I got used to the rhythms of a louder, more expansive Stefan rushing down the stairs, slamming the doors, growing to inhabit the space that belonged to him, but that he could not quite bring himself to trust, in the same way that, at first, he couldn’t quite believe he could stand out in the snow for as long as he wanted.
But still when he was at home on his own, Stefan usually remained withdrawn. He seemed perpetually restless, obsessed with the possible outcomes of his surgery, even though he knew that when the patch came off, the full extent of his eye healing would take weeks more still. Perhaps because he understood his uncle had no choice, Stefan seemed to accept Andy’s decision to let him go from the lumberyard. Still he muttered about the eventual fate of the guys who’d jumped him. Jep overheard Stefan and Will once discussing plans that included following cars to local watering holes with baseball bats and eggs in the back seat. We hoped that was no more than aggressive preening. Jep said he would have a word with him to remind him what was at stake, but he understood Stefan’s simmering fury.
No part of this process was easy, no part was going the way I had hoped it would. But I had no choice. I had to slow myself down, pace myself, follow Stefan’s lead. No way was I giving up on my son having a normal life again someday. I was realizing it really would take time.
Jep and I thought at first the best way for Stefan to move forward would be for him to get a job. So we were hopeful that the lumberyard would be that step. But clearly it was not. Still there had to be something. Something had to work. Jep wasn’t a patient man by nature, but he was enduring. And also a bit naive. Stefan wasn’t. Every time I turned toward a new hope, I scraped my face against that particular wall. But what was my option? Neighbors could turn away. Employers could turn away. Even relatives could turn away, but I could not. I made him. He was my only.
Spring comes and goes in Wisconsin like a gifted illusionist, revealing a little more each time. Still, at this point, it was making a boisterous display, every day another blazing blue sky, a bonus that seemed to shout, get out here and recreate. The last of the ice broke up. Boats began their familiar skim across nearby Lake Mendota and tourists couldn’t wait to start throwing themselves at the art fair and the farmer’s market, buying crocheted ponchos and hen-shaped oven mitts they would never take out of their closets, and more jam than a family could eat for a generation. We who lived here knew enough to keep our parkas handy.
One Monday morning toward the end of May, Stefan said this was the day; he was ready to go to the cemetery.
We bought two dozen pink roses, Belinda’s favorite, on the way there. When we got close to the place, Stefan mumbled thanks to me, something about being scared of facing a real grave, the grave where Belinda’s body was, all alone. He was also scared somebody might see him. As we drove through the black iron gates, I was reminded of the pattern of leaves wrought into those iron gates of the prison, right next to the acres of razor-topped wire. Stefan could drive out of these gates as we had driven out of the other ones; but Belinda could not. She was a permanent resident.
Despite its quaint name, Angel Oak was the biggest cemetery in the area, by far. We had to stop at the office and get a map of the grounds to find the place where she lay next to her father, the Rev. Lowell McCormack, and Belinda Lowell, the great-grandmother for whom she was named. I’d never met Belinda’s father before he died in an accident; but the family was originally from Wisconsin. After divinity school in North Carolina, where he met Jill, Lowell was “called” to become assistant pastor at Temple Baptist Church, not far from where we lived. Jill hated the brutal Wisconsin winters, and often spoke of how Lowell had “broken his vow” to take her Smoky Mountain home where the black-eyed Susans and cardinal flowers grew wild in the backyard of her childhood. And yet, she was a minister’s wife who knew her duty. Athletic and strong, she said she followed Lowell into winter pursuits with the church youth group: It was, in fact, on a ski trip up to the Porcupine Mountains in Michigan that Lowell died, with Jill at his side. Later, and cruelly I thought, doctors would tell Jill that Lowell might have survived his spinal injury if she could have reached the ski patrol in time. Belinda told me that her mom’s mobile was fully charged but the surrounding hills evidently blocked the signal. So Jill held his hand and sang his favorite hymns to him, Belinda told me. When he died, she was not quite three and she barely remembered anything of her father, but the conjured image of her brave mother, her voice a pure pipe in the fastnesses of those cold and darkening hills, always made Belinda cry.
How much Jill had suffered.
How much more than I she had suffered.
I could not even imagine my way into Jill’s deracinated world, stripped of everyone she loved, even her musical cousins, her aging father, a minister who, well into his seventies, still rang the bells himself, evenings and Sundays in a green, fog-shrouded North Carolina hollow where Jill went to church three days a week and never suspected there were little girls who only went once—if at all.
For a moment, I wondered if Jill might not go back to the South now; but I put that speculation quickly aside. Her advocacy against dating violence—and, if I am honest, I thought as well, her hatred of Stefan—were the beacon in her life now.
At the cemetery, I was astonished at the number of cars on a weekday until I realized with a shock that this was Memorial Day.
The caretaker advised us that we’d see a flowering redbud tree and then a small wrought-iron fence on a knoll far back, not visible from the winding little road. We parked the car at the curb near that section and slowly walked up the gentle hill. The fence wasn’t as small as I imagined. It was waist-high and about four by six feet. Inside it rested a few bedraggled teddy bears and a few tiaras, and a large SAY sign laminated against the weather. We stood there quietly, and then, impossibly, simply not possibly, I heard, and I hoped that Stefan didn’t hear, a treble voice say, “It is so him! I saw him on the news.”
Stefan tried to shrink. He would have loped back toward the exit if it didn’t mean passing the members of a small family group who were now all frankly staring at him.
“Maybe they didn’t even mean you.” I cast around for a possible loophole.
“Sure, Mom. There are probably a lot of people in this cemetery right now that somebody saw on the news.” His lip jutted and his elaborate slouch was almost risible, a cartoon of disgruntlement. “You know, this is bullshit.”
“What is?”
“My coming here today. Trying to make anything better. What am I, an idiot? A child? No one’s ever going to believe a word I say ever again. Nothing is ever going to change. Everybody will always think I’m a stone-cold killer who likes to hit girls. I’m a real model for rebuilding your life, huh? Broke and now, wow, probably half-blind, no future, living with my parents and sleeping in the bed I slept in when I was twelve?”
“Stefan, half the people you know your age are still living with their parents. Give it time.”
“Give it time! More time! More time! More time won’t change anything. I’ve been home months now.”
“I get how hard it is to keep starting over.”
“Do you? I don’t think you do. All you ever had to do was be the good girl and life just unfurled in front of you.”
I struggled to breathe deeply and stay quiet and just let my son vent. I pictured my stomach like a beaker into which an incendiary acid fell drop by drop, until the bubble quickened to a boil. He was wrong, of course, in part because he was young; to any kid, it might seem that life for his parents fell easily into a smooth sequence. What I couldn’t say, wouldn’t say, was that our path, Jep’s and mine, was probably smoother because we didn’t stop to get hopelessly screwed up on drugs and kill somebody.