He had been hiding for hours, mostly in the woods of Cold Spring Park, in backyards, and in the play structure behind the elementary school he had once attended, which is where the cops found him at around eight o’clock.
He submitted to the handcuffs without complaint, the police report said. He did not run. He greeted the cop by saying “I’m the one you’re looking for” and “I didn’t do it.” When the cop said dismissively, “Then how did your fingerprint get on the body?,” Jacob blurted—foolishly or cannily, I am still not sure—“I found him. He was already lying there. I tried to pick him up so I could help him. Then I saw he was dead, and I got scared and ran.” It was the only statement Jacob ever gave the police. He must have realized, belatedly, that it was risky to blurt out confessions like that one, and he never said another word. Jacob knew, as few boys do, the full value of the Fifth Amendment. Later, there would be speculation about why Jacob made this singular statement, how complete and self-serving it was. There were intimations he had crafted the statement beforehand and conveniently let it slip—he was gaming the case, launching his defense as early as possible. All I know for sure is that Jacob was never as smart or as cunning as he was described in the media.
In any case, after that, the only thing Jacob told the cop, over and over, was “I want my dad.”
He could not be bailed that night. He was held in the lockup in Newton, just a mile or two from our house.
Laurie and I were allowed to see him only briefly, in a little windowless visiting room.
Jacob was obviously shaken. His eyes were watery and red-rimmed. His face was flushed, a single horizontal slash of red across each cheek, like war paint. He was obviously scared shitless. At the same time he was trying to stay composed. His manner was clenched, rigid, mechanical. A boy imitating manliness, at least an adolescent’s conception of manliness. That was the part that broke my heart, I think, the way he struggled to hold it together, to keep that storm of emotion—panic, anger, sorrow—all siloed up inside himself. He would not be able to do it much longer, I thought. He was burning fuel fast.
“Jacob,” Laurie said in a wobbly voice, “are you all right?”
“No! Obviously not.” He gestured at the room around him, the situation he was in, and made a sardonic face. “I’m dead.”
“Jake—”
“They’re saying I killed Ben? No way. No way. I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe this.”
I said, “Hey, Jake, it’s a mistake. It’s some kind of horrible misunderstanding. We’ll work it out, okay? I don’t want you to lose hope. This is just the beginning of the process. There’s a long way to go.”
“I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. I’m just, like”—he made an exploding sound and with his hands he sculpted a mushroom cloud—“you know? It’s like, it’s like, who’s that guy? In the story?”
“Kafka.”
“No. The guy from, whatsit? The movie.”
“I don’t know, Jake.”
“Where the guy, like, finds out the world isn’t really the world? It’s just, like, a dream? Like a simulation? A computer made it all? And now he gets to see the real world. It’s, like, an old movie.”
“I’m not sure.”
“The Matrix!”
“The Matrix? That’s old?”
“Keanu Reeves, Dad? Please.”
I looked at Laurie. “Keanu Reeves?”
She shrugged.
It was amazing that Jake could be goofy, even now. But he was. He was the same dorky kid that he had been a few hours before—had always been, for that matter.
“Dad, what am I supposed to do?”
“We’re going to fight. We’ll fight this every step of the way.”
“No, I mean, like, not generally. Now. What happens next?”
“There’ll be an arraignment tomorrow morning. They’ll just read the charge and we’ll set bail and you’ll come home.”
“How much is bail?”
“We’ll find out tomorrow.”
“What if we can’t afford it? What happens to me?”
“We’ll find it, don’t worry. We have some money saved up. We have the house.”
He sniffed. He’d heard me complain about money a thousand times. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t do it, I swear. I know I’m not, like, a perfect kid, okay? But I didn’t do this.”
“I believe you.”
Laurie added, “You are perfect, Jacob.”
“I didn’t even know Ben. He was just, like, this kid from school. Why would I do this? Huh? Why? Okay, why are they saying I did this?”
“I don’t know, Jake.”
