by Jeff Hobbs
The following Friday night, while Coach Ridley was packing for a water polo tournament—and trying to figure out who could play the hole position in Rob’s place—Rob called him at home. He asked when the bus was leaving tomorrow. Coach Ridley, aware that Rob knew very well what time the bus left, told him to be at school by eight in the morning.
“Cool,” Rob said. “Cool.” Silence followed, but neither hung up.
“How are you feeling about the games tomorrow?” Coach asked.
“Strong. I think we can run the table.”
They talked for an hour, about game strategy against the talented Exeter Academy team, about the New York Giants, about random school gossip and events. They talked about everything except what they’d talked about earlier in the week.
Rob was on fire at the tournament, scoring multiple goals in each of their four games. They lost to Exeter in the semifinals but won their consolation game to take third place overall. And Coach Ridley never confronted Rob again about marijuana. He figured that here was a fundamentally good kid of spectacular mental faculty, and that if he could do as well as he did while relying on a little cannabis to metabolize his anger, then maybe it was best not to meddle, not now.
IN THE SECOND week of their senior year, Rob was elected group leader, the president of all the eighteen color groups, each of which had its own president and vice president. He was in charge of the convocation each morning, resolving conflicts among the underclassmen, and, above all, disciplinary measures. One of his first actions was to make boots illegal in school. Because of the uniforms, many students utilized footwear as fashion statements. Sneakers weren’t allowed, and so kids wore big construction boots with the laces untied—just like Rob had worn at Mt. Carmel. Rob decided that these boots were a distraction in the hallways and in class, with the heavy thumps they made and the fights they sometimes caused. He took plenty of flack for this policy decision, but he didn’t care. The rule went into effect.
When he wasn’t at school, he was with Curtis, whose father had died during the summer between junior and senior years: an assault of cancer similar to that which had taken Tavarus’s father four years earlier. Alone or all together, the Burger Boyz reneged on their silent agreement to steer their talk clear of the hard stuff, and they wondered what beef God had with the fathers and sons of East Orange. Curtis’s father, though sometimes gruff, had provided a beacon for the group, as well as a motivator, a constant stream of eyes-on-the-prize mentality. While thugs, junkies, and vagrants trolled up and down Smith Street at night, Mr. Gamble had always been home by six, available for help with homework or a verbal ass-kicking for any of the five boys who merited one. And now he—just like Tavarus’s father, just like Flowy’s, just like Drew’s, just like Rob’s—was gone.
Losing a father was more than a singular devastating event. It marked the beginning of a struggle, a lifetime struggle made harder by the conscious awareness that it would always be so, that no achievement would ever nullify the reality of such an absence. The single thing that did help—to cope with if not to overcome—was friendship, to which these boys clung fiercely.
Through all the various periods of tragedy during their four years together, Rob had yet to reveal anything about his own father. He visited Skeet once a month—more often if his sports schedule permitted—in secret. These visits encompassed more than a father and son divided by Plexiglas, striving to remain in tune with one another’s day-to-day. Rob had in fact been spending a vast amount of time helping his father legally prepare for his long-awaited first appeal, which Skeet had been engineering for five years now.
During the summer between sophomore and junior years, Rob and Tavarus had both interned at a real estate firm run by a St. Benedict’s alumnus, mostly doing title research. They’d spent much of each day in the Office of Public Records downtown, cross-referencing tax maps with parcel numbers and property values and transfer deeds, making sure that there were no title irregularities capable of deep-sixing an acquisition (Newark real estate was characterized by its irregularities). The Essex County Law Library was just across Springfield Avenue from the Office of Public Records, and during lunch breaks Rob began spending time there, studying capital murder cases and all the various elements of his father’s trial that, increasingly as he grew older, plagued him. Once his junior year of school began, he would finish his homework and then—while his classmates watched TV or talked on the phone or slept—spend a late-night hour with these dense tomes of legal jargon, filling up notebooks with any shred of precedent that might help. As a teenager beginning in 1996, Rob had taken it upon himself to do what the public defenders had failed to do in the fall of 1990: prove that Skeet was innocent. Through his junior year, the following summer, and the first semester of his senior year, in the midst of the trail hikes and early-morning lifeguarding and his group leader responsibilities and high school romances and his first college applications, Rob worked on behalf of his father.
