Chasing Forgiveness by Neal Shusterman
A car pulls up into the driveway, and I get up to greet my father. I figure I’ll say something like, “Nice going, Dad,” and sort of make him feel just a little bit bad for making me wait all afternoon and half the night for him to show up. Grandma Lorraine opens the front door. There are two men there: one dressed in a jacket and tie, one dressed in a policeman’s uniform. They stand at the threshold and mumble something to my grandma. Outside the window I can see the police car.
“I’m afraid we have bad news for you.”
I can’t hear the rest.
But Grandma suddenly goes stiff as a board. She takes a deep breath and closes her eyes, then takes a second breath.
And suddenly it seems as if the air pressure in the house has dropped, as if someone has opened a window into space. The air has been sucked out, I can’t seem to breathe, and the horrible silence around me is unbearable. It’s as if time itself has just died of shock.
Grandma should be screaming; I know it’s that bad. She should let off a wail so deep and so powerful that it shakes the house like a sonic boom . . .
. . . but I hear nothing. Grandma stands there silently and doesn’t move. She floats in space.
And I know what’s good for me.
I turn and I get out of there as fast as I can.
I go back into the den and I close the door. I lock it. I go to the screen door leading to the patio, and I lock that, too, and then I pull the curtains. I sit on the sofa, and I turn up the volume on the TV. Seventh inning. The crowd is loud in my ears.
No one comes to get me. I thought they would, but they don’t. I have to peek out of the room every once in a while to see what’s going on, because as much as I don’t want to know, I have to know. I have to.
The first time I look out, Grandma is lying stretched out on the floor of the empty living room. At first I’m afraid that she’s fainted, but then I see that she’s awake and calm. Still in control.
The second time I look out, Grandpa is there. I see him for an instant. He is shaking. He is crying. I close the door before I can see any more.
The third time I look out, I can see Grandma, sitting on the piano bench facing the wrong way. She is talking on the phone. She is talking to Aunt Jackie. Something about my mother.
I slam the door again. This can’t be about Mom. This can’t be. I won’t even try to guess what happened. A car accident. A plane crash. I won’t even try to guess. I don’t want to know what, and I don’t want to know who, and I don’t want to know where or when. I want to watch baseball. I want to sit here all by myself forever and watch this stupid baseball game and I never want to come out and I never want to know anything ever again ever. Ever.
Something terrible has happened. But if I stay here long enough, then maybe it won’t be real. If I can make it go away for the rest of the night, maybe I can make it go away for tomorrow and the next day. Maybe I can make it go away for the rest of my life. Maybe I can push it so far down, I can make it not be true. Whatever it is.
The last side retires. The All-Star game is over. The crowd cheers. I watch it over again. I don’t care that I’ve just seen it. I don’t care.
Nobody bothers me.
Not for a long time. Then I hear the doorknob turn and wiggle. They can’t get in—it’s locked. Good.
They knock. I pretend I don’t hear it.
“Preston?” It’ s Grandma. “Preston, let me in,” she says. Outside I can hear people coming into the house. People crying and moaning. I hear our pastor’s voice out there. Oh, God. This must be really, really bad if the pastor had to come by.
I turn the lock on the door, and Grandma opens it, stepping in. “Preston, can I talk to you?” she asks.
I shrug and refuse to take my eyes off the TV.
Grandma sits down in a chair, with perfect piano posture. She gently grabs the remote control from my hand, finds the right button, and turns off the TV. I hate her for doing that. I hate her for coming in here and making me hear what she has to tell me. And I don’t care if God hates me for feeling that way.
“Preston,” says Grandma, as calmly as she would teach someone to play piano. She takes a long time—as if taking a long time could really make a whole lot of difference now. She takes both of my hands.
“You’ve heard what’s going on in the living room,” she says, so kindly, so gently, as if all her emotions and fears have been wrapped in a thick, warm quilt. But not mine. My feelings are cold and raw, and there is no blanket for me.
