“Less talking and more eating, please.” She wags her finger at my cold sculpted mashed potato. I sigh. I really can’t eat it. I look down at the bland, pasty goo. It’s not food. It’s that pallid gunk you repair walls with, or use to seal rusted pipes. And regrettably, I’ve run out of passably tasty items to blend with it.
I look to my dad, who returns my gaze levelly. He raises his eyebrows. I understand. I blast the stucco mound with an alloy of condiments and get it down as rapidly as I can without complaint. Once it’s gone I know that he’s right. It really is easier this way. I even compliment my mother on the meal. In a way, it feels like a victory.
Later, with my mug of sweetened Pablo in my room, I think about my dad. It’s as though we’re on equal footing again, like something has shifted back into place.
It seems to me that perhaps he knew I was lying that night. He’s not an idiot. He must have smelled the liquor, he must have known I was drunk. He must have seen my dirty clothes, my red eyes. And he’s seen me lie before. I remember the way he frowned down at me. I don’t think he believed me for a second.
So when he saw me sitting with Eliza today, I think it might have confirmed some crucial part of my story, or enough of it to have him trust me again. Just enough to know my lie wasn’t as flagrant as he might have thought. That I might not have told the whole truth, but enough of it was in there.
I wish Jasper Jones would come round tonight. I don’t know why, but I want to tell him about Eliza. That I kissed her. That she kissed me.
***
He came to my window twice when I was detained. The first was a few days after it happened. He turned up late and full of apology. Whispering, I told him I’d been grounded and I couldn’t come out. Jasper kept saying he was sorry, that it was all his fault. He said he should have brought us back sooner. I did my best to allay his misgivings, but I feel he left that night heavier than he’d arrived, harried by guilt.
I’d wanted to follow him out, to assure him I was embroiled in this by my own choice. I could have pulled out if I wanted, but I believed him. I wanted to help. Not that I was much good to him anyway.
I also wanted to tell him then that I’d resolved to leave with him, escape to the city once this was all over.
I’d thought a lot about it. Especially when I was most bitter about being kept inside. My determination ebbed and flowed, but I always held on to the idea. Of course, the notion of running away scared the shit out of me, but the thought of walking out on Corrigan side by side with Jasper Jones was galvanizing enough for me to believe I could actually do it.
The second time Jasper showed up, it was Christmas Eve. This time he was urgent, impatient. Almost the same as that very first night he tapped on my louvres. Breathing heavily, sweating as though he’d just run here. I flipped my window open and found him stepping from one foot to another.
“Charlie, I know it were him. I can prove it.” His eyes bulged with feeling. He smelled of earth and cigarettes.
“Quiet!” I said to him, holding my finger to my lips. “The walls are real thin. My parents might hear. What’s happened?”
“I got him, Charlie. I reckon I fuckin got him,” Jasper hissed.
“Who? Jack Lionel?”
“That’s right.”
“How? What do you mean?”
Jasper told me how he’d snuck onto Lionel’s property that dawn, knowing he’d be asleep. He’d come in from the back, ducking through Lionel’s wire fence, and started snooping around. He went right past the peach tree and under the veranda, opening dusty cupboards and running his eyes over cluttered shelves, but there was nothing except empty paint tins and tools. I was astonished by his bravery. If it weren’t Jasper Jones, I would never have believed it.
He had even peered through the windows of the house, but that didn’t give much away either. The kitchen was as good as barren: a small kettle on the stove, a tin mug in the drying rack by the sink. A small table with vinyl chairs. Around the side, under the peach tree, another window revealed a neat brown living room. A single reclining chair. A small radio and television sat on a low table. I pressed Jasper for more details. There were photographs on the upright piano by the far wall, but he couldn’t make them out. A landscape painting. A stack of newspapers. A fireplace. Every other window was hidden behind thin beige shades. It didn’t sound like the home of a psychopath.
