Chasing Forgiveness

by Neal Shusterman

  Forgetting Russ for a moment, I race off down the alley on the side of the house, toward the front yard.

  “What is it?” yells Russ, following close behind.

  There, in our driveway, my little brother, Tyler, is being dropped off by one of his friends’ parents. He fumbles with his papers and pencil case, with his lunch box and thermos. He has never figured out how to keep it all in his backpack. But then, he’s only in kindergarten.

  Tyler sees me coming out of the alley. “Hi, Preston,” he says with a big smile. Tyler’s a good kid. He doesn’t talk much, but he always has this big smile on his face, and most of the time no one notices that he’s quiet, because they’re too busy trying to figure out what he’s smiling about. That’s what I like best about him. Everything could be going up in flames, and he would be smiling as if the whole world was a giant finger painting with a big blue house and a happy green tree and a grinning yellow sun.

  Today, I don’t smile back at him.

  “Around back, Tyler,” I tell him. “Don’t go in the front way.”

  Tyler sighs, the smile slipping away from his face. “Again?” he asks.

  I nod. From here we can see them in the living-room window, as if they are on display. Dad paces back and forth, shaking his head and gesturing with his hands. Although I can hear them, I don’t listen.

  I wave to the driver who is waiting to see Tyler get safely in the front door, and she waves back and leaves. I turn to see Russ, standing on the front lawn with his hands in his pockets. A little red mark shines on his forehead where the Ping-Pong ball hit him, but he isn’t angry anymore.

  “I forgot the score,” he says, not too enthusiastically. “Who was winning?”

  I glance once more at my pacing father in the living-room spotlight.

  “You won,” I say.

  Russ nods. “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.” He glances once at my parents, then jogs across the lawn and into the street. “Don’t forget to bring your skateboard,” he calls, and then vanishes around the tall hedge.

  Alone with my brother, I lead him around to the back. As I open the back door, I help Smiling Tyler shove all his loose papers into his pack before they end up sprawled across the kitchen floor.

  “What’s for dinner?” Tyler asks.

  “Who knows?” I answer. “Probably nothing.”

  We get to the hallway, close to the battleground, and I hurry him toward the bedrooms. We don’t say anything to each other anymore about the fights. What’s the use? Occasionally Tyler used to whisper to me, “I wish they’d stop,” as if he were telling me a big secret. Eventually he stopped wishing it to me, when he realized I couldn’t do anything about it. I always tell him to save it for his prayers.

  I go into my room, and Tyler follows, since his room doesn’t have a TV. I close the door, so now their voices seem farther away. Farther away, but still clear as a bell.

  Tyler immediately turns on his cartoons—and laughs at Wile E. Coyote getting blasted by some Acme dynamite. But the cartoon explosions are never loud enough to drown out the voices in the living room.

  • • •

  Today it’s Mom’s turn to slam the door. And by the weight and direction of the noise, I know it’s the front door. I can always tell how bad it is by which door slams. The bathroom door means they’ll be talking again by the time the night is over. A bedroom door means somebody sleeps in the den. The front door slamming means they may not speak for days.

  In a moment I hear Mom’s Cadillac start up and drive away. She’ll go to Aunt Jackie’s, I think, or Grandma and Grandpa Pearson’s. Maybe she’ll come back late tonight; maybe she won’t come back till morning.

  Tyler fell asleep without having dinner, lying on the floor, with cartoons dancing across the television. I turn off the TV and the lights and lie back, trying to fall asleep as well. Downstairs I can hear Dad busily working to keep his mind off Mom. I can smell frying meat, and it makes me hungry, but I don’t feel like eating. I don’t feel like leaving my room. Dad’s always been a good cook, but over the past few months, it seems he’s been having to cook for us a whole lot more. Not just cook, but also do a lot of other things that Mom used to do. It’s like Mom suddenly got too busy at her job at the bank, or too upset, or just lost interest.

  What I don’t get is that Mom always says she would rather stay home and be a full-time mom than have to work. That’s what she says, yet when she’s home with us these days, it’s almost like she doesn’t want to be there either.

