The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (14 page)

The fifty-day stay the judge had granted loomed even now. Mr. Herman had left them with no doubt that the State would eventually file its counterappeal of the postconviction relief ruling, and when it did so, Skeet would almost certainly have to return to prison until the appeal was ultimately decided. They didn't know how long the State would take to prepare this counterappeal; they hoped that the approaching holidays would delay the motion, since lawyers had families, too. In the meantime, Rob was fueled by the prospect of reintroducing his father to the neighborhood the same way that his father had introduced it to him so long ago. All those hours in the law library, all those commutes to Trenton State, all those nights lying awake and alone in his bed—and here was the culmination: he and his father entering the house on Chapman Street together.

But the reality of Skeet's homecoming in no way resembled Rob's fantasies.

Skeet moved into the third floor, in a room directly above Rob's. Immediately, the house felt crowded. For the first few weeks before
Christmas, Skeet didn't leave. He paced around, ate, read, and continued barraging Rob with questions. He seemed self-conscious about venturing out the way he'd once relished doing, reluctant to confront any of the dozens of neighbors he'd counted as his extended family.

“Everyone's been asking about you,” Rob implored him. “Let's take a walk around.”

“Uh-uh, uh-uh,” Skeet replied. “It's too damn cold outside.”

Day after day, his father kept himself surrounded by four walls nearly at all times. Maybe he needed time to acclimate. Maybe he felt vulnerable, disconnected, no longer the Man in this domain. Maybe his father knew that the second he ventured outside he would begin to attract old friends who were exactly the types of people he couldn't be seen around right now. Maybe he would also attract people who had known the Moore sisters, people not above their own brand of retribution. Maybe, after a decade in a cell, he needed those walls on all sides just to breathe.

Jackie kept herself busy and largely apart from the son and his father during these first weeks. She'd convinced her parents to let him stay there temporarily, at least through Christmas, for Rob's benefit alone. But she had no role to play between them, not anymore. Even if she did have one, Jackie wouldn't have had the energy to fill it. She was tired to a degree never before known to her. She'd watched her son's body grow strong from swimming, his mind oiled and tight from the rigorous curriculum he'd designed for himself (which now included college-level calculus and chemistry classes at Essex Community College). She sometimes felt that her own body had withered in inverse proportion, that her own mind had become diffuse and good for little besides calculating stew ingredients according to serving size. Her hair was graying, her posture was slouched, her knees were shot. She hadn't been able to save any money in four years and had relied on her parents' savings to get her through a few lean months. She'd taken Rob to school at five thirty for his lifeguarding job as often as she could. In her parents' Lincoln, she'd picked him up at Curtis's near midnight after study marathons. She'd
skimped as little as possible when it came to his education. As much as she could, she'd tried to shield him from the strain this placed on her. The fact that her son was thriving, that he was on course for college, had sustained her. And now, on the home stretch of senior year that she'd always envisioned as a time of vital decisions and valuable reflections on the eighteen years of life she and her son had lived together, she was instead worried about Skeet. She worried about whether he would actually find another place to stay like he'd assured her. She worried about him eating more than his share. She worried about him distracting Rob from schoolwork, something that no one prior had ever been able to do. But she had never worried that having his father at home would make her son unhappy.

Skeet tracked the boy's movements obsessively. Anytime he left that month—to hang with Curtis on Smith Street, to go to the mall in Union with a girl, to work out with Tavarus and Flowy at the pool—Skeet met him at the door, wanting to know exactly where he was going and with whom. And when he returned, Skeet would be there waiting for a detailed rendering of what he'd done while away.

Rob had been living more or less as an adult, responsible for his own time, for years now. He'd constructed his own social network, his own schedule, his own way of life. And he'd done all this with aplomb, ascending to the pinnacle of the St. Benedict's community as well as the precipice of a college education. Through it all, Rob had spent time every day for ten years wondering what it would be like to have his father back. Against the image of this father waiting almost desperately by the front window for him to show up (and Rob could remember waiting in that same place himself as a seven-year old), he was spending his days remembering fondly what it was like being his own man, with no one hovering or questioning or living vicariously through him.

