Man on Fire: A Story About Grace
He sits across from her in an orange jumpsuit, smiling big and goofy, unrestrained. There’s a sense of undeserved joy on the man’s face. He shouldn’t look so happy, given the setting, given the very framework for her visit. Nonetheless, they can both tell it’s going to be a good visit. Not like the last one where he asked her to leave on account of her asking too many questions. He was irritable and covered in a cloak of shame and was itching to isolate. There were too many unknowns to be asking for the details of what would never be solidified.
Sometimes history can’t be retold, you know, sometimes the stories get mixed up. Maybe that’s why they make it up in the textbooks. Maybe that’s why they get it all wrong on the television screen.
The girl sits with good posture and blonde hair that touches just past her shoulders; hair that should have been trimmed two months ago but has been unattended to because the very act of living life got in the way of regular hair cuts. She’s just gotten out of the hospital for the fourth time. A psych hospital, that is. She isn’t apeshit crazy though. No, not like her brother who wears the jumpsuit and refuses to take medication and blabbers on about God fixing him just right. “He’ll fix me, not the doctors.” The silence is short because the visits can only last so long and she hasn’t got much time to let the discomfort linger. She told herself she wouldn’t carry on about the things that didn’t matter; wouldn’t talk about the weather or politics; she would only talk about the heart, the soul, and life inside the prison walls.
“Happy Birthday.” She says.
“I wasn’t sure if you would come.”
“Of course I came. It’s your 29th birthday. I tried to bring a cake but they wouldn’t let it pass security.”
“DId Mom come too?”
“She’s in the lobby and will come in after me.”
He smirks a boyish smirk that’s hidden behind three days of stubble and teenage years spent covering the pain with drugs and girls and everything messy. He’s happy in the only way he knows to be.
That’s how the world feels these days; with this family and this situation, especially in this moment.
Everything messy.
They sit separated by a wall of glass, connected by two telephone cords; separated by a crime unthinkable, connected by love unconditional.
Three years, three months, and three days earlier, on November the 11th he burned down his mother’s house. She lost everything. Well almost everything. 95% of her possessions went up in flames or were ruind by the residual affects of smoke and fire. Soot, the professionals call it. The mother said the worst part wasn’t losing all her belongings but losing her son. The doctor’s said she lost him to the illness. The lingering, “were not exactly sure” illness. Maybe it was Bipolar or schitzo-affective disorder, maybe it was just plain crazy making. The friends blamed it on the drugs. And they probably didn’t help, all those chemicals coming in and throwing everything off kilter like they do in the movies. That’s one thing the movies get right: addicts. Dual-diagnosis, maybe.
But she was the only one who blamed it on herself, the mother, that is.
The reality though is that he’d been gone long before the fire. He was gone in every conversation, every uncompleted job application, every failed love interest. He was gone like the last President, the last hurricane season, the last playoff game that was lost. His life felt like a history that could be traced back to days spent in middle school before he started getting high and watching Pokemon “because it was funny”. He was gone before the neighborhood fights and skipped classes, before the rolling eyes and undone chores. And she tried. Lord knows his mother, a single-one at that, tried. But he was fierce and strong and too clever for most his age.
And so, as the story would go things only got worse for him. The sickness and the partying kept him from finishing college, got him kicked out of his house, and before the age of 24 he was living homeless near his hometown. It was a life that he had chosen through a series of unfortunate events. Before the fire, at the age of 26, his mother took him back in, “just until you get a job, Trevor.”
He was manic and high and drunk and close to blacking out when the smoke detectors finally went off. He couldn’t tell you whether he used a match or lighter, candle or cigarette. Three years later the details still come like nightmares, in glimpses, haunting his every move. The Devil comes in the details too- in the night- in the moments when the regret nearly swallows him whole.
One only knows how to say sorry so many ways. We’ve only been taught to do it with so many words and looks and lashings to the self. One only knows how to be sorry appropriate to the pain they’ve bestowed.
And so mostly he says sorry when his mom isn’t around. When no one is around. When she isn’t sitting across from him separated by glass and telephone cords. He says sorry when the world is quiet, save the sound of self-hate that rings like alarms inside his ears. He only knows how to beat himself between meals served on metal trays, between in-house preachers, between outside recreation.
What he doesn’t know though is that none of this is necessary. Not from her end anyways. He doesn’t know that the self-hate won’t get him moving, it won’t take back the smoke, won’t get his mom a new house. What it definitely won’t do is get him on solid ground to where he can finally forgive himself. What he doesn’t realize is that she’s already heard I’m sorry. She heard it three years ago on November the 12th from a collect call that came from the Dade County Correctional Institution. She heard it and she received it and it’s all she ever needed. That was enough. End of story. Grace has been dished out.
All because she loves him bigger than the moon, more than all the words in the dictionary. She loves him in a way that can’t be said; that can only be proved. And even though his actions took it all away- up in smoke her entire life went- she doesn’t care. The mom doesn’t care and the sister doesn’t care, because they love him like that. They love him like conditions don’t exist, only grace does.
All they want is to tell him “Happy Birthday.”
All they want is to say “I love you” and for him to believe it.
