Defending Jacob (35 page)

“The good news is that
NPD
is not a chemical imbalance. And it is not genetic. It is a complex of behaviors, a deeply ingrained habit. Which means it can be unlearned, over time.”

The doctor went on with barely a pause.

“The other disorder is actually the more disturbing one. Reactive attachment disorder is a relatively new diagnosis. And because it is new, we don’t know much about it. There hasn’t been much study done. It is uncommon, it is difficult to diagnose, and it is difficult to treat.

“The critical aspect of
RAD
is that it stems from a disruption of ordinary childhood emotional attachments in infancy. The theory is that ordinarily infants attach to a single, reliable caregiver, and from that secure base they explore the world. They know that their basic emotional and physical needs will be met by that one person. Where that reliable caregiver is not present or where the caregiver changes too often, children may relate to others in inappropriate ways, sometimes grossly inappropriate ways: aggression, rage, lying, defiance, lack of remorse, cruelty; or overfamiliarity, hyperactivity, self-endangerment.

“The definition of this disorder requires some sort of disruption in early caregiving—‘pathogenic care,’ usually mistreatment or neglect by the parent or caregiver. But there is some controversy about exactly what that means. I am not suggesting either of you were deficient in any way. This is not about your parenting. But recent research suggests the disorder can arise even without deficient caregiving. Some children just seem temperamentally vulnerable to attachment disorders, so that even minor disruptions—day care, for example, or being passed from one caregiver to the next too often—can be enough to trigger an attachment disorder.”

“Day care?” Laurie.

“Only in exceptional cases.”

“Jacob was in day care from the time he was three months old. We both worked. I stopped teaching when he was four.”

“Laurie, we don’t know enough to presume a cause and effect. You have to resist the urge to blame yourself. There is no reason to think neglect is the cause here. Jacob may just have been one of these vulnerable, hypersensitive children. This is all a very new area. We researchers are struggling to understand it ourselves.”

Dr. Vogel gave Laurie a reassuring look, but there was a hint in her voice of protesting too much, and I could see Laurie was not mollified.

Unable to help, Dr. Vogel simply plowed on. She seemed to think that the best way to get across all this devastating information was to do it quickly and get it over with.

“In Jacob’s case, whatever the trigger, there is evidence of atypical attachment as an infant. You’ve reported that as a child he seemed guarded and hypervigilant at times, or erratic and prone to excessive anger and lashing out at other times.”

Me: “But
all
kids are ‘erratic’ and ‘prone to excessive anger.’ Lots of kids go to day care and don’t—”

“It would be very unusual to see RAD”—she pronounced it as a rhyme for
bad
—“in the absence of some sort of neglect, but we simply don’t know.”

“Enough!” Laurie raised both hands in a stop sign. “Just stop it!” She stood and pushed her chair away, retreated to the far corner of the room. “You think he did it.”

“I didn’t say that,” Dr. Vogel demurred.

“You didn’t have to say it.”

“No, Laurie, really, I don’t have any way to know whether he did it. That’s not my job. It’s not what I set out to determine.”

Me: “Laurie, this is psychobabble. She said herself, you could say these things about any kid—narcissistic, self-centered. Find me a teenager who
isn’t
like that. It’s garbage. I don’t believe a word of it.”

“Of course you don’t! You never see these things. You’re so determined to be normal and for
us all
to be normal that you just close your eyes and ignore anything that doesn’t fit.”

“We
are
normal.”

“Oh my God. Do you think this is normal, Andy?”

“This situation? No. But do I think Jacob is normal? Yes! Is that so crazy?”

“Andy. You’re not seeing things right. I feel like I have to think for both of us because you just can’t see.”

I went over to her to comfort her, to lay my hand on her crossed arms. “Laurie, this is our son.”

She flailed her hands, batting mine away. “Andy, stop it. We are not normal.”

“Of course we are. What are you talking about?”

“You’ve been pretending. For years. All this time you’ve been pretending.”

“No. Not about the important things.”

“The important things! Andy, you didn’t tell the truth. All this time you never told the truth.”

“I never lied.”

“Every day you didn’t tell, you were lying. Every day. Every day.”

She shoved past me to confront Dr. Vogel again. “You think Jacob did it.”

“Laurie, please sit down. You’re upset.”

“Just say it. Don’t sit there and read me your report and recite the
DSM
to me. I can read the
DSM
too. Just say what you mean: he did it.”

“I can’t tell you he did or didn’t do it. I just don’t know.”

“So you’re saying he
might
have done it. You think it’s actually possible.”

“Laurie, please sit down.”

“I don’t want to sit down! Answer me!”

“I see certain traits and behaviors in Jacob that disturb me, yes, but that’s a very different thing—”

“And it’s our fault? Excuse me: it
could
be our fault, it’s
possible
that it
might just be
our fault, because we’re such bad parents, because we had the nerve, the … the cruelty to put him in day care like every other kid in this town. Every other kid!”

“No. I would not say that, Laurie. It is positively
not
your fault in any way. Put that thought right out of your head.”

“And the gene, this mutation you tested for. What do you call it? Knockout whatever.”

“
MAOA
Knockout.”

“Does Jacob have it?”

“The gene is not what you’re suggesting. I’ve explained, at the most it creates a predisposition—”

“Doctor. Does. Jacob. Have it?”

“Yes.”

“And my husband?”

“Yes.”

“And my—I don’t even know what to call him—my father-in-law?”

“Yes.”

“Well, there you go. Of course he does. And what you said earlier, about Jacob’s heart being two sizes too small, like the Grinch?”

“I should not have phrased it like that. That was a foolish thing to say. I’m sorry.”

“Never mind how you phrased it. Do you still believe it? Is my son’s heart two sizes too small?”

“We need to work on building an emotional vocabulary for Jacob. It’s not about the size of his heart. His emotional maturity is not at the same level as his peers.”

“What level is it at? His emotional maturity?”

Deep breath. “Jacob presents some of the characteristics of a boy half his age.”

“Seven! My son has the emotional maturity of a seven-year-old! That’s what you’re saying!”

“That’s not the way I’d put it.”

“So what do I do? What do I do?”

No answer.

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Shh,” I said, “he’ll hear you.”

D
ay three of the trial.

Beside me at the defense table, Jacob picked at a gristly nubbin of skin on his right thumb, near the nail. He had been scraping away at this area of his thumb for a while, nervously, absently, and had opened a little crack that extended from the cuticle down about a quarter inch toward the knuckle. He did not chew the cuticle, as kids often do. His method involved scratching the skin with a fingernail, lifting little peels and shavings until he succeeded in scooping up a substantial sliver, whereupon he would bear down and set about removing the rubbery protrusion by a battery of wiggles, tugs, and, when all else failed, slicing it with the dull edge of a fingernail. The area of these excavations never had a chance to heal. After a particularly aggressive excision, blood would seep from the wound, and he would have to squeeze his thumb with a Kleenex, if he had one, or stick the whole thing in his mouth to slurp it clean. He seemed to believe, against all logic, that no one could be bothered by this nauseating little drama.

I took the hand Jacob was punishing and moved it down into his lap, out of the jurors’ sight, then rested my arm protectively on the back of his chair.

On the stand, a woman was testifying. Ruthann Something-or-other. She was fifty years old or so. Likeable face. Short, plain haircut. More gray hair than dark, a fact she made no effort to conceal. No jewelry except a watch and wedding ring. She wore black clogs. She was one of the neighbors who walked their dogs along the trails in Cold Spring Park every morning. Logiudice had called her to testify that she passed a boy who roughly resembled Jacob near the murder scene that morning. It would have been a worthwhile bit of evidence if only this woman could deliver on it, but she was obviously suffering on the stand. She washed her hands over and over in her lap. She weighed every question before answering. Before long, her anxiety became more compelling than her actual testimony, which did not amount to much.

Logiudice: “Could you describe this boy?”

“He was average, I guess. Five nine, five ten. Skinny. He was wearing jeans and sneakers. Dark hair.”