It was only when Jasper gave up and walked back the way he came, past the outhouse and the chicken coop and the overgrown vegetable garden, that he stumbled across it. A way past Lionel’s rickety corrugated-iron woodshed, lying in the open among spikes of tall dry grass, was the burned, rusted husk of a car. Jasper had approached it without much interest. The front end of its shell was completely crunched in. Jasper walked around it, peered inside. Gossamer cobwebs hung from crevices, budded with dew. It smelled of dust and rat shit. What little was left of the interior foam had rotted through.
Jasper told me he was about to leave when he looked down and saw it. He said it made him freeze, made him sick to his guts. He thought he was dreaming. There. Right there. On the passenger-side door, etched deep into the rust.
A single word.
Sorry.
He had to touch it to make sure. He found it difficult to bend his knees in order to squat down to inspect it further. That word. That same word, this time spelled out in capitals. A good deal older than the one on the eucalypt. It was barely noticeable, but it was there.
“I had to sit down,” Jasper told me. “And then I just got angry. It was all I could do not to run inside and grab him then and there. I knew it. I knew he done it. I just sat there and kept starin at that word. Readin it over and over.”
Jasper paused to light a cigarette while my brain slowly churned around this information.
“Are you sure it looked the same as the tree? Was the writing the same?” I asked him.
“The word was the same,” he stated, and exhaled.
“Blow away from the window,” I hissed, feeling like a pansy. “Or else they’ll have me for smoking too and I’ll be stuck in here until my bollocks rot.”
“Shit. Sorry, mate.” Jasper flapped at his silver breath and smirked.
In the short silence that followed, I tried to get my head around the story. It was certainly intriguing. Could it really be truth? Did it really implicate Lionel? Maybe Jasper was right all along. But to whom was this apology dedicated? If the etchings were old, as Jasper stated, it had to have been for somebody other than Laura. So who? I couldn’t make sense of it. The whole thing seemed so cryptic and tenuous.
“I don’t know, Jasper. It could all be a complete coincidence,” I tried to reason.
“What? Charlie, listen, there’s no such thing as coincidence. Think about it. Think about everythin we know. About Jack Lionel coming out shouting at me without fail, wavin and screamin. Because he’s a crazy old bastard. About the fact that we know he’s murdered before. And now, all this about him scratchin his guilt everywhere. Come on, Charlie. It was him. He killed her. It makes sense. It stands to reason. This is it. This is the thing that links him to it, to my spot, to Laura. We knew it from the start, and now we can prove it.”
I frowned over these two apologies. One whispered, one shouted. One etched in wood, one scratched in tin. It was compelling, I had to admit. It felt like a true clue. And Jasper’s certainty was so alluring. I was sorely tempted to agree with him, to grab my pitchfork and run, just to have this solved and settled.
But in order to be useful to Jasper, I had to be evenhanded and logical, like Atticus, like my dad. Critical. I had to fight it with questions. If it stood to reason, it could stand to me.
“But if Mad Jack Lionel is such a dangerous criminal,” I whispered, “why haven’t the police been round there? Why hasn’t he been questioned or apprehended already? Seems to me if his reputation were true, he’d be the first person I’d go talk to if a young girl went missing. I mean, is there a chance he really isn’t who we think
?”
“First, Charlie, we orready know how smart the police are in this town. Other thing is, we don’t know that they haven’t bin to see Lionel. I don’t have his house under constant surveillance. Who knows? Maybe they took him in. Maybe that’s where he’d bin, why he hadn’t bin out yelling at me while I waited all those nights.”
“So you think they have talked to him?”
“I’m sayin they might have. But the real problem with the police is that they don’t even know what they’re investigatin. You see? All they know is that Laura is missing. That’s all they got to go on. They still think she’s just disappeared on her own. They still think she’s run off to the city or whatever. You don’t start lookin for a murderer until you’re know someone’s bin killed.”
“True,” I conceded. I sensed some impatience from Jasper, as though he’d argued this before.
“Anyway,” he went on, “he caught me.”
“What?”
Jasper nodded slowly and crushed his cigarette into the windowsill. “Yeah. See, after I sat there for a bit, I decided to go back for a closer look before I left. Now that I was sure it was him. But I got back within view of the house, and there he was, on the back steps, starin straight at me.”
“Christ. What did he do?”
