Defending Jacob (19 page)

Dr. Vogel: “Andy, looking back, what do
you
think about all those kids who got hurt around Jacob? All the kids falling off playground structures and crashing bicycles? Was it all just bad luck? Coincidence? How do you think about it?”

“Jacob had a lot of energy; he played too rough. I acknowledge that. It’s something we dealt with when he was a kid. But that’s all it was. I mean, this all happened before Jake got to kindergarten. Kindergarten!”

“And the anger? You don’t think Jacob has an issue with anger?”

“No, I don’t. People get angry. It’s not an
issue
.”

“There’s a report here from Jacob’s file that he punched a hole in the wall in his bedroom. You had to call a plasterer. This was just last fall. Is that true?”

“Yes, but—how did you get that?”

“Jonathan.”

“That was for Jacob’s legal defense only!”

“That’s what we’re doing here, preparing his defense. Is it true? Did he punch a hole in the wall?”

“Yes. So what?”

“People don’t generally punch holes in walls, do they?”

“Sometimes they do, actually.”

“Do you?”

Deep breath. “No.”

“Laurie thinks you may have a blind spot about the possibility of Jacob being … violent. What do you think of that?”

“She thinks I’m in denial.”

“Are you?”

I shook my head in a stubborn, melancholy way, like a horse swaying its head in a narrow stall. “No. Just the opposite. I’m hyperalert to these things; I’m hyperaware. I mean, you know my background. My whole life—” Deep breath. “Lookit, you’re always concerned when kids get hurt; even if it’s an accident, you never want to see something like that. And you’re always concerned when your own kid behaves in ways that are … disturbing. So yes, I was aware of these things, I was concerned. But I knew Jacob, I knew my kid, and I loved him and I believed in him. And I still do. I’m sticking with him.”

“We’re all sticking with him, Andy. That’s completely unfair! I love him too. It’s got nothing to do with that.”

“I never said you didn’t, Laurie. Did you hear me say you didn’t love him?”

“No, but you always retreat to that:
I love him
. Of course you love him. We both love him. I’m just saying, you can love your child and still see his flaws. You
have
to see his flaws, otherwise how can you help him?”

“Laurie, did you or did you not hear me say you didn’t love him?”

“Andy, that’s not what I’m saying! You’re not listening!”

“I am listening! I just don’t agree with you. You’re drawing this picture of Jacob as violent and moody and, and dangerous, based on nothing, and I just disagree. But if I disagree, you say I’m being dishonest. Or ‘unreliable.’ You’re calling me a liar.”

“I did
not
call you a liar! I’ve never called you a liar.”

“You didn’t use the word, no.”

“Andy, no one’s attacking you. There’s nothing wrong with admitting your son might need a little help. It doesn’t say anything about you.”

The comment bayoneted me. Because
of course
Laurie was talking about me. This whole thing was completely about me. I was the reason, the only reason, she thought our son might be dangerous. If he were not a Barber, no one would ever have parsed his childhood so closely for signs of trouble.

But I remained silent. What was the use? There was no defense to being a Barber.

Dr. Vogel said cautiously, “Okay, maybe we should just stop here. I’m not sure it would be productive to go on much longer. This isn’t easy for anyone, I realize. We’ve made some progress. We can try again next week.”

I looked down at my lap, avoiding Laurie’s eyes, ashamed, though for what I was not exactly sure.

“Let me just ask you both one last question. Maybe we can leave on a happier note, okay? So let’s assume for a moment that this case will go away. Assume that in a few months the case will be dismissed and Jacob will be free to go and do whatever he pleases. Just as if this case had never happened. No qualifications, no lingering shadows, nothing at all. Now, if that were to happen, where would you see your son in ten years? Laurie?”

“Wow. I can’t think that way. I’m just getting through from one day to the next, you know? Ten years is just … too hard to imagine.”

“Okay, I understand. But just as a thought exercise, try. Where do you see your son in ten years?”