Christmas arrived, and various extended family members came home from Georgia, Florida, and Ohio. The Peace clan, almost all of whom had begun their lives in this house, congregated there once more. Rob
had organized the reunion himself, calling, cajoling, offering to help pay for airfare; he'd been obsessed with a family Christmas. Now Rob seemed to locate the happiness that he'd found so elusive in the weeks since his father's release. He cooked and passed around trays of food. He decorated the house. He invited Victor and his aunt over, and Victor would remember for the rest of his life the degree to which Rob resembled his father. Presents were relatively few, but Rob gave his parents both imitation-leather coats that he'd bargained for in the fashion district of Manhattan. Skeet held up his coat and nodded thanks, but no one saw him smile. It was as if he knew that he'd never wear it.

Just after the second semester of school began in January, the State filed its counterappeal to the postconviction relief ruling. As stipulated by the judge's prior stay, Skeet returned to prison. Once more, Rob walked with his father across a prison parking lot, this time to Essex County, to await another verdict.

N
EAR MIDNIGHT
, a sharp breeze rolled across Orange Park. The swing set creaked near the bench on which Victor and Rob sat. Victor couldn't recall seeing his friend cry in eight years of knowing him. Had their positions been reversed, Rob most likely would have told him to “quit being a bitch.” But Victor wasn't going to say that. His friend spent so much time being rough, hard, guarded, that this moment felt almost precious, and Victor wished he knew what to do or say.

They were sharing a joint, both leaning forward with elbows on knees. Orange Park remained a relatively safe place to smoke, because the police still didn't make regular patrols and because the boys knew by name all the young dealers who operated here—had grown up with many of them. They were left alone to work their way through this new problem, rare in the sense that it belonged to Rob.

In early spring of their senior year, college acceptance letters had begun trickling in to the school. Rob had been advised to apply to nine colleges: three “stretches,” three “good bets,” and three “safety schools.”
He'd ultimately chosen to apply to six, in order to save Jackie money on application fees: Johns Hopkins, Yale, Penn, Columbia, Seton Hall, and Montclair State. Earlier that day, Rob had received his third response, from Montclair. The state school had offered Rob a full merit scholarship. The Ivy League did not award merit-based scholarships, only need-based. Columbia, in New York City, had turned him down—Rob felt because that was the one application on which, in the financial aid attachment, he'd mentioned his father's status as an inmate. Johns Hopkins, his first choice after all the college visits, had accepted him but with only partial financial aid. He'd made the mistake of listing the house on Chapman Street as an asset, which had shaded his and Jackie's circumstances in ways he hadn't foreseen, as it had once done for his father in pursuit of public defense. For the general essay question, “Write about a challenge you have overcome,” he told the story of the storm on the Appalachian Trail and shepherding underclassmen down the mountainside at night.

Now, he was crying, trying to hide it, digging his index finger into his eye as if there were a bug in it.

“I don't know what I want to do,” he murmured.

“You have to go to Montclair, you go to Montclair,” Victor responded. “I know it's not an
Ivy
and all, but it's not a bad college.”

Rob shook his head. “You know you want to fly planes, right?” Victor had been learning to pilot small planes throughout high school with a group called the Young Eagles, and he'd already accepted admission to Daniel Webster College in Nashua, New Hampshire, which had an aviation program. “But I don't know
what
I want to do.”

“You're going to do whatever the hell you have to do,” Victor told him, and he ventured laying a hand on Rob's thick shoulder as his friend took a deep drag of marijuana and handed the joint back. “Just like you're doing now.”

