“A few of them actually knew Belinda. The past Stefan has, it’s with him right now. Maybe five, ten years from now, people will forget. They’ll know him for other reasons, ten years from now. Right now, they only know him for one reason.” Andy paused and took a sip of his beer. “This was an assault. Of course it was. Did they plan to hurt him? Will they admit it? The point is, it was an assault. Possibly on both sides. Open to interpretation. Yes, Stefan was attacked. He was provoked. But who knows what side the police would come down on? Do you even want to risk the chance of Stefan, just out of prison and on parole, being involved with a violent crime?”
When Andy put it that way, I had to take a long breath. And then I had to take another long breath. A few of them actually knew Belinda. Was one of them the kid in the sunglasses and hoodie? Would the menace always be this close? How could I live in such a world? How could my son? It wasn’t as though I was one of those wives who had some kind of honor promise to tell her husband everything. I was annoyed by women like that and how fulsomely they boasted about being one soul in two bodies; I wanted full custody of my own soul, thank you very much. But I had never wanted to confide in Jep about the hooded stalker more than I did right now. He would be outraged, and rightly so, that I had not. I was leaving Stefan wide open to any threat.
Meanwhile, Andy was saying that he would give Stefan six months of full pay beyond his disability time. And he would give Stefan some clerical work to do at home once his vision recovered to give him enough work time to qualify for unemployment so he could have extra time to consider his options. It occurred to me to ask why he couldn’t just give Stefan work to do at home until he could actually find another job, but I didn’t dare. My brother-in-law had done everything right. This wasn’t his fault or his wish, but I was still aggrieved.
“So, he can’t come back to work at the lumberyard. But everyone else is forgiven.”
“I didn’t say that everyone else is forgiven. I’m going to do my own investigation and there will be consequences, and not just losing a job, when I find out who did this. The fact is, Stefan is not safe there. What if it had been worse, Thea? Your sister and I could never live with ourselves and neither could you.”
Stefan came home two days later. He and Jep hatched a plan in the hospital about how he would help Jep out informally at some local football camps for high-school players, but the eye surgeon had nixed that idea. He said while he couldn’t put Stefan in a bubble, he would if he could, since the slightest speck or inflammation of the injured eye could deep-six the whole intricate effort of repair he had undertaken. Stefan was looking at least more than a month of downtime. By the time he was fully healed, it would be nearly summer.
* * *
One morning a week or so later, on the kind of glorious morning that makes you wish you could live forever, Stefan wanted to visit Belinda’s grave. I was surprised to realize he had never been there. But of course he wouldn’t have gone.
“I thought I’d get arrested or something,” he told me. “I don’t know how this works. I don’t know if I’m allowed.”
For a fact, I didn’t know either. The etiquette for this particular mourning eluded me.
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“I’m still not supposed to drive until my eye heals more,” he said. He seemed angry, for some reason. Lately he seemed angry all the time, which I put down to his frustration with his injury and its aftermath. “Of course I could, but I’m not supposed to.”
“When do you want to go?”
He said, “Soon. I’ll let you know when.”
So I waited for his request.
I busied myself with my manuscript, on which I was finally making some progress. The editor at the publisher of my previous book had written me several emails, calling herself “really quite eager.”
One day, I came home from getting groceries to find Will Brent, Stefan’s best male friend from growing up, sitting in the kitchen. The two had played football together and remained close throughout high school. Will had been, in fact, Stefan’s one true buddy. So complete had been Stefan’s absorption with Belinda that he had never seemed to require other friendships, and though Belinda had more friends—I’d seen her with groups of girls—her first loyalty always was to Stefan as well. They spoke to each other each morning even before they had breakfast; they told each other good-night, last thing before turning out their bedroom lights.
“Ho, Stefan’s mom! Long time no see!” Will said. They were eating a pizza. Will was drinking a beer. I thought that it was the first time that anyone Stefan knew from before had actually reached out to him, but Will later said he had tried to visit Stefan when he was inside, but Stefan had turned him away. Family was one thing, but Stefan had no interest in friends seeing him that way. I remembered Will as a handsome mischief maker, but now he was in a combined BS and master’s program in nursing.
“Hey, Will!” I said, and then, hating myself, added, “You can’t drink, Stefan.” Even if he had been of age, his parole forbade him to touch alcohol or drugs.
“And I’m not. Will can drink though. He’s twenty-one.” To Will, he said, “Parole condition. Not that I was ever a big boozer.”
“Leave that to me,” Will said.
They were going out to play bocce ball by the lake with some guys Will knew from college, and for some reason, this cast me into a panic. What if someone who knew us saw him? What if someone who saw the local news coverage spotted Stefan? Not that they necessarily would recognize him, in the baseball cap he donned, but what if they did? What if some busybody snapped a picture of Stefan frolicking with friends while Belinda lay folded cold in earth at Angel Oak Cemetery?
Stefan looked, if too wary to be eager, then at least willing to go, glad of a break from the endless days he’d spent alone since his surgery, hours watching detective shows and cold-calling prospective employers. He did go with Will. He was careful of his eye but still yelled and sweated. He had fun, got exhausted, went for fried perch with the guys, left his sneakers by the door so he wouldn’t track in dirt. Luckily no one was out front to harass him when he came home. Will was busy that spring with finals and planning for a summer nursing internship, but he went out of his way to make time for Stefan.
Stefan marveled at this, and the expression of wonderment on his face turned my heart.
“Nobody treated me any different,” he said. “I could tell the others were curious, but Will was direct and just said, this is my boy Stefan. We go way back. He was responsible for a bad accident, and he went to jail. That’s over now. So we’re good. And they were good. It was like I was a regular person.”
“You are a regular person.”
“You know I’m not, Mom.”
After that Stefan saw Will often, most weekends, sometimes going over to campus with him to see a movie or shoot pool at the Union, sometimes just hanging out at our place and playing games on the PlayStation console my parents had given Stefan as a belated Christmas gift, which Stefan had never taken out of the box. Stefan didn’t really have the same hand-and-eye coordination since the accident, but he was happy to play electronic games with the others now. Even touch football and lifting weights were off the table for him for the time being. Still, Will introduced Stefan to a group of guys and girls who welcomed him. The group of them went to a ball game. They went to the movies. They went out to hear music. Stefan mentioned that he was interested in Will’s plans for a combined degree. He talked about getting a master’s in English, maybe teaching someday and though we knew that was probably unrealistic, at least the teaching part, we didn’t say so. He talked to his therapist, sometimes in person, sometimes on the phone. It seemed sometimes that things were beginning to fall into place.