Chasing Forgiveness

by Neal Shusterman

  She rearranged her fingers on the piano and began to play again. Something soothing. Something beautiful and sacred. The slight redness in her face quickly faded away. As I watched her, I could imagine her playing the organ at her old church, many years ago. How beautiful her music is. How many other lost souls—kids and grown-ups—have heard her music in the street, walked into her church, and been saved through her music, the way she was saved through someone else’s?

  When you’re sitting at the organ like that, so close to the pulpit and the preacher, your heart must be so filled with the Lord, there simply isn’t any room left in there for questions you can’t answer.

  You don’t know everything, Tyler once reminded me. And now I know that in spite of her music and the power of the Lord . . . neither does Grandma.

  13

  COLLISION AT RUSH HOUR

  May

  I ride home from school alone on my bike today. But when you ride home from school, you’re never alone. You’re always surrounded by a hundred other kids, racing to get home. Rush-hour traffic.

  Kids at school are beginning to guess things are funny about my parents. Some kids even know what happened—or at least they think they know what happened. The newspapers barely said anything about it, but tragedies just have a way of making themselves known, even though nobody talks about them. Things just come out.

  And people can be cruel.

  The cruelness at my new school began with rumors. Nobody says them right to my face, of course, but I hear them all the same. The rumors go like this:

  “I hear Preston Scott’s mom was gonna marry Warren Sharp, and his dad shot her and tried to shoot Preston.”

  or

  “Hey, I hear Preston Scott’s dad shot Preston’s mom right in front of Preston’s eyes!”

  or

  “Preston Scott’s dad is a psycho killer!”

  I hear the lies and pretend I don’t. I can handle them. I know that now. I’m older, and what happened—well, that’s over. It’s been more than a year since Mom died; Dad’s trial has been over for months. I can just let stupid people’s stupid words roll off their stupid tongues and then off my back like it was nothing.

  I’m calm. I’m in control.

  People who spread rumors, says Jason, are wastes of life. They’re like the people who read the National Enquirer. They’ve got such boring lives, they have to make up stuff about other people to get their kicks.

  As I ride home today, Jimmy Sanders—a kid in my English class—accidentally rams me on his bike.

  “Oops,” he says. “Watch where you’re going, Scott.”

  He’s only kidding—we both know that.

  “Oh yeah?” I pick up speed and ram him.

  “Ooh!” he says, laughing. “You die, Scott!”

  He chases after me, but my legs are strong from football and track. I race up the bridge that crosses over the railroad tracks, leaving Jimmy far behind. I wonder if Jimmy is one of the people who’s been spreading rumors. It wouldn’t bother me if he is; I’m calm and under control.

  People who spread rumors, says Jason, probably have parents who believe Elvis is still alive.

  Jimmy catches up to me on the other side of the bridge. He rams me in our annoying little game of bumper tag.

  “You’re slow, Scott,” he says. “That bike’s a piece of crap!”

  He speeds past me, and I change gears, pedaling hard in a high-speed pursuit. Nobody calls me slow. Nobody calls my bike crap. I rocket past a group of kids—a couple of them are girls I’d really like to go out with, now that I’ve broken up with Angela.

  Angela and I weren’t really right for each other. She talked a lot and complained that I didn’t talk much at all, which isn’t true; I talked all the time, just not to her. So we broke up, and it doesn’t bother me. I’m never going to let breaking up with a girl bother me, I’ve decided.

  Angela never knew about my parents. Actually, though, I think she did but just didn’t say anything, and I never asked her.

  “That’s Preston Scott,” says one of the girls we pass, and they start whispering secretly to each other as I speed out of view. I wonder what it is they’re whispering. Are they saying good things about me? Do they like the way I look? The way I run? The way I play ball? Or are they whispering about other things?

  People who spread rumors, Jason says, like lies better than they like the truth. Don’t trust anyone who spreads rumors.

  The girls disappear behind me as my bike speeds toward Jimmy. I don’t care what the girls talk about. It doesn’t bother me at all if it’s rumors they’re spreading. I’m better about that now that the trial’s over.

