Wild and Crooked

by Leah Thomas

  They don’t ask where I’ve been, or why my fist is bloody, or why my makeup is smeared. Mom’s crying, in that particular way she cries, like she’s storing just enough fluid on her cheeks to put her cigarette out against her skin if she feels like it.

  I am this close to screaming. “What’d I do?”

  Grandma waves me closer. “Big papers. Very big papers.”

  “Honey.” Mom lays her palms flat on the big papers. “We’ve got news.”

  “What?”

  And holy shit, now she’s smiling. “It’s amazing. It’s the Innocence Fighters. They’re taking our case. They’re going to prove your dad’s innocence.”

  “But Dad confessed.” The reply’s automatic.

  “He confessed, sweetie, but I married an innocent man. I knew that, no matter what. Last year, I contacted the IFA. They did some digging. Kalyn-Rose, they agree with me. We’re gonna bring him home.”

  Grandma’s crying now, too.

  I take a damn seat.

  This was our story:

  The night that James Ellis got killed, he was shot not once, but twice, at distant range by a 9-millimeter Smith & Wesson semiautomatic.

  The first bullet entered through his rib cage on the lower right side and exited his back just below his left shoulder blade, shattering three ribs and fracturing another two.

  The second bullet entered through his right eye socket and exited the back of his skull at what experts estimated was a thirty-three-degree angle.

  Those experts weren’t sure whether he was dead after the first shot or the second, and maybe it doesn’t matter.

  The tricky thing about confessions is they tend to halt investigations. The moment Dad said he’d shot James Ellis, no “maybes” about it, forensic experts didn’t have to try so hard to confirm evidence. The boys disliked each other—a dozen witnesses said so. A dozen witnesses talked about bullying, although most painted Dad as the instigator.

  Again, it didn’t matter. Dad confessed; case closed.

  The gun was his, too. Not on paper—Dad was barely eighteen, and the pistol was licensed under Grandma’s name—but she’d gifted it to him on his sixteenth birthday, as per Spence tradition. Dad brought the gun to the station when he turned himself in.

  James Ellis harassed the Spences for years, and when he appeared at the salvage yard with a knife in his hand, Dad snapped.

  There’s one section of the taped confession that people love to ridicule: a policeman in the interrogation room asks, white-hot angry, “What did you think would happen when you killed the quarterback?”

  Dad answers, “James was the running back.”

  I’ve watched a hundred video clips. Here’s the sobbing family on one side, and on the other, there’s Dad sitting with terrible posture in a wrinkled suit. The whole damn trial, Dad keeps his eyes closed. I think he looks sad, but critics say he’s indifferent. He’s a monster, heartless, another sociopath, et cetera.

  To make the case stronger and put James Ellis in the shiniest light possible, Mortimer Ellis and family denied any trespassing. They accused Dad of kidnapping.

  Dad shrugged at that. He shrugged in court. They could have accused him of starting a nuclear war and he’d have shrugged. His defense attorney hated his guts.

  Dad must have looked sad to Mom, too. The day after the trial finished airing, she sat down in her Wisconsin cabin and wrote him her first letter.

  My whole life, Mom hinted at Dad’s innocence, but Dad never has. I thought she did it to make me feel better, but I wasn’t ashamed. Dad just got sick of rich bullies getting away with shit. He dealt his own justice. I understood it fine.

  But our story’s changing.

  At the card table, Mom tells me how right after we moved to Samsboro she tore through Grandma’s storage shed in a frenzied fit of tidying.

  “I figured we could put that shed to better use.”

  “How?”

  “Believe me, the shit I got up to in high school, I’d’ve loved my own room.”

  It’s nice of her, really. Mom, trying to give me something she didn’t have.

  When I think of Gus’s mom, watching him like a terrifying hawk-monster, hiding teeth behind cobweb-thin smiles, I know I’ve been lucky in the parent department.

  Well. And I don’t have a murdered dad, either.

  “The junk in that shed hadn’t been touched in decades. Hubcaps, old grease cans, tobacco from the seventies, and photographs and moldy newspapers and so much dirt. But I still found it. The mother—” She covers Grandma’s ears. “—fucking gold mine.”

