Life After Murder

A hundred miles away in Sacramento, the scene is set for Phillip’s long-awaited homecoming. Using directions Phillip gave me from memory while we were still inside the guards’ office, I drive away from the cool ocean breezes of the Bay Area and head for the hot central valley and Phillip’s family home. If I overshoot the freeway speed limit and test the ticket gods for the next seventy-five miles, I just might make it there before Phillip.

It works. Phillip and his parole officer have to make a prerelease stop at the North Sacramento parole office to check him in and go over his parole conditions before he is officially released. That gives me about an hour’s lead: just enough time to meet the folks and friends waiting for him to walk through the front door.

Skirting south around the center of the capital, and pulling off the freeway, I drive down a long artery past a sprawling high school, a church, and a corner market. Hanging right, and then making a quick left, I slow to check the house numbers and park directly across the street from his family’s single-story manicured tract house. One of the large, leafy plane trees lining the comfortable middle-class street blocks the late August sun, and for just a moment, I stop and take a breath of the stiflingly hot air surrounding me. It’s midday quiet. People are at work. Except for a car every now and then, no one seems to be around.

I recheck the address against the notes scribbled on the notebook in front of me. That’s the one. It doesn’t stand out. It looks just like all the other houses on the block, only today this one is different. I pull my body, drenched in sweat, out of the car, grab my equipment, and cross the narrow street. Yanking open a waist-high latched gate and stepping up to a screen door, past a row of flowering rosebushes, I stop. Are they expecting me? Will they let me in? I knock and wait. All I can do is try.

I introduce myself as a reporter, trying not to say the wrong thing. “Oh, I’m Phillip’s sister, JJ,” the woman says, pushing the screen door open. “Why don’t you come in? It’s so hot out there.”

As I step by JJ, I can see her face is flushed. I could have been Phillip, but I wasn’t. Disappointed but gracious, she closes the inner front door behind me. The change from bright sunshine outside to living room inside is dramatic. Heavy curtains are drawn across the front picture window, making the living/dining room cool and dark. It takes me half a minute to adjust to the pairs of eyes staring back at me from around the room.

Phillip’s mom, a squat, overweight woman with wavy white hair, is sitting in a padded rocking chair midway between the door and the dining room table to the back. “Oh, you must be hot,” she says in a strained, excited, but weary voice. “Would you like a glass of water?”

Now standing in the middle of the room, encircled by people sitting in chairs, on a couch, and on the carpeted floor, I stumble a bit. The heat has made me dizzy. Gently they pepper me with questions: Who am I? Why am I here? How do I know Phillip? Now that he’s getting out, they want to do everything they can that they haven’t been able to do for twenty years: protect him. Some are willing to accept me as one more part of their reunion celebration. Others, staring at the microphone in my hand, aren’t so sure.

“Yes, I’d love to see it,” I say, moving toward the even darker dining room. A cake decorated with balloons and flowers is in the middle of the table, surrounded by potato salad and chips. She says they’ve been cleaning the house for days. They want it to be perfect when Phillip walks in the door. She wants to give him the best of what he’s been missing all these years. Her voice stumbles. “Until he walks through the door, I won’t believe it.”

Phillip’s stepfather, a man he calls Pops, keeps watch at the window, pulling the heavy curtains to the side just enough to see the street out front. He is so excited he can hardly sit.

Phillip’s girlfriend, a volunteer he met inside San Quentin, is sitting in the middle of the sofa, glowing. A perky, bright, professional woman with short brown hair and blue eyes, she says they’ve got plans. She’s rented a room at a nearby hotel for when the little celebration at the house is over. No, she says, they don’t have plans to get married. Not yet. “Phillip,” she says, “is going to stay single for a year. That’s clear.”

Waiting patiently over to the back of the room is Jan Karowsky, the lawyer who represented Phillip a little over twenty years ago when he first went to court for the murder. He says Phillip never denied the crime and never shied from doing time, and he has always respected him for that: “I wouldn’t miss this day for the world.”

There are others, including people who knew Phillip in high school. Turns out, he kept in touch with his old friends through long letters and shorter phone calls. It was all in preparation for today, the day he would have a chance to start his life anew.

Everyone settles back into an almost-silent waiting. They don’t know how long it will be, but together in this cool, darkened living room, it doesn’t seem to matter. They’ve been through board denials, governor reversals, and court rulings. Today is different. Today he’s coming home.

