“It was an accident,” he said and saw that shadow of skepticism, that downward twitch of the lips, that had crossed so many faces since he had confessed. “But that’s not why,” he added. “It was because I was a coward. A coward and an idiot.” He bent his head, too. He looked down at their hands, the two long brown ones, the two stubby white ones with the nails half-chewed off.
She made a noise on the other end of the phone. He couldn’t tell what kind of noise it was.
“I’m sorry I killed your son,” he said into the phone. The words were garbled because his throat was so thick and so dry. He put his head down on his arms and hoped the guards didn’t think he was crying. He was, a little bit, but that was beside the point.
He felt she was waiting for him to say something else. He wasn’t sure what, and then he knew. He took the phone into the cradle of his arms and said the rest: “I know you can’t forgive me.”
Forgive. It wasn’t a word he had ever used before recently. Wanting forgiveness was a part of him now; he craved it like he craved alcohol.
There was a long silence.
“It’s funny,” she said at last, though there was nothing funny in the whole world, as far as Paul could tell. He looked up and her face was calm. “I’ve been thinking about that.” She spoke like a teacher, someone who knew something. “The Bible says ‘Forgive and you will be forgiven,’ … and the Buddhists, of course, believe that hatred only leads to further hatred and suffering. As for me—I don’t know. I know I don’t want to hold on to hatred anymore. I can’t.”
Her eyes lingered on his face, as if she was deciding whether or not he was hideous. It occurred to him that wanting forgiveness meant you had to give it, too. He knew he hadn’t forgiven his dad for some things. He couldn’t imagine doing that.
“Tommy’s teaching me, every day,” she continued, and he nearly fell right off his seat. How could Tommy be teaching her anything? “He’s forcing me to let go of him,” she said, “to surrender to the moment at hand. There’s joy there. If you can do it.”
He couldn’t believe she was sitting there talking about learning something from her dead son, talking about joy, to him. To him! Maybe he’d driven her crazy and he’d have that on his conscience, too.
“How is it here?” she asked quietly. “Is it bad?”
He couldn’t tell whether she wanted to hear that it was or it wasn’t.
“It’s what I deserve, I guess,” he said simply.
She didn’t dispute it, but she didn’t seem happy about it, either. “I’d like you to write me,” she said. “Will you do that? I want to know what it’s like in here and how you’re getting on. I want to know the truth.”
“Okay.” He thought that he would tell her, too, even if she was crazy. He could tell her all the things he’d been through here that he didn’t want his own mom to know about.
“So we’ve got ourselves a deal?” she said. He nodded. She stood up. She belted her coat tightly across her waist—she was thin, like something that could break in two seconds, and at the same time he felt that she was probably tougher than he could ever hope to be. She lifted her hand up to him and waved good-bye, a smile passing across her face, there and gone, so quick he wasn’t sure if he’d imagined it.
After the visit, he stabilized a bit. He stopped hating the feel of the scratchy uniform on his skin, and the way one moment slammed into the next moment with no room for wriggling free except for the novels he got out from the prison library and the GED class he was taking and the visits from his mom to see how he was doing. He wrote letters to Mrs. Crawford, telling her the truth. He woke every morning from a heavy, dreamless slumber, still surprised to find himself there.
The people in the novels he was reading lived in peat and stone dwellings in hilly lands covered in mist, and they raised dragons and learned magic. They passed on their secrets from mother to son.
*
Anderson felt the warm water licking at his feet.
He walked in slowly, aware at every moment that he could turn back, the water encompassing his calves and his sore knees, his thighs and his chest. He was unsure of what he was going to do until the last moment the sandy ground slid beneath his feet and he was swimming, and even then he glanced back and saw the shore so close and his sandals and his book right there, waiting for him.
The beach was empty. It was too early for tourists and there were no fishermen on this side of the island. It was as if he was the only one in the whole world who was awake. There were a few palm trees scattered here and there, the craggy mountains cradling the water, the sign about the water’s current planted in the middle of the beach. He couldn’t read it anymore, not in any of the languages they had posted, but he knew what it meant.