A Criminal Defense

by William L. Myers Jr.

  I smile, tousle Gabby’s hair. “You can bother me all you want.”

  What is Piper up to? Watching me sleep last night, coffee in bed, and a big breakfast this morning? I search my memory of the past few days, searching for some reason for Piper’s apparent warming, but can find none. In earlier years, such solicitousness was typically a prelude to request to make a major purchase. But Piper no longer seeks my approval before buying big-ticket items. She now prefers to spring them on me and coil for the counterattack she knows she’ll launch in response to my protestations.

  Our breakfast proves to be the most pleasant meal I’ve had with Piper in years. She tells me all about the show she saw last night, and how she and her friends reacted to it. Gabby pipes in that she wants to go to a play, and Piper says she’ll find one the three of us will enjoy. I say what great fun it would be to go to a show with Piper and Gabby, and we all agree we’ll see one before Thanksgiving.

  After breakfast, I move into my home office, crank up the computer, and work on an appellate brief that’s due to be filed with the superior court. Piper knocks on the door’s frame and asks if I want a sandwich before I leave to meet Tommy. Still full from breakfast, I beg off but thank her for asking.

  An hour later I’m in the car, heading to Lancaster. I wonder why Tommy was so insistent on visiting our parents’ graves this weekend, why it couldn’t wait until after the Hanson trial. I let my thoughts drift to the period after Mom died, when it was just Dad and Tommy and me, groping our way through it. The memory that comes to mind is of Tommy and me hiding behind the trunk of the big tree in our backyard one December evening as our dad grilled us all some steak; Dad was awful with the oven and cooked most of our meals on the grill, even in the winter. Tommy and I waited until Dad opened the grill lid to flip the steaks, turning his back on the tree. We sprang from our hiding place and pelted him with snowballs. He dropped his spatula into the grill and engaged us in a snowball fight that took us from the backyard to the front. All of us forgot about dinner, and the meat and the plastic handle of the spatula were burned to a crisp. Dad ended up taking Tommy and me to Burger King, the three of us laughing our heads off over the mess we’d made.

  I suddenly can’t wait to see Tommy, smile with him over the snowball fight. As I turn into the cemetery parking lot, I’m in the best mood I’ve been in for months. This is exactly what I needed. I’m glad Tommy persuaded me to do this. I get out of the car, walk past Tommy’s black-and-silver Harley. It’s a chilly day, overcast and in the low fifties. I’m surprised Tommy rode his bike. He’s told me before how cold it can get riding on a day like this, even with leathers.

  I walk through the arbor leading into the cemetery and make my way down the path to my parents’ graves. In the distance, I see Tommy in front of the big marble headstone that marks their final resting place. Tommy is kneeling, and it seems to me he’s talking to them. He sees me approach and stands up. His solid, 210-pound frame is covered in black leather from collar to foot—a guy you wouldn’t want to meet in an alley. I smile and wave to my brother. Tommy waves back. I step up beside him, and we shake hands. I’m still smiling, feeling light.

  “Drive by the old house after this?” I ask, something we often do after visiting the grave site.

  Tommy looks at the headstone without answering. He kneels back down, adjusts the fresh flowers he brought with him. I never remember to do that. Tommy never forgets.

  I kneel beside Tommy, brush my fingers across our parents’ names. “Thanks for suggesting this,” I say. “I needed to do this more than I thought.” After a minute, I remind Tommy of a time that all four of us went together to Long’s Park for a picnic. How pretty Mom looked. How strong Dad was, how far he could throw a football. How young we all were.

  Tommy nods but keeps staring at the tombstone.

  After a while, we both stand up, and I ask Tommy how he’s doing. Whether Lawrence Washington is still hiding out at his trailer and if he is, how he’s holding up.

  “Still there,” Tommy answers. “How’s he doing? He’s dying. He’s down about forty pounds.”

  “He should be in a hospital.”

  “He doesn’t want to be in a hospital. Hooked up to all that equipment. Nurses in and out all day and night, sticking needles in him. Maybe have some roommate who can’t stop talking. Where he wants to be is home, but he can’t go there. The DA would be all over him for taking off. And his former buddies might smoke him before he’s ready to go.”