This was not a boy she was describing, it was a shadow. Half the kids in Newton fit the description, and she was not done yet. She hedged and hedged, until Logiudice was reduced to prompting his own witness by sneaking into his questions little reminders, like cue cards, of what she had said in her initial answers to the police on the day of the murder. The prosecutor’s constant prompting got Jonathan up on his feet to object over and over, and the whole thing became increasingly ridiculous, with the witness getting ready to recant the ID, and Logiudice too dense to get her off the stand before she made it official, and Jonathan jumping up and down to object to the leading—

and somehow it all faded into the background for me. I could not focus on it, let alone care about it. I had a sinking sense that this whole trial did not matter. It was already too late. Dr. Vogel’s verdict mattered at least as much as this one would.

Next to me was Jacob, this riddle Laurie and I had made. His size, his resemblance to me, the likelihood that he would fill out and come to resemble me even more—all this shattered me. Every father knows the disconcerting moment when you see your child as a weird, distorted double of yourself. It is as if for a moment your identities overlap. You see an idea, a conception of your boyish inner self, stand right up in front of you, made real and flesh. He is you and not you, familiar and strange. He is you restarted, rewound; at the same time he is as foreign and unknowable as any other person. In the push/pull of this confusion, with my arm on the back of his chair, I touched his shoulder.

Guiltily he laid his hands flat on his lap, where he had gone back to picking the raw skin on his right thumb and had managed to pry up a new sliver.

Directly behind me, Laurie sat alone on the front bench. She sat alone every day of the trial. We were friendless in Newton, of course. I wanted to enlist Laurie’s parents to sit with her in the courtroom. I am sure they would have done it. But Laurie would not allow it. She was being a bit of a martyr here. She had brought down catastrophe on her own family by marrying into mine; now she was determined to pay the price alone. In court, people tended to leave a foot or so on either side of her. Whenever I turned, she was alone in that zone of isolation on the bench, distracted, her arms half folded, her chin resting in one hand, listening, looking down at the floor rather than at the witness. The night before, Laurie had been so shaken by Dr. Vogel’s diagnosis that she begged one of my Ambiens and still could not sleep. Lying in bed in the dark, she said, “If he
is
guilty, Andy, what do we do?” I told her there was nothing to do at the moment but wait until the jury decided if he was guilty or not. I tried to snuggle with her to comfort her, which seemed like the husbandly thing to do, but my touch rattled her even more and she wriggled away from me to the very edge of the bed, where she lay as still as she could but quite obviously awake, her sniffles and little movements betraying her. Back in her teaching days, Laurie had been (to me) a miraculous sleeper. She turned off the light as early as nine o’clock because she had to wake up so early, and she was asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow. But that was another Laurie.

Meanwhile, in the courtroom Logiudice apparently had decided to ride it out to the end with this witness, even as she gave every sign of imploding. It is hard to justify Logiudice’s decision in strategic terms, so I imagine he just wanted to prevent Jonathan from having the honor of eliciting her final recantation. Or maybe he still hoped, desperately, that she would come around in the end. But he would not give up, the stubborn bastard. It was actually sort of noble, in a weird way, like a captain going down with his ship or a monk dousing himself with gasoline and setting himself on fire. By the time Logiudice got to his last question—he had scripted the whole examination on his yellow legal pad and stuck to the script even as the witness improvised freely—Jonathan had put down his pen and was watching through his fingers.

Question: “Is the boy you saw in Cold Spring Park that morning sitting here in the courtroom today?”

Answer: “I can’t be sure.”

“Well, do you see a boy matching the description you gave of the boy from the park?”

Answer: “I don’t—I’m really not sure anymore. It was a kid. That’s all I know for sure. It was a long time ago. The more I think about it, I just don’t want to say. I don’t want to send some kid to prison for life if there’s a chance I might be wrong. I couldn’t live with myself if I did that.”

Judge French blew out a long, droll sigh. He arched his eyebrows and removed his glasses. “Mr. Klein, I take it you have no questions?”