Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [6]
After dropping Mary off at home, an already exhausted Joy drove south thirty miles to California State University at Hayward, where Ed was at football practice. When she drove up, Ed was standing in his uniform on the sideline.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. Joy couldn’t speak through her sobs. Ed kept repeating, “What? What?”
Finally, Joy got her voice. “It’s Bobby,” she said. “He jumped from a bridge. Eddie, he’s dead!”
Ed stiffened, blood draining from his face. Abruptly, he picked up his equipment from the bench and broke into a wild run, heading nowhere, just zigzagging across the field. He yanked off his helmet and kicked it. In the car, Joy followed along the running track that circled the field. She reached him and jumped out, yelling, “Eddie, please, stop. We’ve got to go home!” Ed slowed to let Joy catch up with him. They clung to one another. “What happened?” Ed sobbed. “I’ll tell you all about it in the truck,” Joy said.
Ed headed for the locker room to change. His head was pounding so hard he thought it would burst. He went to a sink and threw cold water in his face. Numbly, he dressed. Then, in a burst of pain and fury, he punched a locker and stormed out without storing his gear.
Ed couldn’t face going home. He asked Joy to drop him at the home of one of the church counselors from Walnut Creek Presbyterian, where Ed was a devout congregant. Some other kids from the church came over, and Ed started downing shots of Scotch. He was not a drinker. The others urged him to slow down, but he got roaring drunk and bawled for several hours.
He and Bobby, the two boys of the Griffith family, had a special closeness, although they couldn’t have been more different. Ed the athlete, built like a truck, always playing soldier, dreaming of being a professional baseball player. Bobby, slender, not into competitive games, artistic, as a kid interested in dolls and drawing and dressing up.
Yet there was a deep bond. As youngsters Ed and Bobby had bunk beds, but every once in a while they would crawl in together and sleep, one brother curled in the other’s arms like a cup in a saucer. It was to Ed that Bobby had first confided he was gay.
Lately, they had drifted apart. Bobby withdrew, set up his own room, hid out in it, and brooded a lot. Ed knew his brother was unhappy, and it troubled him. But he figured Bobby would grow out of it. He never dreamed…
Their last parting, when Bobby had come down for a short visit from Portland, was unusually painful. Ordinarily they separated with a bear hug. This time Bobby merely put out his hand for a shake.
For now he tried to forget it all with booze. The next morning he awoke at the counselor’s house with a big hangover and finally went home.
By Saturday afternoon, Mary had worked up the courage to call her parents. She prayed that Porter would answer the phone. Her mother and father knew nothing of Bobby’s gayness, which until now was the nuclear family’s deep, dark secret. She had only recently confided in Porter, her younger brother, a bachelor who still lived with their parents. Almost fifty, Mary still feared Ophelia Harrison’s tart tongue almost as much as she desired her approval. Porter did answer, and Mary told him what had happened. “Porter, I truly believe Bobby killed himself because he felt guilty about his homosexuality.”
Something had backfired. God was supposed to heal Bobby. She had seen so many success stories on the religious channel about gay people being healed by prayer. Lord knows Bobby had prayed. She had prayed. What went wrong?
The rest of that week was like navigating through a fog. There were a million details to attend to. Family members converged and took on the mundane tasks of keeping the household going. Mary, who was finding it difficult to get motivated, even to eat, was grateful. Besides, she found the chaos and confusion a blessed distraction.
But several things absolutely had to be settled. One was the question of the details of Bobby’s death. Did he jump? Did he fall? Mary called the medical examiner to confirm that Bobby was neither