A sobering price to pay

WOBURN - Two unraveled families sit in a bland, fluorescent-lit courtroom. The parents and their children hold each other, wiping away tears, trying to make it through another awful day.

They are here because one rainy Monday night 16 months ago, the Clarkes's boy, Matt, missed a bend and drove his car into an Arlington house. The Leones's boy, Paul, was in the passenger seat. Matt was drunk and high. He survived the crash. Paul died.

Now Matt, 19, in a too-big suit and bright white sneakers, stands before Judge Diane Kottmyer. Quietly, he pleads guilty to motor vehicle homicide. The judge asks him an endless series of questions to make sure he understands what he is doing. Yes, your Honor. Yes, your Honor. He wishes he was the one who died.

"The truth is that I live every day of my life knowing that my best friend is gone because of one night of mistakes that I made," he tells her. "There is nothing this court can do which compares to that."

Paul was tall, entertaining, a basketball player. He and Matt met playing lacrosse at Arlington High. Matt was quiet, but somehow they fit together. They were fixtures at each other's houses, each of the college-bound seniors adored by the other's family.

Carla Leone could not bring herself to sit in this courtroom today, could not bear to see Matt stand before the judge. She had long bombarded her son with warnings about getting into cars with drunk drivers. Call me, she would say to Paul. Doesn't matter what time it is. Doesn't matter where you are. I'll come pick you up.

"It was my constant refrain," she says. "He was like, 'Mom! You've said this a thousand times. Awkward!' "

Awful things happen to other people. Especially if you're 18. And so Matt drank and smoked pot and got behind the wheel of his father's white Sable. And Paul, sober, strapped himself in beside him.

Before the judge hands down Matt's sentence, Paul's father John, his eyes red-rimmed, rises to speak. He has rewritten his victim impact statement so many times to get it just right. But his grief pulls the polish off his careful sentences.

"Our house and dinner table seem oddly empty now," he says haltingly, his voice trembling. " I find that I am quite often only going through the motions of life."

Paul's father says he wants Matt to do jail time. Not because it would make him feel any better, but to send a message to other kids who think they're invincible. To show them there are prices to be paid. To make his son's death mean something.

"I cannot let Paul's death pass without some social benefit being derived from it," he says.

The Leone family, united in their grief, are divided on what should happen to Matt. Carla Leone sees no point in adding to Matt's misery. She sends along a statement for the prosecutor to read on her behalf.

"Sending Matt to jail will not bring me any relief. It will just bring me more pain . . . I do not believe any sentence imposed upon Matt will prevent another life from being taken, because no one believes it will happen to them."

The judge sends Matt to jail for one year.

He does not look back as the officers take him out of the courtroom and on to the Billerica House of Correction.

He does not see his own stricken family - his mother, his father, his two brothers - or Paul's weeping father and sister - watching the door close behind him.

He does not see John Leone stop as he passes Matt's mother, Terri Clarke, turning up his palms as if to say, "What can I say?"

He does not see them hug each other.

He does not hear his sobbing mother say sorry one last time before the Leones and the Clarkes go home to their separate hells.

Yvonne Abraham is a Globe columnist. Her e-mail address is abraham@globe.com