Triptych Read online

  His credit was excellent, his checking account with the local bank in good standing. Obviously, he was a pretty reliable customer and had been for about six years. But for one “slow pay” on the Shell card, all his creditors were satisfied with his prompt payments, which was kind of funny when you thought about it, because for the last twenty years, Jonathan Winston Shelley hadn’t gotten out much. The guards at the prison tended to keep a close eye on you when you were serving twenty-two-to-life for raping and killing a fifteen-year-old girl.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  John had known Mary Alice Finney all of his life. She was the good girl, the pretty cheerleader, the straight-A student, the person just about everybody in school knew and liked because she was so damn nice. Sure, there were some girls who hated her, but that’s what girls did when they felt threatened: they hated. They spread nasty rumors. They were nice to your face and then when you turned around they stuck the knife in as far as it would go and twisted it around for good measure. Even in the real world, find some woman who’s doing well for herself, being successful, and there’s always going to be a handful of other women standing around saying she’s a bitch or she slept her way to the top. That was just how the world worked, and it was no different in the microcosm of Decatur High School.

  Actually, John later found that it was a hell of a lot like prison.

  The Shelleys lived a couple of streets over from the Finneys in one of Decatur’s nicer neighborhoods bordering Agnes Scott College. Their mothers knew each other in that circular world of the upper middle class. They had met the way doctors’ and lawyers’ wives have always met, at some fund-raiser or charity for the local high school, hospital, college—whatever institution served as an excuse to throw an elaborate party and invite strangers into their beautifully decorated homes.

  Richard Shelley was an oncologist, head of the cancer treatment ward at Decatur Hospital. His wife, Emily, had at one point been a real estate agent, but she’d quit that job when Joyce, their first child, was born. John came three years later, and the Shelleys thought their world was complete.

  Emily had been one of those mothers who threw herself into parenting. She was active in the PTA, sold the most Girl Scout cookies, and spent the end of most school years sewing costumes for the Quaker Friends School’s graduation gala. As her two children grew up and stopped needing her—or wanting her, for that matter—she found herself with a lot of time on her hands. By the time John was in junior high and Joyce was two years away from attending college, she had gone back to the real estate agency part-time just to give herself something to do.

  Their lives were perfect except for John.

  The lying came early on and seemingly for no reason. John was at home when he had said he would be at football practice. He was at football practice when he said he would be at home. His grades started slipping. He let his hair grow long. Then, there was that smell. It seemed like he wasn’t even bathing and his clothes, when Emily would pick them up off the floor of his dank bedroom to throw them in the washer, had an almost chemical feel to them, as if they had been sprayed with Teflon.

  Richard worked long hours. His job was emotionally and physically demanding. He didn’t have the time or inclination to be concerned about his son. Richard had been sullen when he was John’s age. He had secrets when he was a teenager. He got into trouble but he straightened out, right? Time to take him off the tit. Give the boy some space.

  Emily was worried about marijuana, so she did not register danger over the powdery residue she found in the front pocket of her son’s jeans.

  “Aspirin,” he told her.

  “Why would you put aspirin in your pocket?”

  “I’ve been getting headaches.”

  As a child, John had put stranger things in his pockets: rocks, paper clips, a frog. She was worried about his health. “Do we need to take you to the doctor?”

  “Mom.”

  He left her standing there in the laundry room, holding his pants.

  The Shelleys, like most affluent couples, assumed that their money and privilege protected their children from drugs. What they did not realize was that those two factors helped their kids get better drugs. Even without that, Emily Shelley wanted to believe her son was a good boy, so she did. She didn’t notice the glazed look he had in the mornings, the eyedrops he was constantly using, the sweet, sickly smell that came from the back shed. For his part, Dr. Richard didn’t look across his newspaper at the breakfast table and see that his son’s pupils were the size of half-dollars or that his nose bled more often than some of the cancer patients on his ward.

  Life came apart in pieces.

