The Reckless Oath We Made

Bill and I went down to Arkansas together to meet with Ms. Howell and Gentry, who looked terrible in his orange jail scrubs. His hair was getting shaggier every week, and he clutched a manila folder of paperwork to his chest like a shield. I longed to hug him, but physical contact had become even more difficult for him while he was locked up. I made do with telling him how glad I was to see him. He bowed to me, then to Bill and Ms. Howell.

She explained the plea agreement more remedially than was necessary, because Gentry’s silence was so often mistaken for a lack of intelligence. After she finished, he held out his hand for the papers. He read it through twice, before he passed it back to her. She flipped to the page he would need to sign and laid a pen on top of it.

“Would ye have me sign it?” he said to his father and me.

“Yes, Gentry. I think it’s the best thing. Don’t you, Bill?”

“I suppose your mother’s right. Because your other option is a trial, and I don’t know about that.”

Gentry nodded, but he stood up and walked to the other end of the room. He’d stimmed on and off while reading the plea, but now he was doing it in earnest. Squeezing his right hand into a fist, while frantically scratching his neck with his left hand, until I knew, from experience, he would end up drawing blood.

“Is he okay?” Ms. Howell said.

“He just needs a few minutes. Gentry—”

“Nay,” he said, loudly enough that Ms. Howell jumped in her seat.

I smiled to reassure her, but she was staring at Gentry, who was pacing and scratching, and having a rather heated discussion with Hildegard, if I were to guess.

“Plague me not, harridan,” he said. “Thou hast no more wit than a stone. And a stone hath a use, more than thee.”

“Should we call someone?” Ms. Howell said.

“Son,” Bill said. “Calm down. You’re scaring Ms. Howell.”

“Nay!” Gentry came back to the table and did something I hadn’t seen him do in years, something he’d been taught in ABA therapy. He put both his hands on the table and forced them flat with his fingers spread out. They’d been trying to stop him from stimming, even though that was actually useful to him. Flattening his hands like that had never helped him, and it made me uneasy to see him do it. He was breathing too fast when he picked up his folder and took out a few photocopies stapled together.

“Read thou this?” he said to Bill, and then to both of us: “Read ye this and ye bidden me agree to such a thing?”

“Do you know what he means, Bill?” I said, but before he could answer, Gentry slapped the pages down on the table between Ms. Howell and me.

“It’s an article I sent him,” Bill said. “About diminished capacity plea deals.”

“Is’t true?” Gentry said. “If I plead as ye would have me, they might give me physic I need not? They might keep me as long as they will? This tells of men held ten years and more, with no hope of freedom.”

“It is one of the risks with this type of concession,” Ms. Howell said. I don’t think she had quite recovered from Gentry’s outburst, because she couldn’t look at him. “It requires him to show progress in his treatment. If he doesn’t, they would be able to incarcerate him for as long as they deemed necessary. For public safety.”

“Of course, he’ll make progress,” I said. I waited for Bill to say something, but he’d picked up Gentry’s article and was flipping through it. “And if he goes to trial and gets convicted, what then? He’ll never get another aeronautics job. Not with a felony. What will he do?”

“I got him the Bombardier job. He can get another job. No, he’ll never get security clearance for military work with a felony, but there are civilian jobs. Besides, maybe he’ll be acquitted,” Bill said, and then the thing he kept saying to all his friends: “Hell, he ought to get a medal for what he did.”

At one point, I almost agreed with him, but in that moment, it made me angry. Unreasonably, irrationally angry at Bill. At Gentry. At myself.

“Gentry, I want you to sign this. I think it’s the best option you have,” I said.

“I will not.” I wanted to believe he was talking to Gawen or the Witch, but he was looking at my hands where I had them laced together on the table.

“Do you understand what it would mean for you to go to prison? It’s not safe. It’s—”

“My mother, I know it well, but I will not go to a mental hospital. Let those who suffer an illness of the mind do so and prosper of it, but I do not and I will not.”

Gentry went to the door, and I knew from the set of his shoulders there was no way to convince him.

That morning, as Bill and I had been driving the nearly eight hours from Wichita for the umpteenth time, I’d held on to the hope that we would go home with things decided. Instead I went home in tears, knowing we would come back for another meeting. As many meetings as it took to convince Gentry to take the plea deal, or to prepare him for trial. I was so upset when I left that I forgot to tell him I loved him.

For the longest time, I’d worried that I was overprotective of Gentry. I’d sheltered him too much and kept him from finding his own way. Now I felt like I hadn’t sheltered him enough. I should have kept him on a shorter leash. I should have kept him under my wing, like the mother hen Bill always accused me of being.

Instead, I’d let Bill teach him about guns like they were harmless toys. I’d let Gentry take boxing lessons. I’d let him go to all those tournaments, and learn to joust, and hang all those swords in his room, like it was a hobby. Like it was model trains instead of learning how to kill people.

When we got home, Bill went to pick up Trang and Elana from Bernice’s, and I went around the house, doing a few chores and trying to calm myself before they got home. Trang had left his baseball cleats in the laundry room, so I carried them back to his room to put them away. There, I looked at the swords in a way I never had before.

In the beginning, when Gentry was a teenager, it was all wooden swords and rubber axes, pretend weapons. The claymore hanging over his bed was the first real sword he’d bought with his summer lawn-mowing money. Hardened steel, double-edged blade. The handle was wrapped in leather and almost a foot long. It was a sword meant to be wielded with two hands, and it took me both hands to lift it down from the wall.

Gentry had left his bed neatly made as always, and I stood in the middle of it in my shoes, trying to steady myself enough to get down while holding that ridiculous sword.

I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it, but it wasn’t staying in my house.

CHAPTER 51