  “What?”

  “I asked Grandma if they’d searched the whole property after the murder. Specifically, did anyone go through that old shed?”

  “I bet they tore the place up.”

  Grandma shakes her head. She puts a hand out like she doesn’t want Mom to go on. Mom doesn’t pay her any mind.

  “She finally told me no, though it was like pulling teeth.”

  Grandma glares at Mom with the side of her face that still glares properly. Maybe she’s still furious about the shoddy police work, even after all these years.

  “They didn’t check it, Kalyn. After a confession, with a man and a gun in custody, why waste the energy? You know cops. They’ve got rolling stops to ticket people for, doughnuts to eat. Why bother investigating a damn redneck murder?”

  I could pretend to be shocked. “What did you find?”

  “A jacket. I found the denim jacket your dad wore the day of the murder. Stiff as an old washboard, shoved between two totes. There were smears on it down low on the front, like maybe he’d dragged a body. But there were other stains, too.”

  Mom twists her cigarette out in the faux-tortoiseshell ashtray. She’s calm as Gus’s koi pond. She’s treating this success like a cool glass of sweet tea.

  “There was spatter all over the top of the back, from say, the chest height up, like bloody freckles on the shoulders. I couldn’t figure out why those would be there. Couldn’t hurt to send it on down to the IFA. I didn’t tell your father a damn thing. I just sent it in, along with a bunch of photos and a letter.”

  I frown. “If Dad shot James Ellis, how’d he get blood on his back? Unless it was some other kind of blood . . . ?”

  “It wasn’t some other kind of blood, Kalyn. The DNA belongs to James Ellis. That’s what the IFA confirmed. And not just blood. There’s evidence of gray matter, too.” Mom lifts a paper from the lacy tablecloth and reads it verbatim: “. . . ​in a pattern ‘consistent with the trajectory of the exit wound in item C.’ Basically, the bullet that went right through James’s skull, Kalyn. This is that spatter. No doubt.”

  “Dad couldn’t have shot James Ellis in the head if he was standing behind him.”

  “Your dad was behind him. And facing the other way.”

  I’ve only seen Dad’s back a handful of times, when he’s retreated to his cell after visitation, but it’s a broad one. Must have been a goddamn canvas for the IFA.

  “Shit.”

  “Kalyn. Your father didn’t shoot that boy in the eye. He couldn’t have.”

  I swallow. “I . . . ​Couldn’t someone else have been wearing Dad’s jacket?”

  Mom doesn’t wanna think this, and who could blame her. But she comes up with a counterpoint. “Say someone else was wearing his jacket. Even if that’s the case, there’s another witness out there somewhere. And that’s something.”

  There are a million questions to ask. Why would Dad confess to a crime he didn’t commit? If Dad was standing behind James Ellis, wouldn’t that mean he saw the real killer? Why didn’t he say so? Did Dad shoot James the first time? What do we do now?

  Who the fuck killed James Ellis?

  There’s only one I can actually ask.

  “When can I talk to Dad?”

  Mom pauses. “He . . . ​well, he’s being funny about the IFA. Says he doesn’t want to dig up old graves. Got himself a martyr complex, and he’s been cooped up too l
ong. He’ll come around.”

  “Is that . . . is this enough to bring him home?”

  “It’s a start. It’s enough to reopen the case and look properly this time.”

  I remember the white dress and wedding, how the following week chocolate milk was dumped down the back of my shirt. It chilled my neck like the hand of death before I spun round and closed my own hand of death around the asshole who’d poured it.

  “It’ll be enough to get the media started, too.”

  “Well. That’s the thing about the IFA, Kalyn. They use public advocacy to draw attention and funding to their cases. Honey, they have to make news to make headway. We might go back to homeschooling, once this breaks.”

  I should feel hopeful, but in some corner of my head, Rose isn’t taking this well. Dad’s back is so broad, but I can’t for the fucking life of me say why he thought that meant putting all this on his shoulders and ours, too.

  What’s the point of being Spence if being Spence means being full of shit?