  A random search at the school yielded a bag of pot tucked into a pair of sneakers at the back of John’s locker.

  “Not my shoes,” John said, and his mother agreed that the shoes didn’t look like any she had seen him wear before.

  A security guard at the local mall called them to let them know their son had been caught stealing a cassette tape.

  “I forgot to pay for it.” John shrugged, and his mother pointed out that he did have twenty dollars in his pocket. Why on earth would he steal something he could pay for?

  The last piece came undone one Friday night. An intern at the hospital called, waking Richard Shelley to tell him his kid was in the emergency room, having overdosed on coke.

  Talk about ripping off the blinders. Medical evidence—something his father could wave under his mother’s nose as physical proof of their son’s worthlessness.

  At night, John would sit in his bedroom and listen to his parents argue about him until his father screamed something along the lines of “and that’s final!” and his mother ran into her bedroom, slamming the door behind her. Muffled sobs would come next, and he’d turn up his stereo, Def Leppard screaming from the speakers, until Joyce (studying, of course) pounded on the wall between their bedrooms, screaming, “Turn it down, loser!”

  John would bang back, call her a bitch, make enough noise so that his father came into his room, yanking him up by the arm and asking what the hell was wrong with him.

  “What are you rebelling against?” Richard would demand. “You have everything you could possibly want!”

  “Why?” his mother would ask her boy, tears streaming down her face. “Where did I go wrong?”

  John shrugged. That’s all he did when they tried to confront him—shrug. He shrugged so much that his father said he must have a neurological disorder. Maybe he should be put on lithium. Maybe he should be put in a mental home.

  “How did it start?” his mother wanted to know. There had to be a way she could fix it, make it better, but only if she could find out how it began. “Who got you hooked on this? Tell me who did this to you!”

  A shrug from John. A sarcastic comment from his father. “Are you retarded now? Autistic? Is that what’s wrong with you?”

  It had started with pot. There was a reason after all that Nancy Reagan told kids to just say no. John’s first hit, fittingly, was right after a funeral.

  Emily’s brother, Barry, had died in a car accident on the expressway. Sudden. Fatal. Life-changing. Barry was a big guy, ate whatever he wanted, smoked cigars like he was Fidel Castro. He was on pills for high blood pressure, taking shots every day for diabetes and generally working his way toward the grave in a slow crawl. That he was killed by a truck driver who had fallen asleep at the wheel was almost a joke.

  The funeral was held on a hot spring morning. At the church, John had walked behind the casket, his cousin Woody at his side. He had never seen another guy crying before, and John felt weird watching his tough cousin, four years older and cooler than John could ever hope to be, breaking down in front of him. Barry hadn’t even been the guy’s real father. Woody’s mother was divorced—a shocking event in those days. She had only been married to Barry for two years. John wasn’t even sure if the guy was his cousin anymore.

  “Come here,” Woody had said. They were back at his house, so empty n
ow without Uncle Barry in it. His uncle had been a gregarious man, always there with a joke or a well-timed chuckle to take off the tension in the room. John’s dad didn’t like him much, and John suspected this was out of snobbery more than anything else. Barry sold tractor trailers. He made a good living, but Richard put the job on par with selling used cars.

  “Come on,” Woody told John, walking up the stairs to the bedrooms.

  John had looked around for his parents, no reason but the tone in Woody’s voice warning him that something bad was about to happen. Still, he followed him to his room, shut the door and locked it when he was told.

  “Shit.” Woody sighed, sinking into the beanbag chair on the floor. He took out a plastic film canister from behind a couple of books stacked on the shelf behind him, then pulled some rolling papers from under his mattress. John watched as he deftly rolled a joint.

  Woody saw him watching, said, “I could use a toke, man. How about you?”

  John had never smoked a cigarette before, never taken anything stronger than cough medicine—which his mother kept hidden in her bathroom like it was radioactive—but when Woody offered him the joint, he had said, “Cool.”

