Apology by Jon Pineda (good novels to read .TXT) 📗

his sleep, how he must have secretly wanted it gone for good.

The bomber took them most of the day to finish because his father decided they should try to make it as close to the real thing as possible. The switch confused Tom.

“You know, that’s what’s important, Tommy.”

Tom didn’t remind him their model would look different from the one in the picture.

When his father left the room, Tom touched a bright ring of color near one of the engines. It was just to see if it had dried all the way. His fingertip caught briefly in the tack. He stared at the spot, his fresh red print. Lines ran parallel and others converged.

He remembered one of the courtroom exhibits, the photograph of the ball, blown up to show the blotted dots of his sister’s blood. Mario’s uncle had sat quietly while the easel was adjusted and the photograph on foamboard was replaced with another, the next one displaying the shovel’s blade alongside the zipper-like gash on Teagan’s shorn head.

One of the lawyers brought out the actual shovel, which had been wrapped in heavy translucent plastic and taped at each end. The woman, dressed in a dark-gray business suit, grabbed the long handle just under the head and held it out to the jury. Tom remembered she had simply asked, “Can you even imagine?”

She raised the weapon high.

It was as if a string had been connected from the end of the blade to the eyelids of those jury members, for their eyes grew wide as the raised shovel approached them, their necks cast back in dramatic choreography.

Tom had started talking under his breath. It was uncontrollable.

Mario’s uncle had not moved once, his head fastened in place so that his gaze fell squarely on the judge in front of him, a man whose own face was comprised mostly of large, whitish eyebrows and a matching mustache.

Shoe had seen this man before. Not this particular man, but one who inhabited a similar space in his life. Hadn’t he felt the identical eyes of judgment long before now? He watched the bristling expression, the black velvet robe mirroring the shadows of a lost country. Its memory threatened to envelop the man’s face altogether.

He would let the chaos come in the form it would take. As it always did. And what was that voice, barely audible now, a boy speaking behind him, trying to get his attention, whispering, “I hope you . . .,” and then so clearly now, “die . . . I hope you die!” That voice seemed to be the one living inside his head as the woman lawyer, out of the corner of his eye, kept swinging the shovel skyward, as if she were the only one trying to escape this pit where the floor, made now of sand and then wholly of light, fell as soon as it formed.

Nights, Tom lay in bed and glanced over at the B-52 that was forever grounded on his dresser. He could imagine, as the lawyer had posed the question that day, but when he did now, parts of his life pulled away. Were swept up and scattered. He thought hard for Teagan, too.

The future had become a distant, unattainable target.

Sometimes he would hear her down the hall. From her room, she would be yelling and, if she was especially upset, beating one of her dolls against the wall.

In the morning, at breakfast, he would find her at the table crying over the doll’s broken face. Inevitably, their father would come home later in the evening with a wrapped present, and she would never be able to guess what was inside. Until the paper was finally torn back and her face grew bright, full of such honest surprise, it made Tom catch his breath.

Her one wish was to see the geese and so they went to Mount Trashmore in Virginia Beach. At one of the picnic tables by the lake, their mother strewed twisted pink and blue rolls of crepe paper, frozen in waves. It was just them.

After a while, Teagan tore off some of the decorations and fashioned the pieces into a headband. She danced around the table while she helped her mother finish setting up. Manny had gone to the top of the hill and was looking past the picnic area to the fleet of paddleboats dotting the man-made lake.

Tom took a seat beside him, breathing heavily.

“Are you an old man now?” Manny said, smiling.

“Not as old as you,” Tom said.

“That’s true. It took me much longer to get here.”

He laughed to himself.

“Gross, what’s that stuff there?” Tom said.

“Where?”

“Those spots along the side.”

He pointed to the rivulets of rust-colored liquid oozing from the ground.

“Trash,” Manny said. “Loads of it right under us.”

Tom tried to imagine the accumulation of other people’s things. Diapers. Baseball gloves. Crushed globes.

“It’s disgusting.” He shook his head.

“It has to go somewhere, Tommy,” his father said.

They both regarded the lake. People were pedaling the little boats across the white surface. Tom wanted his father to say something, but Manny was already thinking about another time, a life long before this one.

.  .  .  .

“Did you know we used to play a game about you?” Tom offered.

“Who?”

“Me and Teagan.”

“What game? What was this game?”

“When you were out to sea . . .”

“You were too young to remember those times.”

“That’s not true. We’d play BATTLESHIP. Except we changed the rules. We had to choose a piece and say that’s where you were. You were inside that little boat. We’d put it back on the board and both of us would start praying out loud.”

Manny smiled.

“You wanted to sink it, yes, Tommy? You wanted to drown dear old Dad.”

“No,” Tom said, shaking his head. He was suddenly serious. “The object was to miss it.”

“Miss?”

“That way you’d stay alive.”

Manny didn’t look at his son. He watched Teagan chasing one of the speckled geese that had wandered over near the