Chasing Forgiveness

by Neal Shusterman

  Especially not Russ Talbert.

  It was Russ’s parents who lent my dad the gun.

  I don’t know why, and I don’t want to know why. I hate Russ. He always talked about how great separation and divorce was—and then his parents end up getting back together.

  “What dumb old trial?” Jason’s the type of guy who has to know everything—and remembers everything he hears. He’s pretty smart, and although he’s not as good in football or track as I am, we make a good team. Although we look like opposites—him with his dark, dark brown hair and me with my light, light blond hair.

  “I said, what dumb old trial?” he asks impatiently.

  “Nothing,” I say. “Just my dad’s trial, so shut up!”

  I want to hit him. I want to hit him so hard he’ll shut up. I can feel my temper about to explode like a gunshot. Jason’s eyes light up. “Cool! Your father’s on trial for something?”

  “There’s nothing cool about it,” I tell him, clenching my fists, wishing that I was here in my secret room alone today.

  “What’d he do? Rob a bank? Steal a car? Or did he just embezzle or something?”

  I look down. “He killed someone.”

  “No way!” says Jason, both excited and horrified. “You’re making this up. You’re just trying to trick me.”

  “Right,” I say, “it’s a trick. So shut up.”

  But he doesn’t shut up. Even though he’s only known me a short time, he knows me better than any of my old friends did. He sees my fists clenched silently by my side, my knuckles white.

  Jason knows that I’m telling him the truth, even though I’d prefer he thought I was lying.

  “Who’d he kill?” asks Jason, almost in a whisper. “Anybody important?”

  I shrug. “Just my mom.”

  His eyes widen, but just a little. He purses his lips, first nodding in understanding, then shaking his head with a sigh.

  “That sucks,” he says, and he says it with the authority of someone who really knows what sucks and what doesn’t. It’s not like the wishy-washy nervous little things my old friends used to say before they all ran away from being my friends. “That sucks.” Yeah, he’s right. It does. It’s about time someone put it so plainly and simply.

  Jason leans back against the wall and looks up to the five-foot ceiling of the secret room—only he’s not really looking there, he’s thinking about something. My fists unclench all by themselves.

  “You know,” he says, “I lost my mom, too.”

  “No!” But even as I say it, I realize that I never have seen his mother, just his dad. He never talks about his mother either. Just like me.

  “She’s not dead,” he says, “but she did leave my dad, my brothers, and me when I was really little.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, wondering why people say they’re sorry when it wasn’t even their fault. I feel genuinely bad about it—even though I usually get mad when people think of divorce as being anything like what happened to me. Jason accepts the apology with a nod.

  “I tell everyone else that it was just a plain old simple divorce,” he says in a whisper that anywhere else in the house would be too quiet to even hear. “But it’s worse than that. She moved to Arizona.” Then he looks up at me. “You’re the first person I’ve really told.”

  “I won’t tell,” I assure him, matching his whisper, so that no one else but the shirts and pants hanging in the closet can hear.

  “Neither will I,” he whispers back.

  • • •

  It’s the very next day, while Jason and I are riding our bikes home from school, that we run into Angela. She’s walking home in front of us, and when we see her, we slow down, then get off our bikes and walk them, keeping way behind her on this bicycle path that winds around the lake.

  It’s only a few weeks into the school year, so there are lots of kids I still don’t know. Angela is one of them. There are no Prestonettes hanging outside my door anymore, like they did at my old house. It’s too bad, because now that I’m starting to finally get interested in girls, I barely know any of them.

  “I know from a reliable source,” says Jason, “that Angela likes you.”

  “Naah, get outta here!” I wave it off but want to hear more. We round a turn and slowly follow her as she walks up the wooden footbridge that crosses the too-blue lake.

  She stops halfway across and looks over the side into the water. I wonder whether she’s just doing it to do it or if she’s trying to stall until we reach her.

  “Uh-oh!” says Jason. “What do we do now?”

  “Just keep walking,” I say.

  We walk our bikes up to her. I’m about to walk past, but then pretend to just notice her for the first time. “Oh—hi!” I say.