“You’ve heard what’s going on,” she says, “and I think you already know . . . your mother is dead.”
I don’t say anything at first. I try to breathe like she breathed when the police told her. Slowly and deeply.
“Now, Preston, there’s lots of people who do fine without their mothers,” she says.
“Like Abraham Lincoln,” I mumble—a stupid fact that I learned today in school. I never thought I’d ever need to know it.
I try to keep it together, but I can’t. I close my eyes and my brain goes into convulsions. I pray to God that she’s lying or that she’s wrong. Let it be anyone else, God, anyone. Let it be me instead—I don’t care. Not my mom.
When I open my eyes, I can’t see. They are filling with tears so quickly my whole head is flooded. My ears are clogged; my throat is clogged; I can’t breathe. When I speak, I cough up the words, unable to say them all in one breath.
There’s only one thing I want to know—the one thing in the world I know for sure I can still have—and nobody’s going to stop me from having it.
“I want my father. I want to be with my dad!” I scream out.
Grandma looks away from me.
“You can’t be with him, Preston.”
“I want my dad!” I scream. “I want him now! Now! I want my dad now!”
“Preston,” says Grandma. “You can’t be with your dad . . . because it’s your dad who killed your mom.” She squeezes my hands tighter. “He shot her.”
I rip my hands away and cover my ears, but it doesn’t make a difference, because the words already made it into my brain, and the wail I let out breaks the silence of space and rocks the house like a sonic boom.
2
MYSTERIOUS WAYS
7
MY CLOSET DOOR
April—One Month After
The whole world seems to spin. Things around me change. I feel like I’m being sucked into a vacuum and I can’t see where I’m going—but I know where I’ll end up. The closet.
I forget where I just was, or what was going on, or what I was thinking about. The walls close in around me and move closer until I can feel the rough brush of jackets against my back, a wall to the right, a wall to the left, and the door in front of me. There is no light. There is no air. And something horrible is going on.
I know this is a dream. I’ve been here before, and it’s always a dream, so I know that much, but knowing it’s a dream doesn’t make it any better. I’m locked in my closet, and there is no air, and something is coming to get me. A monster is going to get me. And I can’t get out of the closet. I reach for the knob but can’t find it. I’m so afraid, I can’t breathe.
I touch the knob. It is hot—maybe there’s a fire on the other side of the door.
Maybe it’s not a monster; maybe it’s a fire. Maybe the whole house is on fire, and I’m stuck here in this closet.
I grip the knob, but it’s covered with grease. My fingers slip around it—I grip it until my knuckles ache, but my fingers still just slide off. Now the jackets behind me that hang from hangers far above my head seem to push closer. The jackets have hands. Hands slip out of the sleeves—thick, dark woolen gloved hands, but I can’t see them, I can just feel them. They’re going to get me—it’s not a fire at all.
It’s ghosts.
“Preston, I’m coming.”
I can hear my mother’s voice. She’s far away now, in another room, but I know she’s running closer, moving through the house, looking for me.
I try to scream to her that I’m here, trapped in this evil closet, but no sounds come out of my mouth. Only she can let me out; I know that. Dad can’t let me out; Grandma and Grandpa can’t. She’s the only one whose fingers won’t slip off the doorknob—I know that as sure as I know that I’m going to die in this closet if she doesn’t get here soon.
“Preston, I’m coming,” I hear her say again—only she sounds no closer than before, and I try to scream to her so she knows where I am, but still I make no noise.
The hands behind me—the sleeves of the heavy winter coats—begin to slide around my waist, and tighten. They’re not ghosts at all.
They’re snakes.
Big constricting snakes—that are going to squeeze the life out of me and swallow me whole.
“Preston, I’m coming.”
But she’s not. She’s no closer. Maybe she’s locked in a closet far away, too. Maybe her closet doesn’t even have a doorknob.
I press against the door with all my might, and cry.
“Preston, I’m coming.” She’s even farther away now. I spin around and try to get the snakes off me. They slip off and turn back into sleeves.