  ACT FOUR

  Hello, Stranger

  GUS

  THE DAY AFTER Kalyn flees my house, I wake up at about 70 percent rigor mortis. I’m on my side even though I’m supposed to sleep on my back. When I roll over and see Dad, I can’t say good morning to him.

  As a kid, it didn’t occur to me that there were reasons I couldn’t keep up with everyone, beyond my constrictive muscles. “Gus,” Dr. Petani told me, “you are working four times harder than anyone else to do the exact same things as anyone else.”

  I’d never thought of that. I was just annoyed at myself for zonking out whenever a teacher treated us to a movie, mad that I couldn’t stand in lines without leaning against walls.

  In first grade, I became fixated on how people walk. How legs bend in tandem when kids jump in PE, how most feet are spaced during jumping jacks. Some people crouch to bend, but others use their legs like counterweights—one planted, one straight back, perpendicular—becoming accidental ballerinas to recapture fallen things.

  On some nights, I’d grab my unbraced right knee—you can sleep in AFOs, but it’s painful for me—and try tilting it to “normal.” I’d aim for the green shag rug by my nightstand to muffle the sound, climbing carefully out of bed like I was defusing a bomb, and lean my full weight on it.

  I felt knives in my knee every time, and lost my balance every other. I cried every five. Eventually I stopped trying.

  I’d thought often about my twisted parts, and about the branches in my head. But I’d never thought about sheer energy until Dr. Petani told me to.

  If I want a glass of milk, I subconsciously plan the route, like I’m embarking on a hiking expedition. I decide where I’ll put my feet, how I’ll get the carton out of the fridge, how best to take the cap off one-handed.

  Phil just takes out his milk and pours it.

  Models have to think about every move they make, pivot on cue, and time high-heeled steps to music. It helps to pretend I’m walking a runway, but it’s still exhausting.

  When I shared this revelation at Camp Wigwah, some kids looked interested and others scoffed. “Well, duh.”

  But that’s the thing—outsiders lump kids with CP under the same umbrella, and that’s another umbrella under the enormous parasol of congenital disorders, which sits under the gargantuan black canopy of disability. We’re sorted into categories, but we can be nothing alike. I don’t even mean how some of us are hemiplegic and others are paraplegic, or how some of us are spastic and others aren’t, or some of us have learning disabilities and others don’t. I mean on a personal level, we’re all different people.

  That should be obvious, right?

  Camp Wigwah is where I realized my disability is like any other part of a person—eyes or ears or teeth or height—in that it’s variable. I have poor eyesight, and the muscles on my right side are tense threads that make my knees collide. But Karen Yuen’s in a wheelchair, and Ali Sniridan spasms every evening.

  I started thinking of CP as part of me, and I stopped resenting it so much. It seems dumb to ask your eye color to change. An AFO isn’t bad when you think of it like a pair of glasses. I love my glasses; they’re one fashion accessory that demands no explanation.

  That’s how the space brace came about. Mom and Tamara were trying to make me love myself. But it’s harder when it’s someone else’s decision.

  So what decisions did Kalyn make about who I am?

  My alarm stopped wailing an hour ago.

  Will anyone at Jefferson wonder where I am? Do people miss potted plants? It’s not like I haven’t been absent before, tucked into hospitals. Maybe kids will scratch their heads, as if they can’t decide whether someone’s rearranged the cafeteria tables.

  “Gus.” Tamara appears at the foot of my bed. “Hon, you need to get up.”

  “I’m not going to school today.”

  “It’s not that. You need to get downstairs and watch the news. Now.”

  I lift my head. Her face is gray despite the sunlight sliding through my bedroom blinds. “Whatever’s on the news, I probably already missed it.”

  “They’re looping it over and over. Your mom’s almost catatonic, Gus.”

  And that’s when I know it’s about Dad. It’s about us. And maybe it’s about a girl named Kalyn-Rose, or named something else.

  I think about every step to the dresser, every motion through the drawers, every step to the bathroom. I manage to catch my toe on the edge of the doorway. I see myself in the mirror, half-dressed, a nightmare.

