Work Text:
One day, Lyle randomly got a phone call. Luke was sleeping on the top bunk, turned over to face the wall, when a guard came for him. “You have a call, Menendez. You got ten minutes, okay?”
Lyle quietly followed the guard to the room where five pay phones lined the wall. He picked up the phone the guard pointed to, his fingers shaking. “Hello?”
His voice is thin and tinny, like the sound of a dime being dropped down into a mine. “Honey? Lyle?” It was his Aunt Terry, José’s older sister.
Unlike José’s younger sister, his Aunt Marta, Lyle had not seen Aunt Terry in more than six years — not since the first trial ended in a hung jury.
“Aunt Terry.” Lyle couldn't say anything else. “Oh god,” he heard his Aunt say, holding the phone away from her mouth. “Oh Jesus, Lyle?” She sounded choked up. “Honey, how are you doing?!”
“Um...” Lyle’s voice trailed off. Once, he would have answered her question without any hesitation. In the family, Lyle had gained the reputation of being quick on the draw, so to speak. He was blunt and brash, never one to hold back.
Now, though, he was at a loss. What did you say to the woman whose little brother you had killed, whose head you had basically blown off?
In the courtroom, the prosecution had seemed to take a sort of morbid glee when they read José’s autopsy, that his "brain had been predominantly eviscerated," and that he had been "explosively decapitated" by the shot to the back of his head.
“I'm uh, I'm doing okay, I guess. As well as can be expected, considering.”
Considering. Terry Menendez Baralt had called her nephew because she had woken up that morning weeping from a nightmare that was also a memory.
In it, Lyle had been six years old, small and sweet, giving Terry a mischievous grin when she caught him sneaking candy out of a forbidden drawer at her house.
Later, Lyle had cornered Terry in the living room of the house in Hopewell. Tears had leaked from his eyes, his voice rough with sobs as Lyle confided in her about José. About how he liked to touch Lyle ‘down there,’ and how it was really starting to hurt.
Later, sitting in the confessional box of her church, Terry had tried to reason with herself, and had tried to minimize the guilt she felt like a stain on her soul.
She had not dared to speak to José, had not imagined that he could truly be capable of the evil things little Lyle had accused him of.
She had sat in the courtroom every day for the first trial, desperate to make up for not speaking out.
Terry had realized too late how simple it would have been to just talk to José, to ask him what the hell he thought he was doing, and to go to the police.
How, she wondered, could she have said to her nephews that she loved him, and that they were the most important people in the world to her, and yet have allowed her younger brother to abuse them for so many years?
How could she sit in church on Sunday and draw a halo around her head, make the sign of the cross, and act like she was so holy and saintly, when all evidence pointed to the contrary?
Such questions hadn't entered Terry's mind until it was far too late, her brother and sister-in-law cold and rotting in the ground in Princeton, while her nephews rotted in prison in California.
Terry closed her eyes and sobbed, her eyeliner melting. “Lyle, my sweet, darling nephew! For what it is worth, I love you. I love you, and you are in my prayers, every single day. Close your eyes, Lyle. I will say a prayer for you now.”
Obediently, Lyle closed his eyes. He listened while Aunt Terry prayed on and on, crying, her voice shaking and barely coherent, until the call was dropped.