Triptych

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 now 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