Triptych

Choosing to become. Like he had a choice. He hadn’t chosen his hard-ass father, his ditzy mother who practically invented rose-colored glasses. He hadn’t chosen Joyce, the perfect sister, the bitch who set the bar so high all John could ever hope to do was bounce on his toes, trying to touch the edge of the bar but never getting high enough to go over.

He had chosen this? He hadn’t had a chance.

“Screw you,” he told Mary Alice.

“You wish,” she snapped, flipping her hair to the side as she turned on her heel and left him standing there like an idiot.

He had looked in the mirror that night, taken in his greasy long hair, the dark circles under his eyes, the acne spotting his cheeks and forehead. His body hadn’t yet caught up with his enormous hands and feet. Even dressed up for church, he looked like a string bean standing on a couple of cardboard boxes. He was an outcast at school, had no real friends left and at the ripe age of fifteen, all of his sexual experience thus far had involved his sister’s Jergens hand lotion and an active imagination. Looking in the mirror, John had taken all of this in, then sneaked out to the shed in the backyard and snorted so much coke that he made himself sick.

John hated Mary Alice from that day on. Everything bad in his life was her fault. He spread rumors about her. He made jokes at her expense and within her hearing so she’d know just how much he despised her. At pep rallies, he heckled her as she was leading cheers on the gym floor. Some nights, he would lie awake thinking about her, detesting her, and then he’d find his hand had gone from resting flat on his stomach to reaching down into his shorts and all it took was picturing her at school that day, the way she smiled at other people when she walked down the hallway, the tight sweater she had worn, and he was gone.

“John?” His mother had some sixth sense and always seemed to knock on his bedroom door when he was jerking off. “We need to talk.”

Emily wanted to talk about his failing grades, his latest detention, something she had found in the pocket of his jeans. She wanted to talk to the stranger who had kidnapped her son, to beg him to give her her Joh

The only person in that courtroom who still believed in John Shelley was his mother. She would not let go of that boy, that Cub Scout, that model airplane builder, that precious child. She wanted to put her arms around him and make everything better, to press her face to the back of his neck and inhale that odd scent of cookie dough and wet clay he got when he played in the backyard with his friends. She wanted to listen to him tell her about his day, the baseball game he had played, the new friend he had made. She wanted her son. She ached for her son.

But he was already gone.

CHAPTER NINE

John hadn’t slept well, which was nothing new for him. In prison, nighttime was always the worst. You heard screams, mostly. Crying. Other things he didn’t like to think about. John had been fifteen when he was arrested, sixteen when he was incarcerated. By the age of thirty-five, he had lived in prison more years than he had slept in his parents’ home.

As noisy as prison was, you got used to it. Being on the outside was what was hard. Car horns, fire engines, radios blasting from all over. The sun was brighter, the smells more intense. Flowers could bring tears to his eyes and food was almost inedible. There was too much flavor in everything, too many choices for him to feel comfortable going into a restaurant and ordering a meal.

Before John was locked up, you didn’t see people jogging in the streets, headphones tucked into their ears, tight spandex shorts clinging to their bodies. Cell phones were in bags like big purses that you carried over your shoulder and only really wealthy people could afford to have them. Rap didn’t exist in the mainstream and listening to Motley Crue and Poison meant you were cool. CD players were something out of Star Trek and even knowing what Star Trek was meant you were some kind of nerd.

He didn’t know what to do with this new world. Nothing made sense to him. None of the familiar things were there. His first day out, he had gone into a closet in his mother’s home, shut the door and cried like a baby.

“Shelley?” Art yelled. “You go

John waved his hand at the supervisor, pushing his mouth into a smile. “Sorry, boss.”

He walked over to a green Suburban and started wiping water off the side panel. That was another thing that had shocked him. Cars had gotten so huge. In prison, there had been one television that got two cha

The guys always got a laugh out of that, shouting “pussy” and “faggot” at the set so that it drowned out the actor’s next line.

John didn’t watch much TV.

“Yo, yo,” Ray-Ray said, bending down to sponge silicone onto the Suburban’s tires. John looked up to see a police cruiser pulling into the drive of the car wash. Ray-Ray always said things twice, hence the name, and he always alerted John when a cop was around. John returned the favor. The two men had never really talked, let alone exchanged their life stories, but both knew on sight what the other was: an ex-con.

John started cleaning the glass over the driver’s door, taking his time so he could watch the cop in the reflection. He heard the man’s police radio first, that constant static of the dispatchers speaking their private code. The officer glanced around, pegging John and Ray-Ray in about two seconds flat, before he hitched up his belt and went inside to pay for the wash. Not that they would charge him, but it was always good to pretend.

The owner of the Suburban was close by, talking on her cell phone, and John closed his eyes as he cleaned the window, listening to her voice, savoring the tones like a precious piece of music. Inside, he had forgotten what it was like to hear a woman’s voice, listen to the sort of complaints that only women could have. Bad haircuts. Rude store clerks.

Chipped nails. Men wanted to talk about things: cars, guns, snatch. They didn’t discuss their feelings unless it was anger, and even that didn’t last for long because generally they started doing something about it.

Every two weeks, John’s mother had made the drive from Decatur down to Garden City to see him, but as glad as John was to see her, that wasn’t the kind of woman’s voice he wanted to hear. Emily was always positive, happy to see her son, even if he could tell by looking in her eyes that she was tired from the long drive, or sad to see that he’d gotten another tattoo, that his hair was in a ponytail. Aunt Lydia came, but that was because she was his lawyer. Joyce came twice a year with their mother, once at Christmas, once on his birthday. She hated being there. You could smell it on her. Joyce wanted to be out of that place almost more than John did, and whenever she talked to him, he was reminded of the way the black gangbangers and Aryans talked to each other. You fucking nigger dog. You fuck-eyed white motherfucker. I’ll kill you soon as I get the chance.