But now I hear something. Someone. There’s someone in the room here with me, standing just behind me. I can hear the breathing. And even in the darkness I think I can see. I know who this is. The blond hair, the blue eyes. It was never monsters or a fire, or ghosts or snakes at all. It’s—
I leap up in bed so suddenly, so quickly, that all the muscles in my stomach tie into a knot, and I can’t straighten myself out. My legs cramp, and I crumple into a ball. The sheets are soaking wet. I wonder if it’s all sweat or if I was so scared that I wet the bed. Would I do that?
I look at my digital clock. It’s only two in the morning. At least three more hours until even the tiniest bit of light will come into the room.
I can still hear Mom’s voice, and I have to think about how much of it was a dream and how much of it was real.
Then the door opens and in walks Mom.
“Preston?”
I gag on my own saliva.
“Preston, are you all right?” She sits on my bed, and I hug her tightly, trying to believe that it’s true. But the more tightly I hold on, the more quickly she slips away. In the dark, it does look like Mom, but I know that it is Aunt Jackie.
After the funeral, things were supposed to go back to normal. That’s what Grandma said. But this is not normal. It’s been more than two weeks, and there are no chores. There are no plans. I don’t go to school anymore. I don’t go out much anymore. I just eat, sleep, and sit in Aunt Jackie’s living room, watching TV. And I have nightmares.
Aunt Jackie dries my tears as if I am a small child. “Do you want me to stay in here with you for a while?”
I shake my head no. “What time do we go to Grandma and Grandpa’s tomorrow?” I ask her.
“About noon,” she says. She seems a bit hurt that I’m in such a hurry to go, but living with Aunt Jackie is just too close to being with Mom. And besides, Aunt Jackie knows she can’t handle having us here. Especially after what Tyler did yesterday.
She gives me a kiss. “Call if you need anything, Preston. Just call.” She leaves the door open a crack as she goes.
And when she is gone, Tyler, lying awake on the bed on the other side of the room, asks the Question of the Week.
“When’s Mommy coming back?” he mumbles.
“Go to sleep,” I tell him. I never want to talk about this with Tyler. Let Grandma explain it. She’s better at it. He knows she’s dead—he was at the funeral—but he just doesn’t get it.
“When’s Daddy coming back?” he asks.
I pretend to be asleep, and eventually Tyler nods back off. Tyler may not understand, but I do. I understand perfectly.
My dad shot my mom and then shot himself.
I can say it, because it feels like it’s not really happening to me. The words just don’t mean anything anymore if I keep saying them over and over. Dad shot Mom, Dad shot Mom. I’ve said it to myself so much that I don’t feel a thing. That’s how come I can sit and watch TV all day. I don’t think I ever want to do anything else.
Dad’s in jail.
He’s in the hospital of some jail somewhere, recovering from the gunshot wound he gave himself. He sits there, and I don’t know what he does or what he thinks about. Maybe he just sits and watches TV all day, too.
I close my eyes and try to force myself back to sleep by thinking of football, but that backfires, because all I can see is Weavin’ Warren Sharp.
I don’t think we’ll ever hear from him again—he managed to weave himself out of this situation with the same skill he brings to a football field. I wish I could blame the whole thing on him, but I can’t because it wasn’t his fault.
“Warren Sharp wasn’t dating your mom,” says Grandma. “She just met with him a couple of times—she was star-struck, that’s all.” You’d never know it was just a couple of times by the way Mom talked about it and by the way Dad reacted. I guess I’ll never be sure of the truth, though, because I don’t think any of us will ever mention Warren Sharp’s name again.
Thinking of this does not help me fall asleep, so I change gears in my brain, and I think about the most comforting thing anyone has said to me. It was one of Grandma’s friends on that awful Thursday night, when we all sat on the floor in the empty living room, reeling from the blow of what Dad had done.
“You’ll see her someday,” the woman said. “You’ll see her again in heaven.”
I know this is true. It must be true, because if it’s not, how can I keep from going crazy?