  He watched his cousin suck the smoke into his lungs and hold it, hoping for pointers. Sweat formed on John’s upper lip as the joint was handed to him. He was more afraid that he would look stupid in front of his cousin than because he was doing something illegal.

  John loved the relief that came from smoking a joint, the way it took the edge off of everything. He no longer cared that his father thought he was a total fuck-up or that his mother was constantly disappointed with him. His sister Joyce’s perfection as she followed in their father’s footsteps didn’t grate as much after a toke, and he actually enjoyed being around his family more when he was high.

  When his parents finally realized what was happening, they blamed that age-old culprit, the bad crowd. What they did not realize was that John Shelley was the bad crowd. In a few weeks, he’d graduated from gawky nerd to pothead, and he loved the attention his newfound transformation gave him. Thanks to Woody, he was the kid who had the stash. He was the one who knew where the cool parties were, where underage high schoolers were welcome as long as they brought some pretty girls along with them. He was dealing dime bags to his new friends by the time he was fifteen. At a family reunion, Woody gave him his first hit of coke, and after that, there was no looking back.

  By seventeen, he was a convicted murderer.

  As far as John could remember, Mary Alice Finney was the first friend he’d ever had who wasn’t a member of his immediate family. Their mothers had carpooled, taking turns every other week shuttling the kids to school. The kids had sat in the backseat, giggling about stupid things, playing the silly games that you played to make the time go by faster. Through elementary school, they had stayed on pretty much the same path. They were the smart kids, the ones who had all of the advantages. By junior high, everything was different. Uncle Barry was dead. John was the leader of the wrong crowd.

  “You’ve changed,” Mary Alice had told him the day he’d cornered her outside the girls’ locker room. She had kept her textbooks pressed tight to her chest, covering the front of her Police concert T-shirt as if she felt the need to protect herself. “I don’t think I like the person you’re choosing to become.”

  Choosing to become. Like he had a choice. He hadn’t chosen his hard-ass father, his ditzy mother who practically invented rose-colored glasses. He hadn’t chosen Joyce, the perfect sister, the bitch who set the bar so high all John could ever hope to do was bounce on his toes, trying to touch the edge of the bar but never getting high enough to go over.

  He had chosen this? He hadn’t had a chance.

  “Screw you,” he told Mary Alice.

  “You wish,” she snapped, flipping her hair to the side as she turned on her heel and left him standing there like an idiot.

  He had looked in the mirror that night, taken in his greasy long hair, the dark circles under his eyes, the acne spotting his cheeks and forehead. His body hadn’t yet caught up with his enormous hands and feet. Even dressed up for church, he looked like a string bean standing on a couple of cardboard boxes. He was an outcast at school, had no real friends left and at the ripe age of fifteen, all of his sexual experience thus far had involved his sister’s Jergens hand lotion and an active imagination. Looking in the mirror, John had taken all of this in, then sneaked out to the shed in the backyard and snorted so much coke that he made himself sick.

  John hated Mary Alice from that day on. Everything bad in his life was her fault. He spread rumors about her. He made jokes at her expense and within her hearing so she’d know just how much he despised her. At pep rallies, he heckled her as she was leading cheers on the gym floor. Some nights, he would lie awake thinking about her, detesting her, and then he’d find his hand had gone from resting flat on his stomach to reaching down into his shorts and all it took was picturing her at school that day, the way she smiled at other people when she walked down the hallway, the tight sweater she had worn, and he was gone.

  “John?” His mother had some sixth sense and always seemed to knock on his bedroom door when he was jerking off. “We need to talk.”

  Emily wanted to talk about his failing grades, his latest detention, something she had found in the pocket of his jeans. She wanted to talk to the stranger who had kidnapped her son, to beg him to give her her Johnny back. She knew her baby was in there somewhere, and she would not give up. Even at the trial, John had felt her silent support as he sat at the table listening to the lawyers who said he was scum, facing a panel of jurors who wouldn’t even look him in the eye.

