“That’s a spectacular idea.”
“Dad, half of the kids I met in Black Creek, they didn’t think they were addicts; they believed you could take it or leave it. The other half were terrified. Me, I thought they were just trying to scare me,” said Stefan. “You know how I got addicted to cocaine real fast, Dad? I tried it. I tried it once. You know how I started using meth? I tried it, once. And then if I would have had all the money in the world to spend on stuff like that, I would have spent all the money in the world on it. It made me feel that good. Especially the coke. But that cost too much.”
“I don’t know why you needed to do it in the first place,” Jep said.
“I couldn’t keep up,” Stefan said.
“With school?”
“With everything. I would be so wound up all week and then all I’d want to do was sleep when I got up there on the weekends. I would get up and take a shower and then I’d want to go back to bed. Bindy would complain that half the time, all I did was fall on her couch and start snoring. Drugs saved me in a way, or so I thought then.”
Stefan could, and did, stay up for a couple of days straight. He said he felt he was bionic. He didn’t need food. He would bang out an online quiz before he left to drive up, then he’d go straight out with Belinda to the town’s one gay bar to dance all night. Druggies, he would tell us later, called the sensation ringing your bell, because it was exactly like that, as if everyone in a restaurant was tapping their spoons on their wineglasses. “So if I wasn’t really doing that great, I still felt like I was doing great. Then when I moved up full-time it all changed.” His gaze fastened somewhere out of the frame, as if he were seeing again his crummy room, the size of a VW van, in a campus house so derelict that it would be demolished a year later. “Just like I told the judge.”
The other shoe swung softly in space.
“What did you not tell the judge?” I asked.
He made a helmet of his hands, over his scalp. “I couldn’t keep up with Belinda. In other ways.”
“What other ways?”
“It doesn’t matter. All that matters is now, and I can’t even keep up now! People hate the sight of me.”
As it turned out, that would be proven within the next twelve hours.
The following morning, early, after another snow tapered off, the three of us took advantage of a break in the weather to finish the path Jep was shoveling to the shed where we kept giant bags of birdseed and snow melt. I was scooping out seed when I heard Stefan talking to someone. Peeking through the crack in the shed door, I recognized our neighbor Charlie Ribosky. Charlie was a retired firefighter in his seventies who’d been Stefan’s T-ball coach fifteen years ago.
“I’ve known you all your life,” Charlie said, interrupting Stefan’s glad greeting. “And I know you’re trying to say this was all a tragedy caused by drugs. But I happen to know that nobody does anything on drugs that they wouldn’t do otherwise...”
“But they do, Mr. Ribosky!” Stefan protested. “Especially, the drugs I was on. They’re really linked to violence. I didn’t know. I’m never like that naturally.”
“So you expect everybody here to just say, well, heck, that was too bad, but it’s all over now.” Charlie poked his index finger at Stefan. “You ruined this neighborhood, son. I say, good for Jill for starting this movement of hers after losing Belinda in that way because how many other girls are living in terror like her poor daughter was?”
“Mr. Ribosky, no. Listen a minute. Just listen. I wish I could change places with Belinda. I don’t remember what happened that night. I blacked out. I take responsibility. But I never hit Belinda before. I swear. It’s like it was someone else.”
“Well, it was not someone else. It was you! I just feel sorry for your poor dad, a finer man I never knew.”
Stefan threw down his shovel and jogged back to the house. Jep rushed past him, picked up the shovel and headed out into green space behind the backyards. Once he was outside our fence, and directly in Charlie’s line of sight, he raised his voice: “Hey, Charlie, you want to start something, how about you start it with me?”
“I can’t believe you people. Acting like it’s all going to be fine.”
“What would you do?”
“It’s nothing to be proud of, is all.”
Jep hurled the snow shovel at the base of Charlie Ribosky’s neatly buzzed privet hedge. Charlie jumped back, then swore softly and stomped off into his house. I had never seen Jep so angry. When we argued, he was always the one to call time until we could both get a good night’s sleep. He wasn’t the coach who called his players sissies or told them that if they weren’t puking, they’re weren’t really playing. He treated them like what they were—boys—and coaxed forth their agility and toughness with humor and patience. They revered him. Now he bent over, hands on his knees, red-faced and panting. He finally picked up the shovel, came back into our yard and shut the gate behind him, banged the shovel against the trunk of a tree, just once but hard, and went inside. Feeling exposed, I followed both of them.
Jep was making a cup of tea in the kitchen. When he was sure that Stefan was out of earshot, he said, “Charlie shouldn’t have said that. But a part of me agrees with him.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was almost easier when Stefan was in prison. Now I have to look at him every day and wonder, what are people thinking about him? And, Thea, what am I thinking about him? I love my son, but I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel.”
He wasn’t the only one. I finally told him about Keith’s reaction, which I had so far avoided. I told him about my enforced sabbatical too. He kept his face neutral, but John Paul Christiansen and I were hardly newlyweds. While he could still surprise me, most of the time, if I couldn’t tell the gist of what he was thinking before he said it, it was because I didn’t want to know. He and the neighbor were anything but the only ones. I recalled uneasily my own trill of fear when I glanced over in the car at the size and strength of Stefan’s hands. My own mother kept calling and telling me about how Jill’s stance against dating violence was undeniably inspiring, and how, now that Stefan was finally home, her own friends were looking at her in a funny way. I wanted to be furious, but I wasn’t. When Stefan was in prison, I put myself out there, almost defiantly. Now, I found myself hesitating. Before today, was it because deep down, despite my stance to the contrary, I was ashamed of my son? Yes. A part of me resented the way his wrongdoing had muddied up my security, my serenity, my own space on earth. And now, the door to our front porch suddenly looked like the portal to hell. I felt I had lost my defenses. What was out there, and how much worse was it than the worst I’d already imagined?