Defending Jacob(6)

“They have to open the school sometime. Life goes on.”

“You’re wrong, Andy.”

“How long do you want them to wait?”

“Until they catch the guy.”

“That could take a while.”

“So? What’s the worst that could happen? The kids miss a few days of school. So what? At least they’d be safe.”

“You can’t make them totally safe. It’s a big world out there. Big, dangerous world.”

“Okay, safer.”

I laid my book down on my belly, where it formed a little roof. “Laurie, if you keep the school closed, you send these kids the wrong message. School isn’t supposed to be dangerous. It’s not a place they should be afraid of. It’s their second home. It’s where they spend most of their waking hours. They want to be there. They want to be with their friends, not stuck at home, hiding under the bed so the bogeyman doesn’t get them.”

“The bogeyman already got one of them. That makes him not a bogeyman.”

“Okay, but you see what I’m saying.”

“Oh, I see what you’re saying, Andy. I’m just telling you you’re wrong. The number one priority is keeping the kids safe, physically. Then they can go be with their friends or whatever. Until they catch the guy, you can’t promise me the kids’ll be safe.”

“You need a guarantee?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll catch the guy,” I said. “I guarantee it.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

“You know this?”

“I expect it. We always catch ’em.”

“Not always. Remember the guy who killed his wife and wrapped her in a blanket in the back of the Saab?”

“We did catch that guy. We just couldn’t—all right, almost always. We almost always catch ’em. This guy we’ll catch, I promise you.”

“What if you’re wrong?”

“If I’m wrong, I’m sure you’ll tell me all about it.”

“No, I mean if you’re wrong and some poor kid gets hurt?”

“That won’t happen, Laurie.”

She frowned, giving up. “There’s no arguing with you. It’s like running into a wall over and over again.”

“We’re not arguing. We’re discussing.”

“You’re a lawyer; you don’t know the difference. I’m arguing.”

“Look, what do you want me to say, Laurie?”

“I don’t want you to say anything. I want you to listen. You know, being confident isn’t the same as being right. Think. We might be putting our son in danger.” She pressed her fingertip to my temple and shoved it, a gesture half playful, half pissed off. “Think.”

She turned away, laid her book atop a wobbly pile of others on her night table, and lay down with her back to me, curled up, a kid in an adult body.

“Here,” I said, “scootch over.”

With a series of body hops, she moved backward until her back was against me. Until she could feel some warmth or sturdiness or whatever she needed from me at that moment. I rubbed her upper arm.

“It’s going to be all right.”

She grunted.

I said, “I suppose make-up sex is out of the question?”

“I thought we weren’t arguing.”

“I wasn’t, but you were. And I want you to know: it’s okay, I forgive you.”

“Ha, ha. Maybe if you say you’re sorry.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You don’t sound sorry.”

“I am truly, deeply sorry. Truly.”

“Now say you’re wrong.”

“Wrong?”

“Say you’re wrong. Do you want it or not?”

“Hm. So, just to be clear: all I have to do is say I’m wrong and a beautiful woman will make passionate love to me.”

“I didn’t say passionate. Just regular.”

“Okay, so: say I’m wrong and a beautiful woman will make love to me, completely without passion but with pretty good technique. That’s the situation?”

“Pretty good technique?”

“Astounding technique.”

“Yes, Counselor, that’s the situation.”

I put away my book, McCullough’s biography of Truman, atop a slippery pile of slick magazines on my own night table, and turned off the light. “Forget it. I’m not wrong.”

“Doesn’t matter. You already said I’m beautiful. I win.”





3 | Back to School


Early the next morning there was a voice in the dark, in Jacob’s room, a groan—and I woke up to find my body already moving, swinging up onto its feet, shuffling around the foot of the bed. Still dense with sleep, I passed out of the gloom of the bedroom, through the gray light of dawn in the hallway, then back into darkness again in my son’s bedroom.

I turned on the wall switch and adjusted the dimmer. Jacob’s room was cluttered with huge oafish sneakers, a MacBook covered with stickers, an iPod, schoolbooks, paperback novels, shoe boxes filled with old baseball cards and comic books. In a corner, an Xbox was hooked up to an old TV. The Xbox disks and their cases were piled nearby, mostly combat role-play games. There was dirty laundry, of course, but also two stacks of clean laundry neatly folded and delivered by Laurie, which Jacob had declined to put away in his bureau because it was easier to pluck clean clothes right from the piles. On top of a low bookcase was a group of trophies Jacob had won when he was a kid playing youth soccer. He had not been much of an athlete, but back then every kid got a trophy, and in the years since he had simply never moved them. The little statues sat there like religious relics, ignored, virtually invisible to him. There was a vintage movie poster for a 1970s chop-socky picture, Five Fingers of Death, which featured a man in a karate outfit smashing his well-manicured fist through a brick wall. (“The Martial Arts Masterpiece! SEE one incredible onslaught after another! PALE before the forbidden ritual of the steel palm! CHEER the young warrior who alone takes on the evil war-lords of martial arts!”) The clutter in here was so deep and permanent, Laurie and I had long since stopped fighting with Jacob to clean it up. For that matter, we had stopped even noticing it. Laurie had a theory that the mess was a projection of Jacob’s inner life—that stepping into his bedroom was like stepping into his chaotic teenage mind—so it was silly to nag him about it. Believe me, this is what you get when you marry a shrink’s daughter. To me, it was just a messy room and it drove me crazy every time I came into it.