Absolute Brightness (30 page)

My mother asked which one of us was supposed to do the talking, and Judge Gamble looked at us over the rims of her half-moons. “It doesn't make any difference. But whoever speaks, they speak for the whole family. I don't want a chorus line of differing opinions. One voice. And try to keep it brief. Five minutes, tops.”

We all stumbled out of there and headed home. No one spoke. I sat in the backseat, staring out the window. When we arrived home, we pushed our way past a few waiting reporters. Only Uncle Mike wanted to stop and make a statement. Just as he opened his big, fat mouth, Mom pulled him along, nearly ripping the sleeve off his coat in the process. Fortunately we were able to drag him inside before he could speak his piece about how “the verdict will surely represent a small step for mankind, but a giant leap for justice,” which was a line that he'd tried out on us during the drive home. Naturally, Uncle Mike wanted to be the one to stand up and speak in court. He felt that he had the right, or so he kept reminding us. “As Leonard's legal guardian…” Blah, blah, blah.

The rest of us were confused about what to feel or how to proceed. Maybe we weren't used to the idea, but no one wanted to stand up in a court of law and make a big speech that would be quoted in all the newspapers and in every salon all over town. Not my mother, not Deirdre, and not me. No one was that brave—or that stupid. The courtroom had been filled with many familiar faces from Neptune: my mother's customers, teachers from Neptune Senior, and former classmates of Travis's. You do one thing wrong in a town like ours and that's that. You become known for it. The story sticks. You never live it down.

Over lunch my mother announced that she was glad the trial was over and she had no intention of dragging the thing out any further, because she was fed up with being depicted by failed artists who had part-time jobs working as quick-sketchers for the TV news channels.

“Who are these people? All the time, they make me look like a hag. And what kind of a job is that for a normal person? Sitting around all day making unflattering portraits of people in bad situations? I won't be party to it.”

Personally, I think she was just scared about speaking in public, but either way she refused to stand up and make a statement.

Deirdre had never been big on the whole trial thing. She had agreed to come that final week because she was on a break from school, but from the very beginning, she made it clear to us that the court case and all its by-products were not going to be a priority in her life. Because she was now a student at Roberson Beauty Academy, she felt that a courtroom atmosphere wasn't consistent with her training process. Her instructor, Todd, told the class that as aspiring beauty technicians they had only one job: to learn how to create and sustain an environment of pure glamour. That was the trick, he informed them. Apparently, this is how JLo does it, as well as Nicole Kidman and other glamour-pusses who'd probably never paid a visit to Asbury Park, New Jersey. In any case, by the time Deirdre did show up in court, she'd missed so many days that she wasn't able to identify who was who in relation to the case. As a designated spokesperson, she would have been useless; and more to the point, she was unwilling.

My father and Chrissie hadn't been attending the trial at all. They announced early on in the proceedings that Trenton was just too far to travel every day and they had responsibilities at work. But they were not people we would have wanted to speak for our family since they were people who did not, at that time, speak
to
our family.

Uncle Mike had a fit when he found out that we were considering the possibility of not allowing him to speak on Leonard's behalf. He reminded us (again) that he and no one else would be speaking for Leonard.

I didn't care who did the talking, but I had plenty to say about the speech we were to make in that courtroom. But we all got into a screaming match about what Judge Gamble had told us to do, how we all had to speak with one voice. This, of course, meant that we had to come to some kind of agreement about what we actually thought.

Uncle Mike considered Travis to be beyond rehabilitation. He pointed out that the “bastard,” as he referred to him, never said he was sorry, never showed any sympathy for us, and certainly never demonstrated any mercy toward Leonard out on the lake. I argued with him; I said that we could not presume to know what Travis was thinking or feeling.

“It's all conjecture,” I said, using a term I'd picked up in the courtroom.

Uncle Mike started yelling. He put his foot down—sometimes literally—which caused the appliances to shake and made cups and saucers rattle in the cupboard. He threw up his hands and said he'd been conjectured up the wazoo since this whole business began. He wanted it known that he was sick to death of talking about Leonard's murder as though there might be shades of gray.

