Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [28]
Mary obsessed over this puzzle into the mild California winter. On February 8, Bob Griffith turned fifty-one. Mary gave him an afghan she had crocheted. Things had gotten better between them as Mary had retrained her sights on the cosmos. Joy gave her dad a pair of tennis shoes. Nancy gave him a shirt, and Ed contributed peanut brittle and socks. It was a lovely day, but Mary felt exhausted and drained. She felt that she was losing both patience and hope. At what may have been her lowest point, she sat down at her notebook that evening in a fit of frustration and anger. “Lord,” she wrote,
I’m still waiting for assurance beyond a doubt that all is well with our son! It’s been 16 months!…Doesn’t Bobby ever think about us anymore? I feel it’s bad manners to ignore people who love and miss you…. We can communicate with you, so why not everyone else that’s there with you? I don’t think that it’s very loving of you. I thought you were a loving Father. I’m not so sure anymore. I can’t help it Lord, your method of communicating is just lousy!
I don’t think any of you really give a hoot about us left behind! So, why should I care about you, and you, too, Bobby, you got what you wanted so the hell with the rest of us…. Lord I can’t believe you and Bobby have left all of us out in the cold, deserted. I feel like I’ve been had all these years…. It’s real B.S. and I’m sick of this one-sided deal.
It was a frustrated, last-ditch appeal. The next day she pleaded for a sign so that she could
get on with life, and stop all this begging. I would do the same for my children if they ask me. I would not shut them off forever from a brother or sister they missed, or any relative. So, I will not write anymore.
And she didn’t, ever again, in the manner of that pleading, haranguing colloquy with God. She had crossed the Rubicon. She had had a glimpse of some new and frightening reality, one in which she could depend neither on the Bible nor on her faith to sustain her any longer. Jesus had said, “The kingdom of God is within you.” She would have to find the answer in herself.
SIX
Coming Out
1979–1982
Bobby was choking on his secret. He needed desperately to confide in someone. The diary was not enough. It helped, but he longed to unburden himself to another human, someone who could help him sort out the powder keg of feelings imploding within. But who? He couldn’t tell his parents, certainly not his mother. He had no friend he trusted enough. Joy? Ed?
He turned to Ed, setting off a chain of events that might have made him wish he had kept his secret to himself and his diary.
Ed Griffith turned seventeen on a rainy day in late April 1979. He was a junior in high school, an accomplished athlete with dreams of becoming a professional baseball player. Ed was a strapping, muscular young man, with sandy hair and a square, chiseled chin. He was a straight shooter free of guile or subterfuge. He believed deeply in the Gospel and the teachings of his church. For the longest time as a child he related being a Christian to being a soldier. He loved war movies, toy soldiers, playing army. Yet behind his macho aspect there was a caring, nonjudgmental person.
Perhaps it was those traits that led Bobby to choose his brother as the person to whom he would unburden himself one warm spring afternoon in May. The two lounged near the blooming apricot tree in the family’s backyard. Bobby, a month away from turning sixteen, seemed very nervous. Finally, he said, “There is something awful I have to tell you. You are going to really hate me and never want to talk to me again.”
Ed’s heart fluttered with a rush of worry. He imagined everything from criminal activity to drugs. He responded, “Bobby, it doesn’t matter what it is. I’m never going to stop loving you.”
It was true.