39 | Paradise
It turns out, you can get used to most anything. What one day seems a shocking, unbearable outrage over time comes to seem ordinary, unremarkable.
As those first few months passed, the insult of Jacob’s trial gradually lost its power to enrage us. We had done all we could. This grotesque thing had happened to our family. We would always be known for it. It would be the first sentence in all our obituaries. And we would always be shaped by the experience, in ways we could not guess at the time. All this began to seem normal, permanent, hardly worth commenting on. And when it did—when we started to get used to our new life as a notorious family, when we finally began to look forward, not back—our family gradually reemerged.
Laurie was the first of us to reawaken. She renewed her friendship with Toby Lanzman. Toby had not reached out to us during the trial, but she was the first of our Newton friends to reconnect with us afterward. Still her old fit, commanding self—same lean runner’s face, same springy, high-rumped body—Toby guided Laurie in a fearsome exercise program that included long, cold jogs along Commonwealth Avenue. Laurie wanted to get stronger, she said. Soon Laurie was driving herself through grueling workouts even without Toby. She would come back from increasingly long runs, red-faced and glistening with sweat in the dead of winter. “Have to get stronger.”
Recovering her role as family captain, Laurie threw herself into the great project of reviving Jacob and me as well. She cooked tremendous breakfasts of waffles or omelettes or hot cereal, and now that we had no jobs to rush off to, we lingered over the newspapers, which Jacob read on his MacBook while Laurie and I shared the newsprint versions of the Globe and the Times. She organized family movie nights and even allowed me to pick the gangster pictures I love, then she suffered good-naturedly as Jacob and I repeated our favorite lines over and over: “Say hello to my leetle friend” and “I didn’t know until this day that it was Barzini all along.” She said that my Brando sounded like Elmer Fudd, which required a trip to YouTube to show Jacob who Elmer Fudd was. How strange to hear ourselves laughing again.
And when all this was not working fast enough, when Jacob and I could not seem to shake the gloom of the last year, Laurie decided that stronger medicine was needed.
“Why don’t we go away for a while?” she said brightly at dinner one night. “We could take a family vacation like we used to.”
It was one of those blindingly obvious ideas that hits you like a revelation. Of course! The moment she suggested it, we knew that of course we had to go. Why had it taken us so long to think of it? Just talking about the idea made us a little giddy.
“That’s brilliant,” I said. “Clear our heads!”
“Push the reset button!” Jacob.
Laurie raised her fists and wiggled them, she was so excited. “I am so sick of all this. I hate this house. I hate this town. I hate the way I feel all day—trapped. I just really want to be someplace else.”
My memory is that the three of us went right to the computer and chose our destination that same night. We picked a resort in Jamaica called Waves. None of us had ever heard of Waves or been to Jamaica. We based the decision on nothing more than the resort’s own website, which dazzled us with fantastically Photoshopped images: palm trees, white-sand beaches, aquamarine ocean. It was all so perfect and so obviously fraudulent that we could not resist it. It was travel porn. There were laughing couples, she toned and tan in her bikini and wrap, he gray at the temples but sporting a full rack of bodybuilder’s abs—the soccer mom and middle manager transformed at Waves into their true inner minx and stud. There was a hotel complex festooned with shutters and verandas, the exteriors brightly painted to evoke a fantasy Caribbean village. The hotel overlooked a network of cerulean swimming pools with fountains and swim-up bars. The Waves logo shimmered on every pool floor. The blue pools spilled from one down to the next until the water reached the edge of a low cliff, and over the edge an elevator descended to a horseshoe-shaped beach and a pristine little cay and, off in the distance, the blue of the ocean stretched all the way out into the endless blue of the sky with no clear horizon line, which would have spoiled the illusion that Waves inhabited the same round planet as everyplace else. It was just the sort of dreamworld we longed to escape into. We did not want to go anyplace “real”; you cannot be in a place like Paris or Rome without thinking, and we wanted most of all not to think. At Waves, happily, it seemed no thought could survive for long. Nothing would be allowed to spoil the fun.