  “Hi,” she says.

  “You’re Angela, right?”

  “M-hmm.”

  “Hi, I’m Preston.” I shake her hand. “This is Jason.” She shakes his hand, and then she turns to look out into the water.

  “Will you look at that?” she says, pointing. “Those are the largest koi fish I’ve ever seen in my life!”

  Beneath the surface of the water, I see about six mutant goldfish swimming into what looks like a current of water being pumped into the lake.

  “Man, those are huge!” I look at Angela again. “You live around here?”

  She points. “One of those condos on the lake.”

  “That’s not far,” I say, and offer for Jason and me to walk her home.

  On the way, Angela talks a lot—as if she’s been waiting a long time to talk to someone. It’s fine with me. The more she talks, the less I have to. She goes on about her house, and her brother, and her parents, and how her father writes computer programs for NASA, and how her mother is a big-time realtor. And then, just as we near her house, she asks the question.

  “What about your parents? What do they do?”

  “I live with my grandparents,” I tell her. “My grandfather’s a high-school coach. My grandmother teaches piano.”

  “Why don’t you live with your parents?” she asks.

  Jason, who has acted kind of like a third wheel since we left the bridge, completely seals his mouth and watches us, his eyes darting back and forth from Angela to me. Angela notices.

  “Is there . . . something the matter with them?”

  “Nothing’s the matter with them. It’s just that they’re out of the country,” I say, amazed at how easily the lie comes. “They travel a lot.”

  Jason picks up from there. “Yeah,” he says. “I’ve never even met them either. They’re always in Europe or something.”

  Angela smiles and accepts this without a second thought. She goes on to tell all about her parents’ trip to Europe.

  And as Angela waves and hurries off into her house, something becomes very clear to me.

  Even if Angela ends up being my first official girlfriend, she will never know about that terrible Thursday last March and the reason I live with my grandparents. No one in this too-perfect town except for Jason has to know, and no one will. No one.

  10

  TURKEY IN HEAVEN

  November

  I would have skipped Thanksgiving if I had a choice, but I don’t.

  “There’s nothing to be thankful for,” I told Grandma and Grandpa, but of course they disagreed, and Grandma came up with a long list of all the things that I personally ought to be thankful for. My grandma’s incredible that way. She could see the bright side of a black hole. Grandpa says some people see a glass of water as half full, others see it as half empty, and Grandma sees it as a whole pitcher of lemonade.

  And so we have a big Thanksgiving family dinner, minus two, and everybody pretends that nothing is wrong.

  Everyone’s there by noon. Only relatives. I used to have friends over for Thanksgiving, but not this year. Angela wanted to come over for part of the day, so I told her Tyler had the chicken pox.

  In the kitchen, Grandma is kept company by Aunt Jackie
and Uncle Steve. Her two remaining children. Mom would be cooking, too, if she were here. She’d be making yams with little marshmallows. She’d be making homemade cranberry sauce and twice-baked potatoes.

  Aunt Jackie and Grandma baste the turkey, which has been in the oven for hours already. Uncle Steve stands around the kitchen picking crust from the pumpkin pies.

  The huge turkey is still pale, but the air smells like Thanksgiving. I wish it didn’t, because it doesn’t feel like Thanksgiving.

  “The last time I cooked a turkey,” says Aunt Jackie, “it—” Then Aunt Jackie cuts herself short, stopping in the middle of the sentence.

  “It what?” I ask.

  Grandma closes the oven and checks the temperature. She pretends not to hear.

  “It what?” I ask again.

  “It burned,” says Jackie. “That’s all, it just burned.”

  “Why’d you let it burn?”

  Uncle Steve puts down the pumpkin pie and walks out of the room. I suddenly realize I’ve hit some sort of motherlode, but it’s too late to shut up now.

  “It was the day of the ‘accident,’ ” Aunt Jackie finally says. “I had a turkey cooking. I ended up leaving it in there for three days. Nothing was left of it when I finally got home, the poor thing.”