And on December 2, 1997, midway through Rob’s senior year of high school, he, Skeet, and a pro bono lawyer named Carl Herman filed a petition for postconviction relief. They argued that Skeet’s constitutional right to a speedy trial, granted by the Sixth Amendment, had been violated. At the center of this strategy was Irving Gaskins, the man in whose home Skeet had been arrested and who had passed away a year before the trial. Gaskins had been interviewed at the time of the arrest, stating firmly that Skeet had possessed no weapon. But he hadn’t been asked to give a formal deposition to Skeet’s lawyers before his death, and so this testimony never came forth in the trial. Carl Herman blamed the public defenders for insufficient representation in this regard, as well as for “severely prejudicing” Skeet’s case due to the nearly yearlong period during which the office denied him representation following his initial arrest. Once Skeet had been granted representation, his lawyers had also opted not to file a “speedy trial motion,” which Herman argued further protracted the proceedings.
One of Skeet’s public defenders from his trial testified during the postconviction relief hearing that December. Ironically, he did so on behalf of the State, making the case that he had represented Skeet more than adequately, that three years between arrest and trial was not uncommon for a capital crime and had been necessary in order to plan his strategy, and that Gaskins’s statement, even if it had been recorded, would not have affected the outcome of the trial given that Gaskins would have spoken of what he had not seen (the murder weapon) rather than what he had. The lawyer argued that the long pretrial process had in fact spared Skeet’s life, as it had granted the defense time necessary to “prepare a list of mitigating factors” and escape the death penalty.
But on that day, the presiding judge sided with Skeet and said, “Based upon the defendant’s claim of a violation of his Sixth Amendment right to speedy trial, and as a consequence thereof, the indictment which charged him with murder and other offenses has been dismissed.” The judge stayed the decision for fifty days to permit the State to appeal, meaning that Rob’s father was not yet an entirely free man. Nevertheless, ten years and four months after the murders of the Moore sisters, Skeet came home.
ROB AND CARL STOOD on either side of Skeet as they walked past the final guard station and into the main parking lot beneath an overcast Trenton sky. The redbrick wall behind and above them cast its long shadow over the rows of vehicles. They burrowed into their coats, walked quietly to Carl’s car, and headed for the turnpike. Rob had spent many nights preparing to fill his father in on how Newark and the world had changed in the last decade: the Gulf War, Bill Clinton, the razing of four project towers by Mayor James, the breakouts of rap artists like Nas and Outkast and Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G. (he’d made a mix tape for the drive), the murders of the latter two. He knew his father thrived on asking questions, and he was ready to provide everything Skeet wanted to know, share all the information that time constraints had precluded during their half-hour vi
sits over the years.
But Skeet’s thirst for human data was limited to only one human: his son. School, sports, his friends, his girlfriends—he drilled Rob with rapid-fire questions, and Rob was startled. As a kid who had geared much of his life around the concerns of others, he was neither accustomed to nor comfortable fielding inquiries about himself. Rob grew increasingly quiet in the backseat as Carl bucked along South Orange Avenue. Skeet had lived his whole preprison life within a mile of this road, but he hadn’t laid eyes on it in a decade. He didn’t lay eyes on it now, craning his body instead to face his son, their too-similar faces just inches apart, breathing the same air, no more barriers between them.
The fifty-day stay the judge had granted loomed even now. Mr. Herman had left them with no doubt that the State would eventually file its counterappeal of the postconviction relief ruling, and when it did so, Skeet would almost certainly have to return to prison until the appeal was ultimately decided. They didn’t know how long the State would take to prepare this counterappeal; they hoped that the approaching holidays would delay the motion, since lawyers had families, too. In the meantime, Rob was fueled by the prospect of reintroducing his father to the neighborhood the same way that his father had introduced it to him so long ago. All those hours in the law library, all those commutes to Trenton State, all those nights lying awake and alone in his bed—and here was the culmination: he and his father entering the house on Chapman Street together.