  I come up on Jimmy, ready to nail his tire, but he turns his wheel unexpectedly. I broadside him, our wheels lock, and we both eat it. I fly into a prickly hedge, and Jimmy lands hard on the asphalt. Our bikes clatter into a fireplug and stop. This is not fun anymore, and now I realize that it never really was.

  Other kids stop to watch, figuring a fight is on its way. But they’re wrong. They don’t know me; they only think they do.

  “You’re an asshole, Scott,” says Jimmy, meaning it with every fiber of his angry, bruised body.

  “You didn’t have to turn your wheel like that, moron,” I say. “It was your fault.”

  Jimmy gets up and brushes dirt from his scraped knees. I ease my way out of the bushes.

  “Like hell it was my fault,” says Jimmy. “You can’t ride a bike for your life!”

  “Yeah?” I say, “Well, you have your brains up your butt!” Some of the other kids laugh.

  Jimmy turns to pry his bike from the fireplug but then turns back with the last word.

  “Maybe so,” he says with his hands dangling by his side like a gunfighter waiting for the draw, “but at least my dad didn’t kill my mom.”

  My ears hear it, and my brain gets it a moment later.

  I can take that. It doesn’t bother me at all.

  And yet I’m all over Jimmy like a pit bull.

  He can say what he wants. Everything’s better now.

  My feet, my hands, have a mind of their own. A sound comes out of my mouth like an Indian war cry.

  I’m okay. I’m okay.

  Jimmy puts up his fists, but his fists are useless. I grab him with my hands and throw him to the ground. I dive on him, growling like an animal.

  It doesn’t bother me. I can just walk away. I’ve said it over and over again until I can hear my head ringing.

  People like that, Jason always says, don’t deserve the time it takes to punch them out.

  But here around me are my friends and classmates. They all heard it. And if they didn’t know before, they know now—and my hands don’t listen to me when I tell them to stop.

  I smash Jimmy Sanders’s head into the concrete again and again until I can hear his skull ringing. It’s over. It’s been over for a year. But if it’s over, then why am I screaming? If it’s over, then why can’t I stop? Why can’t I stop?

  3

  THE THREE OF US

  14

  THE LION AND THE LAMB

  September—Eighteen Months After

  “Do your knees hurt?” asks Dr. Parker, my pediatrician. “Do you ever get pains in your legs?”

  I shake my head no, figuring if there’s anything wrong with my yearly checkup, I won’t be able to stay in football.

  “Hmm,” she says. “You’ve grown four inches since I last saw you. I thought you might have some growing pains. Guess not.”

  I suppose I have grown a lot. It’s not just my size either—it seems everything changes when you grow. Suddenly your bicycle seat is as high as it can go, and you can reach the shelf above the refrigerator, and you can’t fit into your old bed.

  And memories change, too. They get flattened out and stacked up like pizza boxes. If I reach in, I can pull out any memory I want—Mom, Dad, Family Feud. But in some strange way, the memories are pressed down into pictures of a life that I can barely recogniz
e. They seem like scenes from someone else’s life.

  Everything about me is changing. The doctor can see that. I’m no longer the little kid Mom used to bring in to see her with the flu or strep throat. I’m no longer that same frightened kid who had to hold Grandma’s hand on the witness stand a year and a half ago.

  “How old are you now, Preston?” asks Dr. Parker. “Fourteen?”

  “Almost,” I tell her. Fourteen’ll be a good age to be, I think. It will be a good time in my life to be fourteen, now that things are calm, stable, and normal.

  She puts her icy stethoscope on my chest and tells me to breathe.

  “Still in football and swimming?” she asks.

  “Football and track,” I correct her. “A high-school coach told me that I’m almost ready for varsity in both sports, and I’m only in eighth grade!”

  The doctor is impressed, but then catches sight of something and gently touches the skin around my eye, where she finds the last fading remnants of a black eye.

  “How’d you get that?” she asks. “Football practice?”