“Nuthin, really. I dint stick round long enough. I was angry but. I pointed at him and yelled out, ‘I knew it! I knew it were you!’ Then I just bolted back the way I come in.”
I shook my head and swore.
“I know,” Jasper said softly. “It’s the closest I ever bin to him. He’s not as old as I thought. I should’ve stayed, but I was so angry, I might’ve had a run at him.”
“Did he yell out to you?”
“Nah, that’s the thing. He dint say one word. He just stood there on his back steps.”
I paused and looked down.
“So what does all this mean?”
“It means we know he did it, Charlie. We know for sure.”
“But do we?” I scratched at my hair. “I mean, I don’t know, Jasper. It’s unusual, I admit. But we don’t know for sure, do we? We need witnesses and all that sort of stuff in order to convince anyone else. Something that ties him there irrefutably.”
“Well, that’s what we get next,” Jasper said simply.
“Yeah, but how?”
“We get him to confess.”
And before I could blurt my next inquiry, there were three loud knocks at my door and my mother called my name sharply. I swatted the air with the back of my hand to urge Jasper away. He vanished. She burst in like she was conducting a raid.
“Go easy,” I told her. “I was just trying to get this window open. The lever was stuck.”
She surveyed my room like a bird of prey.
“Have you been smoking? I smell smoke. Is that why you’re opening your window?” She leaned in, stern, looking for any justifiable cause to smite me to a bloody pulp. She’d been doing this for the past two weeks: coming in tense and terse and suspicious, as though I might be digging an escape tunnel or harboring communist spies. She was more aggressive with me than ever. She’d been everything I’d imagined a prison guard to be, but without the uniform or baton or occasional displays of humanity.
“What? Of course not,” I answered, crumpling my face into a portrait of confusion and offense.
She humphed, narrowed her eyes, and exited.
I’d embarrassed her the night I was caught, that much I knew. I’d shattered the facade; I’d sullied the family name and her repute. Tongues were wagging. Aspersions were being cast like dandelion spores on hot, gossipy winds. The CWA brigade and the badminton babblers were tutting like vultures. I was no longer a model child and she was no longer a model mother. And a snide, petty part of me was thrilled about it, almost proud.
After she shut the door, I stared out the window. I waited all night for Jasper Jones, but he didn’t come back.
It’s been three nights since I saw Jasper Jones, and I’m brimming with questions and news.
So tonight, I try to write to make sense of it. I’m anxious and excited after spending the day with Eliza and seeing Jeffrey triumph. But all that is still tempered by the brick in my gut, the wasp nesting in my chest, the girl in the water.
For some reason, I begin by scrawling that word at the top of the page. I look at it. Sorry. Sorry. It’s a word that haunts and hurts to read. It seems to pardon itself for being on the page. It’s a word as clear as it is elusive.
I write around it. Weaving and scratching. I give it story and dialogue. I give it names and places. I give it breath and voice. My writing is fast and messy. I chew the insides of my mouth and barely notice when I taste blood.
And it becomes clear to me that it’s a good word used by good people. Nobody is truly virtuous, nobody avoids the creeping curse. Every character in every story is buffeted between good and bad, between right and wrong. But it’s good people who can tell the difference, who know when they’ve crossed the line. And it’s a hard and humbling gesture, to take blame and admit fault. You’ve got to get brave to say it and mean it. Sorry.
Sorry.
Sorry means you feel the pulse of other people’s pain as well as your own, and saying it means you take a share of it. And so it binds us together, makes us as trodden and sodden as one another. Sorry is a lot of things. It’s a hole refilled. A debt repaid. Sorry is the wake of misdeed. It’s the crippling ripple of consequence. Sorry is sadness, just as knowing is sadness. Sorry is sometimes self-pity. But Sorry, really, is not about you. It’s theirs to take or leave.
Sorry means you leave yourself open, to embrace or to ridicule or to revenge. Sorry is a question that begs forgiveness, because the metronome of a good heart won’t settle until things are set right and true. Sorry doesn’t take things back, but it pushes things forward. It bridges the gap. Sorry is a sacrament. It’s an offering. A gift.
