Not replying, he pointed toward a glass window. Patrick was waiting on the other side.
When I walked toward the window, I almost expected the Patrick I remembered: gap-toothed, half-grinning, a sheepish mixture of the wry and pensive. That look that greeted me when he didn’t do his homework, when I visited him at his house, when I said something nice to him.
Patrick’s face had thinned. His striped prison garb was two sizes too big. His mouth was turned downward. He looked older—he was older. It had been two years since I’d seen him.
He looked very surprised to see me.
I picked up the black phone hung on the wall.
“Ms. Kuo, I didn’t mean to,” he blurted out, in a tone of supplication.
Those were his first words to me. They sounded common, the words of a child who had done something wrong. In reality, he was no longer a child; he must have been eighteen or nineteen now. But I suppose in my mind he still was one.
I asked him what happened. He told me that he’d come home that night, looking for Pam, his youngest sister, who was in special ed. She was sixteen. He knocked on a neighbor’s door. Nobody answered. He went home again. This time Pam was walking up to the porch with a man called Marcus. They looked high; he was definitely drunk. Marcus started to talk crazy to him. Patrick told him to get off the porch. Marcus wouldn’t get off. Patrick thought Marcus might have a weapon in his pocket. He got scared and picked up a knife, which, he said, was on the porch because he’d used it to fix his nephew’s stroller that day. He’d just meant to scare the guy. But they fought. Marcus limped away, and Patrick was about to go inside when he saw that Marcus had fallen near the sidewalk. The police came. They handcuffed Patrick. He told me that he’d been in jail for three days, that there were bad people there, and that the jail was like hell.
I asked him what kind of relationship Marcus and Pam had. “They were having sex,” he said. He stopped. “I didn’t mean to kill him,” he said again.
He was silent. We looked at each other through the glass. He shook his head. “Ms. Kuo, I don’t even know.”
The way he said it—“Ms. Kuo, I don’t even know”—made him seem more familiar.
We talked more. How were his dad and mom? Fine. Making it. How was the food? Bad, real bad. How was school? He couldn’t keep up. Just stopped going. He tried, he really did. But he didn’t want to talk about it.
The officer came to get me. Time was up.
I rose and thought about the last time I’d seen him. Toward the end of our year together, some form of self-knowledge had begun to flicker inside Patrick, a self-knowledge too tremulous to be called pride. But I would have called it a kind of warmth toward oneself. “I can hear myself in here,” Patrick had told me about our classroom. Now that warmth had either disappeared or gone dormant. Whatever gains we’d made had receded. Did those gains still matter?
I told Patrick I’d write. It was a promise, I reminded myself, that I must keep.
—
I HAD BEEN taking a writing class when Patrick was arrested. After I returned from visiting him, I started to write about my time teaching. Frenzied, concentrated, I wished to remember everything. Two years had passed since I’d left the Delta, yet the names of certain students returned to me like reflex. Miles, Tamir, Kayla. Writing was like stepping back into an old dream.
At first, writing felt urgent and necessary. Writing joined me to Patrick, allowing me to remember who he was and my time in the Delta. In the privacy of my room, I could confront the Delta and consider what I had and hadn’t done for it. I tried to evaluate myself honestly. I asked, with dread, whether there was any connection between my leaving and Patrick’s dropping out of school. Like a vaccine that injects you with a strain of illness, writing infused a kind of negative life. I was admitting danger, admitting fallibility, and in so doing I was becoming stronger.
But that strength also felt odd. For, by the time I was done writing, it felt very nearly as if I was done with Patrick. No detail from my memory of him had gone unravaged; his gestures started to repeat themselves.
In trying to remember him, I had treated him like someone who was lost. In my writing, Patrick had become a thing on the page, somebody who existed to serve me and my need to not forget the Delta.
—
FIVE WEEKS PASSED. In November of 2008, Obama won the presidency. On a windy Boston evening, I searched three newsstands before I found one that hadn’t sold out of The Boston Globe. I wanted Patrick to see Obama’s triumphant picture, to feel a part of this historic event. I put together a package, also enclosing James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, marking an X in the margins of passages I liked. I had never shared the book with the students, afraid that they would be bored.
And I wrote him a letter. It began in a too-civil manner. How are you? I am well.
*
There was a black male in a red shirt lying face down [sic] just to the left of the hedge bush with blood under him. Myself and Ofc Rose was on scene as I rolled over the victim, he was gasping for air. I then try try [sic] to find a pulse but could not find one there was 2 large what appeared to be stab wounds to the upper chest area on the victim and his eyes were fixed and dilated.
In the spring of my last semester of law school, I showed Patrick’s police report to my professor, a former public defender whose ruthlessness I hoped Patrick might benefit from. I had enrolled in her criminal defense clinic and been assigned several cases. My main client was a heroin addict charged for assault and battery—of his mother. She was a sixty-seven-year-old diabetic from Mexico, whose five strokes had put her in a wheelchair. The whole family was fed up with him. He’d stolen her disability checks, left her place ravaged with needles, and nearly gotten them evicted.
My professor had told me to find out where the mother lived, knock on her door, and convince her to drop the charges.
“You want me to talk to…to talk with his mother?” I said, swallowing nervously.
“Who else?”
I’d done what she asked and gone to the apartment. But—perhaps to my own relief—the mother refused to budge.
Surely this professor, of all people, could uncover some aspect of the case that might help Patrick.