Riven (33 page)

Thomas lowered his head and gazed at the pastor. The young man was trying so hard. And he seemed to genuinely care. “I appreciate your concern,” Thomas said. “And I will think about what you’ve said.”

Part Two

39

Addison

Brady Darby spent much of the next two years in and out of juvie hall, then was tried as an adult at eighteen for a botched escape attempt when he was just days from having served his time. He spent most of the next year in the local jail, which he would not have survived without having earned his chops in juvie.

One place he didn’t want to wind up was back in the county jail. That, many said, was worse than the state’s supermax, because rather than being isolated from each other, prisoners were crammed together all day every day.

Every time Brady had been released from juvie—once for good behavior, twice due to overcrowding—he had used the new criminal knowledge gained inside to find more and more creative ways to ruin his life. Petty theft, a clownish armed robbery (which he claimed he didn’t realize he could be charged with since he was faking a weapon with his finger tenting his jacket pocket), and finding himself in the middle of a very real drug bust had turned him into a jail rat, on his way to becoming a career criminal.

At yet one more sentencing, a judge clearly at the end of his patience cocked his head and squinted at Brady. “Listening to you will spoil my lunch, Mr. Darby. To hear you tell it—” he grabbed a sheaf of papers and waved them about—“none of this is ever your fault. Misdemeanor, misdemeanor, petty crime, felony, felony, felony. But no, in your sedated mind, it’s always a misunderstanding. You were in the wrong place at the wrong time, blamed for someone else’s crime, victim of bad counsel or an overreaction from a hanging judge, you name it. Well, I’ll gladly serve as your excuse this time, son. I’m tired of your sorry face.”

Even Brady’s aunt and uncle had given up on visiting him, having heard, Aunt Lois said, “one too many tall tales. Just know that we will continue to pray for you, Brady. But you won’t be seeing us again until you’re out and make the effort to come to us.”

That last hurt Brady, because they were the only ones who ever brought Peter to see him.

His mother made a huge show of disowning Brady and bad-mouthing him to everyone she knew:

“He knows better.”

“He wasn’t raised like that.”

“I don’t know where he learned that kind of behavior. Must have got it from his no-account dad.”

When such comments got back to Brady, he just shook his head.
As if she’s ever been a real mom.

Truth was, Brady had given up on himself. Since his brief, so brief, season in the sun as Conrad Birdie, he seemed to be at the mercy of his impulses. He found it hard to admit, even to himself—and certainly never to anyone else—that he seemed incapable of making good decisions.

Not even his old friend Stevie Ray would have anything to do with him anymore.

Brady hated himself for the example he was setting for Peter. When his brother visited, he looked more and more like Brady each time, and he talked tougher, sounding more cynical. Brady tried to tell him to be good, but who was he to talk? While Peter was no longer listening to Brady, it was clear he liked being known as the brother of a bad guy.

Terrific.

When he finally got out for what he hoped was the last time, Brady talked his mother into taking him back and letting him live in the trailer. He accomplished this by promising to pay rent. Embarrassed and humiliated though she might have been because of him, he knew she could never turn down the lure of cash.

Brady promised himself he would never smoke dope again, and when he landed a job driving a truck (or, as the drivers called it,
driving truck
), he was ready to get back on the straight and narrow once and for all.

Funny, what he’d missed most while in the joint (he loved calling it that, and it seemed to come up frequently in conversation) was seeing movies. He still fancied himself an actor, a natural, as Clancy Nabertowitz had once said.

Who knew? Maybe once he got on his feet financially he would be able to get his own car and be mobile enough to try some community theater after work. He would be just as much a curiosity there as he had been on the boards in the Little Theater at Forest View High School.

As soon as he got his first paycheck, Brady paid his mother, put a down payment on a junk car, then found he was forced by law to insure it. And so he did. Which put an idea in the back of his head. A bad place for any idea.

