The Book of Michael Read online

  The pile of books in my bedroom were all from Lisa and Phyllis. Pilgrim’s Progress, Leaves of Grass, das Capital, The Art of War, Grapes of Wrath, Gulliver’s Travels. Lisa had read all of them. Now it was my turn. I had many, many empty days to fill. My parents were worried about me. And I felt guilty about that. A son ruins his family’s life. Then what? I was glad I did not have any brothers or sisters. Imagine what it would be like to have a brother who everyone believes is a murderer.

  It’s funny what went through my head during the following week. My parents tried to get me to do things–go for walks with them, go to movies, watch sports on TV, go for a family trip. I wasn’t interested in any of it.

  I thought about Lisa all the time. I ached for her. I felt total confusion when it came to Miranda. By now she was locked up. Unlike me, they did not treat her as an adult offender. She was in an all–girls correctional “facility”– Woodvale. I’d heard about the place. The inmates were allowed to live in cottages. You were locked into Woodvale, but you got to live in cottages. Even the murderers.

  I couldn’t begin to understand why Miranda had killed Lisa. All I knew was that it had something to do with me. Lisa and Miranda barely knew each other. I was the link. I was the reason. I knew that drugs were part of it. I knew how crystal meth could mess you up good. Lack of sleep. Paranoia. Feeling powerful and feeling scared. But it was more than the drugs. I could speculate–and I did way too much of that–but I had a craving, a need to know. Why?

  I hated Miranda, I knew that. I hoped she’d stay locked away for a long, long time. But it wasn’t just hate. I had this feeling that my own fate was somehow tied to hers. The story was not over. This haunted me late into the night–those terrible, dark nights when I could not get to sleep. My own sleeplessness had begun in Severton and followed me home to my own bedroom. The worst of it was imagining Lisa being stabbed, imagining what was going through her mind as she was dying.

  ***

  In those golden moments when I could pull myself back from the brink of my own despair, here’s what I thought about. I made a list of possibilities. The options went like this:

  1. Get fat. Just take up eating as a serious pursuit. Food was an easy escape. Just go for it.

  2. Go far away. With this one, often pondered in noble moments to save everyone a lot of grief, the question was always, how far and where to and what exactly would I do when I got there?

  3. Return to school one day and pretend that nothing happened. Ignore the looks. Be a good student. Do my homework. Make new friends. (This was fantasy territory and much harder to envision than 1 and 2. )

  4. Get back at someone or some thing. Revenge, pure and simple. Who exactly was I angry at? I had a list. The jury members. The judge. My idiot attorney – “the best in the business. ” Society. (Of course, but such a large task. ) All those who believed I was guilty and treated me to their hatred. Or me. Just get back at me somehow for being such a screwup. This latter item seemed most satisfying.

  And then, after dipping into the I Ching book or reflecting on something I’d read by Thomas Merton, I’d think of another option.

  5. Prove to the world that I am a good person through doing great deeds. Like saving people or animals or rainforests or whales. As Lisa would want me to do.

  It’s when I thought of option 5 that I began to see the impossibility of my life. “Human wreckage” was the phrase I saw in the Dostoevsky novel. I was not the first or the last but a member of the tribe of human wrecks. Perhaps there was nothing for us but to litter the landscape of history, and age gracelessly into adulthood. And if that was going to be the case, I could settle in if I had one good and simple pleasure. Food might be enough. I’d eat well, get fat, and people would understand. They would say, “Look what happened to Michael Grove. He was smart, he showed promise. He went bad. He got blamed and then exonerated. But it ruined him. So he stayed home, became a burden to his family, and got fat. Isn’t it a pity?”

  Yes, that’s what I wanted. I wanted pity. I wanted people to feel sorry for me. I didn’t want to fix anything. And I couldn’t change the past. So what could I do to bring on the pity? It was the path of least resistance.

