I Am No One You Know Read Online Free Page A

seeing the loathing in their faces. I wouldn’t be informed but would read in the Perrysburg Journal that a police search team had found Leo’s baseball bat, buried amid litter about two hundred yards from our house. The bat, its handle wrapped in black tape, had been washed to a degree, but bloodstains and partial fingerprints remained; most incriminating, wood splinters matching those in the bat had been embedded in Jadro Filer’s scalp. I would read that, faced with this incontrovertible evidence, the lawyers representing my brothers and their friends advised their clients to plead guilty, not to murder charges but to manslaughter. The lawyers negotiated plea bargains with county prosecutors, first-degree manslaughter for Leo, who’d actually wielded the bat, second-degree manslaughter for Mario, Walt, Don. Because he was sixteen, Mario was sentenced to five years at a youth facility; he was released after three. Leo received the stiffest sentence, seven to fifteen years at Red Bank Correctional, a medium-security prison. The black community protested that thesewere overly lenient sentences, considering that Jadro Filer had been killed in an unprovoked attack; this was further evidence of racism and bigotry in Perrysburg. Some members of the white community denounced the sentences as too harsh, evidence of racism and bigotry in Perrysburg.
    For a long time I’d wake in my new bed in my new room confused and hopeful. Thinking, Maybe it hasn’t happened yet?
    At least there was no trial. I was spared having to testify against my brothers in court.
     
    N OBODY EXPECTED D AD to live to see the new millennium. But he did. So Mariana marveled, “He has so much courage.”
    They’d called me back, and like an eager dog I returned. On a windblown March morning, light flashing off the river like broken pieces of mirror, I brought my dying father a bouquet of white carnations from a florist in town. White carnations! As if Daddy had ever been a man to admire or even take notice of flowers, but what else? I could hardly have brought him a bottle of whiskey. I could hardly have brought a man dying of emphysema a handful of those fat foul-smelling Portuguese cigars he’d loved.
    “Daddy, I’m Lili Rose. I guess Mom told you I was coming?”
    Daddy nodded at me, frowning. It was all he could do, sucking oxygen through a plastic nose piece. His eyes careening onto me, and away. The truth was he’d never intended to get old like this. He’d been contemptuous of sickly, self-pitying relatives. I’d heard him say to whoever was listening, Jesus! Take me out and shoot me, I ever get like that.
    Daddy had become a sunken-chested man with drooping eyelids and trembling hands. And the veins bulging in those hands, frightening to see. The hospice nurse had said, if there’s bitterness between you…I wanted to lean close to Daddy to whisper, Is there bitterness between us? After so long? It was up to him, of course.
    My mother had forgiven me, I guess. Those years she’d avoided me, saying her heart was broken. Well, what of my heart? I’d given up explaining. No one cared. You made your choice, now live with it. Ruined your brothers’ lives. My sisters were the ones who’d urged me to return, now Daddy was sick. They’d told me it had come out just recently:Daddy had given, over a period of years, more than five thousand dollars to Jadro Filer’s mother. (“He wanted it anonymous. He didn’t want it known. ”) They’d prepared me for the changes in our father, yet somehow they had not. This strangeness! Not just John Dellamora was an old, sick man but he was in a hospital bed in our house, in my former room. He hadn’t been able to climb stairs in a while, so this was a practical solution. I wondered if he resented being in my old room. Or if he even remembered whose room this was. From the window, the river looked unchanged. It was slate-colored, so turbulent you couldn’t have told which direction the current was