THE OTHER THING THAT HAPPENED when Jesse was nine, besides all the other things that kept happening and why dwell on them, they are what they are, you said, you can’t fix the past, was that he met Gene Cupp. Gene’s family had moved from Arizona to California in the middle of the school year; it’s hard for children to be uprooted from their environment and have to make new friends, though Gene, at eleven, had already been through the process several times.
He lived with his father, which was unusual. You learned about Gene and his father early on because Jesse had befriended him on the playground the week he got to school; Gene had been playing tetherball by himself in a far corner of the playground, hitting the ball as hard as he could in one direction, then pivoting on his heels to hit it back after it had circled the pole a time or two.
His father, you said, was a biker. He had a beer belly and a brown beard and a leather jacket, and a Harley-Davidson, which was what most of the bikers rode. He dropped Gene off at school from his motorcycle; Jesse thought it was the coolest thing he’d ever seen. Gene would lift the helmet off his head and hand it back to his father, who would then lower it onto his own head and roar off. Gene’s dramatic drop-off routine had made him the subject of rumors from his first day at school, most of them whole-cloth playground inventions based on how bikers looked on TV.
You are pretty sure Jesse imagined Gene’s relationship with his father as something really great, you said, something worthy of his young envy. As it turned out, Gene’s household was even worse than yours, but what mattered more were the dreams in Jesse’s head. Jesse was smaller than Gene, who had begun growing into his preadolescent body already, his arms gangly, an uncombed mop of hair atop his head like an old pelt set haphazardly down on his skull.
You knew now that there was something weird about their friendship; of course you did. But at the time, you were thankful: for a friend in Jesse’s life who made him happy, and at whose house he could play in the afternoons. Because Jesse’s dad was yelling more than ever. Sometimes it felt like it never stopped, or like the quiet parts were only spaces that grew shorter every week. Anything that could keep Jesse from having to hear more of that, you said, seemed like a good thing worth pursuing.
5.
BY THE TIME JESSE GOT TO HIGH SCHOOL, you were starting to panic, because it felt like you were losing him. All parents who love their children experience something like this as those children grow into adults: the loss of the child, the emergence of the person he will become. You knew you weren’t the first person to feel this way. But it’s different, you told me, for people who have been trying as best they can to protect their children from something, because this is the time when these moms and dads get their first chance to find out whether their efforts have been enough.
Of course, it was worse because Michael was not getting along with Jesse at all now. It was so much worse than it had ever been; for you, it was also almost a little bit of a relief, because Michael seemed to have become focused on his son instead of you, and specifically on how his son was increasingly disobedient. You felt guilty about that at the time. Nobody deserves to get yelled at the way Michael yelled when he was angry, which was at least once every day; nobody deserved to get hit, to have things thrown at them from across the room. But you had been living as a target for so long. People who’ve learned to live in a war zone need a break sometimes or they’ll go crazy, you said.
But of course it also made things worse inside your head. The guilt made it hard to sleep; losing sleep made everything a little harder the next day, every day. You only had one child, and now you could not protect him unless you were willing to take his place. Michael didn’t seem to have enough energy to focus his anger on both of you at once; it floated. At fourteen, Jesse seemed weirdly willing to place himself in the line of fire.
He still hadn’t cut his hair; he kept it long and ragged in the style of the times, and you thought he looked wonderful. You were proud to have a son so handsome, who could look so stylish without really trying. He wore blue jeans and T-shirts, and he stayed away from home a lot—over at Gene’s, sometimes, or out running around with Gene, who had gotten a driver’s license as soon as he’d turned sixteen.
Jesse’s classmates had a different view of him. He did not seek their company, and had little to say to or about any of them. Gene was his only real friend, and the way they were always together led to rumors no one dared voice in Gene’s presence, because most people were afraid of him. Only the jocks ever tried their luck around Gene, and he was rumored to have pulled a knife on one of them; that he carried a knife on his person, a big one that could do real damage, was generally understood.
As Gene’s only real friend, Jesse felt privileged, protected. It was sad, you said, but you understood how it must have been for Jesse. How he must have felt like he had finally gotten lucky in life. This, you said, was one of the things you were pretty sure I had not understood, and which you hoped to make me understand, even if it took you the rest of your life.
* * *
THE OTHER THING ABOUT JESSE when he was fourteen was that he started smoking pot. You felt like you’d noticed it early, but there was no way to be sure; that’s how it works with secrets. By the time you know somebody has a secret, it’s already been hanging around for a while, doing its work in the shadows.
It hurts worse with your children, because secrets are how you know for sure that their baby days are gone. Of course, Jesse had not been a baby for a long time; you knew that. But even through junior high, the child he’d been was still findable in his face: he felt small to you then. Now he was sprouting up like a tree. He’d be as tall as you soon enough. Like other boys his age, he sometimes wore things that men of Michael’s generation would never have been seen wearing: chain necklaces with tiny turquoise pendants, cheap rings with glittering imitation stones. And the expressions on his face, you said, seemed so complicated now: sad, angry, frightened, hungry. Hungry was the one that bothered you the most; he got plenty to eat. Like so many teenage boys, he conducted daily raids on the cupboard and refrigerator. But neither his body nor his face reflected the effort: he was gangly, and his eyes darted this way and that, as if he were scouting out the area for provisions.
Except when he was high, you said. Or so you figured. Sometimes, when he came home from school in the late afternoon, he didn’t look hungry at all. He still went to the kitchen and made short work of any food available, but his whole aspect was different. He never asked what there was to eat: he lazed through the shelves like he was the only person in the house and had all the time in the world. Checked out, you said. Like somebody else was driving.