Outside the courthouse, a hard wind jetted down Thorndike Street. Another architectural flaw: the high, flat walls on all four sides created a tornado wind around the base of the building. On a raw April evening like this, with the wind swirling around it, the courthouse could be hard even to reach. There might as well have been a moat around it. I pulled my coat around me and made my way down Thorndike toward the garage with the wind jostling my back. It was the last time I was ever in that courthouse. I leaned back against the wind like a man holding a door closed.
Of course, some things are impossible to put behind you. I have imagined those last moments over and over. I relive the last few seconds of Jacob’s life every day, and when I sleep I dream of it. It does not matter that I was not there. I cannot keep my mind from seeing it.
With less than one minute remaining in his life, Jacob lolled in the middle row of the minivan with his long legs stretched out in front of him. He always sat in the second row, like a little kid, even when he and his mom were the only ones in the car. He was not wearing his seat belt. He was often careless about it. Ordinarily Laurie would have hassled him to put it on. That morning she did not.
Jacob and Laurie had not spoken much during the ride. There was not much to say. Jacob’s mom had been quiet and saturnine since we had come back from Jamaica a few weeks earlier. He was smart enough to give her some space. Deep down, he must have known he had lost his mother—lost her trust, not her love. It was hard for them to be together. So, after exchanging a few labored words as they drove up Route 128, they both fell silent once they reached the turnpike, heading west off the ramp. The minivan merged into traffic and picked up speed, and mother and son settled in for the long dull ride.
There was another reason for Jacob’s silence. He was going to an interview at a private school in Natick. We did not think any school would admit him, honestly. What school would risk the legal liability, even if it was willing to brave the notoriety of having bloody Jacob Barber on campus? We expected Jacob would be homeschooled for the rest of his high school years. But we had been instructed that the town would not cover the costs of homeschooling under a special-ed plan unless we had exhausted all other options, so a few perfunctory interviews had been arranged. The whole process was difficult for Jacob—he had to prove he was not wanted by being rejected over and over—and this morning the need for another pointless interview made him sullen. The schools granted him interviews, he thought, just to get a glimpse of him, to see what the monster looked like up close.
He asked his mom to turn on the radio. She put on WBUR, the NPR news station, but turned it off quickly. It was painful to be reminded that the great world continued to turn, unnoticing.
After a few minutes on the highway, there were tears on Laurie’s face. She clenched the wheel.
Jacob did not notice. He was lost in his own thoughts. His eyes were fixed on the view ahead of him, between the two front seats. Through the windshield: the crowd of cars speeding in formation down the track.
Laurie signaled and moved into the right lane, where the traffic was sparse, and she began to pick up speed, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80. She unclipped her seat belt and handed it back over her left shoulder.
Jacob would have grown, of course. In a couple of years his voice would have deepened. There would have been new friends. In his twenties he would have looked more and more like his father. His dark stare would have relaxed, with time, into a gentler expression as he set down the worries and sorrows of adolescence. His rawboned frame would have filled out. He would not have been as big as his hulking father, just a little taller, a little broader in the shoulders than most. He would have considered law school. All kids imagine themselves in their parents’ occupations, however briefly, however uncomfortably. But he would not have become a lawyer. He would have considered the work too extroverted, too theatrical, too pedantic for his reticent personality. He would have spent a long time searching, a long time laboring in jobs that did not suit him.
As the minivan crossed 85 miles per hour, Jacob said, without any real concern, “Going a little fast there, aren’t you, Mom?”
“Am I?”
He would have met his grandfather. He was curious already. And given his own legal problems, he would have wanted to confront the whole issue of his patrimony, of what it meant to be the grandson of Bloody Billy Barber. He would have gone to meet the man and been disappointed. The legend—the nickname, the fearsome reputation, the murder that was literally unspeakable to so many—was much bigger than the withered old man behind it, who in the end was just a thug, albeit a well-bred thug. Jacob would have come to terms with it somehow. He would not have done it the way I did, by erasing it, ignoring it, willing it away. He was too thoughtful to fool himself that way. But he would have made his peace with it. He would have passed from son to father, and only then would he have seen how little the whole thing really meant.
Later, after some wandering, he would have settled somewhere far away, somewhere no one had ever heard of the Barbers, or at least where no one knew enough about the story to bother with it. Somewhere out west, I think. Bisbee, Arizona, maybe. Or California. Who knows? And in one of those places, one day he would have held his own son in his arms and looked down into that baby’s eyes—as I did with Jacob many times—and wondered, Who are you? What are you thinking?
“Are you all right, Mom?”
“Of course.”
“What are you doing? This is dangerous.”
88, 89, 90. The minivan, a Honda Odyssey, was actually quite heavy—not mini at all, its name notwithstanding—and had a powerful engine. It was easy to speed. It felt very stable at high speeds. Driving it, I was often surprised to glance down at the speedometer and discover I was doing 80 or 85 miles an hour. But above 90, it began to shudder a little and the wheels began to lose contact with the road.
“Mom?”
“I love you, Jacob.”
Jacob pressed himself back against his seat. His hands scrabbled for the seat belt but it was already too late. There were only a few seconds left. He still did not understand what was going on. His mind grasped at explanations for the speed, for Mom’s bizarre calm: a jammed accelerator, a rush to avoid being late for the interview, or maybe her attention had just wandered.
“I love you and your father both.”
The minivan began to slip into the breakdown lane on the right side of the road, first the right wheels stepping over the line, then the left—only seconds remaining now—and continued to pick up speed as the road went down a little hill, assisting the engine, which was beginning to top out as the vehicle hit 96, 97, 98.
“Mom! Stop!”
She launched the minivan directly at a bridge abutment. It was a molded-concrete wall built into the side of a hill. The abutment was guarded by a Jersey barrier, which ought to have guided the minivan away from a direct impact. But the vehicle was going too fast and the angle of approach was too direct, so that when Laurie edged into it the Jersey barrier lifted the right-side wheels, causing the vehicle to skitter up the wall and, disastrously, to flip. Laurie lost control of the car immediately but she never let go of the steering wheel. The van scraped and skidded up the Jersey barrier and vaulted off the top of it, its momentum catapulting it up into the air as it rolled three-quarters of the way to upside down, like a ship capsizing to its port side.
With the minivan in the air, rolling counterclockwise, the engine racing, Laurie screaming—a fraction of a second, that’s all—Jacob would have thought of me—who had held him, my own baby, looked down into his eyes—and he would have understood I loved him, no matter what, to the very end—as he saw the concrete wall flying forward to meet him.
BY WILLIAM LANDAY
Mission Flats
The Strangler
About the Author
WILLIAM LANDAY is the author of two other novels: Mission Flats, which won the Dagger Award for best debut crime novel, and The Strangler, which was nominated for the Strand Magazine Critics Award for best crime novel of the year. He lives in Boston.
www.williamlanday.com