begin to race, my legs and arms start to tingle, and my knees grow weak, getting worse by the second. I suddenly start to feel dizzy, so I put a hand on the wall for support. It hits me that this isn’t a game anymore. These guys aren’t hounding me because they hope I’ll confess. They’ll nail me even if I don’t. Six months earlier, I’d rolled my eyes at the detective and told him, “Maybe a jury would believe your accusations, but I sure won’t agree with them.” Now it seems that my words have come back to bite me. They only had circumstantial evidence at the time, but maybe they have more now. I can already picture the grand jury.
One of the cops has a folder in his hand. He looks down at it, and then, as if to confirm the point, he says, “We’ve got everything we need.” Before I know it, I’m inviting them into my parents’ house. I cock my head toward the inside of the house.
“Fine. Let’s get this over with.”
We walk into the kitchen, where they decline to take a seat at the table. Instead the sergeant slaps the folder onto the counter and opens it, sliding photos and copies of witness testimonies toward me. They really do have everything they need. He has photos of me, photos of stolen property, photos of me buying and selling drugs, photos of me shaking hands and inviting in friends of mine who became informants without me knowing it. The list goes on and on and is accompanied by witness testimony and signed statements that accuse me of felony after felony. All of it is directly related to my heroin addiction.
“So why even talk to me? You know that I have been dodging you and I know that you won’t quit. Either you have what you need or you don’t, so what are you going to do with all this?”
“You’ve got us all wrong, bud. We’ve waited this long, what’s another week?” asks the partner.
“What do you mean a week?”
“All this petty stuff would have been enough to put you away for probation violation, but we decided to let you continue until we hit the jackpot: felonies.”
They are right; I had gotten into increasingly serious drug-related crimes. They’d been surveilling me, using informants, and following me around—tracking my every move for more than six months. I am in so far over my head that I may as well have been drowning.
“See, guys like you aren’t going to give up the petty crap with a slap on the wrist. We want a conviction to put you away long enough to make you stop.” They say that all they really want is for me to stop, and that another conviction under my belt won’t do the trick. They say they want me to give it all up, to change my ways once and for all. I don’t believe them at all, not at first anyway.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way, it’s up to you. Come with us and cooperate and we’ll cut your time in half. If you try to run, you know we’ll find you. And then we will charge you with everything . . .”
Apparently, it’s up to me: I can choose between six years in prison, possibly out in three with good behavior, or three years in prison with the possibility of being out in one and a half. If I was dizzy at the door, I am now suffocating in sheer terror. They both look at me intently, waiting for my answer.
“Goddamnit, I just don’t know, alright?”
“That’s why we’re giving you one week, so you know you can trust us. We’ve been real nice up to now, bud, and we both know you need this. You need to quit this one way or another, and going to prison could be the turning point. It’s all up to you.”
I look the lead detective dead in the eyes. Maybe he is being generous. Glancing at the floor, I mutter, “One week?”
“To the minute, right here.”
“Okay,” I say biting my lip. “Alright.” I offer to walk them to the door, but they leave abruptly and just like that I’m back in the kitchen alone, trying to process what just happened.
“Everything okay?” asks Judy as she passes by with an armful of bedsheets.
Startled, I snap back to reality and nervously dart a glance at her, hoping she didn’t hear anything. “Yeah, yeah, everything’s fine. It’s all gonna be just fine.”
Part One
Chapter 1
Sitting in my aunt’s living room in a house atop a beautiful bluff overlooking the water, I begin to shiver while waiting for someone to bring me a towel. No one brings one. I’m fourteen and begging God, in whom I suddenly believe, to let my back be okay. I rock back and forth, trying to comfort myself, and then let out a deep guttural moan, like a woman in labor.
Aunt Tracey calls to me, “Your mother wants you to walk home, so it’s time for you to go.” Her son, my cousin Jay, six years older than me, looks at me and I realize I’m no longer welcome. His piercing eyes say, Get lost. There isn’t much to do in the remote place where we summer and Jay is the only person ever available to me, but he’s clearly reached his limit with me. He warns me that I better stop coming over and says he doesn’t want me playing his drum set anymore. It’s hot and sticky outside, a typical Wisconsin summer day, and no one is in a good mood. In fact, just a little while earlier, Jay and his friends had decided to do whatever it took to get rid of me.
A few years earlier, while staying at my parents’ beach house, I had learned how to wakeboard with Jay and his buddies, and earlier today I’d wandered over to see what they were up to and spend some time on the water with them. Except for the outdoors, Jay’s house seemed the only place to go to in the remote area my parents dragged us out to each summer, Shore Acres, near Dyckesville, Wisconsin, less than an hour outside our hometown of Green Bay.
Out on the water, with the rope coiling around me like a snake, I had the eerie, panicked feeling that some sort of immense, deep-sea, slithering, sharp-toothed creature was lurking just beneath me. Still, I hurriedly grasped the triangular rubber-gripped handle as the boat rounded me and the instant the rope was taut, I bellowed, “Hit it!” Jay rammed the throttle forward with such fist-pounding force that the gas throttle on the 240-horsepower V6 engine of the bombardier jet boat jerked wide open. The craft pulled me forward with such force that I was thrust up and out on top of the water and then flung vertically into the air. Somehow I managed to flex my abdomen muscles tightly and pull my legs and the wakeboard back underneath my feet before I rebounded down into the water.
Landing about ten feet in front of where I was launched, I struggled to maintain my balance and control my hyper-light wakeboard as I accelerated at full throttle behind the high-powered jet boat. Jay wouldn’t . . . was all I managed to think before my board caught a diagonal front-right edge on a rift in the water at high speed, separating me from my board and careening my body like a flying superman headlong into an approaching wave at about 45 miles per hour. I felt my spine crunch so violently that I could actually hear it snapping in my eardrums as I plunged and folded in half, face first into the water.
After the initial shock, I turned around and floated on my back, slowly letting out gasps of air as the cool water and wind stroked my face with soft comfort. I tried but failed to move my legs, which had gone completely numb. Panicked yet frozen, helpless after having had the wind knocked out of me, I looked up at the sky and focused on keeping calm. I don’t remember it,
