The young man said the name of the person who had carried the gas can, and I stopped hearing the sounds of the visiting room. The vending machine, the voices of the families, the buzz of the doors. His mouth moved, and I watched it move, and the word he said was not a word I had ever expected to hear in a place like that. He said, “It was your son.” He said it gently. He said it the way you tell someone there is a snake near their foot. “It was Daniel. Your boy.”
I did not scream. I have gone over it many times since, and I did not even gasp. I sat in my church dress on a plastic chair that was bolted to the floor and I looked at the young man, whose name I now learned was Terrell Washington, and something inside me turned to cold glass. I said, “That is not possible.” He said, “I know it sounds like it.” He took a breath. “Mr. Gerald told me the whole thing the first Saturday he came. He cried the whole visit. He said it was the worst thing he ever did.”
Terrell explained it in a low steady voice. In the spring of 2013, my son Daniel was seventeen. He was angry at the school over a suspension, and he had fallen in with some older boys. On the night of the fire, they went to the gym with a can of gasoline, meaning only to scorch the door of the office of the principal. They lit it and ran. A janitor, a man named Mr. Ruiz, was asleep in the equipment room and did not get out. Gerald, working late on his paperwork, came out of his office in time to see my son run across the parking lot, white faced, with the empty can.
It is never too late to set down a lie, and the one who sets it down first sets down the heaviest part for everyone else.
I should say that I knew my husband for forty one years, and that in all that time I never once heard him tell a lie larger than a fish story. He was a principal. He told children every day that the truth was a thing you paid for with your pride. And on the morning after the fire, with a man dead and a boy on his way to the police station, he stood in the hallway of his own school and watched them arrest a fifteen year old who had been seen near the building. He said nothing. His own son was upstairs asleep. He kept silent, and the jury believed the police.
Terrell said, “He came to my trial every day. He sat in the back, in a gray suit. I did not know why. I thought he was being kind.” His eyes were wet. “After the sentencing he came to see me. He said he would never stop. He said he would pay for everything, my mother rent, my commissary, the lawyer. He said he would tell the truth before he died. And then he did not, because he was a coward. He told me so. He said it every time.” He looked at me. “And then he died, and I thought it was over.”
I stood up. I do not know how. I said, “Excuse me.” I walked out of that room on legs I could not feel, and I let them search my purse and return my keys, and I sat in my car in the prison lot for an hour. I thought of Gerald in his study on Sunday afternoons, with his door closed, writing. I thought of the locked drawer in his desk, the one I had never opened, because he had asked me not to. I drove home with both hands on the wheel and did not let myself think. When I reached the house I went straight to the study.
The key was in a coffee tin on the shelf. In the drawer was a manila envelope, sealed with tape, and on the front, in the handwriting of my husband, were four words. To be opened after. Inside was a statement, eleven pages long, notarized in August of the year before he died, in the presence of a notary and a witness. It described the fire in full. It named my son. It gave the times, and the clothes he was wearing, and the words he had said. It ended with a single line, underlined: Terrell Washington is innocent. I am the guilty one, for having let him pay.
My son was thirty years old and teaching history at a middle school in Lawrence. He came to the house that evening because I called him. I put the envelope on the kitchen table without a word, and he read it standing up. I watched the blood leave his face. He sat down. He said, “Mom, I have thought about it every day for sixteen years.” His voice shook. “I was a coward. I was a child. And then Dad took it from me, and I let him, and I told myself the boy would get out.” He put his hands over his face and sobbed.
I did not comfort him. I want to be honest about that. I said, “Daniel, there is a young man who has spent thirteen years of his life in a cell for what you did. And you are going to the county attorney tomorrow morning, and you are going to tell them the truth. And I am going with you.” He nodded without lifting his head. He said, “I know.” He drove me to the courthouse at nine the next morning. He wore his teaching tie. He gave the statement for six hours.
Terrell was released in the fall, after a review by the court. Daniel pleaded to the charge of involuntary manslaughter and received a sentence of seven years, with credit for his cooperation. He is serving it now. On the first visiting day, I drove to Lansing and sat across from my son, and the next Saturday I drove up and sat across from Terrell, who now lives in the old house of my mother on Quindaro Boulevard with a new job at a welding shop. He comes to dinner on Sundays. He sits in the chair of my husband. He says grace, and I say amen.