“It's black and white,” he kept repeating. “It's open and shut! The bastard deserves the death penalty. End of discussion.”

Of course, Uncle Mike was not the only one who had been talking about capital punishment as the only acceptable outcome to this case. From the beginning all sorts of people had been claiming that if found guilty, Travis should have to pay the ultimate price: It was the only outcome that would bring closure to this whole situation.

“What's closure?” I asked.

“An eye for an eye, and all that,” Uncle Mike told me. “Says so in the Bible.”

I couldn't agree with him.

“An eye for an eye is just a rationalization for killing people.”

Uncle Mike cut me off.

“You don't know what the hell you're talking about, and if you think Leonard's killer should go scot-free, then you're too young to understand the value of human life.”

I began screaming so loud at him, I could hear the oven racks ringing.

“
Every life is worth something
,” I told him, sounding like a TV evangelist. “And what would killing Travis Lembeck do for Leonard? It's not like it would bring Leonard back from the dead. It's not like it would make us feel all happy inside afterward and allow us to go on like nothing ever happened. No. Leonard was killed. We have to find a way to live with it. We have to go on. All of us.”

“But not Travis,” Uncle Mike said, shaking his head and smiling out of just the bottom half of his mouth.

“Yes,” I said. “Even Travis.”

As I left the kitchen, I could hear Uncle Mike muttering to anyone who would listen, “What happened here? I thought we were talking this through.”

 

twenty

AFTER A LONG
day in the courtroom and then the business with Uncle Mike, I had to go somewhere on my own to clear my head. But where? I briefly considered heading toward the beach so I could sit there, like Leonard used to say he did, watching the waves roll in and feeling his
weltschmerz
; but it was already dark, and listening to the waves just wasn't the same. I wandered up and down the side streets, thinking hard about the past two years. Soon I found myself wishing that we had never let Leonard live in our house in the first place. Then I wished that Electra and I were still best friends. Then I wished that Dad had never run off with Chrissie Bettinger, and my parents weren't divorced. I wished Deirdre had never turned sad and sullen because of what happened between her and Dad. I wished … And just when I was in danger of wishing my whole life away, I found myself standing in front of St. Stephen's, the Catholic church in town where my family goes to Mass, the place where Mom and Dad got married. I thought about stepping inside and saying a prayer or whatever, but the church was locked up tight.

Next door, however, a two-story brick building was lit up, and African music was coming from it. This was the place where Father Jimbo had lived since moving to Neptune. Though the house had originally been designed for a thriving parish that could comfortably house up to three full-time priests, two visiting novices, and a live-in housekeeper, it had in recent times become home to only Father Jimbo. Constructed of tan-colored bricks and plain old concrete, it stood back from the street under a big old sycamore tree. The front steps were wide and gracious; and they led up onto a tiny enclosed porch. The heavy oak door had a gleam to it. Two very handsome stained-glass windows, one on either side of the door, silently informed trespassers and solicitors that this was no ordinary home; it was a rectory.

“Hello. Can I help you?”

I turned and saw Father Jimbo. He was standing at the foot of the stairs with his coat on and a golf club in his hand.

“Oh. Phoebe,” he said when he saw me looking down at him. “It's Phoebe, isn't it?”

I nodded. And I guess he noticed me staring at his golf club, because he held it up, looked at it with a puzzled expression and then laughed out loud.

“I know. Strange thing, the golf. The nuns made a little putting green over there behind the convent. They installed lights and everything.” He pointed with the club to a place I couldn't see, around the side of the house. “They made it for Father Cooper years ago. Did you know Father Cooper?”

I didn't.

“Yes, well now I have inherited his golf as well as his parishioners. But I bet you have not come to talk about golf.”