  In the corner of the glass, a senior photo of Dad stares eternally.

  “You should have let me go.” That’s what Mom told him yesterday.

  I don’t know what it meant, but I think he’s started frowning.

  KALYN

  MOM TELLS ME to play hooky. I tell her to go to hell.

  “That’s where you’re going,” she yells, following me to her room. “Stay home!”

  I’m tearing through her dresser drawers like they’ve insulted Grandma, sending clothes flying. “You just want Officer Newton to come visit again. You wanna pour him sweet tea and sweet talk. Don’t care. I’m going.”

  I find it: the white dress I wore to my parents’ wedding, the dress that used to tickle my little ankles.

  I pull off my tee, throw it at Mom, and force the dress down my torso. Turns out I haven’t grown all that much in ten years, despite a few creaking seams. The thing almost looks like a blouse, cupcake chic. It hangs long enough that I can wear tights with it.

  I wonder what Gus will say about this fashion statement, and then I remember Gus probably hates me.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Mom’s fuming. I sling on my backpack and elbow past her. I make it to the kitchen before she catches me by the wrist. “Kalyn!”

  “Think Grandma has the keys to any Tauruses? Give ’em a real shock.”

  I think Mom wants to slap me, but she doesn’t. Mom ditched the flyswatter when she ditched the booze. She got slapped too much when she was my age. When that happens, people either keep the slapping cycle going strong, or they snap it right down the middle. Mom broke it best she could, but she can’t break my resolve.

  Sure, it was surprisin’, waking up at five a.m. to find Mom and Grandma on the couch, gawping at the news. It was surprisin’, seeing Dad’s face and James Ellis’s face on the screen over the words: Killer Case Reopened: DNA Evidence Exonerates Murderer? Whoever wrote that headline’s an ass. Dad can’t be a murderer if he’s exonerated.

  He can’t be what he’s pretended to be.

  “Now who could be mad to hear that an innocent man’s going free?” I ask Mom. “Shouldn’t we be celebrating?”

  Grandma sits at the table, crying into her oatmeal.

  “People need hard proof. Even when they get it, they say it isn’t hard enough.”

  “So? Folks will be pissed. It’s got nothing to do with Rose Poplawski.”

  Mom lets go. Her nails scuff my skin. “You�
�re still going by Poplawski?”

  “You didn’t want me to be me, right?”

  “Hell, I didn’t mean—I’m just . . . surprised.”

  “You told me to be her!”

  “I know. I know, baby. But I thought blood would out. Thought I’d raised a rebel.” Her smile is sad. I’m itching to slap something. “Fine. I’ll drop you off.”

  I deflate; she looks so tired. “You work today?”

  “Nah. Even if you aren’t playing hooky, I am. Got errands to run and phone calls to make.” She clears her throat. “Heard from the lawyer. Your dad? He’s going to call us tomorrow. Nine p.m.”

  “Should be interesting.”

  Her eyes soften. She pulls a cigarette from her breast pocket. “Should be.”

  After the usual fuss, we’re out the door and inside the old minivan, and none of us are talking. No matter how many windows I roll down, there’s not enough air. I’m dying for a smoke. Grandma starts coughing the moment we hit the main road, so Mom squishes her butt out on the dash.

  This is the best news we’ve ever had. So why does today feel like a funeral?

  I’m going to school in a dress that doesn’t fit me. No white dress ever suited a Spence. Rose aside, Spencehood was never something I doubted.

  “You can be nice. When you try!” Olivia screeched, way back when.

  Chances are, Gus will recognize this dress. Maybe I want that. Maybe the guy who knows confusion better than anyone can help me level the forests inside me now.

  Mom turns on the radio. We hear Dad’s name. Grandma starts sobbing.

  Getting through today is gonna take one helluva performance.

  GUS

  THE NEWS HAS set this tomb on fire.

  That’s how it feels, sitting on the couch beside Mom, watching the television recycle the story of our lives.

  The screen pans to a decade-old picture of Mom and me at the Samsboro pumpkin patch. We took second place in the competition for smearing a collage of Roald Dahl characters along the sides of a pumpkin.