  I can imagine what you might think about this whole self–pity plan but I’d be lying if I told you that it didn’t make me feel a little bit better. I’d never really pondered fat as a solution to one’s problems. Now it seemed perfectly logical. I even started another list: hot dogs (the big, bloated, meaty ones infested with nitrates), ice cream (vanilla fudge), pizza (double pepperoni), cheese (I could develop an appetite for all kinds of cheese but I’d settle for Cheez Whiz if I had to), French fries (I could assume the title of King of the Transfats). This list could grow.

  I could end up like one of those guys who has to be hauled out of the bathtub by unlucky firemen. I could be like that.

  A week had gone by since my release. My parents were out. It was three in the afternoon. I was snacking in the kitchen. Cheez Whiz on celery. My mother’s compromise. “If you are going to eat garbage, you should eat something healthy at the same time. ” Clog and unclog your arteries, was the way I translated that.

  The doorbell rang.

  I’d become good at not answering doorbells or phone calls.

  It rang again. And again.

  I saw an Acura parked in the driveway and didn’t know anyone of my parents’ friends who drove an Acura. Through the peephole in the door, I saw it was Josh Hawker. Good reason not to answer.

  I think Josh knew I was home. Hell, where else would I be?

  I opened the door. The fool was smiling. I blinked at the daylight and realized I had not set foot out of the house since I had visited Phyllis. I think part of me had believed the world had gone away or that it at least had decided that I was not part of it.

  “Hi, Michael. Good to see you. ”

  “Screw you too, Mr. Hawker,” I said flatly.

  “Good,” he said. “Anger is good. We can work with that. ”

  “Work on what?”

  “Can I come in?”

  “No. ”

  He did not take this as an insult. He smiled. “We can use your anger to fuel our case. ”

  “What case?”

  “Wrongful conviction. What you’ve been through… this miscarriage of justice. You deserve compensation. ”

  Compensation sounded like such a funny word. I couldn’t help but laugh.

  “You have been injured,” he explained. “We can assign blame and demand compensation. That’s the way it works. ”

  “You think any of that can be repaired?” I asked sarcastically.

  “No. But you can be compensated. ”

  “How?”

  “Money,” he said. “Lots of it. ” He handed me a manila envelope. “I had my secretary put together a little package. Here are some news stories of other people wrongfully convicted who sued for compensation from the government. You were not the first. ”

  “So now I’m part of some club of losers. And I should profit from my misery, everyone’s misery? No way. What about Lisa’s parents? What kind of compensation are they eligible for?”

  “If they wanted to, they could make a case against that girl’s family,” he said matter–of–factly.

  “Jesus,” I said. “Does it all boil down to money?”

  Hawker looked straight at me. “Michael, what else is there? I mean really. How else can you compensate someone for what you’ve been through? Rewire your brain, erase the memories, the punishment? Can’t be done. So it’s imperfect but it’s something. Can I talk this over with your parents?”

  “I thought I was deemed to be an adult. I thought I committed an adult crime, deserved an adult sentence. I thought the judge redrew the boundary of childhood just to make sure I was fully responsible. ”

  “Something like that,” Hawker admitted. “Take a look at the file. I’ll call back. I never gave up on you, remember?”

  “You were being paid, asshole,” I said. “
That’s why you didn’t give up on me. ”

  He turned and started for his car. “Just take a look at the news clippings. I’m really hoping we can work together again. ”

  I stood there blinking in the light. He hit the car remote and the car horn bleeped and the doors unlocked. “Wait a minute,” I yelled to him. He took a few steps back in my direction.

  “What did you really believe back then? I know you defended me. It was your job. But did you think I really did it?”

  He looked up at the sky for a minute, trying to figure out how to answer this. He knew that his request depended on how he answered. And he must have opted for telling the truth. “Yes,” he said. “I believed you did it. ”

  I felt myself beginning to tremble with anger. But I was glad he said what he did. I knew it back then. I knew he never truly believed me.