  “Naah,” I tell her. “It was a fight.”

  She looks up at me with a troubled expression, then gets her penlight and points it into my eye, telling me to look at the wall. She stares right into my eye, and for a moment, I get the feeling that she’s looking clear into my brain to see what makes me tick.

  “You get into a lot of fights?” she asks.

  “No, not really,” I tell her. “Well, yeah, sort of,” I finally admit. “It’s because I’ve got this competitive nature. I get angry really easily—but I only let loose when it’s a good time to, you know? I’ll beat the heck out of kids who pick on my friends. I’ll nail kids who cheat or lie or steal. I don’t start fights,” I tell her. “I just finish them—and I never pick on kids. I just defend them. I’m kind of like the school policeman.”

  The doctor smiles and shakes her head the same way my principal does.

  It’s not up to you to administer justice, the principal always tells me. But I always tell him right back that if it’s not up to me, then who is it up to?

  The doctor finishes looking in my eyes and gives me that concerned look again. It’s like I’m back on the witness stand being questioned by the district attorney and I’m feeling guilty for telling the truth.

  “It’s not like I’m a bully,” I tell her. “I’m real sensitive, too—I mean I cry and stuff.”

  She nods, but I’m not sure if she believes me. I do cry. I cry on Mom’s birthday, all day. I cry on Thursdays in March. I cry on Christmas and New Year’s and the Fourth of July and on any holiday that reminds me of her.

  “I cry about as much as I fight,” I tell Dr. Parker, “so it all balances out.”

  I think about how Grandpa Wes puts it—he has his own way of saying how I balance out. He calls me The Lion and The Lamb.

  I guess I could be a lion. I sort of have this mane of blond hair. I guess I could also be a lamb on account of the tight curls of light hair that have been springing up all over my arms and legs. What Grandpa really means, though, is my mood swings. It’s funny how I go from one extreme to the other so quickly. My dad’s like that, too, only worse. Sometimes I think about how much my dad and I are alike. And it troubles me. The doctor looks at my growth chart, then up at me, then at my chart again, but I don’t think she’s thinking about my height and weight.

  “Ever been in therapy, Preston?” she asks. “Have you ever seen a counselor?” No matter how casual and offhand a tone she tries to use, the question comes out sounding calculated. Dr. Parker knew my mom. She knows what happened to her. In the times I’ve seen Dr. Parker since then, this is the first time she’s come even close to bringing it up.

  “Yeah,” I tell her, “I had therapy once.” I have to think hard to even remember it. It was sometime before my dad’s trial. This psychologist saw Tyler and me once and couldn’t find a single thing wrong with us.

  “That was it?” asks Dr. Parker. “Just once?”

  “Yeah,” I tell her, “he said I had less mental problems than most kids my age.”

  She chuckles, closes my chart, then reaches in her pocket out of habit to hand me a lollipop, but thinks better of it. Then she looks at my eyes one more time—not like a doctor, but more like that psychologist had.

  “So do I check out okay?” I ask her. “Is there anything the matter with me?”

  “No, Preston,” she says, almost disappointed, “you’re fine. I can’t find a single thing wrong with you.”

  • • •

  On Sunday I go to church with Grandma, Grandpa, and Tyler, like I always do. We pray and thank God for this miracle he’s made in our lives. The miracle that we’re okay—that we didn’t lose our minds. That Tyler and I didn’t turn into bad kids who hate themselves and everything around them.

  For the miracle that Dad will be coming home.

  I grip my book of hymns a little hard as I think about that. And although my voice sings about walking in the garden with Jesus, I think about walking through the prison with Dad.

  He spent a year in jail before his trial, a year of his sentence was suspended, and they took over a year off for good behavior. That left him a prison term of a little less than two years, and it’s just about up. Two years. A pretty good deal for a guy who killed someone.

  The prison he’s in now is so low-security that there are barely any fences—and without fences he’s free enough to dream. He has all these wild plans that seem to race out of all the prison gates with nothing to hold them back.

