Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row

novels because they remind me of “home.” Nostalgia, you could say.
    At any rate, it didn’t work. I knew things between my parents were finished when I was walking home from a friend’s house one day and saw my father’s car in the driveway. As I approached I saw that the driver’s-side door was open and my father was sitting on the seat. One leg was on the ground, the other was in the car, and his face was hidden behind his hands as he cried so hard that his entire body was shaking. At first I thought he may have been laughing, until I looked up at my mother. She was standing outside the car next to him, with bloodshot eyes. When I got within arm’s length, my father grabbed me and held me while he continued to cry. It scared the hell out of me, and I had no idea what to do.
    My mother gave me a saccharine-sweet explanation of how my father wasn’t going to be living with us anymore, but that he’d still come by to see my sister and me on weekends. And he did for a while. He’d come get us and take us to visit my aunt or grandparents on his side of the family. It all came to an end soon enough, though.

Four
    I t wasn’t long before my mother met someone else. I would have been in third grade at the time. His name was Jack Echols and he was twenty years older than my mother, though you wouldn’t guess it by looking at her. A steady diet of greasy fried food, cigarettes, no exercise, and a dead-end life had all come together to give my mother the look of years she didn’t yet own by the age of twenty-five or so when they were married. I’ve never encountered a single person in my life who had anything good to say about Jack. He was a hateful bastard who only grew worse with age.
    After breaking up with my father, my mother started going to a Protestant church not far from our house. This is where she met Jack, who had been attending services there for an eternity, or at least since Jesus, the carpenter, built the place with his very own hands.
    I can still close my eyes and see the first time I noticed him. Church had just come to an end, and I rushed out into the parking lot to play a quick game of tag with all the other little heathens when I looked up to see Jack walking out the front door with his arm around my mom. My mind snapped to attention like a dog’s ears standing up at a strange sound. It interested me only for a moment; then I went back to what I was doing. I felt a great deal of resentment toward her, and I clearly recall one day when she found me crying and asked me what was wrong.
    I told her that I wanted to live with my father, to which she responded, “Well, he doesn’t want you to.” I knew he had never said any such thing, but it still hurt to hear it. She couldn’t imagine the depth to which such a remark wounded me; she informed me that she had already told my father that she would soon be getting remarried, and I had better start getting used to the idea. At any rate, the moment she said that, I felt as if there were no comfort to be found anywhere in the world. I felt so cold inside, and there was nowhere to turn. By the look on her face I could tell she took pleasure in informing me of this. It wasn’t a happy or gleeful expression—it seemed more defiant than anything. I felt like Jekyll and Hyde—part of me still wanted to seek some sort of comfort from her, for her to tell me that everything was going to be okay. The other part wanted to say things that would go straight to her heart and hurt her the way I was hurting.
    *  *  *
    A t home I used to walk through emotional wastelands where the lines on craggy faces were so deep that the wind whistled through them. People fell in and out of my life, but it was the
places
that really mattered. Even now I can feel them tugging at my sleeve and spinning around in my head. All the old stories have it wrong, because it’s not the ghost that haunts the house; it’s the house that haunts the ghost. I feel lost out here, and everything reminds me that I’m not quite real. In the end it’s always home that damns us.
    My days have somehow become as rich and twisted as the kudzu vines that grew around my grandmother’s house back home. It’s almost too much to take, and my heart is on the verge of breaking. I’m overwhelmed with things I can’t even articulate. I’m haunted by the way overhanging leaves used to cast reflections on asphalt puddles. I want to go home. Never have I wanted anything so badly. Ghosts are