Yes. Sorry is when good people feel bad. And the folks who trouble me are the ones who, through some break in their circuitry, through some hole in their heart, can’t feel it, or say it, or scratch it into trees, or transmit it to the sky with their palms kissing. Eric Edgar Cooke never whispered it. Albert Fish never admitted it. The Boston Strangler never offered it up. Gertrude Baniszewski never burned it into the skin of Sylvia Likens. And that’s why a part of me is reluctant to believe it was Laura’s killer who was responsible for scarring that word into wood. Sorry. It had to be somebody else. I’ve read about murderers revisiting the scenes of their crimes, but never out of contrition. Never to make good with a ghost. If you’re capable of that kind of evil, can you be capable of an equal share of remorse?
But who else could it have been? Who else knew? Who else could have cause to apologize? Maybe I’m being wilfully obtuse. I’m probably wrong. About everything. And maybe Jasper’s right. Maybe Sorry isn’t as simple as I think it is. Or as honorable or romantic or grand. Maybe it’s just the refuge of the weak. Maybe it’s just the calming balm of the bad and the ruthless. Maybe it’s little or no reward for those in receipt. Maybe it’s just an empty promise, the gift of a hollow box. Maybe it’s self-serving and loveless. Maybe it takes what it needs and gives nothing back. Maybe it’s as stupid and lousy and meaningless as all these yellow slices of hackneyed scrawl, cased up and locked away.
I think about Eliza, and my belly grips and fists and rolls over itself. I tear to a new page and huddle over it, desperate to trap her with words.
A tree
doesn’t know it’s a tree.
It doesn’t know how pretty its flowers are,
or how beautiful they smell,
or how soft and sweet its fruit is.
It can’t feel how warm I am with my arms around it.
It can’t hear me when I tell it these things.
It doesn’t know anything.
I’m glad you’re not a tree.
I read it through and sigh and strip the page from the pad. I scrunch it into a ball the size of a wa
lnut. But I don’t throw it away. I place it in my top drawer, even though it’s the worst poem ever contrived.
Stuff it. The world is beating me tonight. My brain is a big, sluggish pink mollusk. I toss my pen aside, frustrated. I rest my head on my crossed forearms and close my eyes. And I go to my Manhattan ballroom for solace.
I grip the lectern onstage, my gold trophy resting in front of me. The applause has stopped abruptly, and what remains is a slightly awkward, confused silence. Somebody coughs. I glance down and notice the engraving on the gilt edge of my prize. It’s not mine. It never was. Two blue-suited men with shades sweep in from the wings and grab my arms. As they lead me away, I look out into the crowd and see Papa Hemingway shaking his head at a bemused Harper Lee, as if to suggest he too has no idea who I am and what I’m doing onstage. Norman Mailer is grinning smugly. People are tittering. Kerouac and Kesey are under a chandelier, giggling to themselves. Roaring now, these cruel fictioneers, all so smart and assured. I’m horribly embarrassed. I glance to my left and see Truman Capote holding a copy of my poem, cringing and rolling his eyes. And the blue suits lead me blessedly away from their cruel laughter, to someplace dark and quiet.
***
And then the noises pull me back to Corrigan.
I lift my head and frown. At first I notice banging, faint from here. And then shouting. I hear car doors slamming. Then a dog barking. I wonder what the ruckus is, who it belongs to.
When it persists, I am compelled to go find out. I slip quietly out of my room and into the living room. I peel back the curtain and survey the street. Something is happening outside Jeffrey’s house. My brick sinks and I gasp. I see four men destroying An Lu’s garden, headlit by their own truck. It doesn’t seem real through this glass. They pull at his flowers, his small shrubs, uprooting everything, throwing the heavier stuff at the house. I’m afraid: more so when the veranda light comes on and An Lu steps outside. I can’t hear him, but I know he’s speaking to them. He has his palms out, like he’s calmly asking for an explanation. Then he points at his garden. But they don’t stop tearing it up until it’s almost razed. He’s walking down his steps slowly. He looks confused. I am shaking.
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