  “When I get out,” he says, “I’m gonna buy you that dirt bike I promised you.”

  “When I get out, we’re gonna go white-water rafting, just the three of us.”

  “When I get out we’re gonna drive cross-country. We’re gonna see the Grand Canyon. We’re gonna go sailing and skiing and camping. We’ll go to next year’s Super Bowl.”

  My dad likes to dream. I don’t know where he’ll get the money to do it all, but he promises, and I believe him. His last promise was that he and Mom would get back together. He broke that promise in a big way. Now he owes me, and he knows it.

  After we sing hymns and hear announcements, the offering box is passed around. I drop a respectable amount of last week’s allowance into the box. Grandpa says I really don’t have to, but it couldn’t hurt.

  I wonder if Dad’s in his prison chapel, thanking God for miracles, too. He got awful godly there in prison. He seems to be right up there with Grandma and Grandpa now.

  “You people,” my friend Jason says, “are like on a planet all your own with God—you talk about him so much.”

  And when he says that, I simply tell him the truth. “You have to trust somebody,” I tell him. Trusting my parents didn’t do me much good, and my old friends deserted me when Mom died. But trusting in God seems to have worked so far.

  But Tyler, of course, still doesn’t quite get it, and in the middle of a hymn about the Lord’s heavenly throne and the firmament of His power, Tyler asks the Question of the Week.

  “Exactly where is God?” he asks. “Exactly where is heaven? How far away?”

  I nudge him, but he asks again. “Where is heaven?”

  “How the heck should I know?” I tell him. “Do I look like God?” In the Bible they always talk about people rending their garments and gnashing their teeth. That’s how I feel when Tyler asks me these questions. I nudge him really hard, and he bumps into Grandpa. Grandpa gently puts his large hand on Tyler’s mop head, like the comforting hand of the Almighty, and it keeps him quiet until we’re both dismissed to our Sunday-school groups.

  • • •

  “But where is heaven?”

  Tyler spends half of his nights sleeping in the lower bunk of my bunk bed rather than in his own room. Usually I don’t mind. Usually he stops asking dumb questions if I yell at him enough or pound his arm—but he’s not letting up this time.

  “Tyler,” I complain, “it’s school tomor
row. Go to sleep, huh?”

  But my clueless brother will not hear reason. “Are you closer to heaven than me because you’re up high?” he asks. “Are you?”

  I try to ignore him by focusing all of my attention on the ceiling, which is lit dimly by Tyler’s Donald Duck night-light. He’s almost nine, and he still needs that night-light. He’ll always be Grandma’s little boy.

  I try to find interesting patterns in the textured ceiling, but all I find are trapezoids and rhombuses and a bunch of other things that I just know will be on tomorrow’s math test. I rub my eyes, but the shapes are still there.

  “Are you closer to heaven because you’re up there?” demands Tyler, as if his life depended on the answer.

  I sigh. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “Is it closer than the moon?”

  “No,” I tell him, but then I stop and think about his question. And my answer. “Yes. Yes it is.”

  “Good,” says Tyler, and with his question finally answered, he promptly falls asleep.

  But I am left awake. My eyes are open wide, three feet above him. Closer to heaven? I don’t know.

  “Stupid questions!” I mumble to myself, but yet I can see why Tyler needs answers. How can such dumb questions have such important answers? Such hard answers?

  I know that heaven is farther away than the farthest star, and yet it’s just as close as the night breeze against my skin. Mom’s that way, too.

  I won’t sleep much tonight now that I’ve started thinking about Mom, and I’m half mad at Tyler, but half glad he’s here, too, because the comforting sound of his easy, innocent breathing will keep me company. When I’m alone, I get caught up thinking about all the little things that could have been different and all the different lives I could have been living if, on that terrible Thursday, Mom had left the room, or sneezed, or turned around in time. Millions of different lives that I’m never going to lead. She’d be thirty-four now. Maybe she would have gotten back together with Dad in time, like Russ Talbert’s parents did. Now no one will ever know.