The Way Home Read online

  Flynn came through the door. He looked at Chris, eating a sandwich off a TV tray, and shook his head in disgust. He looked at Amanda and sharply pointed his chin toward the center hall stairway. She followed him up the stairs.

  It came to Amanda, when she was trying to “understand” Tom in moments of tension and conflict such as these, that it must be odd for her husband to have to act like an adult and deal with adult problems in the home in which he had grown up. Walking behind him up the stairs, she imagined him as a little boy, taking the steps two at a time, going up to his room to play or to wrestle with his big brother, Sean, now a Boeing executive in Chicago with whom he had little communication. She wondered if Tom, alone at night with his private demons, talked to his parents, whose spirits surely were in this house, and in his desperation sought their help.

  It wasn’t difficult to imagine him as a child. She had known him since their days at Blessed Sacrament, the Catholic school at Chevy Chase Circle that went from K through eighth. They were boyfriend and girlfriend through high school, and had married against her parents’ wishes when Thomas was twenty and she was nineteen. Her father was dismayed that she was making this decision at so young an age and openly discouraged her from marrying a young man who had no intention of going to college.

  “He wants to work, Dad,” said Amanda. “He’s ready to make money now.”

  “And what about you, Amanda? You’re going to throw away a chance to go to college, to have that experience?”

  “I’m with Tommy,” she said.

  Amanda had known he was the one as soon as she’d seen him, a black-haired, green-eyed Irish boy, walking cocky through the halls of BS. He was a tough kid, quick to fight, a basketball player who haunted the courts at Friendship, Lafayette, the Chevy Chase Library, and Candy Cane City, and later was point guard and the sole white player on his Interhigh team. He was not a good student, and, with the exception of American history, a subject that fascinated him, he had no interest in books. He liked to have fun, fucked off in class, drank Budweiser from cans, and smoked any kind of weed that was offered to him. His father, an Irish immigrant complete with brogue, worked for the Government Printing Office. His mother was of Irish stock, American born, and proud to be called a housewife. They bought the clapboard house on Livingston on the cheap, when nonprofessionals still lived in Friendship Heights and Chevy Chase, D.C., and upper Northwest neighborhoods were heavy with Irish Catholics. Thomas Flynn delivered the Washington Post all through high school, even during basketball season. On his route lived Red Auerbach, whose Celtic-green Mercury Cougar was usually parked in the driveway of his home, two blocks off Nebraska Avenue. Tommy Flynn always put Mr. Auerbach’s newspaper at the top of his stoop, just outside the door.

  Amanda had grown up on 31st Place in Barnaby Woods, on the east side of Connecticut Avenue, in a brick colonial that looked like several others on her street. Her father worked for an unidentified government agency, traveled frequently, and never talked about his job. Friends and neighbors assumed correctly that he was CIA.

  Flynn had his buddies but spent most of his time with Amanda, a full-figured girl with strawberry blonde hair and fair skin, physically mature and sexually precocious at the age of fifteen. The two of them enjoyed their marijuana, alcohol, mushrooms, and downs, and, when they were in the company of kids with money, finger-thick lines of cocaine. They were faithful to each other and made it everywhere, in the front and backseats of Flynn’s 442 Cutlass, on a blanket in the high-grass field at Glover and Military, and on the green of Rock Creek Golf Course on summer nights. Tommy couldn’t get enough of her lush figure, and Amanda liked the wheel.

  After high school, they married and rented a row home in pregentrified Shaw, still dirt cheap at the time. Flynn took retail jobs, then entered the MPD Academy and briefly worked as a police officer. Kate was born and died. Flynn’s father dropped dead of a heart attack, and soon after that his mother, Tara, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and was gone in six weeks. His parents had willed the house on Livingston to Thomas, leaving their pitifully meager savings to their elder son, Sean, causing a rift between the brothers that would never heal. Flynn quit the MPD and moved with his wife into the Friendship Heights house in which he’d been raised. Amanda found Jesus, had a failed pregnancy, then carried Chris successfully to term. All of this occurred in the space of two and one half years.