  She laughs a little. Grandma laughs a little. Then Aunt Jackie cries, like you cry when you laugh too hard—but she wasn’t laughing too hard. “That poor old turkey,” she says again, drying her damp eyes. And then she hugs me for no reason. There’s lots of hugging for no reason going on today.

  • • •

  Out back Tyler plays a game of touch football with our cousins, most of whom are closer to his age. As I watch them, Uncle Steve sneaks up behind me, picks me up, tosses me around, and wrestles. I refuse to enjoy it, and tell him to quit, but he doesn’t. He keeps it up until I laugh in spite of myself. He spins me by my arms, drops me to the ground, and then yells at Tyler and the others for roughhousing. I sneak back inside.

  • • •

  Later everyone sits in the living room, waiting for dinner to be ready.

  “Remember the time,” says Aunt Jackie, munching on chips and dip in the living room, “Megan won the Miss Bank of America beauty contest?” She smiles and thinks back.

  “She was so happy,” says Grandpa. “Remember how we all sang to her ‘There she is, Miss Bank-of-America’?”

  On TV, the game is into its second quarter. The smell of Thanksgiving is so strong, it makes me feel like I’m seven, and the four of us are going to Grandma and Grandpa’s old house, when Thanksgiving was much more fun.

  “Remember your slumber parties?” says Grandma to Aunt Jackie. “You were so mean to your friends!” Aunt Jackie laughs and covers her face, knowing what’s coming. Grandma turns to everyone else. “Jackie and Megan would always wake up before their friends did in the morning, and they would decorate their sleeping friends’ faces with whipped cream and raisins and sprinkles, and then they would stick big ribbon bows on their foreheads!”

  Everyone laughs except for Uncle Steve. He turns up the television volume with the remote control.

  “Remember the time—”

  “Can we please not talk about this?” says Uncle Steve. “It’s supposed to be Thanksgiving.” No one but the sportscasters answers back.

  “There’s nothing wrong with talking about Megan, Steve,” says Grandpa.

  “Can’t we just watch football in peace?”

  “Steve,” says Aunt Jackie. “Do you remember when we used to call you Piggy Poodle?”

  Everyone but Steve laughs. He shakes his head and turns up the volume. Uncle Steve hasn’t stopped being angry since the “accident.” When Mom died he didn’t have Grandma’s Peace.

  Thinking quickly, I change the subject.

  “Dad’s trial’s coming up soon,” I say, “isn’t it?”

  It’s like a boulder falls from the sky and shatters Grandma’s glass coffee table. Everyone takes a deep breath and shifts uncomfortably in their seats. Maybe I didn’t change the subject enough.

  “I’ll check on that turkey,” says Uncle Steve, and he makes a quick exit into the kitchen. His wife, Aunt Linda, goes after him.

  “I hate football,” says one of my little cousins.

  • • •

  In my secret room Tyler and I watch the end of the game together. I usually don’t let him in here, but today is an exception. There are so many people in the house, there’s nowhere else he can go to escape. Keeping him out would be cruel and unusual punishment.

  “Do you think,” asks Tyler, “that they cook turkeys in heaven?”

  “Naah,” I answer him. “They don’t need turkeys there.”

  “Then what do they eat on Thanksgiving?”

  “You don’t eat in heaven,” I tell him.

  “That’s no fun,” he says.

  “It is too fun,” I tell him. “Heaven’s so much fun that you don’t even have time to eat. You don’t care about eating anymore.”

  Tyler wrinkles his brow and thinks about this. “But if they did have turkeys,” he asks, “do you think Mom would cook one? Or would she be eating one in someone else’s house?”

  “Okay, Tyler,” I say, thinking this one through. “If there were turkeys in heaven—I’m not saying there are—but if there were, Mom wouldn’t have to cook it. Jesus cooks it—he cooks one humongous turkey, and it’s enough to feed everyone in heaven, like he fed the five thousand with the five loaves of bread.”

  “Oh,” says Tyler.

  Behind me I hear the closet door slide open, and the shirts and pants begin to rustle clumsily.

