The Way Home Read online

  Jason walked down the street. When he turned the corner, Chris drove off, but not in the direction of his own house. He had too much energy, and he needed to work it off. He headed south, where his girl, Taylor, stayed with her mother, on Woodley Avenue, a street of modest row houses in Woodley Park, between Connecticut Avenue and the zoo. Taylor’s mother would be sleeping now, but Taylor would be up and ready. She’d let him in.

  TAYLOR DUGAN had put Chris’s two remaining beers in the freezer to rechill them quickly, then brought them back down to the basement, where Chris was sprawled out shoeless on the couch. Taylor’s mother, a divorcée who worked as a lawyer for a trade association downtown, was in her bed and snoring, two floors above. Though it was tempting, Chris and Taylor never raided the mother’s liquor cabinet while Chris was visiting late at night. Taylor’s mother, like many alcoholics, counted her drinks and memorized the levels of the bottles, no matter how trashed she got, and Taylor did not care to get busted by her mom.

  Taylor was a slim young woman with short dyed-black hair, a nose ring, freckles, and blue eyes. She had changed into boxer shorts and a V-neck white T-shirt after going upstairs to get the beer.

  Taylor handed Chris his beer and put hers next to a 35 mm camera that was on an old table set before the couch. She went to a bookshelf, removed a paperback, and found a stash pipe with a hole in each end, one to light, one to draw from. In the middle, a small amount of marijuana was fitted in a screened chamber.

  “You want some?” she said.

  “Sure,” said Chris.

  He got up on a chair and cranked open a casement window, and then she joined him. The chair wobbled beneath them and they giggled as they each took a couple of deep hits and blew the exhale out into the night.

  “Whew,” she said, as she stepped down onto the carpet.

  “You need some more?” said Chris.

  “No, I’m good.”

  “Because I copped tonight. I got a pound out in my truck.”

  “That’s not all you did tonight.”

  “Oh, man. You should have seen me.”

  “Were you scared?” said Taylor, flopping down onto the couch. Chris had already told the general story, but she was buzzed now and wanted to hear the details.

  “Nah, not really,” said Chris, walking to the table to get his beer, careful not to step on the sketchbooks scattered about the carpet. “I mean, I didn’t think on it all that much. It’s like that shrink said to me, the one my parents made me go to? ‘It’s all about choices, Chris.’ Well, I made one.”

  Taylor picked the camera up off the table, framed Chris through the lens, and snapped a photograph. “Why’d you take off?”

  “I dunno. That boy practically begged me to hit him. I mean, what, I was supposed to take the weight for that? I hate the police. I don’t like explaining myself to them. I don’t even like to speak to them if I don’t have to.” Chris took off his T-shirt and dropped it on the floor. “Hot in here.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Taylor.

  Chris tipped his head back, took a long swig of beer, and let her have a look at his flat stomach. Taylor took several more photographs of him like that and placed the camera back on the table.

  “How far did they chase you?”

  “A good long while,” said Chris. “It was like Cops, only they didn’t get me. Shit was sick, Taylor. I blew a red light on Connecticut Avenue at McKinley, and cars were spinning out in the intersection.”

  “Bad Chris,” said Taylor.

  “That’s me.”

  Taylor was at that public arts school, Duke Ellington, and liked to paint and stuff. Chris had met her at a Blessed Sacrament dance when they were both in middle school. She had come over to him. Told him later that she’d noticed him straight off, that he looked different from the other boys, that he wasn’t trying too hard and that she liked his aloof manner, whatever that meant. They had been together, friends and lovers, for a couple of years. He wasn’t worried about the other boys at her school, who she said were “fey.” He guessed that meant they were faggies or something, ’cause it rhymed with gay.

  “I’m just a bad boy,” said Chris, smiling slowly.

  “Did you bring any protection?”

  “Didn’t know I’d be seein you, girl.”

  “We’ll improvise,” said Taylor.

  Chris said he was good with that, and Taylor laughed and opened her arms.