“This is your case! What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“I just don’t know.”
“You mean, you don’t want to tell me.”
“No. Don’t say that. Jake, do you think I was investigating you? Really?”
He shook his head. “So just for no reason—for no reason—I killed Ben Rifkin? That’s just—that’s just—I don’t know what it is. It’s crazy. This whole thing is totally crazy.”
“Jacob, you don’t have to convince us. We’re on your side. Always. No matter what happens.”
“Jesus.” He raked his fingers through his hair. “This is Derek’s fault. He did this. I know it.”
“Derek? Why Derek?”
“He’s just—he’s like—he gets freaked out by stuff, you know? Like, the littlest things and he freaks out about them. I swear, when I get out, I’m going to fuck him up. I swear it.”
“Jake, I don’t think Derek could have done this.”
“He did. You watch. That kid.”
Laurie and I exchanged a puzzled look.
“Jake, we’re going to get you out of here. We’ll put up the bail, whatever it is. We’ll find the money. We’re not going to let you sit in jail. But you’re going to have to spend the night here, just until the arraignment in the morning. We’ll meet you at the courthouse first thing. We’ll have a lawyer with us. You’ll be home for dinner tomorrow. Tomorrow you’re going to sleep in your own bed, I promise.”
“I don’t want a lawyer. I want you. You be my lawyer. Who could be better?”
“I can’t.”
“Why not? I want you. You’re my father. I need you now.”
“It’s a bad idea, Jacob. You need a defense lawyer. Anyway, it’s all taken care of. I called my friend Jonathan Klein. He’s very, very good, I promise you.”
He frowned, disappointed. “You couldn’t do it anyway. You’re a DA.”
“Not anymore.”
“You got fired?”
“Not yet. I’m on leave. They’ll fire me later, probably.”
“ ’Cuz of me?”
“No, not ’cuz of you. You didn’t do anything. It’s just the way things go.”
“So what are you going to do? Like, for money? You need a job.”
“Don’t worry about money. Let me worry about money.”
A cop, some young kid I did not know, knocked and said, “Time.”
Laurie told Jacob, “We love you. We love you so much.”
“Okay, Mom.”
She wrapped her arms around him. For a moment he did not move at all, and Laurie stood there hugging him as if she had embraced a tree or a building column. Finally he relented and patted her back.
“Do you know it, Jake? Do you know how much we love you?”
Over her shoulder, he rolled his eyes. “Yes, Mom.”
“Okay.” She pulled herself away and swiped the tears from her eyes. “Okay, then.”
Jacob seemed to tremble on the verge of crying as well.
I hugged him. I pulled him close, squeezed hard, then stepped back. I looked him over from head to toe. There was mud ground into the knees of his jeans from the hours he had spent hiding in Cold Spring Park, in a rainy April. “You be strong, okay?”
“You too,” he said. He grinned, apparently catching the dopiness of his answer.
We left him there.
And still the night was not over.
At two A.M. I was in the living room, slumped on the couch. I felt marooned, unable to move my body up to the bedroom or to fall asleep where I was.
Laurie padded down the stairs barefoot, in pajama bottoms and a favorite turquoise T-shirt that was now too threadbare for anything but sleeping in. Her breasts drooped inside it, defeated by age, gravity. Her hair was a mess, her eyes half shut. The sight of her nearly brought me to tears. From the third step she said, “Andy, come to bed. There’s nothing more we can do tonight.”
“Soon.”
“Not soon; now. Come.”
“Laurie, come here. There’s something we have to talk about.”
She shuffled across the front hall to join me in the living room, and in those dozen steps she seemed to come fully awake. I was not the type to ask for help often. When I did, it alarmed her. “What is it, sweetheart?”
“Sit down. There’s something I have to tell you. Something that’s going to come out soon.”
“About Jacob?”
“About me.”
