How do you know if you're speaking to somebody when you pray? Or if that little voice is just you saying what you want to hear?
I've never thought about it before tonight. I always believed I knew the answer. But a few blocks from here, a young man is lying bleeding and bruised on a playground, and I'm not going to do anything about it. If it's God's will, he'll be found and brought here, and the same doctors that have cared for you these couple months will make him whole again. I'm not hopeful one way or another.
You are our boy in all the ways a person can say that. I'm sorry. I know you hate it when I talk like that. You've never told me, but I can tell it bothers you. You're at that age when you know that you have a life of your own, while the world reminds you that you have to wait 'til you're eighteen to really live the way you'd like. Then your prison sentence will be over. You'll be free, so the story goes. But like me, you're impatient, and your revenge (I know that sounds harsh, but it is that in a way) is to keep yourself a secret from me and your mom. At dinner when we tried to talk to you, when you came out of your cell every night with your earphones on, your answers were like those of a prisoner of war: name, rank, and serial number, grunted out with as little feeling as possible. So your likes and dislikes, the you in you, have become secrets you hold against us, and in that space between what we think we know of you and what you are, you've become your own man.
Honesty lives in the silence of this room, which is why I can't lie to you or myself, though I might want to. I know that even if you opened your eyes right now and smiled at me the way you sometimes still do, it wouldn't take long for other walls to go up again like before. There's always some kind of separation that exists between people, and I guess this is why I'm writing. Tonight I need to believe in impossible things. I need to believe that there's a point to my being here and to writing this note to you, that somehow through this letter, I'll manage to get over those walls between us. Walls we've both built over the years.
By the time you wake up, you may hear things about me and you might wonder if they're true. I'll tell you now what I know. I walked here tonight. The weatherman said it might snow, but I'm not sure I paid any attention as I left the house without a hat or a scarf on. I've heard a lot of things lately that have entered one ear and haven't stuck. Your mother has told me to get a grip. Your Uncle Julio said the same. They love you and worry about you just like I do, but maybe it's because I'm your father, or maybe it's just because of who I am, but I've felt the need to understand what happened to you that night.
No one's sure. A mystery? That's what the police are saying, but you know I don't take the word lightly. Before I met your mother, I never thought I'd live in a small town. It's all you've ever known, but as a young man, I thought I'd always live in big cities. There the police are like a big, clumsy machine. Cops don't know victims or their families so maybe they don't care enough, but then again, they go where the investigation takes them. Here, in this tiny dot on the map that we've called home your whole life, everyone's connected. So mystery becomes a convenient word to explain what they already know and want to avoid.
At the office, I get smiled at - little sweet smiles made up of pity or something else. They're hoping that my bad luck isn't contagious. And my boss, though sympathetic, is getting tired of me not being around. But in all of these cases, just like with the weatherman, I've been teaching myself to ignore anything that doesn't help me understand this: you, here, in this hospital room.
Please don't hate me for what I'm about to tell you, but I've been talking to your friends. I've learned about your hangout at the back of the convenience store on Broome. How many times have I been there to buy cigarettes or soda over the years? Must be a hundred, maybe a thousand times, never knowing that Roger let you spend time in his backroom - a kind of clubhouse for you and your friends. It wasn't easy finding this stuff out. Another wall I had to climb, I guess. But without saying a word, through pained, pink cheeks, Roger let me know that he didn't fit either when he was in school. Did you know that? I guess he's trying to help others like him.
This isn't about me, I know. But still, it's painful realizing that I really didn't know you. Another thing to apologize for.
Your friends, especially Julie, are very brave. She loves you. The way she speaks about you - part admiration, part longing. She knows you'll never love her the way she loves you. It's not in your nature. Walls come up between people even when they don't want them to. So many people would walk away from that pain, but she sticks by you.
It took me weeks of visiting that convenience store to get her to open up. I understand. I'm a parent - another prison guard in her eyes. But I begged and begged, and maybe she saw it: another admirer standing outside you waiting to be let in on the secret of who you are.
In the quiet of this room, another discovery comes to mind: I'm not that different from you. I keep my own secrets. Did you ever sense that about me?
When you wake up, whether that be in five minutes or five weeks, the doctors will talk to you about the incident. That's the language - cold and clinical - they'll use to describe your attack. I've tried not to think about that night too much. It's not healthy. But they're stubborn thoughts, and I can't help myself.