  Thomas Flynn walked into their bedroom, waited for Amanda to join him, and closed the door behind her. He used his right hand to pop the knuckles of his left. When he started the mangling of his joints, Amanda knew he was attempting to control himself and also that he would fail.

  A shock of black hair had fallen over his forehead. He didn’t look all that different than he had as a teenager. A little thicker and some lines around his eyes, but that was all right. She still found him handsome and often wanted him and his touch. Because of fatigue, and because their differences on the handling of Chris had put something impenetrable between them, they made love infrequently. Sometimes it was good, and occasionally it was eye-popping, but when it was over, Tommy’s black mood would always return.

  “What is it?” said Amanda. “You’re not going to lecture me, are you?”

  “I see you made Chris a sandwich.”

  “And?”

  “Did you serve it to him on his Star Wars plate?”

  “I fixed him some lunch. You think I should let him starve?”

  “Let the kid make his own lunch. He’s old enough to stick a knife in our hearts. He can build a sandwich by himself.”

  “Okay, Tom. Okay.”

  “You’re not helping him, Amanda. He doesn’t need an enabler or a personal chef. It’s pretty obvious that the gentle way doesn’t get results with him.”

  “I’m keeping the lines of communication open.”

  “I tried that and it doesn’t work.”

  “You tell him to shut up. Then you tell him to shut the fuck up. That’s not communication.”

  “It’s what he deserves.”

  “He deserves our support. And I don’t want to lose him.”

  “We’ve already lost him.”

  “I don’t believe that. Look, I know you’re angry. But he needs to know that we still love him.”

  “Fine.” Flynn’s beeper sounded. He checked the number on the display and took a deep breath. “My mailbox is so full it’s not taking any more messages. I can’t keep ignoring the business.”

  “Go to work,” said Amanda. “You need to.”

  “I will. But listen, don’t let Chris leave the house. He’s going to tell you he’s only going up to the store, or he’s only going out to see his girlfriend. It’s a violation of his terms of release. Don’t let him play you, do you understand?”

  “I get it, Tommy.”

  Flynn looked her in the eyes. He dropped his hands to his sides and softened his tone. “Amanda.”

  “What?” Now he was going to apologize.

  “I’m sorry. This stuff with Chris has knocked me down, obviously. I’m all messed up.”

  “I know. Go to work. It’s all right.”

  She wanted him to go. It was better here when he was not around.

  Flynn left without touching her. He left the house without speaking to his son.

  THOMAS AND Chris Flynn had little communication over the next few months. Chris continued to see the same psychiatrist that Thomas and Amanda saw as a couple, but Chris refused to meet as a family. At home, Amanda and Chris spoke regularly and cordially, and she cooked for him and did his laundry. Thomas and Chris spoke to each other only if necessary. Often they were in a room together and did not speak at all.

  Thomas Flynn kept busy with his carpet-and-floor business and met Bob Moskowitz occasionally to discuss Chris’s upcoming hearing. Fall arrived, and as other students returned to their high schools, Chris remained home, sleeping late, watching television, and killing time. He spoke often with Taylor on the phone but had infrequent conversat
ions with his friend Jason Berg, and finally had none at all.

  When Chris’s case came up on the court’s docket, everything seemed to accelerate. Chris pled guilty, and Moskowitz made a well-reasoned and passionate plea for lenience. But the judge was well aware of the criticism he would receive if he were to show mercy to the white kid from upper Northwest who had made the print and broadcast news, especially in light of the boy’s history of theft, reckless acts, and violence. In accordance with D.C. juvenile justice procedure, he committed Chris Flynn to the custody of the District of Columbia. It was decided that society and the District would be best served if Chris were to be incarcerated with other young men until it was determined that he had achieved an acceptable degree of reform. And that was it. Chris kissed his mother, said nothing to his father, and was led away, shackled in handcuffs and leg irons, to a van that would transport him to the juvenile detention facility at Pine Ridge, in Anne Arundel County, Maryland.

