The Way Ice Melts: The Things We Never Knew About Our Fathers...

There is a memory I will never forget. I have carried it with me all these years as a reminder of the price we pay for the decisions we make.

My neighborhood friend and I devised a way to break into a house without leaving any evidence behind and executed the plan just to prove it could be done. We shattered a neighbor’s window with a few cubes of ice, climbed in, climbed out, and left the ice behind melting our fingerprints. We weren’t criminals. We were scientists testing a hypothesis.

The police didn’t feel that way. Being a small community, they were pointed in our direction by surrounding neighbors and wasted no time in manipulating our confessions out of us. They took us to court and charged us both with felonies.  We were in the seventh grade.

As I said, our town was tiny. Everyone knew us and knew what we had done. They called us idiots, saying “they didn’t even steal anything, what were they thinking.” Our brilliant plan became our greatest shame.

I had been a popular kid in school, but after that we were lepers—festering sores in the town’s complexion. The humiliation consumed my friend and he killed himself. His father was retired military and so a gun wasn’t hard to come by. He shot himself in the head, and his family never forgave me for it. It had, after all, been my idea. 

At his funeral my friend’s father and brother approached me as the black clad audience somberly dispersed. His father spoke in clipped words to me, “Next time you..” but I never heard about the next time. I couldn’t bear to hear what he had to say and I ran away crying.

I find myself wondering, from time to time, what he had been about to say. But questions like that will never be answered. It wasn’t a moment exactly, this experience, but it was the most embarrassed and ashamed I have ever felt. I have never committed a crime since, and I will never forget that my friend paid for ours with his life.