The remarkable thing about all this emotional manipulation was that it actually worked. We actually achieved the traveler’s fantasy of leaving our old selves and all our troubles behind. We were transported, in both senses. Not all at once, of course, but little by little. We felt the weight begin to lift the moment we booked the trip, a nice long two-week stay. Then we felt lighter still when the plane lifted off from Boston, and even more so when we stepped out into the glare and the warm tropical breeze on the tarmac at the little airport in Montego Bay. Already we were different. We were strangely, miraculously, deliriously happy. We looked at one another with surprise, as if to say, Could this be true? Are we really … happy? You will say that we were deluding ourselves; our troubles were no less real. And of course that is true, but so what? We had earned a vacation.
At the airport, Jacob grinned. Laurie held my hand. “It’s paradise!” she beamed.
We made our way through the terminal and out to a small shuttle bus, where a driver held a clipboard with the Waves logo and a list of guests he was supposed to pick up. He looked a little bedraggled in a T-shirt, shorts, and shower sandals. But he grinned at us and he peppered his sentences with “Ya, mahn!” and generally he made a good show of it. “Ya, man!” he said over and over, until we were saying it too. Obviously he had performed this happy-native routine a thousand times. The pasty vacationers ate it up, us included. Ya, man!
The bus ride lasted nearly two hours. We bounced over a crumbling road that roughly followed the north coast of the island. To our right were lush green mountains, to the left, the sea. The poverty of the island was hard to miss. We passed little tumbledown houses and shanties knocked together from scrap wood and corrugated tin. Ragged women and scrawny kids walked along the sides of the road. The vacationers in the bus were subdued during the ride. The natives’ poverty was a bummer and they wanted to be sensitive to it; at the same time they had come for a good time and it wasn’t their fault the island was poor.
Jacob found himself seated on the wide bench at the back of the bus next to a girl about his age. She was pretty in a debate-team way, and the two kids chatted cautiously. Jacob kept his answers short, as if every word was a stick of dynamite. He wore a dumb grin. Here was a girl who did not know anything about the murder, did not even seem aware that Jacob was a geek who could not quite bring himself to look a girl in the eye. (He was proving himself quite capable of looking this girl in the chest, however.) It was all so wonderfully normal, Laurie and I made a point of not staring lest we screw it up for him.
I whispered, “And I figured I’d get laid on this trip before Jacob.”
“My money’s still on you,” she said.
When the bus finally arrived at Waves, we passed through a grand gate, past lush manicured beds of red hibiscus and yellow impatiens, and stopped under a portico at the main entrance to the hotel. Grinning bellmen unpacked the bags. They wore uniforms that combined British military bits—pith helmets blancoed to a dazzling whiteness, black pants with a thick red stripe down the side—and bright flower-print shirts. It was a delirious combination, just right for the army of Paradise, the good-time army.
In the lobby, we checked in. We exchanged our money for the in-house currency of Waves, little silver coins called “sand dollars.” A good-time soldier in a pith helmet served a complimentary rum punch, about which I can tell you only that it contained grenadine (it was bright red) and rum, and I immediately had another, feeling it was my patriotic duty to the pseudonation of Waves. I tipped the soldier, Lord knew how much since the exchange rate for sand dollars was a nebulous thing, but the tip must have been generous because he pocketed the coin and said, “Ya, man,” illogically but happily. From there, my memory of the first day gets a little fuzzy.
And the second.
I apologize for the silly tone, but the truth is we were damn happy. And relieved. With the strain of the previous year finally removed, we got a little silly. I know this story is all a very solemn business. Ben Rifkin had still been murdered, even if it had not been by Jacob. And Jacob had only been saved by the intervention of a second murder arranged by a deus ex prison—a secret only I was aware of. And of course, as the accused, we were still widely presumed guilty of something and so we had no right to be happy anyway. We had taken to heart Jonathan’s very strict instructions never to laugh or smile in public, lest anyone think we were not treating the situation with the proper gravity, lest they think we were anything less than shattered. Now, finally, we exhaled and, in our exhaustion, we felt intoxicated even when we weren’t. We did not feel like murderers at all.
We spent our first few mornings at the beach, afternoons at one of the many pools. Every evening the resort offered some sort of entertainment. This might be a musical show or karaoke or a talent contest for the guests. Whatever the format, the staff exhorted us to have the most extroverted sort of fun. They would call from the stage in lilting island accents, “Come on, ev-ry-bah-dy, make some noise!” and we guests would clap and cheer with maximum gusto. Afterward there would be dancing. A good dose of Waves punch was required to get through it.