  That night, Flynn and Amanda ate a meal at home and turned in early. Amanda slipped under the covers and turned her back to her husband. He listened to her sob quietly and when her breathing evened out he knew she had fallen asleep. But he couldn’t sleep or even close his eyes. He got off the bed and, in his boxers, went downstairs to the dining room, poured bourbon into a tumbler, and drank it down neat. He poured two more fingers from the bottle and took it out to the living room and stood by the mantel over the fireplace, where Amanda had set up framed photographs, the usual array of family and friends.

  Thomas Flynn looked at an old photo, taken at the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade down on Constitution Avenue, when Chris was two years old. Thomas had put Chris up on his shoulders so he could see above the crowd, and Chris’s tiny hands were wrapped around his father’s thick index fingers. And then there were those days that Flynn would ride his old Nishiki ten-speed on the bike path of Rock Creek Park, Chris strapped into a seat mounted over the rear tire, a smile on his chubby face as the wind hit it and blew back his hair, Flynn reaching behind him and squeezing Chris’s hand. Flynn could feel the warmth of those hands, the way they clung to him, even now. He remembered how proud he had been the day of the parade, how proud he was to have people see him and his son together on that bike, how certain he was then of his role as provider, protector, and father.

  It was no longer about Chris’s disturbing behavior, or his indifference to fitting into society, or his trouble with the law, or his marijuana use, or the embarrassment Flynn felt around the friends and acquaintances whose sons and daughters had stayed on track and were heading for college.

  Chris was in prison. It felt final and irreversible, and Flynn did not know what to do.

  He placed his empty tumbler on the mantel and listened to the tick of the clock mounted on the wall. It was very quiet in the house.

  Chris Flynn had spent nearly every night of his life here on Livingston Street. Now it was as if he had never lived here at all. There would be no muffled sounds of the television behind his closed bedroom door, no floor-rumbling bass of his stereo, no low chuckle as he talked on the phone with his girl, no heavy, clumsy footsteps on the stairs. Chris was gone, and the silence he had left behind was a scream in his father’s ears.

  It was 1999. Chris was seventeen the day he entered juvenile prison. Thomas Flynn was thirty-nine years old.

  PART TWO

  UNIT 5

  FIVE

  THE GUARDS called it a room, but it was a cell. To name it anything else was a lie.

  It was a six-by-nine-foot space containing a floor-bolted cot and thin mattress, a particleboard desk and chair, and a steel shitter and piss hole. There was a barred window giving to a view of a dirt-and-mud field, leading to a twelve-foot-high fence topped with razor wire. Beyond the fence was a forest of oak, maple, wild dogwood, and weed trees, but no pines. The door to the cell held Plexiglas in its cutout. Comically large Joliet keys, so named because they were originally manufactured for use in Illinois’s Joliet prison, unlocked the steel doors.

  Wake-up was at 6:30 a.m., then group showers, check-in, and breakfast. Then school, 8:30 to 2:00, Monday through Friday. Regularly scheduled recreation, canceled as often as it occurred, dinner, visiting hours, and psychiatric counseling with staff who barely spoke English. The intended illusion was of routine, just like for boys on the outside.

  There were a dozen units housing offenders of various degrees of criminality. The most violent boys, those convicted of second-degree murder and manslaughter, and sexual offenders, who were few, were housed together in Unit 12. That they were designated with the highest number, putting them by implication at the top of the pecking order, was a distinction not lost on the other inmates.

  Chris Flynn lived in Unit 5, an L-shaped, low-slung brick building, with fourteen other young men. The residents of each unit wore the same color polo shirts, short sleeves in the summer, long in the winter, and system-issue khakis. They were allowed to wear lace-up shoes and sneaks. Their shirts had distinct colors so that an inmate could quickly be identified by his unit. The boys from Unit 5 wore maroon.

  Classes were held in a building the size of a small-town elementary school. It was set apart from the housing units, close to another building that held a cafeteria that sometimes doubled as an auditorium, complete with stage. The warden and other administrators, including the central guard detail, kept offices in a separate structure.

