I remembered meeting Roman, talking briefly with him and his family at the prison’s Christmas dinners. He was almost cartoonishly handsome, like the drawings of Prince Valiant in the old comics sections my parents used to pull from the Sunday newspapers. Sweet, soft-spoken, he was married to a girl he’d known all his life, who meant what she said about better and worse and stuck by him after Roman, who was also a binge drinker, mowed down a mother and daughter, killing the daughter, who had two children of her own. Roman’s little boy, Joey, was at one of those dinners. Roman told us that Joey was the same age as one of his victim’s children.
Stefan said, “You guys only met him a couple times. But I saw Roman and Trina and their little boy all the time because they had those special visiting hours for families to have some private time, but you could invite another inmate in if the guards and the family approved of it.”
While Roman and Trina held hands and talked privately, Stefan used to play with Joey, making puppets out of strips of paper and playing endless rounds of Chutes and Ladders. Trina told Stefan later that whenever he wasn’t around, Joey would ask, where’s that big boy? Does he want to play? “She was just the nicest person. She raises Neapolitan mastiffs as a business and her breeding pair, Churchill and Tosca, they’re champions, worth ten thousand dollars each.” He said she had emailed him when he got out, and I remembered him talking about it at the time. “Trina said that Roman was seriously depressed when I left. I used to keep his mood up a little. We played chess and talked about movies. Now I’m not even allowed to write to him.”
Stefan’s parole conditions stipulated that he could never associate with another former inmate.
While I quickly volunteered to act as the intermediary on behalf of Stefan this time, the next day, I confided in Julie my anxiety about doing this. She stepped up and offered to help me. I lied when I told Stefan I was ready. The Healing Project was way more appealing to me in concept than in actuality.
Julie was always made of sterner stuff than I. You don’t think of oral surgeons as having to be gladiators, but Julie showed me pictures of mouths with grotesquely mislocated teeth impinging on the person’s eye sockets that turned my stomach. In ordinary life, to be fair, Julie’s sterner stuff had not been tested quite as vigorously as mine had. But I owed Stefan for dumping ice water all over his zeal. This would be my amends; and to quote Thea Demetriou, it wouldn’t always be pretty.
It wasn’t Roman who answered our knock when we arrived at his home, but his wife, Trina. When she swung open the door, I nearly jumped onto Julie’s back. The dog creature who stepped into the space resembled a living gargoyle the size of a pony. “Say hi, Churchie,” Trina instructed the beast. Julie knelt, and a hundred and fifty pounds of muscle melted into her arms like a newborn lamb. Nervously, Trina invited us in. “I would really like to give Stefan one of our puppies as a thank-you.” Another huge dog, trailed by a slight blond boy, rounded the corner into the front hall as we entered. Tentatively, I ruffled the several yards of grizzled skin that draped the dog’s neck.
“These are very expensive dogs,” I said. “You shouldn’t just be giving them away.”
“Well, Thea, I can call you Thea, right? My husband might not be alive except for Stefan.”
Roman came to greet us, and I remembered his abundant waves of hair and eyes so big they almost looked upside-down. He was still jail pale, only fifty days out.
“Stefan and I talked about everything,” Roman told us, as Trina and Joey carried plates of sandwiches into the living room where we gathered. “Sure, I hated that Stefan was there. I hated what he did. But he seemed like just a kid, not that much older than my students. And your son was just consumed with regret. Helping him find a way to go on, it helped me find a way to go on. I never pictured myself in prison. Not that anyone ever does.”
Roman asked if I had a picture of Stefan with me. Then he laughed. Why would you? Stefan wasn’t a child whose mother carried school pictures in her wallet. But he wondered, had Stefan gained some weight? I assured him that he had, that Stefan was stronger in every way, working outside, planning to go back and finish college and that he sent his regards. Roman seemed relieved by this. Stefan often told him what we already knew, that if he’d ever really cared about anything beyond Belinda, maybe none of this would have happened. Roman preached the salvation of school. Nothing about education would ever go to waste, he told Stefan, although they acknowledged that nothing about education had made either of them smart enough to avoid his fate.
“Guys like Stefan and I, we had a lot more breaks than most of the others in there. But we were murderers,” Roman said. “Stefan often said, why did people always tell you to get past feeling guilty? And I agreed. Guilt is probably one of the most complicated of human feelings, but one of the most useful. It makes you think.” Roman laughed nervously at himself now, tugging at his mat of blond curls I noticed now were going gray.
Sun spattered the perfectly alphabetized spines of a library straight out of old-timey Boy’s Life: Treasure Island, Great Expectations...and it did seem absurd that we were sitting in this safe, silent space talking about unspeakable horrors. I knew from Stefan that Roman had been a model prisoner, breaking up fights, hosting book clubs, but nothing eased his shame. He told us now, “I can never get past the wounded bafflement on the face of my own mother and father, a vegetable farmer from Del Rio, Texas, who put his four sons through college.” He added, “I am the youngest of them and, especially for my mother, I was a shining light, the promise of the American dream made real. The only time I feel suitably punished is when I think about never being able to teach again.” He remembered his father, too, exhausted, his faded blue shirt still salty with sweat and grassy from the smell of the tomato fields, reading to them at night about Thor Heyerdahl’s epic voyage aboard Kon-Tiki. Now, encouraged by his wife, Roman was going to complete a second degree that would allow him to work as an alcohol and drug abuse counselor.
“The purpose of this Healing Project is just that, to start you on a new road,” Julie said. “But even more, it lets you do some real good for your victim’s family.” As we spoke, I noticed a door to the room open and close quickly. A small, attractive woman, maybe in her late sixties, poked her head in for an instant. The look on her face as she took in the scene was as if she were watching a knife fight. This is his mother, I thought. I wished I could sit alone with her and talk about all of this.
Roman’s proposal for renewal was that, as a drug counselor, he would pledge part of his salary to an education fund for the children of the young woman he had killed. Merry Betancourt would help him set up the fund, which would start with an initial grant from The Healing Project until he finished his training as a counselor.
He read his letter to us: