The Death Class: A True Story About Life (9 page)

On the morning of the trip, Caitlin told her father, “I’m not going.”

But he looked at her and replied, “You’re going.” For all of their problems, her parents knew this professor of hers was a good influence. Her dad’s words echoed:
Don’t be a quitter.

When Caitlin showed up at the medical examiner’s office, she saw a dead person on the table who had died of alcohol and drug abuse. She stared at the swollen organs, the liver, the lungs. She thought of her mother. This is what her body will look like if she doesn’t stop. But she did not throw up.

See? Norma said. Caitlin could face her worst fears without chants or pennies or sanitizers and still come out okay.

“It’s good to be alive, right?” the professor often told her students after the autopsy, including those who had run outside in tears. “Did you notice how fragile we are? We have no business taking our lives for granted.”

A
S THE SEMESTER
stretched on, Norma suggested it was time for Caitlin to visit a campus therapist. As Caitlin had been learning in school, most mental disorders came from a combination of biology and environment, and the professor thought the sessions could help now that Caitlin was beginning to understand the roots of her anxiety and OCD.

Maybe Norma was right, Caitlin thought. Maybe she could conquer her demons, invest in herself, even if her parents didn’t seem as though they ever would do the same. She could help others with her background in psychology and get a job working with young people who struggled like her. Maybe she could even get married one day and raise kids in a peaceful home. She could find her own skeleton key buried within.

“As long as a man has the strength to dream he can redeem his soul.” She’d heard those lyrics to a song once, and they were beginning to make sense. Caitlin had reason to hope for the future; she was madly in love. The closer she grew to Norma, the more she told her professor about him.

His name was Jonathan, and he was twenty-three, almost a year older than she was. They had known each other since high school, and it sometimes still felt as though they were love-struck teenagers.

She would never forget the day she’d fallen for him. Driving by the high school parking lot one summer afternoon in 2003, Caitlin’s best friend had spotted Jonathan talking to the school security guard. Her friend knew him through a mutual friend. Kids usually gathered in the parking lot, even when school wasn’t in session, to throw Frisbees or talk about what they could do next on lazy summer afternoons, but on this day it looked as though Jonathan might need help. The girls drove up to Jonathan and his two-door 1997 Firebird Formula. Caitlin’s friend asked if something was wrong.

“My car won’t start,” Jonathan said. He’d left the lights on, and his battery had died.

Wow, he’s cute, Caitlin thought. They had the same color eyes, hazel, with flecks of copper and green. Why hadn’t she paid more attention to him before?

“This is Jon,” her friend said, introducing them. Jonathan Steingraber.

Their mutual friend called someone she knew who fixed cars, and he showed up minutes later and got the Firebird started again, telling Jonathan to go to the auto shop and pick up a specific part. Caitlin stepped up. “I can go with you if you want.”

Jonathan looked at her as if he was considering the offer but then said it wasn’t necessary.

Was he being polite? Or was he just not interested? Caitlin couldn’t be sure. She handed over her phone number in case he needed help along the way again.

A few days later, she spotted him in the same school parking lot, next to his Firebird like the last time. But his car was not broken that day. As she approached, rain began to fall, and she stood before him, rapidly getting soaked.

“I’m having a party at my house,” she said. “You should come.”

“Yeah, I don’t think I can,” Jonathan said to her. “I just broke up with my girlfriend. I’m not in a good mood.”

Rejection again? Could his girlfriend have been the reason he’d turned down her offer to accompany him to the auto shop the other day?

“Come on,” Caitlin said flirtatiously. “Just come to my party.”

He flashed a perfect grin. “All right.”

It was the beginning of Jonathan and Caitlin.

C
AITLIN COULD NEVER
have known that Jonathan had kept his eyes on her all school year. Or that he already knew her name. She would later learn that he’d watched Caitlin from afar for months before they met, mostly passing her in hallways since they didn’t share any classes, catching glimpses of her in her baggy sweatpants, tank tops, and Timberland boots. At the time, she was a grade ahead of him. She soon discovered that he had been held back a grade because his own family upheaval had forced him to move around so much. She would also find out that he really didn’t need any more convincing that day. Jonathan was surprised that she was coming on to him. He tried to help her realize that she didn’t need to be any thinner. He thought her body was beautiful the way it was.

Caitlin felt the rush of love: joy, heart palpitations, constant fantasizing.

But that was all a reaction to her “brain on drugs,” as Norma explained the behavior to students in her love lectures. “It’s all your mind’s trick to get you to have sex and make babies.” When a person is attracted to someone, as the professor explained, his or her brain becomes flooded with a cocktail of chemicals—many of the same feel-good chemicals that are released in the dying brain.

Though euphoria might be one characteristic of the brain and body’s intense reaction to love, according to one study published in the
Journal of Neurophysiology,
others can include “focused attention on the preferred individual, rearrangement of priorities, increased energy, mood swings, sympathetic nervous system responses including sweating and a pounding heart, emotional dependence, elevated sexual desire, sexual possessiveness, obsessive thinking about him or her, craving for emotional union with this preferred individual, affiliative gestures, goal oriented behaviors, and intense motivation to obtain and retain this particular mating partner.”

It is that feeling of “I wonder what that person’s doing, I wonder what that person’s thinking, is he going to call me, is he going to text me, should I go on Facebook, see if they’re on Facebook, if I go here maybe I’ll see him
again.” Norma rattled off the thoughts at high speed. Serotonin, she explained, is likely responsible for the feelings of infatuation, while norepinephrine causes an adrenaline rush (the heart beating faster, blood pumping, loss of appetite), and dopamine can be linked to increased energy, cravings, and intense bursts of utter elation followed by withdrawal symptoms, similar to what happens with cocaine addiction.

Some people become so dependent on these love highs that when such feelings wane in one relationship, they jump into another. Someone experiencing unrequited love may end up acting out with “inappropriate phoning, writing or e-mailing, pleading for reconciliation, sobbing for hours, drinking too much and/or making dramatic entrances and exits into the rejecter’s home, place of work or social space to express anger, despair or passionate love,” according to the
Journal of Neurophysiology
study.

But real love? That isn’t just a conglomeration of temporary chemical reactions. Real love sustains itself on good and bad days, as the professor taught, after the rush of infatuation-stage neurotransmitters have normalized and oxytocin, the cuddling hormone, has become more prevalent.

Caitlin now believed she was way past infatuation-stage endorphins. She loved Jonathan because he was protective and gentle, yet stronger than she could ever be. For most of her life, her dad was the one person in her life who made her feel truly loved. But now, Jonathan made her feel that special too. It had taken years of dating for her to fully comprehend the horror of Jonathan’s childhood, which was far worse than all of her combined memories of pills stuffed into socks, Mommy’s suicide attempts, stray gunshots, and thrown-up Doritos.

Jonathan didn’t talk about his childhood much to anyone. It took a while for him to trust her enough, but eventually he did. Most others didn’t know why he had no parents or why, as soon as Jonathan had turned eighteen, he’d adopted his younger brother.

Caitlin’s heart broke when she tried to imagine Jonathan as the child he had been before he’d grown into the young man she’d fallen for. The very thought of him at such an innocent age made her want to reach into the past, before his world had severed, and protect that little boy from all of the pain and death to come.

March 10, 1996

Eleven-year-old Jonathan Steingraber opened his eyes. Some kind of loud noise had jolted him awake. Like screams, he thought. Definitely screams, a woman’s screams, and they sounded close, as if they were coming from the living room, or the kitchen. Still in his pajamas, he stumbled out of bed.

Jonathan liked wearing his pajamas, especially the fuzzy warm kind that zipped up the front. He and his two brothers would stuff them with pillows and fight like sumo wrestlers. Wrestling, Super Nintendo, and eating mounds of Cheerios—that’s what life was all about, and the boys’ lives, so far, had been pretty good, apart from their parents’ divorce.

