“Maybe. Jeremy would disagree, though.” For some reason, I think of that night when Jer and I sat in that old car and Jer’s song, or God’s song, filled the air.
We ride in an easy quiet until we’re at my house. I thank him for the ride, then run up the sidewalk, wondering why I told him so much about me.
The front door swings open and Rita steps out in her white slip, a beer in one hand. She’s the only person I know who wears slips, although I’ve never seen her wear them under anything.
“Where in red-hot blazes have you been?”
I glance back, willing Chase to be gone. The car pulls away from the curb and drives off.
“Was that Chase Wells? Matt’s boy?” She downs the rest of her beer, shaking the can to be sure she hasn’t missed a drop.
“Don’t start, Rita.” I shove past her into the house.
She trails in after me. “Mmm… mmm. He’s a lot better-looking than his old man, that’s for sure. What were you doing with him?”
“Nothing. He just gave me a ride home.” I kick off my shoes. “We didn’t do anything.”
“Well, you can take it from your mama-you’d better do a little something with him if you want to keep him coming around.”
Only Rita would be upset because I hadn’t done anything.
I try to get to my room, but she’s not finished with me. She lights a cigarette and takes a deep drag. “I’ve been trying to reach you all day.”
I pull out my cell and see that it’s turned off. “Sorry, Rita. You have to turn off cell phones in the courthouse. I guess I forgot to turn it back on.”
“I guess I forgot to turn it back on,” she repeats, mocking me in the whine of a six-year-old. Her words slur into each other. “Don’t you lie to me!”
I have to be careful around Rita when she’s like this. I need to get away from her. “All right.” I try to walk around her to get to my room, but she blocks me with her cigarette hand.
“Did I say you could leave?” she cries.
I stop, turn to face her, then wait. “What, Rita?”
“The sheriff called here looking for you,” she says.
“Sheriff Wells? Why?”
“Looking for his boy.”
I think about Chase heading home. Maybe I should call him, warn him.
“Four times! That’s how much… how many… times he called.” Rita sniffs, then swipes her nose with the back of her cigarette hand. “He said you and his boy were together.”
“Is that a crime now?”
“Don’t get smart with me!” She takes a step forward. Automatically, I take a step back.
She comes at me, but stumbles. Ashes break from her cigarette. “I’m still your mother, you know!”
“I know,” I mutter.
She squints as if trying to see through me. “What happened in court today?”
“Why?”
“Because Raymond called and said things went lousy.”
A rush of guilt sweeps over me. My stomach feels like I swallowed lead. “What else did he say?”
“He said I’m going to have to testify because you screwed up. What did you say anyway?”
She’s gotten to me. Even though she’s drunk enough to pass out, Rita’s still got the upper hand. And once again, I feel like everything in the world is my fault. “I’m sorry. I tried, Rita. I really tried.”
“Tried? All you had to do was tell them Jeremy’s insane. And you couldn’t even pull that one off?”
“But he’s not insane!” I take another step back so I can lean on the couch, brace myself against it.
“Not this again!” She slams against the end table. Something falls off, but neither of us makes a move to pick it up. “Get your head out of the clouds, girl! How do you explain that bloody bat in his closet? He was there! That McCray woman saw him running from the barn, swinging that-”
“Maybe he was scared! Did you think of that?”
“He was scared all right. Scared he’d go to jail and-”
“No! Rita, listen to me. Anybody could have used Jeremy’s bat. He always left it right inside the barn door. Everybody knew that. Maybe somebody’s trying to frame him.”
Rita lets out an ugly “Ha!” Then she takes a long puff on her cigarette stub and grinds it out on her beer can. “Framed? Right… just like in the movies. So, Sherlock Hopeless, whodunit? Who’s framing your poor, innocent brother?”
“I don’t know. Anybody on his baseball team could have done it. Any one of them could have taken Jeremy’s bat. Or somebody from the stable? One of the boarders, maybe.”
Rita’s shaking her head, but I don’t care. I’ve gone over this a million times. Nobody will listen to me. So even a falling-down-drunk Rita is better than nothing. “What about Coach’s wife? Mrs. Johnson might have-”
“Are we talking about bedfast, cancer-stricken Caroline Johnson?” Rita asks.
“Maybe she’s not as sick as she pretends. Did anybody think of that? She hated her husband.” Out of all the people I know who might have murdered Coach Johnson, his wife is the most likely. I saw her go off on Coach one time before a game. She was scarier than Rita. “Don’t they claim it’s almost always the spouse who does the murder?”
These aren’t new thoughts for me. For the first month after Jeremy was arrested, I went over and over all of this with Raymond because Rita refused to talk to me about it. Well, now she’s too drunk to run away. She can just hear me out. “Jeremy didn’t murder anybody. If you knew him at all, you’d know that. You and Raymond aren’t even trying to prove somebody else could have done it!”
Rita points at me, her lips curled into a snarl. “You listen to me!” Her finger stabs the air with each word. “Thanks to you, Raymond says he has to call me to testify now. I’m going to have to clean up the mess you made and get that jury back to believing Jeremy’s insanity plea.”
“But he’s not-!”
“Don’t say it!” Rita screams. “We are not proving that boy innocent, because he isn’t! You think I don’t know my own son? He probably didn’t know what he was doing, but he did it. And we’re proving he’s insane so they don’t execute him for what he did. You get that through your empty head, hear? So don’t be talking around town about how normal your brother is, because he isn’t and he never has been!”
“You’re wrong, Rita. My brother is innocent, and I’m going to prove it.”
“You?” Rita laughs. “You and T.J. and that sheriff’s boy, I suppose? That’s what the sheriff tried to tell me. And I told him he didn’t have to worry. You’d give up on your own sooner or later-sooner, most likely. I don’t know why I’m wasting my breath.”
I can’t take any more of this. Rita knows exactly how to shut me down. I run past her to my room and slam the door. My whole life this is how it’s been. I hate the arguing. It’s so much easier just to let Rita have her way.
Only not this time. For Jeremy’s sake, not this time.
12
I stay in my room until I hear Rita leave the house. The lingering toxic aroma of cheap perfume tells me she has a date and won’t be back until morning.
Part of me wants to pray, to talk to God the way Jeremy does. Wouldn’t God know who killed Coach, if he’s keeping an eye on everybody? So I ask-not out loud but inside my head, the way Jer does it: God, who did it? Who really murdered Coach Johnson?
Nothing.
Okay. I’m not so sure how this works anymore.
For a minute, my mind is a blank. Then, slowly, I remember a cozy night years ago. Jeremy and I are sitting on his bed, and I’m reading from a kids’ book of fairy tales. Only I’m too little to read the words, so I’m just telling the stories and Jeremy’s filling in the parts I forget. He could talk then. We look so normal, both of us in snowflake pj’s. This could be the best memory I have of childhood. Of Jeremy.
This is the Jer I want back home. I can’t let them take him away. Not to prison. Not to a mental hospital. Home. Jeremy belongs at home, with me. I’m all he has. I have to find out who really killed Coach.
Unsure where to start, I go to my closet to search for something to write on. A shoe box tumbles from the top shelf, and sea glass rains down on my head. I sit on the floor and put back each piece-a pale green chip from an old railroad insulator, a red piece from a railroad lantern, a chunk of orange carnival glass T.J. said came from one of Lake Erie’s famed shipwrecks. Each piece is smooth from over a hundred years of being knocked about in the waves.