The Book of Michael Read online

  To Valerie Burke-Harland and Peter Carver

  Chapter 1

  Some people still think I killed her. Despite the evidence. Despite everything.

  I would prefer not to tell you this story. I am sick to death of thinking about it. I’m twenty–one now. That’s supposed to mean something. That’s supposed to mean I’m an adult and can leave some things from my childhood and teenage years behind. If only I could do that. Telling you this story will not give me hope or peace and it cannot make the past go away. I live with it everyday. My eyes are wide open to what happened. I can still see every detail vividly. Writing it down will not change that. It will not make me happier. But I will do this thing. I will tell my story.

  “Tunnel vision” is the phrase they used to explain why I was charged, arrested, and convicted. The police investigators and the prosecution had tunnel vision.They could only see what they believed to be true.

  They believed I murdered my girlfriend. They were dead certain that I killed Lisa. During the trial, I started to cry and they thought it was because I was guilty. I was blubbering and I don’t think anyone could even understand what I was saying. How can you murder someone you love? That was what I was trying to say. No one seemed to understand that I loved Lisa so much. And then she was gone.

  And it was my fault.

  But I didn’t kill her. I could never have harmed her.

  The worst of it is this: five years after all this happened, I still miss her. I still want her to be there.What we had can never be replaced.

  Tunnel vision.The law could not see that I loved her. The law could not see that it was impossible for me to do such a thing.The law saw a young man with a chip on his shoulder, an angry young man. I was that person. I was angry about a lot of things, although much of it, I think, was just being sixteen and being male. I had pushed away some people who cared about me and trained myself to be downright nasty to those I didn’t like. And then the one good thing in my life was violently taken away from me.

  Lisa loved me despite the anger I had in me. And I think I was changing. I was becoming a better person. A happier person.

  The cops with their tunnel vision saw the way I was dressed, knew that I did drugs, smoked weed, and took some pills.They knew that I had been picked up drunk on a couple of occasions. One time I even pissed on the tires of the police car. Stupid of me, yes. But that was before Lisa. She was helping me clean up my act.

  They all knew for a fact that I had had sex with Lisa. They knew this because I told the truth. I had admitted that we had made love. The prosecutor immediately rephrased love to sex and made me say that we had sex. They wanted me to say it that way. They already knew that we had sex because there was evidence.The sex part added to the tunnel vision of the law. It was as if we were the only sixteen–year–olds who were sexually active. It was as if that was all part of the crime.

  And that made everything appear that much worse.

  ***

  And I’m going to have to tell you about Miranda. I’m going to have to explain why Lisa’s death was my fault. I’m going to have to tell you why I feel so guilty.

  The court had assigned this shrink to me, Dr. Kaufman, to do a psychological evaluation. He had the tunnel vision too. He saw everything in black and white. I’d never even met a psychiatrist before. And Kaufman was a forensic psychiatrist. Like in the TV shows. He understood nothing about me. The more I said, the more he interpreted. The more he got it wrong. And in the end used it against me. He said it was all confidential but it wasn’t.

  I made the mistake of telling him about the dream.

  After I lost Lisa, I had the dream over and over. Lisa had breathing problems sometimes. She had asthma. When she first told me, I couldn’t believe it. She was so smart and so beautiful. And so everything. I just didn’t think a girl like that could have asthma. Sometimes she’d be short of breath or have a hard time breathing and she’d use one of those puffers. Sometimes when we were together, I’d carry her puffer. How’s that for romantic?

  So in my dream, I’m with Lisa in the forest behind her house and she starts to have problems breathing. She asks for the puffer and I can’t find it. In the dream, she gasps and gasps and holds onto me and then stops breathing. In the dream, she dies and it’s all my fault.

  “And you feel what?” Dr. Kaufman had asked.

  “I feel fear and panic and then sadness. And guilt.”

  “Guilt?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He had recorded that conversation. It was never presented as evidence in court but then it wasn’t really necessary. Kaufman interpreted my recurring dream as evidence that I had really killed Lisa but was repressing the truth, making myself believe that I didn’t do the crime when in fact I had.

  “You’ll feel better,” he said,“if you can come out and say what really happened, if you can stop covering up the truth. Admission of guilt is the first step to healing.”

  That was when I first began to see the possibility that I was crazy, that something in me had snapped. Maybe because of the drugs. Maybe something else. He succeeded in making me doubt myself. He succeeded in making me doubt the truth.

  Until I came to the conclusion that there was no truth. Only the pain I felt in my heart. And that I wanted to die but didn’t have the will to do it.

  Chapter 2

  I served six months in the Severton Correctional Institution.A half year is a long time when you are sixteen. It’s crazy how many times when you are growing up, you use a word like “jail.” “They put him in jail,” you’d say about a criminal. Or about the drugs: “They’d fine you but they’d never put you in jail.” Or my father talking about some corporate sleaze who was ripping off the public: “Someone should put that bastard in jail. Lock him up.”