  “But now I’m giving you a way to get on with your life,” Hawker said. “Think about it. ”

  Chapter 12

  There was a tent in the forest behind Lisa’s house.We went there sometimes in the afternoons or evenings. While other kids were hanging out downtown on the street or in the malls, we escaped to this, our perfect little world. I thought it was the safest place on earth.

  The tent belonged to Lisa’s parents and they didn’t seem to mind that we were alone back there.They didn’t exactly like me, I could tell. But they had tremendous trust in their daughter.They knew she was smart and, in her own way, responsible. I think that they understood we were having sex. I really do. Lisa’s mother had talked to her about AIDS and venereal diseases and had taken her to the doctor to get birth control.

  I was the first guy she’d had sex with. She was not my first. Miranda was. But I had certainly not been Miranda’s first partner.

  I’m writing this to put in order the sequence of things that happened. Unanswered questions haunt us for a long time. I am deeply haunted by many. But some things have been put to rest. I just want to say how it happened. I don’t have all the answers as to why. But I’ve been working on that ever since Lisa’s death.

  Just so you don’t think it was all about sex, let me say this. Lisa and I were very much in love. She and I were very different. She wanted to save the world. I wanted… what? Not to destroy it? Maybe just thumb my nose at it. Maybe write graffiti on it. It’s easy to be young and angry even if you don’t have a personal legitimate reason to be so. Miranda fed my anger and, at first, that was a kind of flattery. But I wanted to move on. And I thought she did too.

  In our tent in the woods, Lisa and I sometimes just read.Yes.We sat quietly together with mosquitoes humming outside the confines of our screened windows and we read. Sometimes we’d read passages out loud to each other. There was philosophy and poetry and books on the environment. And novels. This all came up in the trial. What were you doing that afternoon there in the woods?

  Imagine how it sounded to the jury. We were reading.

  Of course that isn’t the whole story. Sometimes we just talked. Sometimes we listened to music. Sometimes we’d toke a little. Nothing more. Nothing less.

  And sometimes we’d make love. Once or several times.

  That was what the jury wanted to hear.

  My lawyer, Mr. Hawker, kept referring to it as “consensual sex.” The prosecutor kept referring to the events as simply sex and murder. Or when he chose to entirely ignore the truth, he used the word “rape.” “She was murdered after all. After the sex. If it was ‘consensual sex’ why would this young man have murdered her?”

  Why?

  But he didn’t murder her.

  Nothing about Miranda ever came up in the hearing. Nothing.

  We had made love twice that afternoon. I had to say this out loud.

  Hawker thought the jury would understand. Making love with your steady girlfriend two times in one afternoon cannot constitute rape. It was something they both agreed to.

  I understood even then, at sixteen, that sex was a powerful, emotional thing. It was a pleasurable thing and it was a dangerous thing. But if two people were in love, what was to hold them back?

  With Miranda, it had always been a little bit strange, a little bit dark. She asked me to do things. She initiated it most times. I liked that at first. But the drugs made it confusing too. She was often higher than I was. The amphetamines and the meth, that was when it just got too weird. And all I could do was find the door, find my way out of that relationship. At first, she latched onto another guy and pretended she didn’t care. Then there were a couple of nasty phone calls late at night.

  And a scene at school. In the hallway. “You asshole,” she said. “You gutless piece of shit.Why did I waste my time with you?”

  This, because I stopped returning her phone calls. Stopped hanging out with her. Stopped trying to get her to clean up her act a little.“You have to draw a line somewhere,” I lectured her.“I don’t care if you want to get high for the rest of your life. But you have to decide when to back off.You have to recognize when something is starting to take over.”

  Like I was the big expert. I wasn’t. I experimented with all kinds of shit but something in me kept backing me off. Mostly it was just the weed. Not that I think it’s good for you or anything idiotic like that. I just believed I could handle it. Maybe that’s what we all say.

  Until it’s too late.

