Watch Me Go

by Mark Wisniewski

  I sit on the edge of the mattress and stare at the blank wall. I have no reliable sense of time, but it must be hours before I accept that I will have a view out of the barred window only—that is, no window through which to see the outdoors. And often, throughout these hours that I sit here alone because of what I’ve done and haven’t done, I think of Jasir’s future.

  What will he tell his friends about me?

  Will my time here be a secret he never shares?

  Of course, I’m trying not to consider who I’ll meet in this building. There will be mostly brothers, so if I’m known as the cop killer, will I be a hero? And if so, will I be spared from the jailhouse horrors no ex-con ever talks about?

  Questions beyond these run through my mind. I sit down. I stand. I remember Gabe’s kindness. At some point I’m sure Gerelli is bound to visit momentarily, but he doesn’t. I promise myself he is now working for me, and after this promise wears thin, I start to doubt Gerelli the man—his resolve, his smarts, his goodness.

  So when the door slides open and I hear, “You have a visitor,” I have roughly as much respect for Gerelli as I do for Bark. Again there are guards, this time two, and again I am handcuffed, the three of us led down the stairs by a black administrator too large to take shit from anyone. He nods me into a room walled by Mets navy blue cinder block, where he alone uncuffs me, has me undress completely and raise my arms and widen my stance; he sees all of me but touches none of me. He stuffs my clothes into a metal bucket marked with the same number as the one on the gray jumpsuit he hands me. He never once looks me in the eye, and he cuffs my wrists tighter than anyone has yet.

  Then he has me leave the room, and we are walking again, his palm on my left shoulder blade, pushing in a way that hints he’s behind schedule. And then we are cutting through a small office to enter a room centered by a white wooden table with three stainless steel rings bolted into it, a visiting room. And here, I notice as I’m cuffed to one of the rings, stands Gerelli, behind the table, wearing that same green suit, setting himself up on a folding chair while I sit. He places his briefcase on his lap and says, “Not so great news, Mr. Sharp.”

  “What is it?” I say.

  “I contacted the three people you wanted to see.”

  He opens the briefcase, pulls out a legal pad, flips his way to a new sheet, pats his inside jacket pocket to find a pen he clicks twice.

  “And?” I say.

  “Well, they’re not here,” he says with a glance behind him.

  “Did you expect them now?”

  “To be honest, Mr. Sharp? People who will visit an accused generally do so right away.”

  “Generally,” I say.

  “Correct. The pattern is more visitors sooner and very few later.”

  He jots phrases on consecutive lines.

  “Let me be candid with you, Mr. Sharp. You’ve been charged with murder. Nine out of ten times, that means the people you know would rather not think about you. Let alone visit.”

  “So who’s my one out of ten?” I ask. “You?”

  “I’ll tell you who it isn’t,” he says. “This friend of yours, James.”

  “You saw him?”

  Gerelli nods. “First thing this morning.”

  “What did he say?”

  “It’s what he didn’t say, Mr. Sharp. Didn’t and thus very likely won’t. What he did say was, essentially, that I should contact his attorney. Who, as it turns out, is the same guy who represents your friend Mr. Barker. Which, of course, means we need to prepare a case that assumes that both of these lifelong friends of yours will, as character witnesses, prove hostile.”

  “You’re saying James will lie, too.”

  “No need to lie to harm character, Mr. Sharp. I mean, we’ve all lived lives.” He jots something, again with a question mark. “And of course nothing’s for certain,” he says, but then I wonder exactly how much extra cash Bark gave James last we all saw each other—plus, Bark, I realize, has been James’s only employer for years.

  Then Gerelli says, “Your buddy James did request that I ask you one thing.”

  My gut guesses James’s question—Who would you side with?—but all I say is “What’s that?”

