You suspected that the driver in question was Gene Cupp. Gene was repeating junior year again; he and Jesse had a couple of classes together. Jesse was good at math, but Gene, still trying to get his algebra requirement out of the way, didn’t seem to care at all about sitting in a classroom full of underclassmen. He cheated off Jesse’s homework, you said; you knew this because sometimes they would go over it in the late afternoon, if Michael wasn’t home.
Michael didn’t like Gene any more than he liked any other visitors, but he seemed oddly intimidated by him. Gene looked like he was in his early twenties: long, curly hair, a mustache more whiskers than wisp, gas station sunglasses he usually forgot to remove when he was indoors. That his father rode with the local motorcycle crew was something Michael knew ahead of time, because Michael’s work was right next door to the motorcycle shop. Local bikers congregated there at all hours, and, if you were smart, you got a feeling for which of them might mean trouble. Gene’s father was one of them.
“What’s up, Mrs. J?” Gene said when he and Jesse came in through the door one day. You didn’t like an older boy leading the conversation the way he did; you hated seeing how passive Jesse was in his presence.
Still, any company was better than none, and you were between efforts at making friends whose presence in the apartment might be acceptable to Michael. “Jana,” you said, for what must have been the tenth time.
“Jana!” Gene said, his eyebrows rising above the rims of his sunglasses. “OK, then!” You smelled the stale cigarette smoke on him as he passed you; you remembered when Michael’s old car had smelled like that, and how it felt forbidden and dangerous to you, a long time ago.
Jesse retrieved a quart of orange juice from the refrigerator, grabbed two plastic cups from the cupboard, and hurried down the hall to his room, Gene behind him, bouncing as he walked. “Hi, Mom,” Jesse said as the door of his bedroom shut behind him, possibly with a small laugh underneath his voice, though you hoped not.
What were you supposed to do? you asked me. Stand between Jesse and his friend, when Jesse had already had such a hard time with friends: if Michael took a dislike to one of them, he’d yell about it at dinnertime until they were out of the picture; even the ones he found acceptable were likely to hear him growing agitated about something before long. If he ever got comfortable enough with a regular guest to show his true colors, then the days of that guest’s presence on the scene were numbered. The reliability of Michael’s equations formed a mathematical language that was easy to understand, and hard to bear. It had broken your heart at least three times during Jesse’s childhood: he loved his friends fiercely, spending as much time with them as he possibly could, and, one by one, they all eventually moved on to other friends. Friends with normal families, friends whose houses felt safe. His little friend Jason, and that other one, Neal. Gone from his life, when friends were what he needed. To see your son grow into a lonely teenager when he’s really a nice kid with so much to give, you wrote. Think about what that’s like.
So you tried to overlook the way your instincts bristled whenever Gene addressed you by name: the way your urge to protect your son, still keen despite years of getting overruled by Michael’s rage, roared into overdrive in his presence. Jesse deserved a friend, somebody who would stick by him. Maybe Gene was that friend. A lot of kids smoked pot now. Things had changed, you said. As long as Gene was gone before Michael got home, you didn’t see the harm.
Both Jesse and Gene seemed to understand, like you, that their alliance would be strained if Jesse’s father came to view it as a threat. They conducted their afternoons in your house like planned raids: arrive, convene, disperse. Some days Jesse went to Gene’s house instead, and sometimes he didn’t get home until after dinner.
Michael made a big deal about it a couple of times and then seemed to decide that he didn’t really care.
Jesse was adrift like a leaf in the wind, you said.
Did I even understand what it takes to know that about your very own son? you said in your letter, whose remaining pages formed a stack which diminished a little every time I turned one of them over, and whose cumulative effect within me was registering with unignorable force.
* * *
BY THIS TIME I had started in on the walls inside Devil House, which, owing to the nature of walls and their ubiquity in the visual field, were going to require the utmost attention to detail. The amount of guesswork needed to get it right irritated me; I knew that at some point in the 1980s, possibly especially in California, the chemical composition of spray paint had been altered to keep kids from huffing it. When I started replicating the photographs, would the drip come out wrong? It’s an affectation, I know; I don’t include any of my restagings in the books I write. But they are important to me, and the idea that a detail isn’t right can fester in my brain like an unbidden thought.
Mercifully, you had begun to gloss over periods of time in your account of Jesse’s life. It seemed that Michael’s violence had become more calculating, and that Jesse had begun avoiding him in the evenings; Michael didn’t like it, and his focus returned to you some nights. But you didn’t want to dwell on this, you said, because this story wasn’t about you.
When you said that, for the third or fourth time, I wished we could meet again, so that I could tell you that this story is about you: or that it’s also about you; that stories in which something ugly bursts out from the confines of its sac are necessarily about every person inside the blast area. But you were patient with your point. Jesse, you said. The boy he had been, the friend to his mother, the companion you’d had on your errands. The one who did his best to keep the secrets you hated having to ask him to keep. The one who, when he grew up, would be free in a way that you probably would never be free, you’d thought: there had even been a weekend, when Jesse was fifteen, when you’d tried running away again, but after a weekend in a motel room you’d had visions of Michael finding you and killing you both, and you’d gone home and taken your lumps and moved on with your life.
Jesse was home a lot less after that time, you said. Michael seemed to sense that his time of hitting without being hit back was growing short, and eased back a little, becoming more hateful with his words.
The words were worse in some ways, you said, because you could tell they reached Jesse in a way physical force couldn’t, but there was no way for the two of you to talk about it anymore, so you just watched, and hoped he’d be able to leave as much of his life with his father behind as possible when he finally set out on his own.
Then it was junior year, you said, and you knew I already knew a little about that: but you were going to tell me anyway, you said, because it was too late to turn back now.
6.