  Locked up. In jail. No matter how you phrased it, that was where I was. Institution sounds grand, doesn’t it? “Where’s Michael?” “Oh, he’s working at the Institution.” Working cleaning toilets. That was my first job at the institution.That and learning who I could trust: no one.And who I needed to stay away from: just about everyone.

  Correctional was the other word that didn’t fit. How was I being corrected? How was I going to be punished and then fixed and then somehow let back out into the world when I was older – after my life was stolen from me?

  I heard what they had said about me. There wasn’t much I missed. “Lock him up and throw away the key.” “He shouldn’t be allowed to live.” Let me remind you that I was charged and convicted of murder, but in the public mind I was also guilty of rape. I was a monster, as far as everyone was concerned. Everyone except my parents. They never stopped believing I was innocent.

  My mother prayed for me through the trial and continued praying for me after I was incarcerated. I heard her prayer sometimes, or thought I did, as I lay on my bed in Severton. “Please, God, please help Michael. Please show him love and please find a way to prove his innocence. And please let him know that I still love him and believe in him. Please, God, do this.”

  Maybe it was God who did set me free. Something happened. Something made the true killer confess.

  And my father. He lost his job. Who wants to buy insurance from a man whose son is a murderer? A murderer and a rapist?

  I was destroying their lives. They were going down with me. All we had going for us was my mother’s prayers. And I didn’t have much faith they would do any good.

  Please, God: just let this all be over. That was my prayer. I didn’t exactly know what “over” meant. Just anything that would make the nightmare stop, anything that would make the anger and the hurt go away.

  I had my own “room” at the institution. The guards were supposed to watch out for me. I was at risk, they
said. Suicide maybe. Or victim to some violent offender in the institution who might want to harm me. A lot of people who knew nothing about me wanted me to be beaten up. Or raped. Or murdered. Or all three in that order.

  So it got me my own room. With a toilet. And a light to read by. I thought reading might save me. It helped. It made the hours of the day move along. It took me into the nighttime until I could fall asleep. I read books on religion and books about dying and the afterlife. Books about near death experience and people back from the dead and books about travel and nature. I read dozens of novels and I even read poetry.

  A rapist and a murderer sitting in his cell reading Walt Whitman and William Wordsworth. And Russian novels. It seems odd, doesn’t it? Weird maybe. Crazy.

  I’m trying to convey how strange it all was. I’m trying to make you understand what it was like. One day, you are sitting in French class in high school, watching the sunlight dance on the hair of a girl across the aisle from you. The hair of a girl you have fallen in love with.You are daydreaming about her, about the afternoon ahead, about the times you have kissed her, made love to her. The teacher is droning on about French verbs. The girl turns and smiles at you.You melt and die–there, I’ve used that word again. You die of… well… of happiness. Something so alien to your system that it makes everything seem like a fantasy. But it isn’t.

  A month later you realize it was a fantasy. A blip in the continuum of unhappiness leading up to pure horror.

  ***

  I need to tell you as much as I can about Lisa but it has to come out in small parcels. It’s too sad to tell you everything at once. I need to tell you about Miranda too and about the drugs. And about jealousy. I didn’t know anything about jealousy.

  I remember Dr. Kaufman asking me a question: “When was the first time that you realized you were on the wrong path?” In life, he meant. During a session with my parents, he had asked them,“When was the first time you realized there was something… different… about Michael?” What I think he meant was, “When was the first time you realized there was something wrong with Michael?” When did he start to turn bad?

  ***

  Maybe it was this. I was thirteen at the time. I was caught stealing cigarettes from someone’s car. The window was down. They were there. I had just started smoking. Cigarettes were expensive. It was easy.

  My grandmother was a smoker. My father’s mother. Phyllis Grove.“Grandma” and “Granny” never fit easily, so we all called her Phyllis. Phyllis gave me my first cigarette. She was that kind of grandmother.

  “Michael, you should forget about all that bullshit they say about cigarettes.There are people out there who don’t want you to have any fun. Some people can’t handle cigarettes. I can. I smoke four a day. No more.” She held out a lit cigarette, some kind of extra–long variety. She traced her finger along the paper.“Right there.The trick is to smoke only two–thirds of the cigarette. Right to there. And then put it out. Avoid breathing the smoke when you snuff it. All the toxins stay in the last third. Forget about the filter. Filters have more chemicals in them than the tobacco. It’s avoiding that last third of tobacco that will save your lungs.”

  I watched intently as she inhaled deeply and her eyes seemed to roll back a little as she enjoyed the smoke. Then she coughed out loud and laughed. That’s what I liked best about my grandmother. Her laugh. She could laugh at anything.Any time, any place. She was a laugher.

  “Your grandfather never smoked,” she told me.“And he died young. He used to lecture me about smoking, about my health.” The laugh again. An infection that started out as a cut in my grandfather’s foot killed him when I was only nine. I missed him. So did she.

  Phyllis had an unnerving habit of asking me the age–old question,“What do you want to be when you grow up?” But she said it this way: “What do you want to be when you grow up… this week?” Because I had a different answer for her each time.