  “His precise words were ‘Why run?’ And I hate to say this, Mr. Sharp, but those two words kind of sum up what we’re up against. Let me be clear here: By no means do I, personally speaking, want to second-guess anything you did or failed to do in the past sixty-some hours. After all, you are, right now, still alive, and survival itself, no doubt, has been a great challenge for you. But all of my compassion for you aside, Mr. Sharp? People will ask why you ran.”

  “I know,” I say.

  “And unless we can give them an adequate answer—which, trust me, I am already working on—we’re going to be up against it.”

  What I’m hearing right now in this room, I tell myself, is lawyer talk, and its essence is that Gerelli has already lost hope. And now here this Gerelli is, glancing at his watch, which means he has other work to do, for other clients if not for me, not to mention he might have his own love and children and all of that.

  Then he leans back in his chair so far it tilts, and now, rounding the doorway behind him, is Madalynn—Madalynn as stately as ever—and I see no speck of her that’s not knock-dead beautiful, her hair pinned back off her strong cheekbones and delicate neck.

  “Hey, Deesh,” she says.

  I want to say Maddie!—but all I do is nod.

  “Now what you done?” she says with a hint of playfulness, and I glance at Gerelli, who stands to let her use the folding chair on his side of the table, gets a folded one from against the wall, sets it up a bit behind her right shoulder, which she glances over before her eyes kill mine.

  “He needs to be here?” she asks.

  “Mr. Gerelli?” I say.

  “Yes, I do,” Gerelli says, and, already, I’m sure, I’m losing her.

  “Well,” Madalynn says, “I figured you could use seeing me.”

  And I say, “Always.”

  Then she and I sit, her eyes searching my face, looking, I sense, for anything at all having to do with me that’s to-the-core true, and here goes another rush, up my neck, of that now familiar heat I give off with shame, and as it leaves my face I know that, yes, since grammar school, it’s been her, Madalynn, one way or another, here and there and wherever I’ve been, who has drawn such heat from me.

  And I want to tell her this, but my thoughts jump to where she and I might now be if Bark hadn’t pulled that trigger, or if I hadn’t joined him to haul junk as a way to make cash, or if I hadn’t kidded myself by thinking Jasir didn’t need a father just because I’d done without one.

  “But the thing is,” Madalynn says, “is that you never did see me.” She huffs out a sigh. “For pretty much every day of our seventeen-year-old son’s entire life.”

  It hits me that she said nothing at all like this on that sidewalk in Brooklyn. Then again, she was talking with Bark. This is what she was saving for me, I think, and I feel both lucky and empty.

  “I’m sorry, Maddie,” I say.

  “Of course you’re sorry,” she says.

  “I’m sorry because I love you,” I say, and with these words I’m not trying to play her, just plain sharing what I’ve felt for years.

  She jabs a thumb over her shoulder at Gerelli. “He tell you to say that?”

  “No, Maddie. He—”

  “See, but, Deesh? I will always wonder if he did.”

  “Why?” I say. “I swear, Mad: You don’t need to wonder. Why do you need to wonder?”

  “Why do I need to wonder?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Deesh, you, the man who is now here in prison, are the reason I have wondered for almost twenty years. You think love can just, that
far down the line, up and turn wondering off?”

  And all I can think is: She said love.

  “Anyway what does all of that really matter today?” she asks. “I mean, Jasir’s been talking about signing a piece of paper to agree to get blown up in some war.”

  “You’re saying he wants to enlist?”

  “No. But he might need to. The point is, Deesh, we’re all a lot older than you think we are. I realize you want to be all lovey-dovey with me now, but it’s not like you can suddenly just start . . . being there after you’ve been gone for so long. I mean, face it, Deesh: People, you know, adjust.”

  “But Maddie, you also have to remember something. That, you know, my being gone caused me to adjust.”

  “So?”

  “So, for what it’s worth . . .” And here, rather than go off on some blue streak like Gabe might have, I think, Forget it. You screwed this up long ago. You should’ve stayed in those woods, away from everyone, Gabe included.

  Then Madalynn says, “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Just tell me, Deesh. You don’t now, you might never.”