  Chris put his beer down and went to the couch. His jeans were tight before their mouths met. She stroked his belly, and her breath was hot and smoky as they kissed. She moaned as they made out, and Chris thought, God, this girl can do it. Taylor pushed him away, crossed her arms, and drew her T-shirt over her head. She came back to him naked above the waist, and Chris ran his strong hands over her slim hips and up her ribcage, and he found her small breasts, circling her hardening nipples with his thumbs, and she took one of his hands and put it inside her boxer shorts. He did what she liked until Taylor couldn’t stand it any longer and she climaxed under his touch. She finished him deftly the same way.

  It would be a long time before he would get with a female again. Later, when he was masturbating at night in his cell, bitter because she had stopped taking his calls, but still, wanting Taylor again so badly he thought he would shout out her name, he would regret settling for a hand job in her basement the last time he saw her. He should have put it in her. So what if he didn’t have a condom? Okay, she could have got pregnant. What difference would that have made to him then?

  “Are they going to get you, Chris?” Taylor was in his arms on the couch, on top of him, her breasts crushed against his chest.

  “Nah, I’m straight. I can get the Volvo’s paint off my bumper, and there’s plenty of Troopers out there the same color as mine. Long as they didn’t read my plates, I’ll be fine.”

  “Maybe you got lucky.”

  “I could have.”

  “Why’d you hit that boy?”

  “I was really tryin not to. Used to be I’d get angry and just fight, but this time was different. I tried to hold back, Taylor. If he hadn’t pushed me so hard, run his mouth like he did, all this shit tonight, it wouldn’t have happened.”

  “It’s over now.”

  “No doubt.”

  “I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  “They can’t hurt steel,” said Chris with a weak smile.

  Taylor hugged him tightly. “I applied to a college I want, Chris. I’m trying to get into the Rhode Island School of Design.”

  “That’s the art school, right?”

  “My counselor says it’s one of the best.”

  “I hope you get in.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Don’t know. First thing, I need to get out my house. I can’t take livin with my father. When I turn eighteen I figure I’ll get a job. Me and Country will find an apartment somewhere. Maybe sell weed on the side, but do it real quiet.”

  “That’s your plan?”

  “For now,” said Chris. “Yeah.”

  Taylor said nothing else and soon fell asleep in his arms. Chris untangled himself without waking her and covered her with a blanket. He dressed and left the house quietly, went to his Trooper, and drove toward his house through backstreets. There were few cars out. It was very late.

  He drove west on Livingston, the street where he lived, and a car turned off 41st and fell in behind him. The car was a big square sedan, and it was then that he knew. Several squad cars were parked on his block, and their light bars were activated as he neared his house. The air had gone out of him, and he simply put the Isuzu in park in the middle of the street and let them come to him. They leaned him over the hood of his Trooper and cuffed him, and one of the uniformed men said, almost in admiration, “That was some real fancy driving, son.” Chris said, “I guess someone got my plate numbers,” and the uniform said, “Oh, yeah,” and Chris remembered that he had a pound of marijuana in the back of his vehicle and he idly wondered what that
would do to compound the charges. “You don’t even know the trouble you’re in,” said the uniform. “The woman who hit our cruiser at Morrison, where you blew that stop sign? Mother of three. She’s in Sibley’s emergency room with severe injuries. They collared her and taped her to a gurney. And that kid in the parking lot is gonna be breathing through his mouth for a while. You broke his nose.”

  Chris raised his head and squinted through the red and blue shafts of light coloring his yard. His father was standing outside their clapboard colonial, framed beneath the portico he’d built himself, his hands buried in his pockets, his eyes black and broken.

  “You made your folks real proud tonight,” said the police officer.

  Chris didn’t care.

  FOUR

  THOMAS FLYNN obtained a bond and made Chris’s bail, twenty-seven hours after he’d been booked. At the arraignment, in a courtroom down in the Indiana Avenue corridor of Judiciary Square, Chris was released to the custody of his parents until the date of his trial. He was represented by Bob Moskowitz, a boyhood friend of Thomas Flynn’s who was a private-practice attorney. The Washington Post court beat reporter, interested and aggressive because Chris was a white kid and his “night of crime” had made the TV news, tried to ask Chris questions, but Chris made no comment by order of Moskowitz and was hustled out of the building by his father, who held him roughly by the elbow.

