He introduced himself—his name was Shawn; he was very pleased to meet me.
Shawn said he’d give me the lawyer’s room, which was better than speaking through a Plexiglas shield. I wasn’t sure why. Was it because he knew I wasn’t a family member? Or because he thought I had traveled on a long journey from the Orient? Or because I had let him flirt with me?
He walked me to a private room labeled INTERROGATION in faded stenciled letters. The room was dank and musky. A bucket sat near the corner, collecting water. Above, a purplish-black splotch spread on the ceiling. I tried to hold my breath, not wanting to inhale the vaguely toxic smell. Patrick emerged. He was shocked, and then he smiled.
“How are you?” I asked.
“I’m all right, ma’am. I’m doing all right.”
As if suddenly remembering something, he said, “How are you, Ms. Kuo?”
“Good.”
“Where you be living now?”
“California.”
He repeated carefully, “California.” He seemed to be trying to recall the word, or a map, in his mind.
I asked him how his family was.
“They be all right.” He paused and we both were silent. He realized that I expected him to say more.
“Yeah, sometime while back they visited. My sisters, my daddy, they all crowd inside the window,” he said.
“You’ve got three sisters?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“No brothers?”
“Naw.”
When I was a teacher, I had known very little about Patrick’s background. Certainly I hadn’t known that he had three sisters and no brothers. Now I realized that this was an essential fact. His mother must have asked him to look for his sister because he was the only son, the man of the house.
“Your mom didn’t come?”
He shook his head. “She got work and, really, it be…it be hard on her to see me. It’s been months since I seen them.”
His family did not live far from the county jail, no more than five miles away. I must have looked surprised, because he looked down. “To be honest, ma’am, I don’t like seeing them this way.” He stopped, searching for the right words. “I smile, but you know…but I don’t like to put on no front. So I just ask them not to come.”
Patrick fell silent again.
“We don’t have to talk about it,” I offered.
School had been where we connected, and I wanted to know: Why had he dropped out? How had it happened? I cared as much about these questions as I did about the question of what had gone wrong one night a year ago. I suppose I believed, on some deep level, that none of this would have happened—that we would not be here in jail—had he stayed in school. Secretly I imagined there had been a noble reason for him to quit; perhaps somebody, his mother or one of his sisters, had gotten sick, and he needed to get a job to support her.
“So when did you”—I was about to say drop out—“stop going to school?”
My tone was unnaturally casual.
Patrick looked away. He didn’t want to talk about this, either. “I tried…” he began. “I wasn’t getting all that treatment you was giving me at Stars. I really didn’t learn too much trigonometry.” He enunciated the word slowly, not wanting to get a syllable wrong.
“Is that what got you down, math?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What grades were you getting?”
“Low grades.”
“Like we’re talking…Fs?”
He hung his head.
“I ain’t know nothing about trigonometry, to tell you the truth.”
“You were good at math,” I said, remembering his fractions.
“Not this math.”
“You didn’t ask your teacher for help?”
Patrick kept his head down.
“Did you think about asking him?”
I tried to keep my tone neutral. Then it occurred to me that it didn’t matter what tone I used or even what I said. It was an unsalvageable conversation: I had been his teacher, and he had dropped out.
“Just didn’t have a lot of…” His voice trailed off. “It be a lot of pressure to ask.”
There was no way—absolutely none—that our math classes at Stars had prepared him for trigonometry. Certainly my after-school math class hadn’t. And the official math teacher at Stars coached the baseball and football teams at Miller, which meant that he frequently left the school hours early, for games and practice, leaving the police officer to chaperone.
Just a few minutes ago I’d been mystified by the question of why Patrick had dropped out; now I could picture it perfectly. I could picture him in his math classroom, in a sea of thirty faces, slipping by unnoticed in a seat in the back, observing the others. I imagined him starting to miss classes. Math, in particular, is cumulative: If you miss one day, the next day you’re lost. I imagined him returning after having disappeared, hoping for a fresh start. Then he’d be given a worksheet that danced with triangles and shapes, with words like sin, cos, tan. He must have felt baffled. I had never known Patrick to ask for help. He took help if you offered it, but he didn’t ask for it.
Then I thought, coldly, that he did have a tendency to give up easily.
I leaned back in my chair. So the topic of school was like the topic of family: a dead end.
“So have you talked to your public defender?”
“My what?”
“Your lawyer.”
“Naw. I don’t know him.”
“Do you have a trial date?”
He shook his head. “Man, I don’t know nothing about that.”
“Do you know what you’re being charged for?”
For the first time Patrick leaned forward, realizing that I might know something that he didn’t about his case. He was flustered. “Ms. Kuo, what I be charged for? Nobody told me nothing.”
His charge—of course. This was what he wanted to talk about, what he thought I could do to help him now. I knew some basics but hadn’t expected that I would be the one to communicate them.
I chose my words carefully. Where once I had tried to think of creative ways to explain theme and symbolism, I tried now to avoid using abstruse legal terms: mens rea, malice aforethought.
“It all has to do with state of mind,” I began. “There’s first-degree and second-degree…” I paused, not wanting to say murder.
“First-degree is when a person intends to—”
Patrick broke into my words, the first time he’d interrupted me. His body tensed, his voice reached a desperate pitch. “I didn’t intend to hurt him; I was just looking for my sister. He got to talking crazy with me, about the bloods, the gang he be in. He be talking really crazy. I tried to walk off and he grabbed me.”
“Do you remember what he was saying?”
He drew back in his seat, embarrassed by his outburst. “I don’t remember much,” he said in a low voice. “It’s confusing, it all happen so fast.”
I cleared my throat. “How did you feel during that moment?”
“Ms. Kuo, I wasn’t really trying to hurt him, or to”—he stopped, gathering strength—“kill him.” At the word kill, he fell silent. “I just…I just started crying when they say what I’d done. I really didn’t intend to; I was really just looking out for my little sister.”
“Do you remember why you were crying?”