I tried to find that bunny in my memory, tried to inventory the bathroom and the things in it, but I came out with nothing, a handful of water.
“Sorry, Libby, that’s a strange memory to throw at you.” I put one tip of my finger near the bottom of the glass window and said, “That’s fine.”
WE SAT IN silence for a bit, pretending to listen to noise that wasn’t there. We had just started but the visit was almost over. “Ben, can I ask you something?”
“I think so.” His face went blank, preparing.
“Don’t you want to get out of here?”
“Sure.”
“Why don’t you give the police your alibi for that night? There is no way you were sleeping in a barn.”
“I just don’t have a good alibi, Libby. I just don’t. It happens.”
“Because it was, like, zero degrees out. I remember.” I rubbed my half finger beneath the counter, wiggled my two toes on my right foot.
“I know, I know. You can’t imagine.” He turned his face away. “You can’t imagine how many weeks, years, I’ve spent in here wishing I’d done it all differently. Mom and Michelle and Debby might not be dead if I’d just … been a man. Not some dumb kid. Hiding in a barn, angry at Mommy.” A tear splashed onto the phone receiver, I thought I could hear it, bing! “I’m OK being punished for that night … I feel … OK.”
“But. I don’t understand. Why were you so … unhelpful with the police?”
Ben shrugged his shoulders, and again the face went death-mask.
“Oh God. I just. I was such an unconfident kid. I mean, I was fifteen, Libby. Fifteen. I didn’t know what it was to be a man. I mean, Runner sure wasn’t helpful. I was this kid no one paid much attention to one way or the other, and here all of a sudden, people were treating me like I scared them. I mean, presto chango, I was this big man.”
“A big man charged with murdering his family.”
“You want to call me a stupid fuck, Libby, please, go ahead. To me, it was simple: I said I didn’t do it, I knew I didn’t do it, and—I don’t know, defense mechanism?—I just didn’t take it as seriously as I should have. If I’d reacted the way everyone expected me to, I probably wouldn’t be here. At night I bawled into a pillow, but I played it tough when anyone could see me. It’s fucked up, believe me I know it. But you should never put a fifteen-year-old on a witness stand in a courtroom filled with a bunch of people he knows and expect a lot of tears. My thoughts were that of course I’d be acquitted, and then I’d be admired at school for being such a bad-ass. I mean, I daydreamed about that shit. I never ever thought I was in danger of … ending up like this.” He was crying now, wiped his cheek again. “Clearly, I’ve gotten over whether people see me cry.”
“We need to fix this,” I said, finally.
“It’s not going to be fixed, Libby, not unless they find who did it.”
“Well, you need some new lawyers, working on the case,” I reasoned. “All the stuff they can do with DNA now …” DNA to me was some sort of magical element, some glowing goo that was always getting people out of prison.
Ben laughed through closed lips, the way he did when we were kids, not letting you enjoy it.
“You sound like Runner,” he said. “About every two years I get a letter from him: DNA! We need to get some of that DNA. Like I have a lockerful of it and just don’t want to share. D-N-A!” he said again, doing Runner’s crazy-eyed head nod.
“You know where he is now?”
“Last letter was care of Bert Nolan’s Group Home for Men, somewhere in Oklahoma. He asked me to send him 500 bucks, so he could continue his research on my behalf. Whoever Bert Nolan is, he’s ruing the day he let goddam Runner into his home for men.” He scratched his arm, raising his sleeve just enough for me to see a tattoo of a woman’s name. It ended in -olly or -ally. I made sure he saw me notice.
“Ah this? Old flame. We started as penpals. I thought I loved her, thought I’d marry her, but turned out she didn’t really want to be stuck with a guy in prison for life. Wish she’d told me before I got the tat.”
“Must’ve hurt.”
“It didn’t tickle.”
“I meant the breakup.”
“Oh, that sucked too.”
The guard gave us the three-minute signal and Ben rolled his eyes: “Hard to decide what to say in three minutes. Two minutes you just start making plans for another visit. Five minutes you can finish your conversation. Three minutes?” He pushed out his lips, made a raspberry noise. “I really hope you come again, Libby. I forgot how homesick I was. You look just like her.”