But the reality of Skeet’s homecoming in no way resembled Rob’s fantasies.
Skeet moved into the third floor, in a room directly above Rob’s. Immediately, the house felt crowded. For the first few weeks before Christmas, Skeet didn’t leave. He paced around, ate, read, and continued barraging Rob with questions. He seemed self-conscious about venturing out the way he’d once relished doing, reluctant to confront any of the dozens of neighbors he’d counted as his extended family.
“Everyone’s been asking about you,” Rob implored him. “Let’s take a walk around.”
“Uh-uh, uh-uh,” Skeet replied. “It’s too damn cold outside.”
Day after day, his father kept himself surrounded by four walls nearly at all times. Maybe he needed time to acclimate. Maybe he felt vulnerable, disconnected, no longer the Man in this domain. Maybe his father knew that the second he ventured outside he would begin to attract old friends who were exactly the types of people he couldn’t be seen around right now. Maybe he would also attract people who had known the Moore sisters, people not above their own brand of retribution. Maybe, after a decade in a cell, he needed those walls on all sides just to breathe.
Jackie kept herself busy and largely apart from the son and his father during these first weeks. She’d convinced her parents to let him stay there temporarily, at least through Christmas, for Rob’s benefit alone. But she had no role to play between them, not anymore. Even if she did have one, Jackie wouldn’t have had the energy to fill it. She was tired to a degree never before known to her. She’d watched her son’s body grow strong from swimming, his mind oiled and tight from the rigorous curriculum he’d designed for himself (which now included college-level calculus and chemistry classes at Essex Community College). She sometimes felt that her own body had withered in inverse proportion, that her own mind had become diffuse and good for little besides calculating stew ingredients according to serving size. Her hair was graying, her posture was slouched, her knees were shot. She hadn’t been able to save any money in four years and had relied on her parents’ savings to get her through a few lean months. She’d taken Rob to school at five thirty for his lifeguarding job as often as she could. In her parents’ Lincoln, she’d picked him up at Curtis’s near midnight after study marathons. She’d skimped as little as possible when it came to his education. As much as she could, she’d tried to shield him from the strain this placed on her. The fact that her son was thriving, that he was on course for college, had sustained her. And now, on the home stretch of senior year that she’d always envisioned as a time of vital decisions and valuable reflections on the eighteen years of life she and her son had lived together, she was instead worried about Skeet. She worried about whether he would actually find another place to stay like he’d assured her. She worried about him eating more than his share. She worried about him distracting Rob from schoolwork, something that no one prior had ever been able to do. But she had never worried that having his father at home would make her son unhappy.
Skeet tracked the boy’s movements obsessively. Anytime he left that month—to hang with Curtis on Smith Street, to go to the mall in Union with a girl, to work out with Tavarus and Flowy at the pool—Skeet met him at the door, wanting to know exactly where he was going and with whom. And when he returned, Skeet would be there waiting for a detailed rendering of what he’d done while away.
Rob had been living more or less as an adult, responsible for his own time, for years now. He’d constructed his own social network, his own schedule, his own way of life. And he’d done all this with aplomb, ascending to the pinnacle of the St. Benedict’s community as well as the precipice of a college education. Through it all, Rob had spent time every day for ten years wondering what it would be like to have his father back. Against the image of this father waiting almost desperately by the front window for him to show up (and Rob could remember waiting in that same place himself as a seven-year old), he was spending his days remembering fondly what it was like being his own man, with no one hovering or questioning or living vicariously through him.
Christmas arrived, and various extended family members came home from Georgia, Florida, and Ohio. The Peace clan, almost all of whom had begun their lives in this house, congregated there once more. Rob had organized the reunion himself, calling, cajoling, offering to help pay for airfare; he’d been obsessed with a family Christmas. Now Rob seemed to locate the happiness that he’d found so elusive in the weeks since his father’s release. He cooked and passed around trays of food. He decorated the house. He invited Victor and his aunt over, and Victor would remember for the rest of his life the degree to which Rob resembled his father. Presents were relatively few, but Rob gave his parents both imitation-leather coats that he’d bargained for in the fashion district of Manhattan. Skeet held up his coat and nodded thanks, but no one saw him smile. It was as if he knew that he’d never wear it.