Laurie considered. She shook her head. “I can’t. I don’t even like to think about it. I just can’t envision anything good. I think about Jacob’s situation constantly, Doctor,
constantly
, and I can’t see how this story could end happily. Poor Jacob. I just
hope
, you know? That’s all I can do. But if I think about when he’s older and we’re not around? I don’t know, I just hope he’s okay.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

“All right, how about you, Andy? If this case disappeared, where would you see Jacob in ten years?”

“If he walks on this case?”

“That’s right.”

“I see him happy.”

“Happy, okay.”

“Maybe with someone, a wife who makes him happy. Maybe a father. With a son.”

Laurie shifted.

“But through with all this teenage crap. All the self-pity, the narcissism. If Jacob has a weakness, it’s that he doesn’t have the kind of discipline it takes. He’s … self-indulgent. He doesn’t have the … I don’t know … the steel.”

Dr. Vogel: “The steel to do what?”

Laurie looked at me across her shoulder, curious.

We all heard the answer in our heads, I think, even Dr. Vogel:
the steel to be a Barber
.

“To grow up,” I said weakly. “To be an adult.”

“Like you?”

“No. Not like me. Jake’s got to do it his own way, I know that. I’m not one of those dads.”

I pulled my elbows into my lap, as if trying to squeeze through a narrow passageway.

“Jacob doesn’t have the kind of discipline you had as a kid?”

“No, he doesn’t.”

“Why does that matter, Andy? What is he steeling himself for? Or against?”

The two women shared a glance, the briefest eye-tap. They were studying me, together, understanding each other. Judging me
unreliable
, in Laurie’s word.

“Life,” I murmured. “Jacob’s got to steel himself against life. Same as every other kid.”

Laurie leaned forward, elbows on knees, and she took my hand.

A
fter the catastrophe of Jacob’s arrest, every day had an unbearable urgency. A dull, constant anxiety set in. In some ways, the weeks that followed the arrest were worse than the event itself. We were all counting the days, I think. Jacob’s trial was scheduled for October 17, and the date became an obsession. It was as if the future, which we had formerly measured by the length of our lives, as everyone does, now had a definite endpoint. Whatever lay beyond the trial, we could not imagine. Everything—the entire universe—ended on October 17. All we could do was count down the 179 days until then. This is something I did not understand when I was like you, when nothing had ever happened to me: how much easier it was to endure the big moments than the in-between times, the non-events, the waiting. The high drama of Jacob’s arrest, his arraignment in court, and so on—bad as those were, they barreled past and were gone. The real suffering came when no one was looking, during those 179 long days. The unoccupied afternoons in a quiet house, when worry silently engulfed us. The intense awareness of time, the heaviness of the passing minutes, the dizzying, trippy sense that the days were both too few and too long. In the end, we were eager for the trial if only because we could not stand the waiting. It was like a deathwatch.

One night in May—28 days after the arrest, 151 still to go—the three of us were sitting at the dinner table.

Jacob was sullen. He rarely lifted his eyes from his plate. He chewed his food noisily, like a little kid, making wet, squishing sounds, a habit he had since he was a little kid. “I don’t understand why we have to do this every night,” he said in an offhand way.

“Do what?”

“Have, like, a big sit-down dinner, like it’s a party or something. It’s just the three of us.”

Laurie explained, not for the first time, “It’s pretty simple, really. That’s what families do. They sit down and have a proper dinner together.”

“But it’s just us.”

“So?”

“So it’s like, every night you spend all this time cooking for
three people
. Then we sit down and eat for, like, fifteen minutes. Then we have to spend even more time after, doing all the dishes, which we wouldn’t even
have
if you didn’t make such a big deal about it every night.”

“It’s not so bad. I don’t see you doing too many dishes, Jacob.”

“That’s not the point, Mom. It’s just a waste. We could just have pizza or Chinese or whatever and the whole thing’d be over in like fifteen minutes.”

“But I don’t want the whole thing to be over in fifteen minutes. I want to enjoy dinner with my family.”

“You actually
want
it to take an hour every night?”

“I’d prefer two hours. I’ll take what I can get.” She smirked, sipped her water.

“We never made a big deal about dinner before.”

“Well, we do now.”

“I know why you’re really doing it, Mom.”

“Yeah? Why’s that?”