  I picture myself fishing in Gabe’s boat as I did—with Bark’s gun no longer in my mind—and think: Stupid. I take a deep breath and notice Gerelli watching me closely, ready, it seems, to do what lawyers do.

  “It’s just,” I say to Madalynn. “That I—”

  “Mr. Sharp?” Gerelli says, and I wave him off with a frown that says chill.

  “It’s just that—you know,” I say to Madalynn. “I want you to believe me.”

  All three of us, Madalynn, Gerelli, and I, wait.

  “I mean, believe that I didn’t shoot anyone,” I say.

  And here I can actually see, on Madalynn’s face, the brunt of an onslaught of thoughts running through her mind, Bark’s story on the news among them.

  “Maddie?” I say. “I’m telling you. I didn’t kill anyone.”

  58

  JAN

  “WE DON’T RUN FROM FUNERALS” was what my mother whispered to me and me only before we’d left the state police parking lot over in Saratoga County, so now here I was again, snug beside moonlight reflected off the lake that had swallowed my father. But now, as I lay on the Corcorans’ summer-porch cot, it occurred to me that my mother must have gone through a hell of her own waiting for my father’s cremation—before she could pour his ashes into the lake and leave New York State to start her life with me. I reminded myself that I was lucky to have had at least one parent who’d stuck close to me, but now, on this night, even though I was in the same house as this parent, I felt more alone than ever.

  Then I heard footfalls, and I sat up and saw Tug emerge from the strip of lawn along the south side of the house, jogging toward the shoreline, where he stopped to face the lake. That he’d run through the dark heartened me a little, though now I couldn’t deny he’d chosen to run without me, and with this well in mind, I actually missed Arkansas.

  Then he walked out onto the pier, in that slightly thicker darkness you see when a cloud obscures the moon, and he kept on walking until he stood at the very end, his arms at his sides, the whole of him reverently still, as if, right now, he might be trying to give the benefit of the doubt to his father’s best intentions, but my gut told me that, most probably, Tom’s love affair with gambling would always lead Tug to disgust, and that this night, for Tug, would probably be unbearable.

  If nothing else I knew well that a dead father never stops being dead, and no wish or forgiveness or run through the dark can change that. And I knew, too, all about the hardest part: Learning that, between you and your dead father, only one of you is now capable of change—you—and then after you do change, the new you comes to feel all the more distant from him, and the longer Tug stood out there on the pier, the more these lessons hit me all over again, and I hated them.

  And I wanted to walk out there and explain all this to Tug and tell him it was only natural, but I sensed that, as bad as I’d had it growing up, Tug now had it worse, because I, being born after my father’s death, couldn’t possibly have done a thing to cause it, whereas Tug, if he felt so inclined, could second-guess dozens of things he’d done and conclude that, hell, if he’d avoided doing just one of them, maybe Tom would be out there right now, standing on that pier with him. Any insolence of Tug’s, any rolling of his eyes, any decision as recent as the one he’d made to run with me in the dark the night Tom had driven off in a huff—anything could be turned over and over in Tug’s mind as a possible fault, and as I watched his stillness I wondered if, instead of being in love with him right now, I might just be feeling sorry for him.

  Then I realized that my hatred of what our fathers had put us through assured me I didn’t want for there to be pity, from Tug to me or from me to him. What I wanted was plain and simple—to be with Tug—and it hit me that what I liked most about running in the dark was picturing myself with Tug some night long from now after some run, doing whatever we wanted without concern about our parents’ troubles or anyone’s gossip, doing it until we’d see that little smudge of light the sun can push between branches at dawn. And it was then that there was simply no more kidding myself that, sure, I was capable of feeling sorry for anyone going through hell, but that my desire to put an end to Tug’s hell right now—so we’d be free of it—meant I loved him genuinely, maybe invincibly. And it was then that I felt how quickly the summer was flying past, how, even if he and I lucked into having long, healthy lives, we would each someday go quickly, too.

  And that’s why I stood and then left the summer porch.

