Leaving Yesterday (13 page)

Jodi had made a Mediterranean pita dish, which looked a lot like pizza except that it was covered in spinach, olives, and feta cheese. I couldn’t help but compare the healthy entrée with whatever it was my son had been eating the last couple of years. I became more and more thankful for Monte and Jodi’s choice to be here.

I watched Kurt, searching for any sign of the agitation that Jodi had mentioned earlier. Of course, the Louisville Slugger’s presence in my attic gave a strong indication of what might be bothering him, if indeed it was
the
Louisville Slugger. In the last few days I’d thought of little else, and had started to suppose that the bat was truly nothing, or just at his place by coincidence, or maybe he had taken it to hide it for the guilty party. That would have him wrestling inside himself, right? Over the course of time I’d started to convince myself that he hadn’t done anything at all, that it was as harmless as the basketball and the cleats and the soccer ball I’d also found in his things. Jodi’s comments seemed to contradict that, but maybe Jodi and Monte were simply reading him wrong. I had decided not to bring up the subject of the bat with Kurt, but now I wondered if I should.

It was amazing the kinds of scenarios a mother could concoct in her mind to protect her children. Thinking about all these made me more than realize why Kurt had been able to hide his drug abuse for so long. I was willing to believe most anything—so long as it meant I didn’t have to believe the worst.

After dinner was over, I looked at Kurt. “Coach Brooks brought by all your things while you were in rehab. I’ve got them loaded in the back of my car. Why don’t you come out and help me carry them in?”

I watched him very closely for any sign of a reaction at this news. His face didn’t change at all, but for just a split second, I thought I saw the light of panic in his eyes. Maybe I just imagined it. He stood and walked out the door with me, and as we started down the drive, he said, “Did you go over to the cabin and load up the stuff yourself, or did he?”

The question could have been innocent enough, but I was afraid I knew why he asked. It was the same question that troubled me. “He had the ranch foreman load everything in some boxes, then he brought them to me.”

I turned to look at his profile in the fading sun. His eyes blinked faster than normal. “Oh, right. Juan Miguel.” He rubbed the back of his neck and seemed to exhale a vast amount of air. “He’s a great guy. I think he’s probably an illegal immigrant, but you talk about a hard worker. The guy doesn’t speak more than a dozen words of English, but ‘work hard’ are two that he does know and live by. I could never keep up with him.”

This conversation relieved me more than a little. On the off chance that it truly was Rudy Prince’s bat, one of the many things that had concerned me about all this was who had put the bat in the box and would he eventually tell? If that person didn’t speak English, he likely wasn’t watching the six o’clock news. Even better if he were an illegal. He certainly wouldn’t be waltzing into the police station to talk about evidence. It was the best possible situation. No, that wasn’t true. The best possible scenario would be if the bat had never existed in the first place.

I opened the rear hatch of my Escape and pointed toward all the clothes, neatly lined on hangers. “They probably got a little wrinkled on the ride up, but I washed them all and pressed everything. You shouldn’t have to worry about wardrobe for a while.”

He nodded absently and began to sift through the remaining box of odds and ends. After a moment he looked up, and I wasn’t sure if he was panicked or relieved. “Is this all there was?”

I looked at him for a few seconds and gave it serious thought before I responded. “Is there something else you were looking for?”

He shook his head. “No.”

“Good, because that’s all there was.”

Sixteen

Monday morning I awoke having decided, though still uneasy about it. I’d given myself all of Sunday to think it over. I’d even prayed about it—though perhaps not with my usual degree of absolute seeking. Mostly I sought peace for what I already planned to do. At least I’d given myself that extra day, not wanting to do anything impulsively that I would regret later. But why would I regret it? A mother does what’s best for her son, that’s what a mother is supposed to do, and that was the end of it.

I somehow managed to go through my morning routine as if everything was the same. I got Caroline up and dressed for school, packed her lunch, and stood smiling and waving at the door, just like always. “Have a good day at school,” I called in my too-cheerful, get-her-off-to-school voice.

She turned around and rolled her eyes. “Yeah, like that’s going to happen.” Then she went skipping down the street, her backpack shifting with each hop.

Once again I amazed myself at the show I could put on. From the exterior, it seemed like a perfectly happy normal day, the complete opposite of the truth. Something about that thought made me shudder, but it did not change my resolve.

I walked back inside, careful to lock the door behind me. Then, oh so casually, I walked to the other doors and confirmed that they, too, were locked before I went to sit on the hearth, stretching out my legs and yawning. I’m not sure whom this show of casual normalcy was supposed to fool. There was no one here but me, and I certainly knew better.

I waited just a few minutes, took a deep breath, then turned and wadded some newspaper into balls. After I piled the kindling over it in a rough rendition of the Boy Scout teepee Nick had learned so many years ago, I removed the box of matches from their place on the mantel. I held the box in my hand and simply looked at its rectangular shape, felt its lightness in my hands. Such an insignificant little piece of cardboard, but once I opened it, once I dragged the red tip of the match over the striking surface, there would be no turning back for me.

Time to cross the line and move on.

The flame moved from match to paper to wood in a matter of seconds. One tiny little wooden stick had the power to destroy so many things—things that by appearance were so much stronger. After the kindling was fully engulfed, I threw a couple of small pieces of firewood onto the top and watched the slow movement of the fire as it found its next piece of fuel. I added a larger piece of wood. This needed to be good and hot. I didn’t want to take the chance of leaving any traces behind.

As the fire began to grow into a flaming mountain, I felt sufficiently satisfied with my work to leave it to its course for a moment. I let myself into the attic and looked around at row after row of dusty pink insulation, all exactly the same. Panic engulfed me, like the flames had swallowed the newspaper. What if I couldn’t find it?