Rob nodded. The problem was not as simple as money, though money was the most powerful variable in that it basically didn't exist. The other
element—the one drawing forth these tears—had to do with potential, of which Rob knew he possessed a vast amount but didn't know where to focus it. He excelled in math and science but remained passionate about books. He'd valued his real estate internship and the complicated minutiae that accompanied the property acquisition ­process—with profits lying in gathering more information than competitors, in being less lazy. He'd been fully immersed in his father's legal battles, and despite the sobering undercurrents of his father's time at home he still held on to the exhilaration of his role in achieving that time. He loved gaining knowledge in any subject, and he was unnerved by the onset of this first consequential decision of his life—the realization that from this point on, the choices he made would begin closing doors as well as opening them. He told Victor, though not in so many words, that he wished he weren't as smart as he was; he wished his horizon might be narrower and thus more easily navigable. Considering his academic pedigree, Montclair State represented a narrow horizon indeed. But that's where he was going to go—even after Yale and Penn accepted him over the next two weeks, with aid packages similar to that offered by Johns Hopkins. He owed it to his mother not to take anything more from her; this debt was unspoken, and unknown even to Jackie herself.

The senior banquet was held in mid-April, in the gymnasium. On the same bowed floorboards on which the class had rolled out their sleeping bags during Summer Phase in 1994, the school arranged two dozen tables with linen and silverware. The cafeteria staff prepared steak, salmon, and Caesar salad. The students had been prepped for their best behavior: no slouching, elbows on the table, jokes. Colin Powell, then the secretary of defense, was the guest of honor. Louis Freeh, the head of the FBI, was there as well, along with an army of Secret Service agents. The banquet was a formal celebration for parents and an awards ceremony for students, but it was also a fund-raising event, a chance for the school to show off its finest to alumni donors and high-profile guests.

Charles Cawley, the MBNA CEO, sat at Table One with Friar Leahy, Mr. Freeh, and General Powell. He was bald, with thick white tufts of hair over each ear, his napkin tucked into his collar over a polka-dot bow tie while he sipped vichyssoise. Though he appeared in the flesh only once or twice a year, his was an everpresence among the students. From behind the scenes he had played a direct or indirect role in each of their lives.

As group leader, Rob gave the keynote address. He'd rehearsed at home with his mother, and his deep voice didn't falter as he spoke of this journey they were near to completing, the reliance they'd placed on one another along the way, the gift of manhood that the St. Benedict's tradition had imparted to them. He was striking to all: muscular, focused, commanding. But what struck Charles Cawley was not Rob's speech but Friar Leahy's introduction. The headmaster spoke of a boy who woke up at four-thirty six days a week to lifeguard at the pool, who taught himself to swim as a freshman and now was among the top ten butterflyers in the state, who led quietly and by example, who spent hours each week officially and unofficially working as a math tutor, who would have been valedictorian if a C in freshman art class hadn't knocked his grade point average down to a 3.97—third in the class—and who had grown up with nothing and now had college acceptances to Hopkins, Penn, and Yale.

At the end of the dinner, Rob was polishing off his chocolate cake when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He looked up into Charles Cawley's face, stood politely to shake his hand and shrug off compliments on his speech. Then Mr. Cawley took a dinner napkin with a phone number scrawled on it from his pocket, and he pressed it into Rob's hand. He said, “You can go to college wherever you want.”

Rob glanced at Friar Leahy, who was watching the interaction with a knowing, contented expression.

“Thank you, sir,” Rob said, not fully understanding.

“Congratulations, son,” Mr. Cawley replied, and he returned to his seat.

A few minutes later, Victor found Rob in the bathroom. For the second time in a month, his best friend since elementary school was crying in front of him.

That night, Rob gave the napkin to his mother and told her what had happened. She figured he'd misunderstood something. Then she called the number the next morning and learned that Rob had been granted a blank personal check from Charles Cawley to cover all his college expenses, no questions asked.

She didn't have time to marvel or celebrate. She didn't even have time to confront her initial reaction, which was to spurn charity and politely decline, write a respectful letter to Mr. Cawley saying that this offer was too generous, and they would be fine making do on their own (she knew that Mr. Cawley was rich; she didn't know that, with an annual salary approaching $50 million, he was one of the best-paid executives in the country). Rob actually called Friar Leahy at home to express this sentiment, and the headmaster told him directly, a little harshly, even, that Mr. Cawley had chosen to make this offer, an offer he had never made to any other student in twenty-five years as a benefactor to the school. Rob had a responsibility to accept it, and to earn it. “Yes, Father Ed,” Rob replied.