  Moskowitz followed them to their house, where he met with Thomas, Amanda, and Chris to discuss the status of the case and their general plan. They sat in the living room, where Thomas had built shelves to hold his collection of history and other nonfiction books. Amanda served coffee that neither Moskowitz nor Thomas Flynn touched.

  “I’ve been contacted by Jason Berg’s father.” Moskowitz wore a caterpillar mustache and was forty pounds too heavy for his height. “After questioning Jason, the police and prosecutors are satisfied that Jason was not significantly involved in the night’s events to the degree that he should be charged.”

  “You mean,” said Flynn, “his father’s wired down at the courthouse, and he got his son off.”

  “There’s no doubt that Mr. Berg has some suction. But more likely the prosecutors feel they can’t make any charges on Jason stick. Jason never got out of the SUV, so there was no contact or conversation between him and the boys in that parking lot. And of course he wasn’t the driver. They’re going to focus on Chris.”

  “What about the pound of marijuana?” said Flynn. “Jason had nothing to do with that, either?”

  “He says it wasn’t his.”

  “It was mine,” said Chris.

  “Shut up,” said Flynn.

  “Tommy,” said Amanda.

  “So, what, they’re gonna let that idiot off in exchange for his testimony against Chris?”

  “Country’s my boy,” said Chris. “He wouldn’t do that.”

  “I told you to shut the fuck up,” said Flynn.

  “Tommy.”

  “I don’t think they’re going to compel Jason to testify,” said Moskowitz with deliberate calm. “His father told me that he had no such indication from his contacts down there. They feel as if they have enough evidence and witnesses to make their case without Jason’s testimony.”

  “What’s going to happen to my son?” said Amanda.

  “I’m going to give him the best representation possible,” said Moskowitz. “Chris?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll speak in more detail, obviously. But what I want to ask you now concerns your alleged assault on Alexander Fleming, the boy in the parking lot. It’s important, because this is the act that triggered everything that followed. If you had reason to hit him, if you felt threatened or were defending yourself—”

  “He didn’t threaten me or nothin like that,” said Chris. “I can’t even say that I was defending myself.”

  “Why did you hit him, then?” said Moskowitz.

  “I was angry,” said Chris. “It wasn’t what he said so much as how he said it. Actin like he was smarter than me.”

  “And what did he say to you?”

  Chris shook his head. “I don’t remember.”

  “God,” said his father.

  “Unfortunately,” said Moskowitz, making a show of glancing at his watch, “I’ve got to get to an appointment. Will you walk me out, Tom?”

  “Let’s go.”

  “Amanda,” said Moskowitz, taking her hand and squeezing it as he rose off the couch. “Chris. You’re to stay here in the house unless otherwise directed. You understand that, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Don’t worry. We’ll get through this.”

  Bob Moskowitz and Thomas Flynn walked to a Mercedes sedan parked on Livingston. Moskowitz stowed his briefcase in the trunk, shut the lid, and leaned against his car.

  “Talk to me, Bobby,” said Flynn.

  “Honestly?” said Moskowitz. “This is going to be a challenge, to say the least. Individually, a few of the charges are minor, but compounded they are significant. That, together with the fact that Chris has a history, will give the impression that the incident follows a pattern of violent, reckless behavior. There’s the robbery of the locker room, the fights at the school. He has that assault-and-strong-arm arrest and the possession charge on his record as well.”

  “That was a while back.”