I crawled from board to board in the general direction of where I knew the bat was hidden. When the fear of falling through the ceiling became almost unbearable, I shoved my hand between board and insulation and peeled it back. Absolutely nothing. I leaned across to the next row and repeated the same, with the same result. Ten minutes later, I was flat on my belly across the supporting boards, pushing my hands into the center of the fluffy pinkness, feeling around for anything unusual.

The roof seemed to be closing in on me and the attic space was getting hotter by the minute. The heat coming from the chimney at the far end of the house couldn’t be helping. Finally, my hand pushed against something hard. I peeled back the padding and finally found what I’d sought. Tears welled up in my eyes then, both from the relief at having found it and from the fear of what it might stand for. I picked it up with my bare hands, wiped it clear of any remaining insulation, then descended the stairs.

I sat on my hearth and held the piece of carved wood in my hands, considering what I was about to do. If this was truly nothing, I was destroying, for no reason, something that had belonged to my son. If it
wasn’t
nothing, if it was
something
, well, I was about to do something so outside of the law that there wasn’t even a gray area to it. I was destroying evidence. Of a murder.

I spent a minute holding it, making certain my convictions didn’t waver. They didn’t. Everything would be better if I just got rid of it. It wouldn’t matter anymore. I could put the whole question out of my mind and get on with life. I spun the bat around in my hands, picturing home runs and strikeouts, certain that was the truth behind this bat. A rough spot on the handle pricked at my finger and I pulled it up for a closer look. What I saw removed all doubts. Tally marks. Forty-two tally marks to be exact.

I remembered the story in the paper, Rudy Prince’s beating tally. Forty-two people. Forty-two. Did my son account for any of those marks? What had he, and forty-one others like him, endured at the end of this bat? The man who did this deserved what he got. Lacey was right about that. There was no comparison between the two lives: a man so proud of hurting others he kept count, and my son who was working in Monte’s orchard, preparing to go to school, beginning a productive life. Those notches felt like forty-two heads nodding at me. For a second, I found my peace.

I looked at the wooden bat, at the fire roaring in my fireplace, and then up toward the ceiling. “God, I am willing to take the consequences for this action, but surely you will not ask that of me. I gave you my first son; He died trying to serve you. Now, you’ve brought my second boy home, just like the prodigal son ran to his father so many years ago. That father held him close and celebrated his return. He didn’t spend time revisiting the son’s past sins, though they, too, must have been awful. Kurt has turned his life around. Surely you would not ask me to take that away from him, to send him to prison with the kind of person that he once was? Even you, in all your holiness, would not ask that. Would you?”

There was no answer. But to be perfectly honest, even if I’d heard a booming voice from heaven say, “Keep the bat; turn him over to the authorities,” I just don’t know if I could have done it. How could any mother? I had the chance to save my son who had been all but unsavable over the course of the last few years.

Maybe Rudy Prince was the person who sold Kurt his very first crack, the one who turned him into the kind of person that could kill him. I knew Kurt must have been high to have ever been able to do this, and wasn’t there some sort of justice in the fact that the man’s own drugs crazed my son enough to kill him? Wouldn’t that fall somewhere into the eye-for-an-eye category? He poisoned their minds with drugs. Why wouldn’t one of those poisoned minds keep him from doing it anymore?

I tossed the bat into the fire and watched the flames dance around its edges. Slowly at first, and then tongues of fire began to lick up from the bottom all around it. I tossed another piece of firewood on top just for good measure. I wanted this thing to burn completely and fast.

Kurt would have his chance. I’d just seen to it.

It didn’t surprise me that I couldn’t sleep. I sat in my king-sized bed with several pages of my manuscript scattered around me, unable to focus long enough to read any of them. I couldn’t write this book—what kind of hypocrite would that make me? Even though no one would ever know, I would know. I needed to e-mail Dennis Mahan and tell him to withdraw my proposal because I’d reconsidered. Tomorrow that’s what I’d do. Not tonight. I didn’t have the energy

I finally picked up the remote and aimed it at the small flat screen mounted on the far wall, then scanned through all eighty channels at least twice. Eventually I settled on a reality show about a group of parents trying to get their kids into some special dance program, not caring one bit about who they hurt in the course of helping their child.

Suddenly, I was helping Kurt get onto the show. But something was wrong; he didn’t sing. That’s when I saw the bat in his hand. I saw him swinging it at a man in the crowd. I ran forward to stop him, until I realized he was hitting Lonnie Vandever. I started screaming, “Hit him again, Kurt, hit him again.” I jerked awake, covered in sweat.

I turned off the television and walked down the hallway. I looked into Caroline’s room and saw her sleeping soundly in the bottom bunk, covers mussed into a big pile in the middle of her bed. One small foot hung over the right edge of the bed, and her head was pressed against the wall on the left— she always thrashed in her sleep. I closed the door and walked down the stairs, where I opened the door to Kurt’s room. Too many troubling thoughts assaulted me to stand there for too long, so I walked out and crossed to Nick’s door, hesitating for a long moment before I turned the knob and went inside.

I had put all thoughts of Chris Marshall’s pictures out of my mind, but now I saw the bag lying on my son’s pillow like an old friend. I picked it up and went back upstairs to my room. I climbed under the covers and gently pulled the top edges of the bag apart. There looked to be about a dozen photos inside.

I pulled them out, placed them in a neat stack on what had once been Rick’s side of the bed, and dared to look at the first one. It showed Nick, Chris, and a half dozen other kids their age, cheeks painted with the red letters USC, the crowd of the Coliseum in the background. They were pumping their fists in victory, so I assumed the Trojans had won this particular football game.