  The classrooms looked like the classrooms at Chris’s former high school, each with a blackboard, a cluster of old chairs, an opaque projector that only one kid admitted knowing how to operate, and the usual silhouette cutouts of Frederick Douglass and George Washington Carver that the boys spit on and occasionally ripped off the wall. Teachers came to work every day, same as any other teachers, but faced more resistance and saw less progress or success. Chris could not imagine why anyone would want that job and guessed that these folks were do-good types, people his father called “crunchy granolas.” What he didn’t know was that Pine Ridge was a dumping ground for teachers who could barely cut it in the D.C. public school system.

  “Does anyone know who the president of the United States was at the time of Martin Luther King’s assassination?” said the teacher, Mr. Brown, a young black dude the boys called Mr. Beige, on account of he talked white. Mr. Brown’s clothes were threadbare, further lowering his status in the boys’ eyes.

  “Roosevelt,” said Luther, a boy who talked incessantly to hear his own voice and always gave the wrong answers.

  “That’s incorrect, Luther.”

  “Coolidge, then.”

  “Gump,” said a boy wearing blue in the back of the room. “Boy, you just naming high schools.”

  They were in history class, the maroon shirts of Unit 5 mixed in with the navy blue shirts from Unit 9.

  “No, it’s not Calvin Coolidge, either. But nice try, Luther. Anyone else?”

  Chris thought he knew the answer. He was certain Ali knew. Sure enough, when Chris turned his head and looked at him, Ali Carter, seated at the desk-chair beside him, was staring down at the floor, mouthing the word Johnson.

  Ali was smooth skinned, handsome, with a swollen upper body built by doing push-ups in his cell and dips wherever he could. He wore eyeglasses, which somewhat lessened the effect of his bulldog chest, and at five-foot-six was one of the shorter boys at the facility. Ali was in on an armed-robbery conviction.

  “Nobody?” said Mr. Brown. “Okay. It was President Johnson, also known as LBJ. Who knows what those initials stand for?”

  “Lonnie’s Big Johnson,” said Lonnie Wilson, a horn dog who tended to turn any conversation toward pussy or his dick.

  “It ain’t near as big as mine,” said a boy.

  A seated guard, one of two stationed in the room, chuckled, his fat moving gelatinously on the action. The other guard, a tall older man named Lattimer, who the boys called Shawshank because he looked like the graybeard in that movie, told Lonnie to watch his mouth and show respect.

&n
bsp; “President Johnson and Martin Luther King had a cordial but sometimes rocky relationship during the civil rights era,” said Mr. Brown.

  “A sex relationship?” said one of the boys, and several of the others laughed.

  “That’s enough,” said Lattimer.

  “Perhaps ‘rocky’ is too strong a term. It’s probably more accurate to say that their relationship was one of guarded respect,” said Mr. Brown, gamely plowing ahead. “Understandably, Dr. King became increasingly frustrated with the slow progress in achieving his goal of racial equality in America, and was also frustrated with the escalation of the Vietnam War…. ”

  Many of the boys sat slumped in their chairs, some with their arms crossed, some looking away from the teacher, a couple with their eyes closed, stealing sleep. Understandable, as the most blatantly inattentive of them could neither read nor write. Ali, by far the smartest boy in the class, understood what Mr. Beige was saying, but the majority of the other boys did not. Just as many did not have any interest in the subject matter and felt that it had no relevance to the reality of their lives. All of this stuff with Dr. King and Lonnie’s Big Johnson had happened before they were born, and wasn’t no Dr. Anyone coming to save them and pull them up out of this jail.

  “… Ironically, it was Lyndon Johnson, a product of the South and its racist environment, who signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which gave all citizens in this country, regardless of their color, the right to vote.”

  “He was a leader,” said Chris, not intending to speak but recalling something his father had said about Johnson at the dinner table one night. His old man was a history buff. The living room of their home was full of books on presidents and war.