  “Tough situation,” I say.

  This isn’t going like I’d planned. Tommy has only smiled once since I arrived. Hasn’t volunteered a single good memory of Mom or Dad. Okay, so it’s up to me.

  “Do you remember that big snowball fight we had with Dad by the grill?”

  Tommy stares at me, then looks down at the marker. A raindrop smacks against the top of the tombstone. Then another, and another. I’m thinking that I wish I’d bought a baseball cap when Tommy says, still looking down, “He didn’t just die.”

  Tommy waits for the words to sink in, but they don’t. I stand there, uncomprehending. Tommy looks up at me, and I see his eyes are wet—and not with rain. “He was in so much pain,” he says.

  Now I get it.

  “Jesus, Tommy. What did you do?”

  “I kept asking the doctors to give me more morphine to take to him; I begged them for it. But they said no, he’d get addicted. Can you believe that? He’s lying on his fucking deathbed, in agony, and they’re holding back on the painkillers ’cause he might become an addict. I almost punched that one doctor, the young one. I did take him by the collar. But I stopped myself, before . . .”

  Tommy is rambling now. I step back, trying to comprehend what I’m hearing. “Are you saying you—”

  “I couldn’t take it anymore. He kept moaning and crying. I begged him to let me call the ambulance, take him to the hospital, but he told me no way, no way. He wanted to go in the house. He told me he could see Mom, sometimes, by the bed, waiting for him. Oh, Christ . . .”

  The tears are streaming down the sides of Tommy’s face now, mixing with the rain. My own eyes are filling now, too. “Did he ask you? To do it?”

  Tommy shakes his head. “He never would’ve put something like that on me. Never. But I had to do it. I had to. It was the only way.” Tommy keeps talking, and by the time I hear the word pillow, my mind is completely dazed. I try to free myself from what Tommy is saying. I look down at my father’s name carved in the marble, then at my mother’s. I look at the flowers, purple and pink. I gaze up at the sky, try to find a bird to fly away with. But the gravity of my brother’s pain keeps pulling me back to him, to his shaking hands, his stinging eyes, his twisted face. Tommy is literally drowning in front of me. I want to reach out, grab him. Save him, somehow. But I am frozen in place.

  My brother and I stand there, facing each other in silence as the seconds drag on. Tommy is looking to me—for something. But I have nothing to give.

  Finally, I lower my head. “My God,” I say.

  And that’s the end of it. Tommy looks at me another minute, his eyes filled with sorrow, disappointment, anger. Then he turns away. I watch him walk down the path to the parking lot and disappear through the arbor. I hear the engine of his motorcycle, loud as he starts the bike and revs it, then fading as he rides away.

  20

  SUNDAY, OCTOBER 7, CONTINUED; MONDAY, OCTOBER 8

  I am soaking wet. I have no idea how long I’ve been in the car or how long I stood at the grave site after Tommy left. I can’t see out the windshield, it’s raining so hard now. The car isn’t running, and I realize suddenly that I’m cold and have been for some time. I turn the key, start the engine, adjust the heat. The radio is on, a female pop singer. Against the backdrop of what’s just happened, it feels obscene to listen to the upbeat music. I turn it off, close my eyes, relive the scene at the grave site. Tommy, state wrestling champ, the unbreakable slab of marble, tattooed survivor of the prison system, leathe
r-clad Harley rider, crying like a two-year-old. Spilling his guts to his older brother, reaching out for . . . what? Something I failed to give him. So he had to ride away, alone.

  I back up, make a three-point turn, and pull out of the parking lot. I’m almost at the turnpike, twenty-some miles from the cemetery, when I realize the radio is on again. I must’ve turned it on, but I don’t remember doing so. It’s four o’clock when I pass through the tolls for Highway 76. Next thing I know, it’s thirty minutes later, and I’m close to home. But I don’t want to go home, so after I exit the turnpike, I make my way to the Stadium 16 movieplex at King of Prussia, across from the mall. In a daze, I buy a ticket and make my way through the crowded lobby, past the ticket taker, down the hall to the theater, where I take a seat in the back row. The lights go down, the noise level rockets, and I sit numb and motionless through ninety minutes of explosions, computer-generated images, and adolescent dialogue.