  The door creaks open slightly, and a bar of light cuts across the dark room.

  “Preston?” says my father. “You all right?”

  “Shh,” I tell him. “Tyler’s sleeping.”

  “Dinner’s ready,” he whispers. “Cheeseburgers.”

  “Maybe later,” I say.

  Dad slips quietly into the room and closes the door behind him. I scoot over on my bed so he can sit down next to me.

  “It’s no fun having to hear us fight, is it?” he says.

  I shift positions, leaning my head against his chest, as if to say it’s all right. He begins to rub my hair and scratch my head like he did when I was really little and had a fever. It feels good. I squint my eyes like a cat being petted between the ears.

  “What’s the big problem?” I ask. “What does Mom want?”

  Dad sighs, rubs his eyes, then says, “Don’t blame her, Preston. This is my fault, not hers. I fly off the handle too quickly. I don’t listen to her. I don’t spend enough time with her.”

  Maybe he’s right. Dad is kind of hard on Mom. He sets rules for her like he sets rules for Tyler and me. Dad’s “old-fashioned” that way, and Mom must hate it—if I were her, I’d probably hate it. Maybe their fights aren’t just about money after all.

  But that’s between them, and just because Mom has a reason to be upset with Dad doesn’t mean that I do. Dad talks to me, he listens to me, and he spends lots of time with me. It’s great, because I’m so much like him and we like to do the same things. We’re always playing ball together, always fishing on weekends. Always racing each other. That’s my favorite thing—racing my Dad. I’m the fastest runner in my age group, but Dad can always outrace me—only barely though. We race each other on the track, in the park, on the beach, any chance we get.

  Although I’d never tell him this, or anyone else for that matter, I’d have to say my dad is kind of like my best friend.

  It’s too bad he’s not Mom’s anymore.

  “Things are going to change, Preston,” Dad says as he sits here on my bed. “I’m going to change. And then everything will be okay.”

  “I know it will,” I tell him.

  He smiles at me and brushes some hair out of my face. He gets up, then bends over, gently picking up Tyler. Tyler complains with a tiny groan, but his eyes stay closed and his body limp. Dad kisses Tyler on the forehead and carries him gently into his own room.

  When I’m sure that Dad is back in the kitchen, I sneak out of my room and into his and Mom’s.

  Their bedroom is a big room, with lots of antique furniture. Some of it Grandma Lorraine and Grandpa Wes gave us; the rest of it Mom bought at all the antiques shops she loves to browse through. The carpet is thick blue, and on the walls are works of art and family portraits—just enough to fill the walls and keep the room feeling warm and homey.

  I dive onto the bed, lying diagonally across it. The bed is so big and so soft, I could get lost in it. When I was little the bed seemed twice as big, and it was that much easier to get lost in—like when I would curl up in it on stormy nights or Sunday mornings. That was before Tyler was born. There was just the three of us, and we would talk and talk about anything and everything in the world—Mom, Dad, and me.

  Of course, I don’t do that sort of stuff anymore, now that I’m eleven.

  But given the choice, I’d rather be five years old and lost in the giant safe bed than be eleven and in the line of fire between Mom and Dad.

  So I
close my eyes, trying to forget, and trying to remember. I feel the cotton of the bedspread billowing around me. Dim dark colors flow around the insides of my eyes. A spot of red where I had been looking at the light dims, then fades. For a moment I feel dizzy and the bed seems to be sailing around the room.

  I start to dream before I actually fall asleep. I dream about school and about track practice, but mostly I dream about being five years old and disappearing in a place that’s safe and warm.

  3

  ESCROW

  February—One Month Left

  Mom is off somewhere, and Dad is off somewhere else.

  But Grandma Lorraine and Grandpa Wes make everything seem okay for an afternoon. Maybe it’s because they believe everything is okay—and when they believe it, it makes me want to believe it, too.

  I spend half the afternoon watching basketball with Grandpa in the den. Grandpa coaches the players on the screen as if he’s coaching one of his high-school teams—but his wisdom is wasted on the Lakers, and the game is a lost cause by the end of the third quarter. Giving up on the game, I follow the soft sound of piano music into the living room.

