DIANA CRANE CALLED YOU, you told me in your letter, more than once. She was not a stranger to you; she cared about Jesse, and had tried to let you know that her concern for him was real. It is hard, you said, to always be getting calls from your son’s teachers: kind people who tell you about the problems your son is having, with whom you always have to feign incomprehension: when, actually, you do understand, with a type of perfect understanding inaccessible to those on the outside, what the problems are, and what has caused them, and why their solutions, while known, feel inaccessible, walled off, out of reach. Over the years, you had fielded enough such phone calls that your response, at this point, felt rehearsed: never tell the teachers the whole truth, always trying not to see the openings they leave in the conversation for you to tell on Michael, to say something that might allow them to file a report with the police. It takes a lot of energy to listen in this way, and to playact at answering; it wears you down.
She would probably have gotten you to talk, to tell the truth, if she had lived, you said: or if the school year had been a little longer, or if you’d met with her, either at her home or at yours, as she’d requested. But you gave her some reason, you no longer remembered what, for not being able to have visitors at the house just now, and you’d said talking on the telephone was best for you, if that was all right.
You remembered four calls: that first one, and then monthly for three months; it emerged at the trial that she’d scheduled those calls on her desk calendar at school, and you imagined her placing them from a phone at her desk at the end of the day. It made you sad, a very painful kind of sad, you said, to think of Diana Crane’s desk calendar, full of weekday errands from Monday through Friday, with Call Jana Larson written on some weekday once each month. You didn’t remember whether they’d been on the same weekday each time or not. In the end it did not matter.
What was important was that Diana Crane had understood Jesse to be in danger—from the way he acted in class, from the way he answered her questions, from his weird proximity to Gene Cupp, who, as all the teachers knew, had no friends, and probably no future, and whose body, during his second attempt at completing his senior year, was now visibly too big for the high school desks. She had made the effort to connect with you, and you had resented her for it, because you had tried, more than once, to better your situation, but did not seem able to do so under your own power, so you hoped that your son would just get a job after he graduated and move out of the house, and then at least one of you would be able to live in peace.
That had been something you looked forward to, you said, Jesse getting a chance to live life on his own, because he had always been curious about the world, and hadn’t had much of a chance to see many places.
The last time she called you had been in May, when she’d said that Jesse’s work in class showed signs of real sensitivity, and she didn’t see any reason why he couldn’t get into Cal Poly year after next, if he tried; to which you had responded, as blandly as you could so as not to arouse suspicion, that you had also heard San Diego State was nice.
You were imagining Jesse, your son, now almost grown, getting far away enough from Michael to be safe.
* * *
BECAUSE HE WAS ALMOST GROWN, you wrote. That’s the thing about it that made it worse. Just one more year and he might have saved enough money to move out; just one more year with his eyes on the goal line. You felt personally invested in this vision, because you had missed your chance, you thought. Efforts to leave always came to nothing and made matters worse, but it didn’t really matter, because you’d had your fun.
I did not feel, sitting on the floor of my house in Milpitas, that it was fair or accurate to say that you, in the years of your life since you’d met Michael Jenkins, had had your fun. You had raised a child you loved fiercely but could not protect from the violence of his father; you had learned to shrink before Michael’s anger rather than resist it, because resistance carried with it the risk of disproportionate response; you had seen the careful, methodical demolition of your every effort to carve out a small space for your own personal pleasure or growth. Coffee with friends, Tupperware parties, Avon errands—their costs had all been too great to pay over and above your daily toll. You lived in waiting: for something to happen, who could say what, that might give you relief.
But it was going to be worth it, you said, to know that you had done your best, even though, back then, you often heard a voice in your head asking whether that was really true; a mocking voice, your own but meaner, that interrogated you while you lay awake sometimes. He’s so big now, the voice said. Too late to help now, the voice said. You knew these were only your own thoughts, and you understood them as expressions of guilt or shame and not the judgment of the outside world: you weren’t crazy. But it just felt so bad, to lie there sometimes, wondering if the mocking, dismissive distance your son now kept from you was your fault, another mark against you, an indication that the hateful things Michael said to you when he was angry—which was all the time; he never got better now—were all really true.
All of this got about a thousand times worse, you said, on the morning after the night Jesse didn’t come home.
* * *
YOU HEATED UP A CAN OF BEEF STEW for Michael the following morning, you remembered. The smell of it still stuck in your brain even down to the present day, a sense memory too powerful to shake. Michael was furious, seated in his chair in the living room, yelling now at the television and now over at you, preparing himself for direct confrontation. You had called the cops, both because you were terrified that something had happened, and because Michael was afraid of the police. A call to the department would leave you with at least one chip in hand, one you couldn’t actually wager but which sat there on the table, visible to your opponent for as long as the game lasted. It wasn’t much, but it was something.
Michael kept right on yelling as you gave them the details: that you had last seen Jesse getting into his friend Gene’s car yesterday afternoon; that he’d missed dinner; that he hadn’t told you he was intending to go anywhere with anyone; that there hadn’t been any major changes or arguments recently—all this was true; the mood in the house had been one of relative calm, if not comfort. Yes, yesterday afternoon, you said again. Right outside, right here. He was getting into Gene’s car.
The more you told them, the more agitated Michael became. You knew that part of what was bothering him was the noise; his hearing wasn’t as good as it used to be, probably from all the loud machines at his work, and he didn’t like to have to turn up the television, whose speaker distorted when the volume got too high. He directed his anger at the absent Jesse for the time being; he yelled that a son shouldn’t treat his mother like shit. He said “shit” so many times, you said. You pivoted on your feet in the hope that you could direct the mouthpiece of the phone sufficiently out of the path of his voice, but you knew the operator would hear everything. Fear and shame and panic, the feeling that you’d lost control at last and would now be forced to bear witness to the extent of your failure. Years of trying. It was so much for you to hold.
“Please,” you said to the operator, trying to tune Michael out.
“I’m going to hand you over to Detective Haeny,” the operator said to you, and you felt the muscles in your jaw tighten as they sometimes did when you knew Michael was about to hit you, which was something, you said, that you had sometimes tried to get control of, because you had heard someone say on a TV show that things hurt more when you are tense, but people who say things like that probably don’t know what it’s like to be under any actual pressure. They are talking about something else.
You listened. Michael watched your face for signs. You put the receiver back in its cradle, conscious of your feet underneath you, holding you upright.
“They say we should go to the station. I can do it,” you told Michael, mechanically, directly, like an engineer who, her instruments all indicating disaster, finds the known center where all the knowledge of her training waits. Perhaps sensing a shift in the energy of the moment, hearing you speak with uncharacteristic confidence, Michael looked at you with an alien gaze: It was respect, maybe, you thought. Or fear of the unknown. Or of the police. Who knows where it came from. It was enough to allow you to get into the car and drive.
You had learned in the years since, you said, that sometimes you get just enough of whatever it is that you need in order to go on to the next thing, no matter how bad it is.
* * *