  At nine I wanted to be a doctor. At ten, a policeman. At eleven, a lawyer, at twelve an oceanographer, at thirteen a doctor, at fourteen a designer of video games. Of course, there were a lot of other oddball professions in between I wanted to be but didn’t really know much about.At fifteen it was starting to get fuzzy. And by sixteen, it had gone to hell. I didn’t really want to grow up to be anything. But that’s not quite right.

  “What do you want to be when you grow up this week?”

  “I want to run away with Lisa and live in a cabin somewhere in the north. I want to live alone with her. We’ll grow our own food and be self–sufficient and stay there. Never set foot in a shopping mall again, never watch TV, never have to put up with people watching us.”

  “Is that your idea or Lisa’s?”

  “Hers,” I admitted, but I wanted to go along with it.

  Phyllis studied the nicotine stains on her index finger and thumb. My guess is that she had long since given up on the four smokes a day.“Why do you want to remove yourself from society like that?”

  “Because society sucks,” I said. “I watch the news. I see what’s going on.”

  “That it does. But some of us are stuck here, I guess, trying to make the best of it.”

  When I was twelve, my grandmother became a criminal. She was working for a charitable organization called the United Appeal. She was a fund–raiser and a good one. So good that she decided to keep part of what she raised for herself.

  “The term is embezzlement,” Phyllis said, looking down.“I knew it was wrong but I did it anyway.And got caught.” She let out a long sigh.“I just felt that all my life I’d never been able to buy the things I wanted. Everybody else came first. And here was this chance.” She looked up at me.“I intended to pay it back and I thought I could do that before anyone would notice. But I was wrong.”

  Unlike me, my grandmother didn’t do any time. She had to turn over the money and she had to pay a fine and see a counselor. She performed “community service,” a term she loathed.“Community service,my ass,” she’d say.

  Phyllis gave a talk at schools about the importance of honesty. She had to repent of her crime and use herself as an example of someone who had taken the wrong path. She even spoke at my school.“That’s your grandmother?” kids would ask, incredulous.As if a grandmother could not steal from a charity.

  “When your grandfather died, Michael, I felt like everything was unfair. It was like there was no justice in the world and there were no rules. I started seeing things differently. It changed me. In some ways I was better off for it.” Phyllis said this to me, not to the kids in the schools. She worked hard to undo her community service when she had her heart–to–heart talks with me.

  One day, less than a month before Lisa died, I was mowing my grandmother’s lawn. It was a warm day and I was quite sweaty when I finished. Phyllis offered me a cigarette as usual and then a beer. “You should run away with that girl, Michael. Get the hell out of here.”

  “You’re crazy,” I said and laughed.

  “Michael, the world is crazy.You’ll have to work hard to hold onto your sanity.”

  “I don’t think I could just run away.”

  “I know. It would break your father’s heart.”

  But we should have run away. We should have moved up north into a cabin. It was almost like my grandmother knew something bad was going to happen.

  Phyllis was the other person who never ever doubted my innocence. The trial and the publicity nearly destroyed her though. She aged ten years overnight. When I was declared guilty of murder, Phyllis stood up and cursed long and hard at the judge and jury until she was removed from the courtroom.

  For three days I felt numb. I felt dead. And then the pain returned. The agony of my loss and the anger at being blamed for killing Lisa.

  Chapter 3

  I don’t know if I can take you to the place where I existed in prison. I mean the place inside me. I don’t know if anyone can understand what I felt. There was a shell I had constructed around me. I talked to almost no on
e. Other inmates hated me. Profound isolation is the term I came up with. Even now, five years later, I sometimes fall into that black hole inside me and have a hard time climbing back out.

  There were “group” sessions with the prison psychologist, who always began the meeting with, “Who wants to go first?”We were supposed to talk about how we hurt people and how we felt about it now. It was all bullshit and everyone knew it.There was an exercise room but I couldn’t handle that–the way some of the men looked at me. I talked my way out of having to go there at all.

  When I was inside, reading helped keep me sane.

  Although sanity doesn’t seem quite right. After everything that happened, I just didn’t think I’d ever be right again. Reading helped some. I could sometimes live inside the books. And when I was allowed outside, always under the scrutiny of guards, I just looked up at the sky. But rather than drive us both crazy with me writing about that time, let me take you to the day when everything shifted.

  It was a day like any other. I was alone but expected to go down the hall and clean up the bathroom in an hour.You can imagine how much I hated that job. The smells, the work, the humiliation. I made a point of not complaining about it, though. I had a part of me that was trying to be tough because I understood that tough meant survival in here.Why I wanted to survive, I didn’t know. Some animal instinct, I suppose. Nothing more. What the hell did I have to live for?

  The news arrived by way of the guard, a guy named

  Gus who was neither mean nor nice. Gus prided himself in being neutral and I admired him for that. He oddly always called me by my full name.

  “Michael Grove,” he said and I looked up from the book I was reading, Orson Scott Card’s Pastwatch.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s over,” he said. “Come with me.” He unlocked the door and walked in but I just sat there. It seemed like a scene out of a novel. Something weird was happening but I didn’t know what. My first thought was that this had all been some kind of terrible dream.The nightmare was over. Or some kind of insane joke.