We ate ravenously. Meals were all-you-can-eat buffets, and we made up for months of undereating. Laurie and I spent our sand dollars on beers and pi?a coladas. Jacob even tried his first beer. “Good,” he pronounced it manfully, though he did not finish it.
Jacob spent most of his time with his new girlfriend, whose name—brace yourself—was Hope. He was content to be with us too, but more and more the two of them went off together. Later we found out that Jacob had given her a false last name. Jacob Gold, he called himself, borrowing Laurie’s maiden name, which is why Hope never found out about the case. We did not know about Jacob’s little subterfuge at the time, so we were left to wonder what it meant, exactly, that this girl was flirting with Jacob. Was she so oblivious that it never occurred to her to do a simple Google search on him? If she had Googled “Jacob Barber,” she would have come up with about three hundred thousand results. (The number has grown since then.) Or maybe she did know and got some weird thrill out of dating this dangerous pariah. Jacob told us Hope had no idea about the case, and we did not dare question her directly for fear of spoiling the first good thing that had happened to Jacob in a very long time. We did not see much of Hope, anyway, in the few days we knew her. She and Jake preferred to be by themselves. Even if we were all at the pool together, the two of them would come over to say hello, then they would go sit at a little distance from us. Once we glimpsed them holding hands furtively as they lay on adjacent chaises.
I want to say—it is important you know—we liked Hope, not least because she made our son happy. Jacob brightened whenever she was around. She had a warm way about her. She was courteous and polite, with blond hair and a wonderful soft Virginia accent that seemed lovely to us Bostonians. She was a little pudgy but comfortable in her body, comfortable enough to wear bikinis every day, and we liked her for that too, for the easy way she carried herself, free of the usual morbid teenage insecurities. Even her unlikely name added to the fairy-tale symmetry of her sudden appearance on stage. “Finally we have Hope,” I would say to Laurie.
The truth is, we were not entirely focused on Jacob and Hope. Laurie and I had our own relationship to work on. We had to relearn each other, reestablish the old patterns. We even resumed our sex life, not frantically but slowly, tentatively. Probably we were as clumsy as Jacob and Hope, who no doubt were fumbling over each other at the same time, in secret corners and thrust up against palm trees. Laurie got very brown very quickly, as she always has. To my middle-aged eyes she looked insanely sexy, and I began to wonder if the website did not have it right, after all: she looked more and more like the hot soccer mom in the ad. She was still the best-looking woman I ever saw. It was a miracle that I got her in the first place and a miracle that she stayed with me as long as she did.
I think that, sometime in that first week, Laurie began to forgive herself for the primal sin—as she saw it—of losing faith in her own son, of doubting his innocence during the trial. You could see it in the way she began to loosen up around him. This was an internal struggle for her; she had nothing to reconcile with Jacob, since he never knew about her doubts, let alone that she had actually been afraid of him. Only Laurie could forgive herself. Personally, I did not see it as such a big deal. As betrayals go, this was a small one, and understandable in the circumstances. Maybe you have to be a mother to know why she took it so hard. All I can say is that, as Laurie began to feel better, our whole family began to return to its normal rhythm. Our family orbited around Laurie. Always had.
We quickly settled into a few routines, as people must, even in dreamworlds like Waves. My favorite ritual was to watch the sunset from the beach as a family. Every evening, we brought beers down with us and dragged three beach chairs to the water’s edge so we could sit with our feet in the water. Hope joined us to watch the sunset once, seating herself tactfully beside Laurie like a lady-in-waiting attending her queen. But generally it was just us three Barbers. Around us in the dimming light, little children would play in the sand and the shallow water, toddlers, even a few babies and their young parents. Gradually the beach would get quieter as the other guests left to get ready for dinner. The lifeguards would drag the empty beach chairs across the sand and stack them for the night, making a clatter, and finally the lifeguards themselves would leave, and only a few sunset gazers would linger on the beach. We would look out into the distance, where two arms of land reached out to encircle the little bay, and the horizon would burn yellow then red then indigo.
Looking back on it now, I picture my happy family of three sitting on that beach at sunset and I want to freeze the story there. We must have looked so normal, Laurie and Jacob and me, so much like all the other partyers and suburbanites at that resort. We must have seemed just like everyone else, which, when you get down to it, is all I ever really wanted.
Mr. Logiudice: And then?
Witness: And then—
Mr. Logiudice: Then what happened, Mr. Barber?
Witness: The girl disappeared.