Just after the second semester of school began in January, the State filed its counterappeal to the postconviction relief ruling. As stipulated by the judge’s prior stay, Skeet returned to prison. Once more, Rob walked with his father across a prison parking lot, this time to Essex County, to await another verdict.
NEAR MIDNIGHT, a sharp breeze rolled across Orange Park. The swing set creaked near the bench on which Victor and Rob sat. Victor couldn’t recall seeing his friend cry in eight years of knowing him. Had their positions been reversed, Rob most likely would have told him to “quit being a bitch.” But Victor wasn’t going to say that. His friend spent so much time being rough, hard, guarded, that this moment felt almost precious, and Victor wished he knew what to do or say.
They were sharing a joint, both leaning forward with elbows on knees. Orange Park remained a relatively safe place to smoke, because the police still didn’t make regular patrols and because the boys knew by name all the young dealers who operated here—had grown up with many of them. They were left alone to work their way through this new problem, rare in the sense that it belonged to Rob.
In early spring of their senior year, college acceptance letters had begun trickling in to the school. Rob had been advised to apply to nine colleges: three “stretches,” three “good bets,” and three “safety schools.” He’d ultimately chosen to apply to six, in order to save Jackie money on application fees: Johns Hopkins, Yale, Penn, Columbia, Seton Hall, and Montclair State. Earlier that day, Rob had received his third response, from Montclair. The state school had offered Rob a full merit scholarship. The Ivy L
eague did not award merit-based scholarships, only need-based. Columbia, in New York City, had turned him down—Rob felt because that was the one application on which, in the financial aid attachment, he’d mentioned his father’s status as an inmate. Johns Hopkins, his first choice after all the college visits, had accepted him but with only partial financial aid. He’d made the mistake of listing the house on Chapman Street as an asset, which had shaded his and Jackie’s circumstances in ways he hadn’t foreseen, as it had once done for his father in pursuit of public defense. For the general essay question, “Write about a challenge you have overcome,” he told the story of the storm on the Appalachian Trail and shepherding underclassmen down the mountainside at night.
Now, he was crying, trying to hide it, digging his index finger into his eye as if there were a bug in it.
“I don’t know what I want to do,” he murmured.
“You have to go to Montclair, you go to Montclair,” Victor responded. “I know it’s not an Ivy and all, but it’s not a bad college.”
Rob shook his head. “You know you want to fly planes, right?” Victor had been learning to pilot small planes throughout high school with a group called the Young Eagles, and he’d already accepted admission to Daniel Webster College in Nashua, New Hampshire, which had an aviation program. “But I don’t know what I want to do.”
“You’re going to do whatever the hell you have to do,” Victor told him, and he ventured laying a hand on Rob’s thick shoulder as his friend took a deep drag of marijuana and handed the joint back. “Just like you’re doing now.”
Rob nodded. The problem was not as simple as money, though money was the most powerful variable in that it basically didn’t exist. The other element—the one drawing forth these tears—had to do with potential, of which Rob knew he possessed a vast amount but didn’t know where to focus it. He excelled in math and science but remained passionate about books. He’d valued his real estate internship and the complicated minutiae that accompanied the property acquisition process—with profits lying in gathering more information than competitors, in being less lazy. He’d been fully immersed in his father’s legal battles, and despite the sobering undercurrents of his father’s time at home he still held on to the exhilaration of his role in achieving that time. He loved gaining knowledge in any subject, and he was unnerved by the onset of this first consequential decision of his life—the realization that from this point on, the choices he made would begin closing doors as well as opening them. He told Victor, though not in so many words, that he wished he weren’t as smart as he was; he wished his horizon might be narrower and thus more easily navigable. Considering his academic pedigree, Montclair State represented a narrow horizon indeed. But that’s where he was going to go—even after Yale and Penn accepted him over the next two weeks, with aid packages similar to that offered by Johns Hopkins. He owed it to his mother not to take anything more from her; this debt was unspoken, and unknown even to Jackie herself.