“So I won’t get all depressed. You think if I just have a nice family dinner every night, my case will just go away.”

“Well, I certainly don’t think that.”

“Good, because it’s not going away.”

“I just want it to go away for a little while, Jacob. Just one hour a day. Is that really so awful?”

“Yes! Because it doesn’t work. It makes things worse. It’s like, the more you pretend everything is so normal, the more you remind me how
un
-normal it really is. I mean, look at this.” He waggled his arms around, flummoxed by the old-fashioned,
haimish
dinner Laurie had made: chicken pot pie, fresh string beans, lemonade, with a cylindrical candle for a centerpiece. “It’s
fake
normal.”

“Like jumbo shrimp,” I said.

“Andy, shush. Jacob, what do you want me to do? I’ve never been in this situation before. What should a mom do? Tell me and I’ll do it.”

“I don’t know. If you want to keep me from getting depressed, give me drugs, not … chicken pot pie.”

“I’m afraid I’m all out of drugs at the moment.”

“Jake,” I said between bites, “Derek could probably hook you up.”

“That’s very helpful, Andy. Jacob, has it ever occurred to you that the reason I make dinner every night, and the reason I don’t let you eat in front of the TV, and the reason I don’t let you stand around the kitchen eating your dinner out of Tupperware or skip dinner altogether and stay up in your room playing video games, is because of
me
. Maybe this is all for me, not you. This isn’t easy for me either.”

“Because you don’t think I’m going to get off.”

“No.”

The phone rang.

“Yes! I mean,
obviously
. Otherwise you wouldn’t need to count every dinner.”

“No, Jacob. It’s because I want to have my family around me. When times are tough, that’s what families do. They gather around, they support each other. Everything isn’t always about you, you know.
You
need to be there for
me
too.”

There was a moment’s silence. Jacob seemed unabashed at his adolescent self-absorbed narcissism; he just couldn’t think of a suitably snappy comeback.

The phone rang again.

Laurie gave Jacob a so-there look—eyebrows raised, chin tucked—then she got up to answer the phone, hurrying a little to reach it before the fourth ring, when the answering machine would intercept the call.

Jacob looked wary. Why was Mom answering the phone? We had already learned not to respond to the ringing. Jacob knew, certainly, that the call was not for him. His friends had all dropped him cold. Anyway, he had never used the telephone much. He considered it intrusive, awkward, archaic, inefficient. Any friend who wanted to speak to Jake would just text him or log on to Facebook to chat. These new technologies were more comfortable because less intimate. Jake preferred typing to talking.

I felt an instinctive urge to warn Laurie not to answer, but I held back. I did not want to spoil the evening. I wanted to support her. These family dinners were important to Laurie. Jacob was essentially right: she wanted to preserve as much normalcy as possible. Presumably that’s why she let her guard down: we were laboring to behave like a normal family, and normal families are not afraid of the phone.

I said, in a coded reminder, “What does the caller ID say?”

“ ‘Private caller.’ ”

She picked up the phone, which was in the kitchen, in clear view of the dining room table. Her back was to Jacob and me. She said, “Hello,” then went silent. Over the next few seconds, her shoulders and back slumped by infinitesimal degrees. It was as if she was deflating slightly as she listened.

I said, “Laurie?”

In a shaky voice, she said to the caller, “Who is this? Where did you get this number?”

More listening.

“Don’t call here again. Do you hear me? Don’t you dare call here again.”

I took the phone from her gently and hung it up.

“Oh my God, Andy.”

“Are you okay?”

She nodded.

We went back to the table and sat quietly for a moment.

Laurie picked up her fork and scooped a token bit of chicken into her mouth. Her face was rigid, her body still wilted and round-shouldered.

“What did he say?” Jacob asked.

“Just eat your dinner, Jacob.”

I could not reach her across the table. All I could offer was a concerned face.

“You could star-sixty-nine him,” Jacob suggested.

“Let’s just enjoy our dinner,” Laurie said. She took another nibble and chewed busily, then sat absolutely stone still.

“Laurie?”

She cleared her throat, mumbled “Excuse me,” and left the table.

There were still 151 days to go.