“We didn’t throw them away,” my father said at last. “We hid them. I don’t think you should read them.”
I contained my anger. I took a deep breath. “Could I have them please?”
My parents looked at each other and then my father said, “I’ll get them.”
When he returned, he set them before me. They were unopened.
“You didn’t read them?”
“No,” my mother said. “It didn’t seem right.”
I picked them up and looked at them. I looked at the handwriting. And the line from the letter I had already opened echoed in my fevered brain. I think you might be the only one who can save me.
I said nothing more but went to my room and read in sequence the three letters that had arrived over the summer.The first had come just about the time of my high school graduation. It was almost incoherent and I had to read it over a few times before I realized how troubled Miranda was. She was trying to explain something about crystal meth. She was trying to get me to understand what had happened to her after we broke up. But it was like an entirely different take on what I had believed to be true. She had liked what the meth did for her. So did I. But I saw the dangers. And I backed off. She didn’t.
I thought we had both just moved on. But it wasn’t like that for her.
The second letter was more analytical and riddled with anxiety and guilt. Her mood was dark, her time in Woodvale was making her crazy.
In the third letter she mentioned for the first time that she was thinking about suicide. It was postmarked August 20. And now it was September.
***
September is, for many, a month of dramatic change. Nicole had gone away to university as originally planned. She e–mailed me almost every day. She said she missed me but that the campus was very exciting. She had already joined a group called Students for Social Justice. And that made me think of Lisa. Lisa would have loved university and a chance to meet up with other social activists. I knew that Nicole had done the right thing for her by going away to a bigger school. And she had done the right thing for me too.We had set each other free.
In late August, I took my first job, working with Louis at the muffler shop. I did not want to go to university or community college. Maybe later but not now. I wanted a job I could do that involved something physical. I wanted to get dirty at work. Louis pulled some strings. I was now his assistant. He was probably the only person in my life who understood me. At least that’s what I believed.
Louis and I talked while we tore off old rusty tailpipes and I located new parts from the warehouse. The other men on the job treated me fairly—which is to say they pretty much left me alone, or sometimes talked to me about their families or girlfriends or how someday they hoped to win the lottery. Nobody ever mentioned anything about the murder or about my conviction.
I liked having someplace to go to in the morning. I liked the feel of the clean overalls I put on each day.And I liked fixing things, although I had never been very mechanical. Each car had a problem. Our job was to fix it. Make it right. You drove your noisy, exhaust–leaking vehicle into our bay and we ripped off what was corroded and faulty and we fitted the car with muffler and pipes that were new. And you drove away a car that was safer and quieter.Two weeks into the job and Louis had taught me to use an air gun and an acetylene torch.
And one September morning I told Louis about the letters.
“She’s crying out for help, Michael. But I’m not sure you should get involved. You’re the last person who wants to get tangled up with that.”
“But I missed something back there. I didn’t know what was happening to Miranda. I dropped out of her life just when she needed me most.”
“You dropped out so she didn’t drag you down.What was it she was taking?”
“Crystal meth.”
Louis shook his head. “Poor man’s cocaine, we used to call it. Big rush, big high, big–headed feeling that everything is going great.Then, look out.”
“I think she was high in school a lot. You should have seen the creeps she was hanging out with.”
“Crystal users are a jittery lot, believe me. The stuff keeps you awake so you don’t get much sleep. If you get tired at all, you want to take more to get that edge back. If you ease off, your brain tells you to get back on the freight train and ride. Then paranoia kicks in. Some people get violent. It’s still you, but a freakier, nastier you than the old civilized self.”
“You’ve tried it, I take it?”
“Oh, yeah. Brother, I tried it. And liked it. Been there, done that. The thing about meth is that it’s very inexpensive and readily available. I didn’t think suburban kids were into it that much. Thought you had your weed and ecstasy and cocaine and all them designer drugs.”
“We pretty much had everything. You just had to ask around. Miranda was used to getting whatever she wanted.”
“And now she wants you to do what?”
“I don’t know. Write to her? Talk to her?”
“She’s straight now, at least, I reckon. But do you really want to do this to yourself? You want to go down that path?”
“I’m scared, Louis. I’m really scared.”
“Then just walk on. Do nothing and maybe it will all go away. You get another letter, don’t open it.”
“But I still feel responsible.”
“I know. But do you have any idea what this would look like to everybody out there?”
“I’m not sure I care much about what people think of me anymore.”
“And what exactly is it you are trying to do?”
“She’s reaching out. I haven’t done anything yet. But one part of me wants to do this thing. I want to go talk to her.”
“You want to what?”
“I want to go there to Woodvale and talk to her.”
“My advice is to run in the opposite direction.”
“But I can’t do that,” I said. “I just can’t.”