The new leaf he had turned over crisped up and blew away when “just one or two joints to relax” made a little crack cocaine sound interesting. Soon he began showing up late for work, then lost his job, then began missing car payments. When the loan company threatened repossession, Brady hid the car at Agatha’s, reported it stolen, and tried to collect the insurance.

When Agatha made the mistake of borrowing the car and was pulled over for a bad taillight—and possession of a stolen vehicle—she quickly broke down and admitted that Brady had put her up to it. Had he not recently tried to dump her by having someone else tell her he had enlisted in the army and been killed in a training accident, she might have been more loyal.

Brady turned on the charm—along with producing cash (from yet another drug sale—this time to three junior high girls, no less) for the missed payment and the next one—and talked the company into dropping the charges and letting him keep the car. It had all been a misunderstanding, you see.

Money talks, he learned.

As soon as he had the car back, Brady bought a can of charcoal lighter fluid, stuffed a rag in the top, set it afire, and tossed it into the backseat.

Fortunately, the automobile was insured for more than it was worth.

Unfortunately, it was all the fire department could do to keep the blaze from burning down Brady’s mother’s trailer, not to mention the rest of the park.

Most unfortunate? It took arson investigators less than an hour to identify the accelerant and trace it to the convenience store in the trailer park.

“Anybody buy charcoal lighter recently?”

“Yeah, matter of fact. We don’t get much demand for it this time of the year, but I just sold a can this morning to Brady Darby. Why?”

Brady tried to tell the cops he still had that new can, unless somebody stole it, and, yeah, hey, come to think of it, there
had
been a suspicious guy hanging around the trailer.

But Brady had been apprehended at the insurance office, where he had hitchhiked to file his claim. And he had both marijuana and crack on his person.

Two weeks later Brady stood before the same judge. “Last chance, Darby. Sending you downstate for eighteen months. You don’t succeed there, you’re on your way toward County, and it wouldn’t surprise me to see you graduate with honors from Pen State University.”

At the medium-security prison Brady found enough mischief and dope to keep him high and in trouble—and behind bars—for the next six years. Every time Brady involved himself in a fight or a scheme, time was added to his sentence.

By his release, Brady was a full-grown man, twenty-five years old and—he believed (along with most others)—beyond hope.

Peter, now seventeen and a junior in high school, looked like a full-fledged hoodlum himself, and he refused to be called Petey any longer. But despite dressing the part and talking a big game, he had never been in trouble, worked at a local grocery, and had his own car.

Brady’s mother, now working at her fourth different restaurant since he had been sent up, was heavy into alcohol and spent her off hours sleeping when and if she was home, according to Peter. There was no steady man in her life, as far as he could tell, but he told Brady, “There must be at least one somewhere, because she can’t be working all the hours she’s away.”

Brady again moved back home. He strung his mother along for a couple of weeks, promising to find a job and pay rent. But he slept most of the time, and while Peter seemed to enjoy the novelty of sharing a room with his big brother again, he soon told Brady he didn’t want to lend him his car all the time. “I gotta keep it running good if I ever want to make something of myself and get out of here.”

Brady told him he would pay for gas and mileage when he needed to borrow it, but he had to use it to try to find a job.

But everywhere he went, the application asked if he had ever been convicted of a felony. When he answered honestly, he didn’t even get an interview.

At a landscaping firm he checked the NO box and during the interview spun a story of how he and his father had had their own little nursery in Indiana before his dad died a few months before. Brady said he could do anything they asked, humbly admitting that he was “not the creative one; that was Dad. But I know what it means to do hard labor in the sun.”

He was hired on the spot, asked to cut his hair, and issued two sets of colorful work clothes.

This time,
Brady thought.
This time, for sure.

Adamsville

While Brady Darby was trying to turn his life around, Thomas Carey was growing old. People always said he had aged before his time anyway, and the mirror did not lie.

