Afraid of the Dark Read Free Page B

ones in years. With a deep breath, Jack pushed forward with his last chance at a breakthrough.
    “My mother left the island when she was seventeen, a couple years after Fidel Castro came into power. Her name was Anna. My grandmother put her on an airplane alone and sent her to live with relatives in Tampa. I can’t even imagine how painful it must have been to watch her daughter go, but Abuela refused to let her child live under a dictator. She hoped to get off the island and reunite in a few months. It took much longer. She missed my mother’s wedding. She missed the birth of her only grandchild—that would be me. It took forty years for my grandmother to finally get out of Cuba. By then, I was in my thirties, and my mother was long gone. Doctors didn’t know much about preeclampsia back then. She died soon after I was born.”
    The translation brought no reaction. Forget “I’m sorry.” Jack didn’t tell that story often, but it was the first time in his life that he’d told it without drawing so much as a blink of the eye.
    “What I’m trying to say is that I know what it must be like to be separated from your family,” Jack said, and then he waited.
    The prisoner looked up, impassive, his demeanor unchanged.
    Time was running out. Jack could feel his heart beating faster, the prospect of failure strangling him. He struggled to maintain an even tone as he spoke.
    “I also know what it’s like to be accused of something you didn’t do.”
    Jack told him about his friend Theo Knight—arrested as a teenager, an innocent man who had wasted four years of his youth on death row, twice having come so close to the electric chair that he’d eaten his last meal and had his head and ankles shaved for placement of the electrodes. It was hard not to get energized when talking about Theo, and Jack’s words were coming so fast that the translator was having trouble keeping up.
    “Four years,” said Jack. “That’s even longer than you’ve been here. Now Theo is a free man. My best friend. He owns two bars in Miami, plays the saxophone every Saturday night at a joint he calls Cy’s Place in honor of his great-uncle. Everybody wants to be Theo.”
    Jack didn’t mention that all of his other clients from those days were either dead or still on death row. He just let the thought of Theo and his newfound freedom hang in the gulf between them. But the prisoner was unmoved.
    Family. Get back to family.
    Jack was about to start talking again, then stopped, deciding to steer clear of his famous father. Tales of the former cop who had signed more death warrants than any other governor in Florida’s history probably wouldn’t endear Jack to a man in shackles. Jack was running out of angles. He was down to Grandpa Swyteck—his father’s eighty-seven-year-old father.
    “I visited him in the nursing home a few weeks ago,” said Jack. “He has Alzheimer’s.”
    Jack stopped. The prisoner looked at him curiously, as if—perhaps—he had been listening with interest to Jack’s stories about his grandmother and Theo and was expecting Jack to say more about his grandfather. But Jack wasn’t sure what to say next. It suddenly occurred to him how little he knew about the old man. A momentary sense of sadness came over him.
    “He was born in the Czech Republic,” Jack said. “Czechoslovakia, it was called then.”
    Finally a reaction—though Jack wasn’t sure what had triggered it. He simply watched as the prisoner sat up, rested his forearms atop the card table, and looked Jack in the eye. There was another long stretch of silence, and then finally, in a moment that nearly blew away Jack and everyone else in the room, the man’s lips moved.
    “I have been there,” he said. “In Prague.”
    The JAG lawyer looked at Jack, then at the prisoner, then back again. “He speaks,” she said in disbelief.
    Jack took one more long look around the room, at the cell and the steel bunk and the steel toilet and the O-ring