It goes against our nature not to move toward something else, some kind of resolution - freedom is what we're looking for. This is what your mother and your uncle mean when they tell me to get a grip. This is why the people at the office and my boss give me wide berth, and why the sheriff shrugs and calls your case a mystery. We seek our own freedom from pain. But like forgiveness, I've started to doubt that that freedom actually exists. It doesn't for me.
It's a sin to hate - another one of the things that Father Rodolfo keeps saying to me when I've made it to mass, though I haven't made it very often lately. Maybe he senses my plan. But like I said, I'm not so different from you. I don't like others looking at me for too long because I have my own walls to keep people away - even your mother; even you, I have to admit.
When I was younger than you are now - I must've been about thirteen - I saw a group of kids taunting another child. There was something about the way they had him surrounded with their bicycles and the small crowd of other kids sitting there watching that has always stuck with me. People are cruel. But when we're young, we don't have the sense - or haven't been taught - to conceal that fact. I tell you now, John, the sight of that kid and those other teenagers taunting him taught me to hate. I knew it then. I could've killed them, the bullies and the crowd watching. Maybe left there, that would be considered a just kind of hatred because in truth I hated how those teenagers were acting. Hate the sin not the sinner, as the Church says. But it didn't stop there. God help me, I hated the kid being bullied. Not the way he was acting, but the child himself. A good person, a noble person, would've stood in for that poor kid. That's how your grandfather taught me to be. To be my brother's keeper. To stand in and take his blows. But what did I do? I ran away.
You don't like church, I know. I always thought it was just the fact that we made you go, or that you didn't want to give up a morning to sleep in, but now I understand there was more to it. You couldn't find a home there. Another thing I've never told you: I go to church because I keep hoping that one day I'll find a home of my own. I haven't found it yet.
I remember once coming back from church you asked me about the Gospel. You never spoke a lot on those drives back, sullen as ever. But that day, you seemed unusually interested in what Father had said in his homily. So you asked about why God needed to put His only son on earth only to then allow Him to die. It all seemed so dumb to you. You thought it would've made more sense for God to forgive us our sins and then let us know some other way. A kind of divine IM, I think is what you called it. I remember not really understanding why you were so up in arms about the whole thing. You never showed much interest in churchy discussions before that. So I said something about God working His way through the world - the type of response that religious people bounce around, not really ever thinking that more was necessary. And when you didn't let it go, I raised my voice, which stopped the discussion. Now I wonder if you wanted to tell me something - a secret - and I was just too dumb, or blind, to get it.
After these past few weeks, I've come to realize you were right. There is proof in the world that God forgives us - an IM message, if you will, that shows up over and over if you allow yourself to look for it. It's like God keeps giving you a chance to make things right. You don't always realize that you're getting these chances at first because over the course of a life, you become deaf to God's voice. Or in my case, scared of it.
I've often been fearful in my life. Fearful I wasn't doing the right thing or that I wasn't good enough, though I can't tell you what I wanted to be good enough for. There was a point where I thought seriously about the priesthood. It was just after college, long before I met your mother. I knew I wanted to live a life that mattered, but wasn't sure what that meant exactly. Not having much money, and because the Church makes anyone interested hold off for a year for the purpose of discernment, I answered an ad promising free room and board in exchange for helping out a disabled man. The house was owned by his mother. A big, old, barn-of-a-house that stood out on a tree-lined street near Harvard Square.
Almost immediately, I'd heard that a couple of the other men who worked there enjoyed hurting Tommy. He would get frustrated and try to injure himself sometimes, so we had to restrain him for his own good.
People seek their own freedom, like I said. It's God's will for us to be free, I believe that, but I think there's a part of us that enjoys hindering that freedom when it comes to others. I felt it sometimes on those days when I had to hold Tommy down, the power over another person. I think his mother did, and some of the men in the house did, too.
I kept on, though, determined to prove I could live a selfless life. I stayed on in the house for a year, taking theology classes, going to spiritual retreats, doing whatever was asked of me until a Jesuit community nearby invited me to join them as a novice. I was all set to go. I thought I was ready. And then, a couple weeks before I was to move out, something happened that changed my plans.
It was a Saturday. No one was in the house except me, Tommy, and his mom. I still have no idea why, but Mrs. O'Neill spent the day needling him, telling him he should be more attentive to how he dressed, petting him as often as she could, even though she knew Tommy wasn't one to be pet. A man named Muin was supposed to take over for me that night. Even though we lived in the same house for a year, I didn't know him well. He was a law student, and I had heard rumors that he was one of the men who enjoyed hurting Tommy - taunting him, maybe torturing him, even.