  If I were to make a list of the things that were most important to me back then I would have had Lisa at the top of the list. Drugs would have been on the list but not in the top ten. Getting high was a way of getting away from what I didn’t like about school and the world around me. Being with Lisa was what I liked most about being alive. God or someone had given me a chance to spend time with someone that wonderful. Smart, beautiful, sexy, and loving. The anger was starting to boil off. The alienation was beginning to fade like an old pair of jeans.

  Lisa was saving me from myself. And I can only wish she’d stayed around to finish the job.

  That afternoon in the tent, we made love twice. Sexy, wonderful, beautiful. I had no idea that someone was nearby watching.

  I’d promised my parents I’d be home for dinner at five p.m. My aunt and uncle were coming over. I didn’t do a lot of things my parents asked, but I liked Ruth and Charlie. I had lived with them one summer when I was younger at a time when my parents were having problems. I hadn’t seen them for a long while. Sure, I’d be home by five.

  Lisa and I had both fallen asleep in the tent. I woke and checked my watch. “Gotta go,” I said. “I’ll walk you back to your house.”

  “No,” she said, “I’m still sleepy. I like it here. I’m going to sleep a little more and then go in.”

  The forest was just beyond Lisa’s backyard. It was a shelter and a familiar place to us, a place of great privacy. We always felt safe there.

  “Okay,” I said.“You got your cell phone?”

  “Yes. But it’s off of course.”

  “Turn it on. I’ll call you after I get home.”

  “A wake–up call?”

  “Yes.”

  But I never called. Ruth and Charlie were already at my house.They were in good spirits and wanted to talk. I guess I figured I’d call Lisa at home after they left.

  The police phoned my house at nine o’clock that evening. My aunt and uncle were still there. My life as I knew it ended with that phone call. The storyline that was my life made a certain amount of sense up until then.Then the nightmare began.

  When I was released, some people used the phrase that I could “pick up my life where I left off.” But those words were hollow. It could not possibly work that way. One thing was shattered. Another thing began.What was needed was a new beginning. But that would not be easy.

  ***

  I thumbed through Hawker’s package of clippings about wrongful convictions and was shocked at how many there were. Supposed murderers spending years or even decades in prison and then released after new DNA testing or after confessions or new evidence. Suits were filed by the
wrongfully convicted.Thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars. In some cases over a million. Hawker was hoping I’d get greedy, hoping I’d want revenge on the system. Hoping he could get a big piece of the action.

  I went a bit further–perverse interest now. I was part of some unlucky elite: murderers who were suddenly no longer murderers and set free. I searched their names on the Internet and tried to find out what happened after the poor sods were set free and sued for damages. Did the money make for happiness?

  The sad truth was that I could not find a single instance of truly renewed lives.The longer the sentence, the worse the damage. I was the poster child of the club. Only sixteen and free before his seventeenth birthday. But it didn’t feel like that.

  Along my search, I stumbled on old news stories of my own trial.The papers had painted me as a monster. I doubted I could shed that image now that it was so deeply implanted in the mind of the public.

  Chapter 13

  I woke up in the morning thinking about capital punishment. In prison, I’d read some articles about the pros and cons of it.There had been an essay by the French writer,Albert Camus, “Reflections on the Guillotine.” And another author who argued that someone wrongfully convicted of a murder and put in prison is so damaged by it all that it would be more humane had he been put to death instead. It scared the hell out of me to be reading the stuff while inside. But I’d read it anyway.

  I’d been home for ten days. Mostly hibernating.There was the school issue. My parents had met with the principal. They had a dream. I would return to classes, catch up on some work, graduate with my class from high school–conditional upon taking some summer classes.

  As if nothing had happened.

  In English class once prior to the murder, Mr. Gelbert made us each take part in a debate. One on one. I was up against Lisa on the issue of capital punishment. This was back before we were very close. I knew who she was. She knew who I was.That was about it.