  The only person in that courtroom who still believed in John Shelley was his mother. She would not let go of that boy, that Cub Scout, that model airplane builder, that precious child. She wanted to put her arms around him and make everything better, to press her face to the back of his neck and inhale that odd scent of cookie dough and wet clay he got when he played in the backyard with his friends. She wanted to listen to him tell her about his day, the baseball game he had played, the new friend he had made. She wanted her son. She ached for her son.

  But he was already gone.

  CHAPTER NINE

  OCTOBER 2, 2005

  John hadn’t slept well, which was nothing new for him. In prison, nighttime was always the worst. You heard screams, mostly. Crying. Other things he didn’t like to think about. John had been fifteen when he was arrested, sixteen when he was incarcerated. By the age of thirty-five, he had lived in prison more years than he had slept in his parents’ home.

  As noisy as prison was, you got used to it. Being on the outside was what was hard. Car horns, fire engines, radios blasting from all over. The sun was brighter, the smells more intense. Flowers could bring tears to his eyes and food was almost inedible. There was too much flavor in everything, too many choices for him to feel comfortable going into a restaurant and ordering a meal.

  Before John was locked up, you didn’t see people jogging in the streets, headphones tucked into their ears, tight spandex shorts clinging to their bodies. Cell phones were in bags like big purses that you carried over your shoulder and only really wealthy people could afford to have them. Rap didn’t exist in the mainstream and listening to Mötley Crüe and Poison meant you were cool. CD players were something out of Star Trek and even knowing what Star Trek was meant you were some kind of nerd.

  He didn’t know what to do with this new world. Nothing made sense to him. None of the familiar things were there. His first day out, he had gone into a closet in his mother’s home, shut the door and cried like a baby.

  “Shelley?” Art yelled. “You gonna work or not?”

  John waved his hand at the supervisor, pushing his mouth into a smile. “Sorry, boss.”

  He walked over to a green Suburban and started wiping water off the side panel. That was another thing that had shocked him. Cars had gotten so huge. In prison, there had b
een one television that got two channels, and the older inmates got to decide what was playing. The antenna had been ripped off and used to pluck out somebody’s eyeball well before John showed up, and the reception sucked. Even when the snow cleared and you could halfway see the picture, there was no sense of scale with the cars on screen. Then you wondered if what you were seeing was real or something just made for a particular show. Maybe the series was really about an alternative world where women wore skirts up to their cooches and men weren’t beneath sporting tight leather pants and saying things like, “My father never understood me.”

  The guys always got a laugh out of that, shouting “pussy” and “faggot” at the set so that it drowned out the actor’s next line.

  John didn’t watch much TV.

  “Yo, yo,” Ray-Ray said, bending down to sponge silicone onto the Suburban’s tires. John looked up to see a police cruiser pulling into the drive of the car wash. Ray-Ray always said things twice, hence the name, and he always alerted John when a cop was around. John returned the favor. The two men had never really talked, let alone exchanged their life stories, but both knew on sight what the other was: an ex-con.

  John started cleaning the glass over the driver’s door, taking his time so he could watch the cop in the reflection. He heard the man’s police radio first, that constant static of the dispatchers speaking their private code. The officer glanced around, pegging John and Ray-Ray in about two seconds flat, before he hitched up his belt and went inside to pay for the wash. Not that they would charge him, but it was always good to pretend.

  The owner of the Suburban was close by, talking on her cell phone, and John closed his eyes as he cleaned the window, listening to her voice, savoring the tones like a precious piece of music. Inside, he had forgotten what it was like to hear a woman’s voice, listen to the sort of complaints that only women could have. Bad haircuts. Rude store clerks. Chipped nails. Men wanted to talk about things: cars, guns, snatch. They didn’t discuss their feelings unless it was anger, and even that didn’t last for long because generally they started doing something about it.