On the back of the photograph, in a slanting hand that was not the handwriting of Howard, were two lines. I could have ended it in 1987. I watched your husband hug a boy who dropped a fly ball, and I went home. Live well. I sat on the edge of my bed in the night, holding a picture of myself at twenty nine, standing on the steps of the courthouse in Pocatello in a yellow dress. Someone had stood across the street and taken it. Someone had kept it for forty years.
The picture was signed with only two letters. S.V. I did not need the Marshal to tell me who they stood for. I carried the photograph into the kitchen and called Ed Garrity, who answered on the first ring, as though he had been sitting by the phone. I read him the note. For a long time he said nothing. Then he said, very softly, “Mrs. Pryce, I think you had better let me come back.”
He arrived at seven in the morning, and he brought a woman with him from the Marshals office in Boise, a young agent named Tolliver with a calm face. They sat at my table and studied the photograph through plastic gloves. Garrity said Sal Vitrano had been out of prison for nineteen days. He had been living in a halfway house in Denver, and he had one thing left to do. He was dying. Lung cancer, the prison doctor said, eight months at the most.
A man can spend forty years planning a terrible thing and still be undone by watching another man hug a child who dropped a ball.
Garrity said that Sal had called the insurance office on Tuesday and asked for the address, but he had told the secretary exactly why. He wanted to write a letter. A secretary who had worked there for thirty years, and who had known Howard since 1985, had the sense to ask for a phone number. She had written it on a sticky note and passed it to the Marshals instead. “He was not hunting,” Garrity said. “He was asking permission.”
I thought for a day and a night. I walked around my house and checked every lock, three times, just as Howard had, and then, standing in the dark with my hand on the back door, I understood that I had been checking them for forty years too, without knowing, out of a fear that had been handed to me like a sleeping baby. On the second morning I called Garrity and told him that I would meet the man, on one condition. Not in my house. In public, with coffee.
We met at a diner on the edge of Pocatello, in a back booth, with Garrity two tables away and the young agent at the counter. Sal Vitrano was a tall, ruined man with a yellow face and a tube in his nose, pushing an oxygen tank on a little cart. He rose when I came in. He took off his cap. His hands shook so badly that he spilled his coffee, and he apologized three times, as though the coffee were the worst thing he had ever done.
“Mrs. Pryce,” he said, “I came to Idaho in 1987 with a gun in my coat.” He told it plainly. He had followed Howard from the insurance office to a Little League field. He sat in his rented car and watched a quiet man in a cardigan kneel in the dirt and put his arm around a crying boy. “And I thought, that is a man with something to lose. And I thought, I have been losing everything for four years, and what will it fix?” He drove back to Denver that night.
He had kept the photograph in a drawer for forty years, he said. He had taken it as a reminder to leave you alone. He had wanted, all this time, to tell Howard that he had been forgiven. But in prison he found that the only person left to forgive was himself, and he was not yet able. He folded his hands on the table. “Your husband was a brave man. I am sorry that I spent his life making him afraid. I am sorry that I spent yours.”
I do not know what I expected to feel. What I felt, mostly, was sorrow, a wide gray sorrow for two men who had been so afraid of each other that they had wasted their lives. I told Sal that I was not able to forgive him for Howard. That was not mine to give. But I told him I was grateful that he had gone home that day in 1987. He bowed his head. Then he reached across the table and asked if he could see the Little League photograph, if I had one.
Sal died in February, in a hospice in Denver, with the Marshal beside him. He left me a note that said only, Thank you for the coffee. In March I unpacked the brown suitcase on my bed, folded the shirts into a drawer, and gave the shaving kit to my grandson. I slept that night with my back to the bedroom door for the first time in my marriage, and I woke at dawn, whole, to the sound of the Portneuf River running high with the snow.