Suddenly the front door swings open. Phillip appears, the bright, blinding sun shining behind him. “I’m home!” he calls out in an almost unrecognizable cry. His mom, already standing, rushes to hug him, their first embrace in years without the eyes of guards watching.

Stunned, the others stand and watch, giving mother and son the first few beats of happiness. Phillip melts into her arms and drops his face into the deep of her neck. “It’s over,” he says in a muffled whisper. “They didn’t appeal. It’s all over.” She begins to sob, which is the cue for everyone to move in.

There are tears and hugs, broken by choking laughter. Lifting his head from the arms and faces circling him, Phillip takes his first good look around. “Man,” he says.

Stepping up behind Phillip like a bad epilogue is his parole officer, white-brimmed baseball cap shadowing his eyes. He introduces himself to Phillip’s parents. Pops takes him on a tour of the small house, into the little hall that connects the living room to the bathroom and the two bedrooms. “This will be Phillip’s bedroom,” we can all hear Pops tell the officer.

Seeing an officer walk into and through their private, curtained-off world seems to shock Mom and Pops, who strike me as somewhat hermetic. In the small bathroom, the officer picks up each round orange vial and reads the contents. Next it’s a check of the exits. “Show me all the windows and doors,” the parole officer orders. “I’ll be stopping by every now and then, to see how things are going.”

No give in his voice, the officer shoots back, “I won’t be calling first.” He pulls the lip of his cap down and heads for the front door. Phillip and Pops follow the officer out to the sidewalk. A quick good-bye and the last vestige of prison pulls away. Phillip watches the officer drive around the corner and out of sight. Now it’s real. He’s standing on the sidewalk, free. There’s no one to tell him what to do, where to go, or how to do it.

Shooting his arms in the air, a release of twenty years of tightness, Phillip opens his chest and takes a breath. He looks around. It’s hot. “Wow. Sidewalks,” Phillip says, his voice tripping like a child’s. “I forgot about sidewalks. They’re so cool. You can just walk down sidewalks in front of people’s houses and it’s okay. I used to ride my bike around, and I forgot about sidewalks. They don’t have sidewalks in prison.” Then he turns back toward the house and his family waiting inside and takes a leaping skip from the sidewalk to his parents’ front door.

Back inside, this time without the parole officer, everyone cheers. Someone pours apple juice into tall plastic flutes. “Does everyone have a glass?” his mom calls out in a voice tight with relieved anxiety, like tears hanging at the lip of a waterfall of pain. She lifts her arm, glass held high. All around the circle, glasses clink with a train-track percussion of plastic repetition. “To Phillip.” Tears choke the air. “To Phillip. To Phillip. To Phillip.” For the first time in so many years, there is a real reason to celebrate and be happy.

Phillip goes shopping for new clothes—khaki shorts and cotton button-down shirts in anything but blue—and on Saturday morning, just four days after he walked out of San Quentin, we walk through the turnstile at Cal Expo, the California state fair. People are everywhere. Parents push kids in strollers, squirmy prepubescent groups run this way and that, self-conscious gaggles of teen girls strut the walkways, passing within a few feet of pants-slung-low tough looking wannabes. I point to one group of bad-looking boys and ask Phillip if they’re trouble. Phillip takes a quick glance. “Nope,” he says. A human Geiger counter after years in prison surrounded by serious criminals, he can identify people who are real trouble in the real world.

Phillip wants to remember the fair the way it was when he was a kid. He’s giddy with excitement and wants to jump on a ride, but vetoes the massive, colorful roller coasters. “No way. I didn’t spend twenty years in prison to get out and die my first Saturday on a roller coaster that breaks.”

In the end, we share a water log ride down a thirty-foot shoot, screaming and laughing all the way down. Before he leaves, there is one ride Phillip says he has to take. It’s a forty-foot drop on a bright yellow water slide into a pool of water. Wearing swimming trunks he brought along for just this moment, Phillip runs over to the base of the spiral stairs and climbs to the top. Standing on the platform, high above the trees and the pool of water far below, he doesn’t hesitate. Holding onto the bar at the top of the slide, he pushes off. Crossing his arms tight to his chest, feet crossed at the ankle, he shoots straight down, water shooting in all directions. “That was awesome! I’m going up again!” he shouts. He rides the big yellow slide again and again, playing with the thrill.