Chapter 25
Maybe I had read too many novels. Maybe that made me feel like my life had to go somewhere. There was a story and it had to continue. I wasn’t looking for an ending but looking for some way to thread together the lunatic sequence of the events of my life and make it add up to something.
I had a feeling that my plot, my life, was being guided by a trail of paper. The proverbial paper trail. And the words that went along with that paper. Phyllis and her I Ching. Skullbones and his books. The books I inherited from Phyllis’s father, my great–grandfather who I had never met. Lisa’s poem that triggered so much within me. Lisa’s journals that I myself did not read. (How similar to my own parents—shielding me from those letters from Miranda but not willing to break the code of privacy of the letters themselves. ) And now that I had read Miranda’s letters, I had the compulsion that I now had to do something. Hexagram 45 (Ts’Ui) says: You will feel the desire for unity and feel at the same time restricted in your actions. Find help from like–minded people. Tears will end and there will be positive results.
***
With my first telephone attempt to speak to someone in authority at Woodvale, I was shunted from office to office until I found myself speaking to Miranda’s counselor, a woman named Sharon Elgard. I told her who I was. She said she knew about the letters.
“How is Miranda?” I asked.
“She is serving her time as well as can be expected,” was the unrevealing answer.
“Do you think she is at risk?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Sharon said, although I knew she did.
“In her letter, she sounded desperate.”
“I’m not really at liberty to speak to you about this.”
“I know,” I said. “I understand. But I really think I need to talk to her.”
The line was silent.
“I know this must sound crazy,” I said. “You know who I am, right?”
“Yes, I know.”
“I can promise you, I have no desire to harm Miranda.
I want to help her.”
“Only family have visiting privileges here. We sometimes make exceptions, but you’d have to have permission from both her parents and from the director here. And in your case that’s not likely.”
“Why?”
More silence, and then finally, “Miranda confessed to murdering your girlfriend. And now you want to talk to Miranda. We’d call that a potentially damaging encounter.”
“But what if her parents thought it was a good idea?”
“Good luck on that one.”
“But will you speak to me again after I’ve met with them?”
“Yes,” she said in very professional tone. “But I’ll need to hear from them first.”
***
I did not speak of any of this to my parents. Louis, however, knew what I was up to. He even knew about Miranda’s father, a fairly powerful corporate lawyer. A man used to getting his way. “You’re playing with fire,” Louis said. “The man will find a legal way to shut you out and keep you out.”
“I’ll talk to him,” I said. “I’ll make him understand.”
I called Miranda’s house and spoke first to her mother. She hung up on me. Then I looked up her father’s law office and took the bus there.
“Do you have an appointment?” the secretary asked.
“No. I need to speak to Mr. Morgan about his daughter, about Miranda.”
She looked at me closely now and recognized who I was. “He’s in a meeting with a client,” she said.
“I’ll wait.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t be here,” she said warily. I could only guess what might be going through her mind.
“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t throw me out.”
Now she looked a little nervous and confused. So I sat down in a chair and opened a copy of Fortune magazine. I stared at an article called “Guerrilla Capitalism” and turned the pages. I stalled when I came to an unlikely quote by an American president. Dwight Eisenhower was quoted as saying, “A wise man doesn’t lie down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.” It almost could have been something from the I Ching. I flipped through the pages and found myself looking at advertisements for mutual funds, expensive watches, retirement communities, and computers. It was like a portal into a world I knew nothing about. The secretary left the office briefly but returned and sat back down at her desk without even looking at me.
After thirty minutes, the inner office door opened and a man wearing a dark suit and carrying a leather briefcase walked briskly through the waiting room and left. As soon as he was gone, a uniformed security guard walked in. He stood there and said nothing. The office door opened again and Miranda’s father walked into the room. He obviously had been prepared. He had been informed that I was here.
“Can I come into your office? I’d like to talk to you about Miranda.”
“We can talk here,” he said. He knew that he couldn’t just tell me to go away. He probably already knew I had tried to talk to his wife. Mr. Morgan nodded to his secretary and she left the room. The security guard stayed. I felt intimidated but I was determined to move forward.
“I think your daughter is considering harming herself. I think I can help.”
He sat down at his secretary’s desk and clenched his hands. I saw the muscles tightening in his jaw. He was a man used to getting his way, of waving his hands or throwing some money at a problem or turning it over to someone else to fix. I saw anger in him but also confusion and pain. He looked at the security guard, “You can go. We’ll be okay. Thanks for coming.”
The guard nodded. “Sure thing. Hit the speed dial on the phone if you need me. I won’t be far.” And he left.
“When I first met you, I knew you were bad news,” he said. “Miranda knew you were the type of boy who would really piss me off. But I couldn’t say anything. She was used to getting her way. About most everything.”
