He talks to Coach Diggins almost weekly, comes to Cortaca every year to talk to Diggins’s team at the start of the season, and that means that he sees Deanne occasionally. This year’s Christmas card has a picture of her with her husband and her two toddler daughters at the Apple Harvest Festival. She’s a pediatrician. Still lives in Cortaca.
Wyatt still lives in Cortaca, too.
They haven’t talked since Jessup got into the Jeep and started driving west to Boise. Jessup has reached out, but Wyatt won’t speak to him. Jessup might as well be dead. But he has held Wyatt’s silence. He has done at least that for Wyatt. He doesn’t know what the cost has been to Wyatt—what it has meant for Wyatt to live with his own actions—but he knows what the cost of his own actions has been for himself. One thing it has meant is that he’s lost two brothers. Wyatt and Ricky.
Twice a year, on top of his talks to Diggins’s teams, Jessup flies to Syracuse, rents a car, drives two hours to the prison where Ricky is still incarcerated, takes a hotel room. The next morning, he signs in, goes through security, waits and waits, but Ricky won’t see him. That’s how it goes every time. He thinks of it as just another attempt to set things right.
Because Ricky won’t see him, Jessup writes letters, but Ricky almost never writes back, and even then, when he does, the letters are vile, full of hatred, calls Jessup a traitor to the cause. Ricky has not been a model inmate. His sentence, originally twenty years, looks like it’s going to stretch to twenty-five, thirty, an entire life gone by.
David John writes to Ricky every single day, but neither he nor Jessup’s mom go to visit anymore. It makes both of them too sad. David John’s shown Jessup copies of some of the letters he writes to Ricky; they are short but heartfelt, filled with small observations from his day, Bible verses, prayers that Ricky will find peace, family pictures. They are, David John says, meant to be a lifeline. All Ricky has to do is grab hold. But he doesn’t. Ricky writes back to David John every few weeks, but it’s clear to David John—clear to all of them—that Ricky is lost.
It’s a permanent shadow over all of them.