Did Mrs. O'Neill mean to do it? Did she make Tommy angry on the day that Muin would be on duty - a day when everyone else was usually away? I don't know. But that night, as I lay in bed, I heard Tommy screaming at the top of his lungs. He'd taken enough from his mother, and now he wanted to fight. It's unnerving to hear a person scream. There's no filter to the sound, no inhibition to the way it echoes in long hallways and worse, in your mind. I'd gotten used to it, in part, because I told myself I was doing God's work, helping the least of these. But even so, the screaming that night seemed different to me.
I went to see if I could help. I passed Mrs. O'Neill's bedroom on my way. Her TV was on louder than usual, but even so, there was no way that she didn't hear him. By the time I got to Tommy's room, the screaming stopped. It had been replaced by a soft padded thud that repeated again and again. When I opened the door, I found Muin sitting on Tommy's legs, punching the air out of him like he was dough on a kitchen counter. Muin was focused, and so angry it seemed, that he didn't notice me.
I froze watching him and then, without much thought, I turned around and went outside and didn't come back that night. For the second time in my life, I ran from someone in need. And just like with that kid, I wasn't only angry at Muin. There was a part of me that blamed Tommy. He was never very pleasant. Even taking his illness into account, his mother spoiled him. I tried to see it from Muin's point of view. It wasn't right, what he did, but I tried to convince myself that at some level Tommy deserved what he got.
The truth (again, this silence isn't good for lies): I wasn't really trying to excuse Muin. I was trying to excuse myself. I know that now, which brings me to tonight, to you, and to the man I left on that playground a few hours ago.
As I've been doing for weeks now, I waited for him outside Bob's Market like in one of those TV cop shows that I scowled at whenever you tried to try to take over the remote. It's not hard. Maybe that's an advantage to living in a small town. Following people is a big city activity. You just don't expect it when you live surrounded by people you know. Or maybe it was that he's young. How many sixteen year olds get followed?
Were you aware that he was following you that night?
He's a creature of habit. I know you know that. After his shift at the market, he cuts through the playground by his house, does forty pull-ups on the jungle gym, and then goes home. Always the same.
Did you ever walk with him during his routine?
When I finally decided to approach him, I had no plan. Maybe some notion of what I'd say, nothing concrete. But as he finished his pull-ups, I came up to him and it flew out of me. I told him I knew it was him. And then he surprised me: he wasn't defensive and he didn't deny it the way I imagined he would. I remember hearing him take a breath. That's all. I'm not even sure he exhaled. It was as if he were about to plunge into a pool for a very long time.
I was prepared for him to act like a monster and laugh, or act like a kid and deny everything. Either way, it would've given me something to lean against, but there was nothing. That's the good thing about those walls we put up. They keep you from falling over. But his response left nothing between us, so I fell toward him. I fell toward him and over him like a tree and I flattened him. And then I left him there on that playground, crushed and bleeding - just the way he left you for dead before.
I'm not telling you this because I'm proud of it. In fact, as the knuckles on my hands turn shades of purple I didn't even know existed, I'm not sure why I don't feel anything. In the past, something, a little voice, has let me know when it was time to stop, to turn away from a decision before I go over whatever ledge I was getting close to. I didn't always pay attention, but at least it was there. But now...
Maybe this is my reward for finally doing the right thing. Did I finally get the message God's been sending me all these years? Or maybe I've already flown over the ledge, and now... And now, there's nothing left to be careful about. Maybe, when those same police who were so unhelpful with your case, show up at our door and take me away, maybe then I'll realize the end of my vacation from worrying. But then again, maybe I won't.
What I can say for sure is that tonight, after I leave you here, I'll drive away from town down Route 122 toward the lake, and once there I'll find a clearing. I'll build a small fire the way you taught me to when you came back from camp so long ago. I imagine it'll be close to daybreak, and in the sky sunlight will start taking time back from a greedy darkness that's covered everything for so long. And as the sun rises, I'll burn this letter that I've written you.
I believe in impossible things. So I'll pray that in the puffs of smoke of that imperfect little fire, God will see that I love you and He'll let you know as much. I know now I can't scale the walls between us, my boy, but I love you. I love you so.