  And why I walked across the moonlit lawn, privy to that same tightness in my chest I felt when Tug and I first met.

  And why I stepped onto the pier, setting it into its seemingly microscopic quiver over the black lapping water.

  And why I kept right on walking.

  And I don’t know why Tug turned around, but when he did, he saw me and sized me up carefully and said, “Yes?”

  And I said, “Yes.”

  And he stepped toward me, then stood directly in front of me, and we kissed, just once, but there was this sort of gravitational pull between us, and there was no shyness.

  “Out here?” Tug said.

  I shook my head no. “On the porch.”

  “But they’ll hear.”

  “No, they won’t, Tug. I’ll be on top, and you won’t move. Just one rule: No squeaks from the cot. They’ll think we’re just sitting there talking.”

  “And that could actually . . . work for you?”

  I nodded. “I like our chances.”

  59

  DEESH

  “I DO WANT TO BELIEVE YOU, DEESH” is what Madalynn says. “It’s just that . . . well, for you to be innocent makes no sense. Since you—you know. Ran away and all.”

  “But I was scared, Maddie. It’s as simple as that.”

  She shrugs. She doesn’t cry. “Scared will never make sense, Deesh,” she says, her voice higher. “If you love someone, there’s no scared. There’s no running! Unless it’s from something like . . . responsibility for a life.”

  You blew it, man, I think.

  “Or several lives,” she says.

  Just shouldn’t have run, I think. Ever.

  “You know?” she says. “When I first saw Bark talking about you on the news, I pointed straight at his face on my TV and said, ‘That Bark is a liar.’ And I said that because I believed in you. But when the news showed you being escorted in that Pennsylvania trooper car? I started shaking, Deesh. Because, all of a sudden my body couldn’t take it anymore. Because, dammit, Deesh? It wasn’t just Bark talking anymore. It was you, all the way out in those big hills covered with all those trees. It was a man obviously caught on the run, and I needed to finally stop denying that that same man was you.”

&n
bsp; Gerelli’s gaze at the ceiling has me certain he’s thinking the worst.

  “You can say caught,” I say, to Madalynn but him, too. “But not on the run. Because I wanted to come back, to own up to you. To you and Jasir. That’s what my heart felt, Maddie, and I promise you that. I wanted to come home, Maddie. You just need to believe I saw home as someplace with you and Jasir. And that’s pretty much all I have to say.”

  “And all I have to say, Deesh?” she nearly shouts. “Is that I can’t believe you!”

  “Not ever?”

  “Not that I can foresee.”

  The sting of these words leaves me unable to move.

  Finally I manage to say, “I still need to talk to Jasir. I need to know that at least he might believe me.”

  “Jasir needs to believe the truth,” she says. “Like he always has.”

  “Then please tell him the truth, Maddie: that I want to talk with him. So I can see all this through. So he can know the whole truth on his own.”

  “No way, Deesh.”

  “Huh?”

  “Jasir is not going to step foot near any Rikers prison.”

  “No, Maddie: Jasir is not going to end up on Rikers. Which is exactly why he needs to talk with me.”

  “Needed.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask, knowing full well the answer to this question.

  “Means it’s too late to be his father now, Deesh. Too late by years.”

  And she nods at me, once but with aim as lethal as Bark’s and Gabe’s aim of that gun, then gets up and walks out of the room, no slowing down or stopping, no turning back.

  60

  JAN

  TUG TOLD ME THAT THE FIRST THING he heard when he woke in his bed the morning after we first made love was nothing for a long time, just a quietness similar to the silence he’d grown up fearing in the house, save the fact that this silence said less about frustrations between spouses and more about shock that another retired jock had passed on. There was also, if you asked me, a certain relief to this silence, a calm because now, among this jock’s survivors, fewer bets would be made, and then, as Tug lay in his bed, he heard “Tug” whispered from behind his opening door, but rather than me it was his mother who stood there, in the doorway, dressed for a trip into town.