“It’s okay,” he told Lydia. “You did your best. Thank you for doing your best.”
When John got back to his cell, he started reading his latest issue of Popular Mechanics. He didn’t cry. What was the use? Show his emotions so some murdering child rapist in the next cell could get off on his pain? No. John had toughened up by then. Ben had shown him the ropes, how to make it in prison without getting knifed or beaten to death. He kept to himself, never looked anyone in the eye and seldom spoke to anyone but Ben.
What John found out in prison was that he was smart. He didn’t come to the realization out of vanity. It was more like an epitaph, a sort of eulogy to the person he could have been. He understood complex formulas, mathematical equations. He liked to study. Sometimes, he could almost feel his brain growing inside of his head, and when he solved a problem, figured out a particularly difficult diagram, he felt like he’d won a marathon.
And then the depression would set in. His father had been right. His teachers were right. His pastor was right. He should have applied himself. He should have-could have-put his brain to work and done something with his life. Now, what did he have? Who cared if you were the smartest convicted murderer in prison?
Some nights, John would lie awake in bed thinking about his father, how disgusted Richard had been that one time he’d visited his son. John was learning other things about life while he was incarcerated. As bad as Richard was, he had never hurt John the way some of his fellow inmates had been hurt. His father may have been thoughtless, but he wasn’t cruel. He had never tortured him. He had never beaten him so badly that a lung collapsed. He had never put a gun to his son’s head and told him to choose between letting some old bastard suck him off so daddy could have a bag of dope or getting a bullet in his brain.
Years passed, and John saw that he had adapted. He could take prison. His days were long and drawn out before him, but he had learned the patience, had built the capacity, to do hard time. The possibility for parole came up for him his tenth year in, and then again every two years after. He was a week away from his sixth parole board hearing and a year and a half away from completing his twenty-two-year sentence when Richard visited his son for the second and last time in prison.
John had been expecting Emily in the visitors’ room, and he’d been staring at the metal detector, waiting to see her come through, when Richard had blocked his view.
“Dad?”
Richard’s lip curled in distaste at the word.
John had barely recognized him. Richard’s hair was a shock of white, still thick and full, a sharp contrast to his well-tanned face. As always, his body was fit. Richard saw obesity as a sign of laziness and he was a health nut long before it became a national obsession.
Emily had divorced Richard a year after John’s conviction, but the two had stopped living together under the same roof the day John was arrested. Richard did not go to the trial, did not pay a dime for his son’s defense, refused to testify on his behalf.
“You’ve finally done it,” Richard said, not sitting at the table but looming over John, his disapproval and disgust raining down like a summer shower. “Your mother has end-stage breast cancer. You’ve finally killed her, too.”
A week later, John sat in front of the parole board, looking them each in the eye in turn, telling them how he had finally come to realize that he had no one to blame for his incarceration but himself. He had hated Mary Alice Finney. He was jealous of her popularity, of her friends, her status. He had been a drug addict, but that was not an excuse. The coke had only lowered his inhibitions, his ability to judge between right and wrong. He had followed her home the night of the party. He had broken into her bedroom and brutally raped her. When he started to come down from the coke, he realized what he had done and murdered her in cold blood, mutilating her body to make it seem as if a psychotic stranger had killed her.
His record was remarkably clean. John had been a model inmate with only two infractions on his record, both over a decade old. He had attended every class the prison offered: Victim Impact, Family Violence, Corrective Thinking, Depression Group, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Life Issues, Communication Skills, Anger Management, Focus Group and Worry Control. He had finished his GED, completed a bachelor’s degree and was in the middle of completing a postsecondary degree when an amendment to the 1994 Crime Bill banned federal education grants to prisoners. John volunteered at the prison hospital where he taught CPR and basic hygiene to the other inmates. He had attended on-the-job training sessions in horticulture and food preparation. A letter penned by John and attached to his file stated that his mother was sick, and he just wanted to go home and be there for her the way she had been there for him all these years.
The official notice granting him parole came on July 22, 2005.
Emily had died two days earlier.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Cousin Woody. The cool one, the popular one. He had a weight machine in the garage and he spent most of his days working out and smoking dope. His chest was ripped, six-pack abs separated by a trail of hair leading down to his privates. Girls climbed all over him like kudzu up a pine. He drove a silver Mustang hatchback, brand-new. He got the kids at the local school to sell some of his stash for him so he always had money burning a hole in his pocket. His widowed mother was on the fast-track at her law firm, always working late nights, always leaving her son alone. Mr. “Come Upstairs,” Mr. “You ”Wanna Toke?“ Mr. ”Just Snort It Up Your Nose.“ Cool Cousin Woody.
John had been following Woody for almost two months now, parking the Fairlane at the Inman Park MARTA station because gas was too expensive to use the car for anything but business. That’s how John thought about it: business. He was the CEO of Keep John Out of Prison. The fucking chief financial officer, the vice president, the secretary, all rolled up into one.
From the beginning, Woody had made it easy for John to keep tabs on him. He had always been a creature of habit, and his adult life had proven no different. John could set his watch by the guy. He went to work every day, came straight home after, kissed the wife if she was home, tucked in the kid, then planted himself in front of the television for the rest of the evening. He did this every evening the first week, and John was beginning to think he was wasting his time when Sunday rolled around. The kid wasn’t there-the wife hadn’t brought him back from church and John assumed he had been left with a family member. The wife left around six, dressed for work, leaving her husband all alone in the house.
“Woody waited about thirty minutes after she was gone, then he got into his car and drove away. Weeks passed with him doing this, then a month, then another. Every Sunday night, Woody was in that car like clockwork.
With time, John had gotten good at keeping his distance, making sure Woody couldn’t see the Fairlane trolling along behind his car. Not that Woody seemed to be looking anywhere except toward the row of women who lined the streets of downtown Atlanta. He’d stop, wave one over, then drive her into an alley or park on an empty street. John would see the woman’s head go down for a few minutes, then it’d bob back up for good and she’d get out and Woody would move on down the road, have himself back in front of the TV an hour later.
Then one night, he’d changed the pattern. He took a left out of his street instead of a right, heading east up Highway 78. John had been forced to hang back farther than usual because there weren’t many cars on the road. He’d jerked the steering wheel hard at the last moment to take an exit, following Woody up a winding road for about twenty minutes, passing a sign that read, Welcome to Snellville… Where Everybody’s Somebody!