  I remain utterly disengaged from the movie until, toward the end, one of the characters, the lead, I think, if there is a lead in this jumble of science-fiction action scenes, asks something that strikes me.

  “Why now?”

  Why have the big robots chosen this precise moment in human history to attack the earth, wipe out humanity? The world is already on the brink of war, the superpowers poised to annihilate one another with nuclear bombs. All the robot invasion seems to have accomplished is to forge mankind into a band of brothers fighting together against a common enemy.

  Why now?

  And I ask myself the same question about my brother. Why has Tommy chosen this precise point in time to tell me he killed our father? Tommy’s had twenty years to unburden himself of his secret. Why didn’t he tell me sooner? Why not wait a little longer?

  After the movie, I drive to Minella’s Diner on Lancaster Avenue, take a seat at the counter. I order meat loaf with mashed, and when the waitress asks what other sides I want, I tell her to surprise me. My iPhone, on the counter, buzzes. I must’ve turned it to silent mode at the movie theater. I lift the phone and see that Piper is calling. I click the power button to turn off the phone, send Piper to voice mail. Then I turn the phone back on and see that she has called me three times already. After a while, I notice the waitress has delivered my food. It gets cold as I pick at it and order refills on my coffee.

  Sometime around eight o’clock, I make it home. I know Piper will be pissed at me for not answering the phone, and I expect a scene as soon as I walk in the kitchen. She’s waiting for me, but it’s concern, not anger, that etches her face. Dense as I am, I figure out why. Tommy must’ve told her ahead of time what he had in store. Which can only mean one thing.

  “You knew?” I say. “You knew!”

  Piper keeps her cool, keeps her voice steady, quiet. “You wanted Tommy to open up to me, Mick,” she says. “You said he was closed off. That he needed someone he could talk to. And you were right. He carried it all inside, for years. The grief. The pain. And the guilt. Monstrous guilt. It’s why Tommy threw his life into the trash heap. Why, when he faced hard time, he didn’t even fight the charges. Tommy is as good as they get, at his core. In his heart. And he knew that, however good his intentions, he had to be punished for what he’d done to your father.”

  I am dumbstruck. I stare at Piper. “He told you all that?”

  “He didn’t have to. It was obvious to me, once he told me about the euthanasia.”

  “Euthanasia?” I repeat the clinical term. “Patricide.”

  Piper’s eyes turn to steel, and she speaks slowly, with visible restraint. “You have no right to judge. You left him there, by himself, to deal with your father’s failing health. You went off to college while Tommy stayed home and put his life on hold. You took your classes, played tennis, and went to frat parties while Tommy struggled at a job he hated just to pay the bills.” She holds up a hand to stop my protest. “Yes, you offered to stay home and help. But Tommy knew, and your father knew, where your heart really was. So they told you to go back to school, finish up. While Tommy watched the man he idolized, his hero, waste away. In the end, Tommy was bathing him, helping him on and off the toilet. Feeding him. Listening to him moan and cry out, so delirious with pain he imagined he saw your mother in the room with him.” Piper is crying now. “Think about it. How could Tommy feel anything other than that you’d abandoned him and your father both?”

  I bend over, put my hand on the marble top of the island in the middle of our kitchen, lean into it as I lower my head, close my eyes. My voice is quiet when I ask, “Why didn’t he tell me . . . about Dad? Why did he hold it back all these years?”

  “I asked him that when he first told me. Tommy said he didn’t want to lay that at your feet. He thought it would mess you up. And make things worse between the two of you.”

  “But now he has laid it at my feet. Why? And why now?”

  Piper shakes her head. She doesn’t know why any more than I do. She stares at me, searching, it seems, or wanting to say something more. But the air goes out of her. She turns and walks toward the stairs. She pauses at the threshold, closes her eyes, takes a deep breath. After a moment, she opens her eyes again and walks up the steps.

  I stay where I’m standing for a long time, watching the space at the bottom of the landing. I am spent, wiped out. I’m also still confused, unable to figure out Tommy’s motivation for suddenly telling me what he did. And I’m pissed because Piper has known all along. I’m feeling like the odd man out in my own marriage, the schmuck left standing without a chair when the music stops. Then again, I’ve been feeling that way for a long time.