  “Hello in there!” Uncle Steve pokes his head in, knocking down some hangers in the closet. “This is your hangout?”

  “Sometimes,” I tell him.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Kids only,” I tell him.

  “Oh, I see.”

  Uncle Steve stands there in the closet for a moment, just on the threshold of the secret room, fiddling with his mustache.

  “Listen,” he finally says. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry if I upset you there in the living room.”

  “Didn’t upset me,” I say. I keep my eyes on the game, never looking at Uncle Steve.

  “Yeah . . . well, I’m sorry.”

  He sort of hangs there for a minute like the shirts and pants. I still don’t look at him.

  “We’ll be eating any minute,” he says.

  “I had too many chips,” I tell him. “I’ll eat the leftovers. It’s okay.”

  He hangs for a few more seconds, then leaves.

  “Close the door!” I yell after him. I hear the closet door sliding shut.

  “But I’m hungry,” says Tyler.

  “So get out of here.”

  Tyler fiddles with his shoelaces and pokes his nose, but he doesn’t leave. I’m glad he doesn’t.

  “Why didn’t you let Uncle Steve in here?” he asks. “Don’t you like him?”

  “Of course I like him,” I tell Tyler. “It’s just that he doesn’t forgive Dad, like the rest of us do. Nobody who doesn’t forgive Dad is allowed in here.”

  “Does he hate Dad?” asks Tyler.

  “How should I know?” I answer.

  Tyler stands up and plants his foot against the wall in a slow-motion ninja kick. It leaves a big black footprint. “If Uncle Steve hates Dad, then I hate Uncle Steve.”

  “You can’t hate him,” I explain to Tyler. “He’s your uncle—you have to love him, no matter what he thinks.”

  “Well, then, I do love Uncle Steve,” says Tyler. “I love him, but I hate him, too.”

  “You can’t love and hate someone,” I explain to him.

  “Why not?”

  “Because that’s just the way it is.”

  Tyler plants another footprint on the wall, making a matching pair, and then he turns to me.

  “You don’t know everything,” he says.

  11

  ON MY SHOULDERS />
  December

  I know the gray walls of the jailhouse now. They are my friends. In the frozen dribbles of paint, I can see sloppy, pockmarked faces escorting me down the long halls and through the “air lock” gates. The same faces stand peeling behind me and keep me company when I wait and wait to speak with my dad. If walls could talk, they would whisper “hello” and call me by name.

  The talk at home is all about Dad’s trial, but the talk is always over my head and behind my back, so I don’t know too much. To me, Dad’s trial hangs in front of us like the moon above the freeway. You can keep driving toward it, but it never seems to get any closer. It’s supposed to happen soon, but nobody tells me when—and when it happens, Dad’s entire life will be decided for him. Prison for a few years. Prison for life. Could they even give him the death penalty? I don’t ask anyone because I’m afraid of the answer.

  “Are you scared about it?” I ask my dad on the smelly jailhouse phone that connects one side of the glass to the other.

  Dad looks down. “A little,” he says.

  “Don’t be,” I tell him. “Grandma and Grandpa Pearson won’t let you go to prison.”

  “It’s not up to them, Preston,” he says. He thinks for a moment, then says, in his fatherly lecture sort of way, “I did something wrong. And when you do something wrong, you have to pay.” He says it like he’s trying to teach me not to steal candy from the store. Why does he try to make it seem so simple? Does he really think of it that way, or is it just that he thinks I think that way?

  “I’m not Tyler, Dad,” I tell him. “You don’t have to tell me about right and wrong. I’m twelve, remember?”

  “You are, aren’t you.” He turns his cheek, like I slapped him in his face. “I wish I could have been there for your birthday,” he told me. “Did you like the bike?”

  “Yeah,” I say. I don’t want to talk about my birthday. It wasn’t much fun.

  “Did Grandpa pick out a nice one?” he asks.

  “Yeah,” I say. “A blue ten-speed. Grandpa has pictures.”

  “Someday, Preston,” he tells me, “I’ll get you a dirt bike—would you like that?”

  “Yeah!” I say.