I told him I’d talked to his lawyer, assuming this would pique his interest. But he had only one question: When was the trial date? He wanted to get it over with. I repeated what Rob told me, that the date again had been postponed—likely no trial until December or maybe even February. At that he lost interest in the law altogether. He didn’t want to talk about his defense. Offhandedly I used the phrase murder charge, and he winced.
He moved the topic to his past. Maybe he had nothing else to talk about and no other direction to go. In retrospect, all incidents seemed to him connected. When he was twelve or so, he said, he was riding his bike, going to steal something. It was a friend’s idea. He had never stolen anything before. On his way he got hit by a truck and was knocked off his bike. “That be a sign, Ms. Kuo.”
“A sign?” I repeated. I’d known he was religious, like most of the kids, but I hadn’t known the extent of it.
Yeah, a sign: God was talking to him right then and there. God was saying he shouldn’t have been doing what he was doing. Nobody knew him the way God knew him.
Patrick recast important events in his life as premonitions he’d ignored. When he was eleven he was in his backyard, playing with a jug of gasoline. He ended up in the hospital, he missed weeks in school, and he fell behind. That was the same time the twin towers fell. He showed me his burns, darkened blotches on his ankles.
“Yes,” I said, “I remember.”
“Cause and effect,” he repeated to himself, as if this were the reason he was here now, the common phrase assuming theological weight. Patrick appeared trapped in a feedback loop: first self-reproach, then a desire to forget, and then, for wanting to forget, self-reproach.
Each conversation had patterns. He would speak and then break off. He would say something that depressed him and he’d drop his head so far down that his back and neck formed a smooth surface, like the top of a table. There were long stretches of silence in which neither of us spoke. I didn’t want to fill the silence with chatter or idle consolation. By not speaking, I thought, I was being honest about who I really was—not the rousing giver of pep talks, not the person who said, You can do it, I believe in you. By not speaking I was trying to say, rather, This is who I really am, a person who doesn’t know what to say, lost like you.
But in the end I usually could not take the silence: He needed to hear good news; he needed a messenger. “Hey, look at me,” I’d say. He’d raise his head slightly so that his eyes met mine, and I’d force myself to give him a pep talk. “Who you are isn’t what happened one night in your life, Patrick, okay?” Or, “Your family has only kind things to say about you, do you hear me? Only kind things.” Or, “Your family loves and misses you.” Or, simply, “I’m sorry this happened.” And despite the lack of substance or originality of these words, their tonal breakings suggested genuine grief.
If he spoke in reply, it was always an assent: “You right,” or “Yes, ma’am,” or “Thanks, Ms. Kuo.”
Before, school had been a world we shared. In the three years I had been absent, we had not simply lost touch with each other, we had ceased to have anything in common. I had assumed just being together would suffice. But we lived in two distinct worlds. His reality was sensory assault. My reality was apparent in the bright screen of my phone, which he touched with his fingertip, trying not to dirty it. Our bond was that between a former teacher and her former student, and its weakness now seemed exposed.
It was possible that for Patrick our conversations were not so terrible; talking to someone is usually better than having nobody to talk to. But for me our conversations were tedious. The shoddy county jail had appeared to accomplish its purpose: This was a punishment, and he had fixed himself into a state of perpetual confession. He wanted to feel guilty; he wanted to suffer. And I wasn’t qualified to act as a default priest.
And yet the idea that Patrick was solely guilty for the death of Marcus was nonsense, wasn’t it? Charged with murder, Patrick was the opposite of an archetypal murderer. He hadn’t covered his tracks. He hadn’t invented an alibi. He hadn’t rinsed the blood off the weapon and hidden it. He had watched the man he hurt walk away. It didn’t occur to him the man would die. He sat on the porch waiting for the police. He cried waiting. He got in the police car, he didn’t ask for a lawyer, and he didn’t feel like talking about a defense now. He did not blame society or poverty. Just himself. The problem was not that he wouldn’t confess but that he had confessed too much; it wasn’t far-fetched to think he might spend the rest of his life confessing.
And yet maybe he needed his guilt; otherwise the death would have happened for no reason, a result of senseless collision—of mental states, physical impulses, and coincidences. He needed, for his own sense of meaning, to knit his failures into a story. “Cause and effect,” as he put it. The thread was that he messed up by ignoring God.
But I didn’t believe the story he told himself. I wanted to break it. For me to do that, we needed to forge a connection. But what did I have that I could share with him?
All I could think of was books. There were other things he liked—he’d tended lovingly to his go-cart and said once that he wanted to be a mechanic. I didn’t believe that reading was inherently superior to learning how to fix a car, or that reading makes a person better. But I did love books, and I hadn’t yet shared with him anything I myself loved. Had I known how to sing, I would have had us sing.
Thus, at the end of October, about two weeks after I’d arrived, I heard myself say, “Patrick, I’m going to ask you to do something.”
Patrick looked at me expectantly.
I said, “I need you to do homework every day.”
He emitted a little childlike shriek—the first smile all day. “Ms. Kuo!” He laughed and covered his open mouth. “Naw, it’s over with.”
“What else are you going to do? Eat? Sit around?”
He was still laughing. “What you mean, homework?” He hadn’t heard that word in a while and it amused him. Then he went silent. “It’s over with,” he repeated.
“Come on,” I said lightly. My voice sounded too casual.
“Too late, Ms. Kuo.” His fingernail scratched the wood. “It’s too late.”
“What do you mean, too late? Dude, you didn’t graduate from high school,” I said. I cringed at how my words sounded in the air, affecting an ease that we didn’t yet share. I already knew he would do whatever I asked of him. Patrick, like Aaron and Gina and Kayla, always took guidance from adults, particularly me.
More gently, I said, “When your daughter sees you and can talk to you, won’t it feel good to read to her?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And you know I’m right.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Then it’s settled. Homework every day.”
I had no idea what the homework would consist of. What would I teach? How would I check his homework if I was coming only once a week? And what if I only knew how to relate to Patrick by exerting authority over him?
6
* * *
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
ON MONDAY MORNING I WAITED in the lobby of the jail, excited to read Patrick’s first piece of homework.