  Grandma sits at her Family Feud piano—a big white grand that fills up half the living room. She uses it to teach piano to neighborhood kids and to play sacred music. Today she sits alone at the keys, playing a hymn I recognize.

  “That was your mother’s favorite when she was a little girl,” Grandma tells me, but I already know because she always tells me that.

  On the wall above the piano is a portrait of Mom, Uncle Steve, and Aunt Jackie that was painted before I was born. They’ve all changed so much since then. Aunt Jackie was thin and pale, just coming through her kidney troubles. Uncle Steve was just a kid, without his thick mustache and all those muscles he got from being on the wrestling team in high school. Mom’s face seemed free of any troubles. “Did Mom know Dad then?” I ask Grandma, pointing at the portrait.

  “I’m sure she did,” says Grandma. “She was sixteen when that portrait was painted.”

  I can’t imagine my mom being sixteen—much less fourteen, which is how old she was when she met my dad. I know all about that—Grandma loves to talk about it because it’s a beautiful fairy-tale romance, the type she could put in a little storybook on her knickknack shelf.

  It goes something like this:

  Once upon a time, there was a fair maiden named Megan Pearson, with huge brown eyes and long locks of golden hair. When she was fourteen she was swept off her feet by a dashing young prince named Danny Scott. They were each other’s first and only true loves. They were married on Megan’s eighteenth birthday and lived happily ever after.

  Grandma was always wise enough to end the story and put the book on the shelf before the fighting began.

  On the wall, Mom’s smile seems to be the very center of the portrait. Aunt Jackie is beautiful, but Mom seems to be a step above beauty. Grandpa always says she’s radiant in that portrait. Mom’s smile is still radiant, but these days that same smile seems to be covering up the stuff going on inside her head. Dad says Mom’s much too negative lately. “Why do you have to be so negative, Megan?” Dad says to Mom all the time. “With you, everything has to be perfect one hundred percent of the time, or it’s no good at all.”

  Mom gets her perfectionism from Grandma, only with Grandma it’s different. Grandma wants things to be perfect, sees them as if they already are, and feels wonderful about it. On the other hand, Mom wants things to be perfect, wonders why they’re not, and feels lousy about it.

  Dad calls it negative, but Grandma calls it moody.

  “Both your mom and dad were always so moody!” she once told me. “When they first met they would sit holding hands for hours, being moody together.” And then she had added, “They were made for each other.”

  Lately I’ve been feeling moody myself. I probably get that from both Mom and Dad.

  Grandma looks at me as I sit on the couch, watching her play her music. She can tell that I’m feeling moody.

  “You should learn to play the piano,” she offers. “I could teach you.” But I just shake my head. Music’s not something I have in me. “Don’t waste it on me, Grandma,” I tell her. “Save it for Tyler.”

  Grandma just smiles and keeps on playing her sacred music, as if reliving that first time she was touched by God. She told me all about how that happened—how she moved to California as a little girl after her grandfather killed himself when the stock market crashed in 1929—how her father would beat her older brother and how she would escape by playing piano. She discovered music when she was ten. Her family was never religious, but one day she walked into a church where a woman was sitting all alone playing the piano. “It was the most beautiful sound I ever heard,” she would tell me, and to this day Grandma swears that the Lord entered her heart on that day and never left.

  When I look at her and talk to her, I know that it’s true—there’s something about her that glows. She’s radiant, but in a different way from Mom. Sometimes I feel it so strongly, I think if I touch Grandma’s fluffy blond hair, I’ll get a shock.

  I think about Grandpa, too, as I sit there trying to get lost in Grandma’s music. Grandpa believes in God just as strongly as Grandma does—that’s how they raised my mom, and that’s how Mom and Dad raised us—but it all sort of gets washed out by the time it gets down to me. I don’t feel half as godly as Grandma and Grandpa probably do. And now, as I sit here trying to get wrapped up in Grandma’s music, I find myself getting bored. Music is not my salvation. I begin to wonder if God could possible touch me some other way. Through football maybe.

  Actually, it’s my parents he should touch, and make them stop fighting over idiotic things. Somebody ought to stop them, because I don’t know what will happen if they keep it up.