In the nine years since Thomas’s crisis of faith, much had changed in his life, but not nearly enough in his heart. If he was honest with himself, he had never recovered from the disappointment the night Henry Trenton was hung. But as he ruminated about it over the years, Thomas realized—or at least felt he got closer to understanding—that it was what God’s silence had revealed to him about himself that had sent him into such a tailspin.

Thomas remained as devout and disciplined as he had always been, but still nothing seemed to really work for him. He wondered what he was doing wrong. It was as if God had turned His back on Thomas.

If his despair over the Henry Trenton debacle had birthed anything, it was a steeliness in Thomas that made him finally able to confront Grace about her health. As lovingly as he knew how, he had put his foot down and told her they both knew what her continuing bouts with fatigue and the return of her inexplicable bruises meant.

Against her wishes, he drove her to the doctor. “Don’t rob me of a healthy wife. You’re the only thing I care about anymore, Gracie.”

She lectured him about that, reminding him that there was his calling, his ministry, his daughter, his future son-in-law. “I know you care about all of that. You must. I’m as heartbroken as you over how a lot of our life has turned out, but we have many miles to go.”

The doctor, half Thomas’s age, confirmed their fears, and Grace was put under vigorous treatment for a slow but steadily debilitating form of leukemia.

Thomas met with the young man alone and demanded to know how badly he had erred by not forcing her to come earlier. The doctor was kind enough to phrase it gently. “Of course we always like to have as big a head start on treatment as we can. But if it makes you feel any better, early symptoms are often mild and indeterminate. The important thing now is medication and treatment.”

“What is her prognosis?”

“You have a difficult time ahead, sir. Her demise is not imminent, but it’s unlikely she will improve. There will be the occasional remission where she’ll feel herself again, but over the long haul, say the next decade, she will need more rest, more treatment, more medication. Eventually you will want help and perhaps a hospital bed in your home, unless you choose to institutionalize her.”

Thomas bit the inside of his mouth to steady his lips. “Oh, never. No. I will take care of her until I am unable.”

“Well, thankfully, that is a long way off, sir.”

Thomas could only hope.

It was clear Grace worried about Thomas too. He wanted to be chipper, to keep her happy and motivated. Her enthusiasm and spirituality never flagged, but her body was simply unable to keep up most of the time, and Thomas regretted having taken so long to do what he knew was right.

Another thing he was unable to forgive himself for was Ravinia. Grace continued to pray for her, and Thomas did too, of course, but he despaired over having lost her. When she and Dirk, after several years of living together while slaving in low-paying jobs after law school, finally decided to marry, Ravinia actually asked Thomas if he would conduct the wedding ceremony.

Thomas had decided he would not even attend, let alone be a part of it, but Grace’s cooler head prevailed. She told Ravinia it was not fair to ask her father to appear to condone this unequal yoke, but that of course they would attend so as not to cause an irreparable tear in the relationship.

“Well, without Dad, it’s going to be a civil ceremony. I thought he might want to pray or something.”

“Believe me, we’ll be praying.”

“And you need to know too, Mother, that this is not an unequal yoke. I don’t mean to hurt you, but you cannot claim me for the faith.”

Thomas and Grace had attended the tiny ceremony, held in the home of friends of the bride and groom. There Ravinia proudly announced that her new last name would be Carey-Blanc, obviously assuming this would please her parents.

Thomas forced a smile. His name would carry on, despite his never having had a son, but he feared what kind of spiritual heritage might be passed down.

Thomas and Grace agreed privately that the wedding was one of the most difficult ordeals of their lives, and it only exacerbated his spiritual doldrums. Would God ever again work in his life, answer a prayer, give him a victory?

Every day he rose early to read and study and pray, and then it was off to the prison, where he slogged through the monotony of days and weeks and months and years of the same old same old. The few convicts who asked to see him had their own agendas and didn’t care about his. They were all angling for something.

If nothing else, Thomas had changed in one regard. He was no longer a softy, a pushover. He could see the cons’ games coming a mile away. And while he was known as a gentle, devout soul, no one could work a scam on the chaplain.