were bathed in the comfort of having forgiven Scott Early. It couldn’t ever have been the same, really; but that act of glorious faith, or foolishness, wiped away the chance that we could ever be anything like the family we were, unless there ever was another event that changed our lives utterly.
And so I began the first steps of the plan for my own reconciliation. Not retaliation. I didn’t think of it that way.
I took driver’s education from an old man who delivered cheese to Jackie and Barney. He’d once been a PE teacher, and though he couldn’t see very well, he still taught a few private students. Serena helped me, too. Whenever she wasn’t at drama club, or I wasn’t working at church for my job, unpacking and stacking big boxes of cereal and toothpaste, we drove around the hilly roads like two wackos in some old seventies TV show. Serena had a little Honda CR-V that her parents had given her for her seventeenth birthday, but she was more gifted in doing pedicures than the three-point turn. At least, though, she could do it and survive. I could sew, and I could teach a horse to back up, but I couldn’t get that car into four-wheel drive to save either of our lives. We would end up sliding backward into little ditches, two 120-pound girls pushing two tons of car.
“Now, Ronnie,” Serena would say once we were back in the seats, belted in and sweating as if we’d run a mile, “remember. Small corrections on the turns, tip, tip, tip. Don’t jerk it like you’re trying to steer the Titanic around an iceberg.”
It was better when we took to the highway and drove to Cedar City. I discovered I had one genius for driving. I could parallel park like an army sergeant. The fact that Serena’s car was about the size of Rafe’s Little Tikes mobile didn’t hurt.
Since I was barely speaking to my parents, except to ask politely if they needed help with something or to answer a direct question, I couldn’t enlist my father. On top of our not speaking, my father would have used our practice sessions in the car to try to convert me to their point of view about Scott Early. Given his ability to talk the birds out of the trees, he might actually have been successful. And if he got me to agree with him, it would have had the effect of making me more than angry with my father, which would in turn have been a terrible heartbreak. I loved both of my parents equally, but I liked my father more. That he had been the brains behind the mediation session at Stone Gate hadn’t done much for that feeling.
One day when we were on the way to get Jade feed, I was driving the pickup and my father said, “By the way you’re shifting gears and checking your blind spots, you seem pretty comfortable behind the wheel. . . .”
“I am, Papa,” I said. “I’m ready.”
“I always imagined I would be the one who taught my eldest how to drive,” he said wistfully.
“We’ve hardly been together,” I said. “You know that.”
“That’s been your choice.”
“Yes, it’s been my choice,” I said.
“Are you a good driver?”
I used one of his own phrases. “Good enough for government work,” I said.
“Then I’ll schedule your test,” he said. “Although this isn’t the way we do things. . . .”
“As Mormons or as us?”
“Us,” he said.
“There isn’t a way we do things anymore, Papa,” I said, “and I’m as sad about that as you are.”
He told me the news then.
Scott Early was about to be released. He had been successful on his home visits—very successful, I thought in an ugly way, given that his wife was already pregnant. And they were moving, somewhere out along the coast. He would continue to study library science—a program he had begun in the hospital—until he had a master’s degree. “Scott” had never had another “incident.”
An incident, I thought, and hit the gas a little.
“Slow down,” my father said. “Get a ticket now and you’ll never get a license.”
I thought about the other ocean. The warm one Serena had told me about. Papa began to tell me where Scott Early was living, since the law required that we always know Scott Early’s whereabouts; but I asked him to stop. In all honesty, I was concentrating on remembering the road signs and pedestrian awareness and the way to yield at a four-way stop. In due time, I would learn. I thought of the ocean and its eternal, imploring calm.
But it was my father who finally drove me to Cedar City to take my test.
He sighed as he signed the papers certifying I’d done my practice.
The tester at the bureau was the twin of the little old guy who delivered cheese to Jackie and Barney. I passed on the first go.
And then it was a matter of getting a car.
I had savings from work, birthday money, Christmas gifts, enough for a couple of semesters at a technical school, where I had decided I would learn to be an emergency medical technician, either for a private ambulance company or for a fire department. The course catalogs I’d sent for, from Boston and Arizona and Chicago, described the job as stressful, requiring long hours (but with a flexible schedule) and the ability to face life-and-death situations. This was supposed to warn you off, but I figured that stress and long hours were my natural habitat. And no one could know more about the sight of people who were injured. At least in this job I’d get a chance to change the odds.
In cities, a person could earn twenty-five thousand dollars or more a year at this work. It wouldn’t take me too long to save enough for college if I lived in a rooming house or at the YWCA. And some colleges, such as UCLA, allowed EMTs to earn their way through school by working for emergency medical services on campus while they were earning their degrees in microbiology or public health—on their way to medical school! What could possibly be better?
One evening before bed, I asked Papa if Jade belonged to me or to our family.
“She’s yours, Ronnie,” Papa said. “And you’ve trained her beautifully.”
“Papa
,” I said, tears teasing my eyes, “I’m going to sell Jade.”
Before he could stop himself, he cried, “No! You love that horse! That horse brought . . . you back!”
“I know. I love her. But I’m going away, and you knew that, to earn money for college, and then to college. No one here will ride her. I have trained her beautifully. She’d behave for anyone, even a child. She’s bombproof. And, I need a car. I know that with the baby coming and with Rafe, you don’t have that kind of money, though I know you would if you could. I need a safe car, Papa. And Jade deserves an owner who’ll be there for her every day.”
Mama came into the room, lumbering. She looked bigger than she ever had when she was pregnant. I wondered if the baby really was further along than they’d thought. It wouldn’t be long now until the baby came and until the . . . anniversary. “What’s all this?” she asked, taking out a plate and filling it with molasses cookies.
“Ronnie has made a decision,” my father said.
It wounded her; I could see it in her eyes, although her mouth said plainly that it was up to me. “Ronnie, we’d set aside funds to help you with college . . . if you wait,” Mama said, “until after your mission.”
“But you didn’t count on the baby.”
“No.”
“And I can do this. I know I can.”
“You’ve always been . . . resolute,” she said.
“I won’t ignore my mission. . . .”
“I know you won’t. And for girls, well, it’s not as essential it be so long, or that you do one at all. Perhaps there’s a way that we can find out whether what you do in this work—”
“Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it, Cressie,” Papa said.
As a gesture of goodwill and because I needed my father’s touch, I asked him to pray with me to find a good owner for Jade.
I hoped it would take longer than a week. But that’s what you get when you pray.