So I will see my mom in heaven. But for now, I’m here in this room, so I pull the covers over my head and pretend that I’m already there. I wonder what Mom does all day in heaven. Does she float around? Does she play the harp? Do you look down on us, Mom? Do you see me there? Are you outside my room trying to turn the doorknob?
If you can’t come to me, then I’ll come to you. I’ll die and go to heaven just as soon as I can.
• • •
The next morning, Aunt Jackie piles us and our suitcases into her newly damaged Mercedes and drives us to Grandma and Grandpa’s, where I think we’ll be living for a long, long time.
Tyler sits in the back playing with Legos, oblivious to the shreds of the convertible top flapping in the wind.
I sit on the passenger side and look at Aunt Jackie, thinking how, from this angle, she really does look like Mom.
She sees me and smiles slightly, knowing what I am thinking. “Your mom was prettier than I am.”
“No,” I tell her, “she’s just pretty in a different way.” I try to imagine Mom’s face as it really is, but I can’t. All I can see is the way it was at the funeral. All still. All frozen, there in the coffin. There were flowers all around, and I remember thinking how stupid it was to kill a bunch of flowers and stick them around a dead person. You’d think they’d at least let the flowers live.
Mom was wearing a pink dress. Someone did her hair and makeup. It wasn’t the way she did it, and it made me mad. I wondered if she’d be stuck that way in heaven forever—in someone else’s makeup, wearing someone else’s hairstyle.
“The Lord works in mysterious ways.”
This is what people tell you at funerals. It’s because they can’t think of something original to say, so they say the same old stuff because it’s better than saying nothing. I wish they would just say nothing.
“What a terrible, terrible thing,” they say, and then they cry for you. Why do they have to do that? Don’t they know that you’ve cried enough already? You don’t need people to help you cry. Death would be a lot better without funerals, or at least without the people who go to funerals.
I kissed Mom as she lay there, surrounded by all those dying flowers and crying friends. I half believed that, like Sleeping Beauty, her eyes would open when I kissed her cheek. I prayed to God she would just sit right up, and smi
Grandma and Grandpa sniffled a bit, and they spoke to her, telling her they loved her. They spoke quietly, like they were afraid to wake her. Grandma took it very well—all wrapped in that invisible quilt—filled with the Peace she said God brought to her the moment the policeman first came to the door. I don’t have quite the same peace. Maybe God just hasn’t gotten around to me yet.
Tyler just stood there and looked at her, like he’d look at a picture. It hadn’t really hit him yet. It didn’t hit him until yesterday.
Halfway to Grandma and Grandpa’s house, we come over a hill, and the view before us is spectacular. The air is clear, and the sun peeks in and out of big billowing clouds that are swept across the sky by a strong wind.
“Aunt Jackie,” asks Tyler, “do you think my mom is helping God hang clouds today?”
I think I’ll always have two images of my brother fixed in my mind. The image of him asking wide-eyed, innocent six-year-old questions about Mom hanging clouds with God, and then the image of him yesterday taking that knife and slashing the convertible roof of Aunt Jackie’s car over and over and over again.
• • •
“What do we do about Danny?” Grandpa says to Grandma, because he thinks I am asleep in my room. “What do we do?”
It’s early Wednesday morning, just a few days after Tyler and I moved in with them. It’s raining, and it’s so dark out, I don’t know whether the sun has risen yet. I stand in the hallway, just out of view, my back pressed firmly against the wall. Then I poke my head out, trying to stay in the shadows. Grandma and Grandpa sit in the breakfast nook, drinking coffee, dressed in bathrobes and slippers.
“What do we do about Danny?”
Grandma doesn’t have an answer right away. This is the first time since the day of . . . since the day it happened that I’ve heard them talk about Dad. Well, sure, I mean they talk about him, but they don’t really talk about him. Grandma gives me “weather reports” about Dad. “It’s sunny today. Could rain later. Danny’s healing nicely. Bit windy this morning.” That’s how they’ve talked for the past two weeks.