They’d watched a movie before falling asleep that night, and now it seemed really late, maybe two in the morning, though Jonathan couldn’t be sure. He glanced at his brothers. Nine-year-old Josh, the youngest of the three, and twelve-year-old Chris were both fast asleep in their bunk beds, oblivious to the uproar beyond their bedroom. Jonathan was the middle child, a take-charge, sports-buff kind of boy who balanced out the sensitive Chris and the stubborn rascal, Josh.

Jonathan followed the screams, breaking into a run down the hall, past his dad’s room, past the bathroom, past the living room of the two-bedroom apartment they shared with their dad. The boys had been living here, across from a high school athletic field just off the Garden State Parkway, for about a year. Their parents had split two years earlier, and they had lived with Mom first, but she’d quickly decided she’d had enough of the boys’ unruliness.
The brothers fought with each other all the time. They drove their mom’s new boyfriend nuts.

Once Josh had refused to take a shower. It was nothing new. Josh always refused to take showers. But since Josh was the most ornery of the three, Jonathan knew that neither he nor Chris could calm him when he got into one of his moods. All they could do was deal with the consequences. So when their mom’s boyfriend smacked Josh across the face for disobeying, Jonathan and Chris jumped to their little brother’s defense right there in the bathroom, pummeling the man with all their might. When the boys visited their father that weekend, they told him what had happened. He flipped out. “I’m not letting some other guy put his hands on you,” Jonathan remembered his dad telling them. The next thing they knew, they were living with dad in Roselle Park, a borough of New Jersey ten minutes from Newark International Airport.

It was cool living with Dad. He took the boys fishing at the waterway in Union County’s Nomahegan Park, where they caught bass and cooked them for dinner. They played basketball together, and football. He told them not to smoke or hit girls, cooked them fettuccine or made them hot sandwiches, and walked Jonathan and Josh to school each morning. Chris was old enough to walk to school on his own. Jonathan knew their dad was not happy about the divorce, but he didn’t seem to show his emotions that often.

So it confused Jonathan when he stumbled into the kitchen that night and saw blood. Lakes of it. He saw his dad, in his work boots, jeans, and white T-shirt, the same outfit he always wore since he worked as a handyman and also in a factory. Why was his dad punching someone in the face? Jonathan looked at the person on the floor. He recognized the long trench coat. He could make out the woman’s blood-drenched hair. Jonathan knew that hair. It changed styles and colors often. The person it belonged to worked as a beautician and massage therapist. Her hair was long, wavy, and black. Mom. She was drowning in her own blood.

“Stop it!” Jonathan yelled. “Stop! Get off of her! Don’t you know who that is?”

“Yeah, it’s your mother. Go back to your room.”

Why was Mom here in the middle of the night? Why was she on the ground?
The next thing Jonathan knew, his father was wielding a steak knife. It had a black handle, or maybe wooden. All Jonathan could focus on was what happened next. His dad plunged the knife into his mom’s chest. Over and over. She’d been stabbed already, before Jonathan even got there.

Jonathan ran over to his dad. He tried to hit him. But his dad shrugged him off. Jonathan bounced back and tried to pull his dad away. But his dad pushed him again. Jonathan looked at the phone on the wall and thought about calling someone, but his dad grabbed him and carried him back to the bedroom, where his brothers were beginning to stir.

“Stay here,” his dad told him, shutting him in.

Jonathan opened the door and followed him back into the kitchen. His dad snatched him up again and took him back to the room, then returned to the kitchen to finish off his mom. He stabbed her twelve times in all.

When he was done, he told Jonathan, “Wake up your brothers. We’re leaving. Don’t put on your shoes, let’s just go.”

It felt like the inside of a freezer as they made their way to the car outside. Jonathan was barefoot. His dad tramped across ice and snow in his boots, headed toward their mom’s car.

This was his chance. Jonathan could make a run for it, zigzagging between parked cars, bolting through an obstacle course of snow-covered bushes and alleys between brick buildings until he showed up at a neighbor’s place, panting, heart pounding, banging on the door with his tiny fists.