I told her everything, all that I knew about my bloodline. About James Burkett, the first bloody Barber, who came east from the frontier like a reverse pioneer bringing his wildness to New York. And Rusty Barber, my war-hero grandfather who wound up gutting a man in a fight over a traffic accident in Lowell, Massachusetts. And my own father, Bloody Billy Barber, whose shadowy climactic orgy of violence involved a young girl and a knife in an abandoned building. After thirty-four years of waiting, the whole story took only five or ten minutes to tell. Once it was out, it seemed like a puny thing to have found so burdensome for so long, and I was confident, briefly, that Laurie would see it that way too.
“That’s what I come from.”
She nodded, blank-faced, doped with disappointment—in me, in my history, in my dishonesty. “Andy, why didn’t you ever tell me?”
“Because it didn’t matter. It was never who I was. I’m not like them.”
“But you didn’t trust me to understand that.”
“No. Laurie, it’s not about that.”
“You just never got around to it?”
“No. At the beginning I didn’t want you to think of me that way. Then the longer it went, the less it seemed to matter. We were so … happy.”
“Until now, when you had to tell me, you had no choice.”
“Laurie, I want you to know about it now because it’s probably going to come out—not because it really has anything to do with this, but because shit like this always comes out. It has nothing to do with Jacob. Or me.”
“You’re sure of that?”
I died for a moment. Then: “Yes, I’m sure.”
“So sure that you felt you had to hide it from me.”
“No, that’s not right.”
“Anything else you haven’t told me?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
She thought it over. “Okay, then.”
“Okay meaning what? Do you have any questions? Do you want to talk?”
She gave me a reproachful look: I was asking her if she wanted to talk? At two in the morning? On this morning?
“Laurie, nothing is different. This doesn’t change anything. I’m the same person you’ve known since we were seventeen.”
“Okay.” She looked down at her lap where her hands were wrestling. “You should have told me before, that’s all I can say right now. I had a right to know. I had a right to know who I was marrying, who I was having a child with.”
“You did know. You married me. All this other stuff is just history. It’s got nothing to do with us.”
“You should have told me, that’s all. I had a right to know.”
“If I’d told you, you wouldn’t have married me. You wouldn’t have gone out with me in the first place.”
“You don’t know that. You never gave me the chance.”
“Oh, come on. If I’d asked you out and you knew?”
“I don’t know what I would have said.”
“I do.”
“Why?”
“Because girls like you don’t … settle for boys like that. Look, let’s just forget it.”
“How do you know, Andy? How do you know what I’d choose?”
“You’re right. You’re right, I don’t. I’m sorry.”
There was a lull, and it could have been all right still. At that moment we could still have survived it and moved on.
I knelt in front of her, rested my arms on her lap, on her warm legs. “Laurie, I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry I didn’t tell you. But I can’t undo that now. The important thing is, I need to know you understand: my father, my grandfather—I’m not them. I need to know you believe that.”
“I do. I mean, I guess I do—of course I do. I don’t know, Andy, it’s late. I have to get some sleep. I can’t do this now. I’m too tired.”
“Laurie, you know me. Look at me. You know me.”
She studied my face.
From this close I was surprised to discover she looked rather old and exhausted, and I thought it had been selfish of me and a little cruel to unload this on her now, in the middle of the night after the worst day of her life, just to get it off my chest, to ease my own mind. And I remembered her. I remembered the girl with brown legs sitting on a beach towel on Old Campus freshman year, the girl so far out of my league that she was actually easy to talk to because there was nothing to lose. At seventeen, I knew: my entire childhood had been just a prelude to this girl. I had never felt anything like it, and still haven’t. I felt changed by her, physically. Not sexually, though we had sex everywhere, like minks, in the library stacks, in an empty classroom, her car, her family’s beach house, even a cemetery. It was more: I became a different person, myself, the person I am now. And everything that came after—my family, my home, our entire life together—was a gift she gave me. The spell lasted thirty-four years. Now, at fifty-one, I saw her as she actually was, finally. It came as a surprise: no longer the shining girl, she was just a woman after all.