  Yes, I do know.

  And I can just see Russ Talbert’s mug smiling at me with that I-told-you-so sort of smile and him telling me what a good thing divorce is.

  I swallow hard and ask Grandma a question that I kind of know the answer to, but I have to hear someone tell me. “Grandma,” I ask, “what does escrow mean?”

  Grandma doesn’t miss a note. “It’s a waiting period,” she says. “Before you can buy or sell a house, you have to wait a month or two. That’s called escrow.”

  That’s what I figured. Nobody tells me anything, but I figured things out.

  “So I guess Mom and Dad are selling our house, then.”

  Grandma hums her soft melody. This is no surprise to her. “Yes, they are, Preston.” She has no problem with it, but I do.

  “Where will we all live?” I ask.

  Grandma takes her time in answering. She finishes her song first, and when the last note has faded away, she says, “Everything always works out, Preston.”

  Just hearing her say that makes me feel a little bit better. When I sit here with Grandma, I can see things the way she does. Everything needs to be perfect, but everything already is. Her home. Her family. All is right with the world. As right as a piano chord and the harmonies of a hymn.

  • • •

  “You don’t get separated,” Russ tells me as we hurl a football across a bleak, windy sky, “you just are separated. You get divorced. You don’t have to have lawyers and stuff if you’re separated. Separated is the easy way to be.” I suppose he must be right, because Russ is the authority on such things.

  I wish Russ didn’t know about my parents’ separation. But he can’t help but know all about it, because when my dad moved out, he spent his first two nights over with Russ’s parents, who are separated but are sort of still living in the same house. Now Dad’s staying with Grandma Lorraine and Grandpa Wes. Russ thinks it’s kind of funny that my dad ended up moving in with my mom’s parents, but that’s just how our family is. We’re close.

  I throw the football long—a perfect pass that falls right into Russ’s fingers.

  “Touchdown!” screams Russ. He imitates the roar of a stadium crowd and spike
s the ball, doing a little dance that is a perfect copy of the way “Weavin’ ” Warren Sharp of the Raiders does it. Weavin’ Warren Sharp made that little dance famous.

  Seeing Russ do the dance makes me a little sick to my stomach, and I wonder whether he did it to be cruel or he just doesn’t know.

  Yes, he does know. He has to know, because he knows every stupid little thing about me. He stops his Warren Sharp dance and looks down, filled with guilt that might be real or might be for show.

  “Sorry,” he says. “Didn’t mean to remind you.”

  “No problem,” I say. “Warren Sharp’s great.” He tosses me the football halfheartedly, and I idly wonder if anyone in the world would blame me if I shoved the entire ball down his throat.

  Instead, I just toss it back to him. “I’m going out long,” I warn him as I turn to head out for a pass.

  I like Warren Sharp. I really do. After all, he single- handedly brought the Raiders to the play-offs last year. He’s got these huge hands that must have their own gravity or something because they seem to suck a spinning football right out of the sky—and once a football has touched the tips of his fingers it’ll never touch the ground. Not until he makes it into the end zone and spikes it down.

  I used to wonder what guys like him did when the season was over. I don’t wonder anymore.

  Russ lets the ball fly but makes excuses right away. “I can’t throw that far—you know that,” he complains even before the ball hits the grass ten feet short of me. I get the ball and bring it back to him for a second try. This time I don’t go out as far.

  My mom’s been seeing Weavin’ Warren Sharp for a few weeks now. I can’t picture him and my mom together, no matter how hard I try in my head. It’s not the fact that he’s so large and compared to him Mom’s so small, or the fact that he’s famous and Mom’s not. It’s not even the fact that he’s black and we’re white. I don’t know what it is, but I just can’t hold both of them in my brain at the same time.

  Mom first met Warren Sharp with Aunt Jackie when they went to Palm Springs—it was sometime after the house went into escrow and Dad moved out. At first I was just impressed to have his autograph and didn’t think much more of it, but then he started calling, and Mom started seeing him. Mom says they’re just friends, but Dad seems to think they’re going together, and who should I believe?