  A few minutes later, I’m in my home office, throwing back a glass of eighteen-year-old Macallan, the thick liquid burning the back of my throat.

  Much later, the bottle sits half-empty on my desk. My head aches. My stomach is churning. I haven’t eaten since breakfast. Tommy’s revelation has unhinged me. Piper’s indictment has cut me to the quick. I see my brother, twenty years old, no one around to help him, looking down at our pain-racked father. I see him crying as Dad’s face disappears under the pillow. I feel Tommy’s strong, resolute hands hold down the pillow as our father goes through his death throes. And when it’s over, I hear Tommy wailing as he cradles Dad, begs his forgiveness.

  I pour another glass of the Macallan, seeing it all clearly now. I’ve spent my entire life leaving the people I love. First, I disassociated myself from my mother’s death. Then I abandoned Tommy and our dad. The DA’s office was another example. Everyone was stunned by my announcement. It was sudden, and I’d done nothing to prepare my team for my leaving, for the onslaught they expected would come from Devlin and his allies. No chance to mend the political fences they’d broken in my name. It was lucky for them that Devlin turned out to be a good leader and welcomed them to his own team.

  And what had it done to Piper? During my years with the prosecutor’s office, Piper and I had done a lot of socializing with my colleagues. Not just the ADAs, but with the detectives who worked side by side with us to build our cases. There were backyard barbeques, picnics, and pickup baseball games in Fairmount Park. Kids’ birthday parties, more than a few weddings. Piper became close with many of my colleagues and their spouses. And yet—inexcusably, I now see—I never considered what my leaving the DA’s office would do to Piper. Looking back, I realize that my abruptly switching sides to become a criminal-defense attorney must’ve been awful for her. Her many friends in law enforcement must surely have given her the cold shoulder. I envision Piper leaving messages on answering machines and getting no return calls. I see the invitations to parties and girls’ nights out drying up. But Piper kept it from me, never once complaining.

  And to bookend the evaporation of Piper’s social life, I gave her less of myself as a private practitioner than I had as a prosecutor. I stayed later at the office, worked every weekend. And when I was home, I wasn’t engaged. As she told me recently, Even when you’re here, you’re not here. Piper had been sittin
g across from me at the dinner table, helping Gabby relate a funny story about something that had happened at school. I wasn’t reacting, and Piper flipped out. “You may as well go back to the office,” she snarled. “You just pretend to be at home with us.” Piper slammed her fork onto her plate and left the table. Gabby started crying. I looked back and forth at the two of them, oblivious.

  “You idiot.” I say it out loud. “You prick.”

  And with that, something inside me, something that’s been lurking for a long, long time, reaches up and pulls me down from the sky and throws me through the window, into the kitchen, where Mom lies dead and Dad weeps over her body. I sit across the table from my little brother, so small, racked with pain and incomprehension, staring at our parents and then looking to me for help. And this time, there is no escape for me. The window is closed; the birds fly past without me. Sorrow slices my heart.

  But this time, I do what I should have done before. I walk Tommy to the floor, where we hug and hold on to our broken father, showing Dad and our departed mother that our love lives on.

  My mind leaps ahead to the summer after my freshman year in college. Tommy and I are sitting in the backyard, watching our father cooking on the grill and coughing. I tell Tommy I’m transferring to Millersville, the local state college, so I can help care for Dad. For the next three years, I live at home, and Tommy and I together share the burden of caring for our father. We are both there when he passes, without our help. Then Tommy enlists in the military, becomes a Navy SEAL. He serves heroically, risking his life in one dangerous black-ops mission after another. When he accepts his discharge, the other men in his unit lament the loss of their best man. Tommy comes home, and I take a few weeks off from my job as an assistant district attorney to vacation with him somewhere hot and hopping with other young people. Then Tommy heads off to the federal law-enforcement training center to become a federal agent. He falls in love with a woman he meets undercover, a frank-talking Italian with a crooked smile and a black belt in kickboxing. They get married, have three boys—roughnecks like their father.