Shannon, though, Shannon he could see; she was too beautiful to fade.
“Hey. I’m Shannon. Don’t you want to know me?” She introduced herself that way without glancing over at Clint, who was walking past on his way to the park. Sunbathing across the hood of a Buick that was parked at the curb outside the group home in Wheeling, blue tank top and black jeans, and smiling right up into the sun. “You’re Clint, aren’t you?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Uh-huh. Well, isn’t it nice to meet us?” she replied, and Clint, despite everything, had laughed, really laughed for the first time in who knew how long.
The group home in Wheeling where he met her was the last stop on his grand tour of the state foster system. For most, it was basically a connecting point to places like Dooling Correctional and Weston State. Weston, a monumental Gothic asylum, closed in 1994. Now, in 2017, it was open for ghost tours. Was that where his father ended up? Clint wondered. His mother? Or Richie, who got his nose and three fingers broken by some prep school boys at a mall because he said they shouldn’t make fun of his purple jacket that had come from a donation box? Or Marcus? He knew they couldn’t all be dead or in prison, and yet it didn’t seem like any of them could still be breathing and free. Did they all float around the dark halls of Weston after hours? Did they ever talk about Clint? Were they glad for him—or did he shame them by still living?
5
The Wheeling home was preferable to many of the stops that had preceded it. The sneering administrator, thumbs popping the pockets of his gray polyester vest, admonished each new arrival, “Enjoy your last year on the state’s tit, younker!” But he, the sneering administrator, didn’t want any trouble. So long as you managed not to get arrested, he let you sign in and out all day long. You could fight, fuck, or shoot up. Just keep it out of the house, younker.
He and Shan were both seventeen then. She had taken notice of Clint’s reading habit, how he slipped off to a park down the street and sat on a bench to catch up on his homework, despite the cold late fall weather. Shannon had also seen the bloody scrapes on his hands from the trouble he found—and sometimes searched for—between the home and school. They got to be friends. She gave him advice. Most of it was good.
“You’ve almost made it out, you know,” she said. “Just need to keep from killing anyone a little while longer,” she said. “Let your brain make you rich,” she said. Shan spoke as if the world didn’t matter too much to her, and somehow that made Clint want to make it matter—to her, to himself.
He went out for track and stopped fighting. That was the short version. The long one was Shannon, Shannon in the sun, Shannon prodding him to run faster, to apply for scholarships, to stick to his books and stay off the sidewalks. Shannon at night, jimmying the lock on the door of the boys’ floor with a celluloid-backed playing card (the queen of spades), and slipping into Clint’s room.
“Hey now,” she said at the sight of him in his team uniform, tank top and high shorts. “If I ruled the world, all the boys would have to wear shorts like that.”
Shannon had been gorgeous and she’d been clever and she had her own boatload of problems and Clint thought maybe she’d saved his life.
He went to college. She advised him to go, and when he hesitated (talking about the army), she demanded. She said, “Don’t be no fool, get your ass to school.”
He did and they fell out of touch, phone calls too expensive and letters too time-consuming. It was eight or nine years between when he left for college before they reconnected that New Year’s in DC. 2001? 2002? He’d been in town to attend a seminar at Georgetown and stayed on for a night because of car trouble. Lila had told him he was allowed to go out and get drunk, but he was forbidden to kiss any desperate women. He could kiss a desperate man if he absolutely had to, but no more than one.
The bar where he’d run into Shan was boiling with college kids. She was waitressing. “Hey, pal,” she said to Clint, stepping up beside at him the bar, bumping him with her hip. “I used to know a guy in the joint who looked just like you.”
They had embraced for a long time, swaying back and forth in each other’s arms.
She looked tired, but she seemed all right. They managed to get a minute alone in a corner underneath a flashing Molson sign. “Where y’all?” she had asked.
“Out in the sticks: Tri-Counties. Place called Dooling. A day’s drive from here. It’s a beauty spot.”
He had shown her a photo of four-month-old Jared.
“Oh, look at him. Now wasn’t it all worth it, Clint? I need to get me one of those.”
Dew shone on Shannon’s eyelashes. People were screaming all around them. It was almost a new year. “Hey,” he’d said to her. “Hey, it’s all right.”
She had looked up at him and the years had narrowed and it was like they were kids again. “Is it?” Shannon asked. “Is it all right, Clint?”
6
Over the warden’s shoulder, on the other side of the glass, late afternoon shadows were staining the garden, where there were rows of lettuce and peas climbing trellises built of scrap wood. Coates cupped her hands around her coffee cup as she spoke.
The coffee cup! Clint could upend it on Don Peters’s crotch and then smash it against his ear!
There was a time, before he knew Shannon Parks, when he would have done so. He reminded himself that he was a father and a husband, a doctor, a man with too much gray in his hair to fall into the trap of violence. Sometime soon he was going to clock out and go home to his wife, his son, and a nice view out the glass doors to a pool in the backyard. Fighting for milkshakes had been in another life. Still, he wondered what that coffee cup was made of, if it was that heavy ceramic that sometimes didn’t even crack when you dropped it on hard tile.
“You’re taking this rather well,” observed Janice Coates.
Peters brushed a finger along his mustache. “I’m just enjoying thinking about how my lawyer is going to make me a millionaire off this wrongful firing, Warden. I think I’ll buy a boat. Also, I was raised to be a gentleman no matter how I was mistreated. So, fire me. Fine, but you got no proof. I’m going to roll you up in court.” He glanced at Clint, who was standing by the door. “You okay? I see you standing there and making fists, you need to pinch a loaf or something, Doc?”
“Fuck you,” Clint said.
“See? That’s not nice,” said Peters. Smiling, showing teeth the color of shoepeg corn.