Once we were inside the house, he switched off the African music and disappeared down a long corridor; he went to make me a cup of hot chocolate, and almost immediately I heard him fussing with the cups and the kettle, every sound bouncing off the highly polished floors and bare walls with a kind of brilliance. I had never been to Africa, but I couldn't help wondering how the sounds of Father Jimbo's childhood compared to the sterile clink of a single cup on a porcelain countertop or the lonely whistle of a ready kettle.

The rooms were large and spacious and seemed as if they'd been designed for the sort of elegance that the church could no longer afford. Cut-rate carpets in off shades of beige and tan clashed with the Old World fabrics of the seat cushions. Chairs that looked like they would've been more at home in a medieval play about knights and dragons hadn't been properly introduced to the Danish modern end tables. It was a mishmash of styles and patterns with only one unifying theme—thrift.

Father Jimbo had parked me in one of those ornately carved chairs in the front parlor. I sat there looking around. This was a room that seemed as if it got more use as an office than anything else. I imagined pre-Cana couples sitting down with Father Jimbo to discuss their upcoming vows, grieving widows with unpaid bills, and recent converts with serious doubts. He probably leaned in to them, listened with his whole self, and then gave them good advice, advice based on the very thing they wanted to do in the first place. People, as he sometimes told us in his Sunday sermons, know what's what, and what they know best is themselves. He wasn't one of those priests who push the church's agenda, rally round the pope, or stalk the altar boys; he was just one of the good guys dressed in black, doing his best to love the world at large one soul at a time.

He sat down beside me, and as I blew a few cooling breaths over my steaming mug of cocoa, he materialized a rattan coaster out of thin air. He placed it at the edge of his large heavy desk and made a gesture so that I would know the coaster was intended for me. Everything on the desk seemed to have been placed with as much care as the coaster—the blotter, the tiny calendar with each day of the month Xed off, the plastic clock with glow-in-the-dark hands, and the 1980s-type phone, the kind with a receiver attached to the base by a long curlicue wire. There was a blue ballpoint pen that had
NEPTUNE SAVINGS & LOAN, SERVING THE COMMUNITY SINCE
1964 written in silver script along its side. Next to it lay a sharpened number-two pencil. A philodendron plant in a green ceramic pot spilled its shiny heart-shaped leaves over the top of the desk; and a rock the size of a child's fist with a happy face painted in Day-Glo pink sat beside it.

“Yes,” he said after I'd finished explaining the situation to him. “So we have a big problem on our hands, you and I.”

He went on to remind me that there is no sense arguing anything in the Bible, because people are always quoting certain passages to back up their arguments. It doesn't matter what you believe, he told me, there's always a snippet of scripture saying that you're right and the other guy's wrong. But he also pointed out that if you actually read the New Testament, Jesus kind of puts the whole eye-for-an-eye thing in perspective.

“If I am not mistaken, Jesus urges everyone to give up this business of knocking one another about and poking one another in the eyes. He told them they had to try, at least
try
, to be forgiving, even unto their enemies.”

“Yeah. That's fine,” I said, staring at the tiny plastic cross on his desk. “But the point is I'm afraid Uncle Mike's planning to do something totally drastic. He's definitely going to get up there in court and make a big speech about why Travis has to die.”

I had already made my own position pretty clear. Even if Travis was in fact guilty, he didn't deserve to be killed. But then to press my point, I added, “As Christians, we have a moral responsibility to do our best so that the jury doesn't just go for blood.” I was sure that Father Jimbo would agree with me, especially since I laid the Christian thing on pretty thick. I was hoping he would volunteer to talk to Uncle Mike. But he only nodded and then gestured with his eyebrows for me to continue.

Uncle Mike, I told him, was using his voice to shout louder than anyone else in an effort to have his viewpoint be the one that mattered, and as a result we were getting nowhere fast. But, I pointed out, appealing to the jury and asking for mercy was definitely the way to go.

There was a slight pause as Father Jimbo leaned back in his chair and removed his gaze from me. He closed his eyes. I could almost hear the wheels and pulleys in his brain; they were turning and clicking as he considered the options. He had the whole picture now.