“This is not about then. It’s about now. She wrote to me. She thinks I can help somehow.”
“She hardly talks to her mother and me. She’s closed herself down so much. I don’t know how much longer she can handle it in there.”
“My parents hid her letters at first. I only found out recently she was trying to get in touch with me.”
“But why would she write to you? And why would you want to get involved?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think they may consider letting her out in maybe five more years. We’ve been working on this since she turned herself in. It was the drugs.”
“I know about the drugs. That was one of the main reasons we split up. She was getting deeper into it and I didn’t want to go that far.”
Mr. Morgan looked angry again. “Then why the hell didn’t you try to help her? Why didn’t you tell us or do something?”
“Because she would have thought I was a traitor, that’s why.”
“And I suppose you were a knight in shining armor?”
“No, I was just a guy who decided to move on.”
“And let my daughter destroy herself?”
“Something like that. And that’s why I’m here.”
“Jesus,” he said. “She wasn’t even out of high school. Do you think a thing like this ever goes away?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“I curse myself for not paying attention.”
“Maybe there was nothing you could do.”
“No, I could have paid attention. I could have noticed that she was changing before my eyes, that she was destroying herself.”
“My grandmother died this summer,” I said, not exactly knowing why I said it. “We talked a lot before she died. She smoked quite a bit and she knew it would kill her and it did. But it didn’t stop her from wanting to smoke right up to the end. She was big on giving advice and a lot of it was wrong. But sometimes she hit the nail on the head. Here’s what she told me. She said,‘Sometimes the single most difficult thing for you to do is the thing you must do. ’ I asked her what she was talking about and all she could say was that I would know it when it came along. And this is it. This is the most important thing I need to do right now. I need to visit Miranda and talk to her. I need to hear what she has to say to me and I need to say some things to her.”
Mr. Morgan looked me straight in the eye and I did not look away. Then he spoke. “But even if they are willing to let you visit, what good can come from it? Why would I even consider the possibility of causing her more pain?”
I slipped the fourth letter out of my pocket and passed it to him. He read it and then sat silently for at least a full minute. Then he looked up at me. And nodded.
Chapter 26
Perhaps you think that what I was about to do was illogical, crazy, or downright perverse. There were no heroics, no high–minded notions. No plan. I took one step at a time, guided by my gut instinct. Maybe there was some sense of charity involved. Or perhaps it was a feeling of guilt. I won’t rule that out.
It’s possible that by the time you finish this, you still won’t understand exactly why things turned out the way they did. All I know is that a single event when I was sixteen changed my life forever. And two survivors of that event would never lead what most would call normal lives. The law has no real way of creating justice. There is crime and there is punishment. And what of the end results? It was a whole lot simpler perhaps (wrong but simpler) when people truly believed that the Devil made a person murder. If it was the Devil who made a person act, then there was no true guilt. But now we know different. We understand something of cause and effect. Something of human psychology and human emotion. We know how to accuse and prove guilt and how to convict. But we know so little about the healing process beyond that. And we don’t know how to contain the widening circle of pain caused by the death of someone who is loved.
***
I believed that it was absolutely necessary for me to sit down and talk with Miranda. It took a while to accomplish. But her father was a lawy
er. Once he was convinced, he pulled some strings. On a cool October morning, my parents drove me to Woodvale and were prepared to wait in the parking lot until my visit was complete.
“You sure you don’t want to reconsider?” my father asked. He and my mom were one thousand percent opposed to my meeting with Miranda.
“I’ve thought about this a lot.”
“I’m worried that seeing her might trigger something, Michael,” my mother said. “You have plenty of reasons to hate her. What if you can’t control your anger?”
“I don’t hate her. I’m past that. I’ve prepared myself for this. I really have.”
We’d been through all this before. But they needed to hear it again. What I could not express to them was the fact that I somehow felt that Miranda and I shared something that no one else shared. That we were alike. Both victims. Of what I don’t know. If these were ancient days, I could call it fate. I didn’t believe in such a simplistic idea. But the link between us, the bond, if you can call it that, was why I had to see her. She had expressed it in her letters.
I opened the car door and approached the gate to Woodvale Youth Correctional Facility. It was not an unpleasant looking place. The law had treated Miranda with some degree of respect. I identified myself to a man in uniform and he directed me to a brick building and then watched as I walked up the driveway a short distance and entered. Inside, I told a woman guard who I was and that I had clearance. She made me walk through a metal detector much like the ones they use at the airport and I had to empty my pockets. Then I was ushered into a nearby office.
A woman in a dark suit greeted me. “Hello, Michael. I’m Sharon Elgard.”
The Book of Michael Page 13