  “It’s there. You have to remember, people were seriously injured because of his alleged aggression and negligence on the night in question. That woman’s back injuries alone appear to be the kind that will plague her for the rest of her life. The boy whose nose Chris broke? His father was a major donor to our own D.C. Council member. Unfortunately, the events made the news and now Chris will be tried, in effect, in the public eye.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “We’ll aim to get some of the charges reduced or thrown out. But I’m almost certain that something’s going to stick. What I’m going to recommend to you… Well, hear me out. You’re going to need to keep an open mind.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “The US attorney is making a hard push on this one because of all the publicity. Chris is not going to walk. The best thing we can do for him is plead guilty on some of the charges. I mean, we can roll the dice and go to trial, but a conviction in court can result in a stay in an adult prison. Juvenile jail is not the worst that can happen to him.”

  “My boy’s going to jail?”

  “Possibly. If so, I’d say that it would be for a relatively short period of time.”

  “You’re talking about that place for juvenile offenders the District’s got.”

  “Pine Ridge,” said Moskowitz. “I’m telling you it’s possible. Of course, I’m going to try to prevent it.”

  “That’s all black kids out there, isn’t it?”

  “I’m guessing it’s about ninety-eight percent, yes. The rest are Hispanics.”

  “They wouldn’t send a white kid from this neighborhood to that place, would they?”

  “It’s rare. But it has happened. There’s only one facility that houses D.C. juveniles who habitually commit these kinds of crimes. He’s not exempt from serving time there because he’s comfortable and white.”

  “I can’t…” said Thomas Flynn, his voice trailing off.

  “There’s something else you need to prepare for,” said Moskowitz. “We’ve only discussed the criminal aspect of this. There will probably be some litigation in civil court as well.”

  “Meaning?”

  “You’re going to be sued, Tommy. Your insurance company, sure, but probably you as well. All those people who got hurt or whose cars were wrecked because of Chris’s actions? They’re going to claim negligence on your part for letting a boy with Chris’s history get behind the wheel of an SUV that you bought for him. It’s convoluted, but there it is.”

  “Can they do that?”

  “My brethren are probably lining up to feed at the trough as we speak. They’ll certainly try.”r />
  Flynn opened his mouth to speak but said nothing. Instead he shook his head.

  “I know this is rough,” said Moskowitz, putting a hand on his friend’s arm. “It all seems insurmountable right now. But look, I see this kind of trouble in families all the time. They get through it eventually. You will, too.”

  “Let me ask you something, Bob. Your oldest son, how’s he doin?”

  “He’s fine,” said Moskowitz.

  “I’m asking you, where is he in life right now?”

  Moskowitz looked away. “He graduated high school a couple of months ago. He’s headed to Haverford in the fall.”

  “Don’t tell me to look on the bright side.”

  “Tommy—”

  “Everything’s fucked,” said Flynn.

  AMANDA FLYNN made Chris a sandwich while her husband and Bob Moskowitz stood talking outside the house. She did it quickly, so as not to annoy Tommy. Tommy would say that Chris, who could take a vehicle his father had bought him and use it to lead police on a high-speed chase, who could punch out a kid in a parking lot for no reason, who could cause a woman to go to the hospital taped to a stretcher, who could carry around a pound of marijuana in his car, who could manage to get kicked out of public high school in the District, who could quit church and sports and everything else, could certainly manage to make a sandwich for himself.

  Amanda did not see it that way. She looked at Chris, knowing all that he had done, and saw a young man who had been locked up for a day and night, who was confused and ashamed, who had to be hungry, who needed to be fed. Thomas looked at Chris and saw failure and an insurmountable problem. She saw her little boy. Amanda thinking, With everything he’s done, he’s still my son.

  “Here, honey,” she said, putting a turkey and Swiss on white down in front of him, mayonnaise, lettuce, no tomatoes, his sandwich, how he liked it. A glass of apple juice, Chris’s preferred drink, set beside the plate.

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  As Chris ate, Amanda looked through the living-room window and watched Bob Moskowitz drive away. Thomas Flynn stood on the lawn momentarily, checking the beeper hung on his belt line, replacing it, rubbing at his face. Then wheeling around and walking heavily back toward the house, sullen, his eyes to the ground. Amanda saying a wordless prayer that he would not enter their home and immediately explode.