After Jep stopped laughing, his comment was, “Enthusiastic?”
I’m sure Jep never imagined struggling to try to bond with Stefan after some traumatic estrangement. Never imagined struggling to try to bond with Stefan at all—or with anyone else. For Jep, the world threw open its arms. He never fretted his looks or his style or his goals. My father called him “Everybody’s All American,” with just a slight sizzle of sarcasm, although my family embraced Jep as their own from day one. Jep’s own parents, John and Paula Christiansen, lived in England for most of Jep’s adult life, where Paula taught at the London School of Economics, and the Demetriou family became his default clan. My sister Phoebe always said that if Jep hadn’t been a coach, he should have been a priest, like in an old Bing Crosby movie. People who came into his harbor felt graced. He had so many Coach of the Year plaques from his different schools, he could have built a shed out of them. He kept every single one. Over the years, many times, he turned to me at night and said in a tone of wonder that he still couldn’t believe that he had the great privilege of doing what he loved for money.
It surprised me how keenly I missed the crisp, sharpened-pencil focus of my own classroom and campus home. But this would be a year spent on tilling my own garden—in a number of different ways. I was right where I needed to be, or so I consoled myself, and every day that passed only seemed to emphasize that truth.
One night a few weeks into the fall semester, Jep came home, gave me a kiss on the forehead and said to Stefan, sitting at the table, “Well, if it isn’t Father Nature.” He got a beer out of the fridge, put it back, and extracted the jug of orange juice. “I can’t let myself have a beer tonight. I’ll never stop. I’ll end up hopelessly drunk. One of my players told me today that he wanted to ask his sociology professor a question, but he didn’t know who she was or where the class met. The tutor just does all the assignments for him. Isn’t that a great system? But if I pointed out the irony, my player would just stare at me and say, What’s up, Coach? It’s his norm. Like he’s been treated like royalty all his life.”
Stefan got up, walked into the living room and stood looking out the window at the tree he’d climbed as a child. Without turning around, he said, “Dad, it’s funny you brought up that whole deal with your players. Because I’ve been thinking about that, not exactly that, but how that whole dynamic applies to me. I have some news for you guys. Not like earth-shattering big news. Just news.”
My mind was a thumb flipping pages: Everything went by. He had AIDS. He had cornered and attacked the guy from the lumberyard. He was on drugs again. When I finally remembered to breathe, my inhale hurt my chest.
“I had an idea,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about it for a while now. Ever since I got hurt, actually. It could be stupid. But it’s about those things I was telling you a while ago when I first came home about people who end up in prison... About how you need to change the things people believe about you. About how doing something good has to be a thrill. It’s sort of a program. Julie thinks it’s a good idea.”
That made me smile.
He’d confided in Julie before me. Again.
Well. On the other hand, I had to admit, “If she thinks it’s a good idea, it probably is.”
And it turned out to be a very good idea. It would end up changing my son’s life, and all our lives, in ways that seemed to mean that the possibility of redemption was real and in reach. We didn’t know that then. At the time, I just surrendered to hope, because why not? Hope was always my default setting.
BOOK TWO:
Renewal
5
The germ of the idea came to Stefan when Jep spoke to him one day about how rest was an important part of his healing, about putting off trying to save the world until the day after tomorrow.
“You have to make healing yourself a project,” Jep had told Stefan. “You have to let yourself feel the healing.” His father’s words didn’t have the intended effect, Stefan later told us. Instead, the sound of the words rolled over and over in his mind, healing, feeling, healing, feeling, urging him to do something, to offer something, to realize something that would really matter to someone else, but would excite and delight him at the same time.
He thought about what he still felt...grief, shame, frustration, remorse. He thought of what he wanted to feel, especially since his eye had healed so well...a second chance, a new life, a different outcome, a positive point of view. It was a project.
The Healing Project. Those three words.
“Look, Stefan,” I told him. “That day we went to the cemetery, I wasn’t trying to use your obsession with Belinda to guilt trip you. I was just reminding you how she always would say to you, don’t waste your life, and how, as awful as it is, you now have this second chance to make something meaningful of your life.”
“Which your landscaping company is doing,” Jep said. “You’re making a lot of people happy, some who you’ll never even meet. You’re giving people beauty to appreciate. And you’re healing. You’re healing from your injury and from prison.”
Neither of us knew how to say to our son, you don’t have to be president of the United States. You don’t have to be president of a bank... But what if he did want to be a bank president, or a computer designer or an architect? Were we suggesting somehow that his sights should be limited? That he somehow wasn’t smart enough?
“It’s just that what I do doesn’t really matter,” Stefan said. “Oh sure, I could just go on making people happy with all the pretty flowers and arrangements. Making myself feel temporarily happy.”
I put in, “Honey, no one’s ever happy every minute, and there’s never anything wrong with happy.”
“Except I feel I’m like one of those guys, those athletes of Dad’s. I’ve had it all handed to me. And I didn’t live up to it.”
“Honey, you’ve worked as much as most people for what you got. And you paid for what you did wrong.”
“Well, I suffered. I suffered a little. I should have suffered a lot more. Because what I did was horrendous. I know I owe more. I want to use what I went through for something positive, not just have it be the dark place I go to in my mind.”
His therapist, whom he’d been talking with every week now, would agree with us, Stefan went on. The psychologist didn’t think that The Whole Blooming World was a trivial endeavor, especially given how it had opened Stefan’s eyes to his joy in something he’d never considered before—color, design, the living world. The therapist further didn’t believe Stefan’s quest to make amends needed to be commensurate with the relative size of the wrong he had done. Even Stefan knew this challenge was his own magical thinking. (He just wanted us to know that he knew.) And yet, if some sort of redemptive action, some sort of atonement, could shield Stefan from the deep despair he felt at times, even the psychologist admitted it would be as effective as the antidepressants and the pills he prescribed for Stefan to calm down and sleep.
Gradually, especially with the physical nature of his work, the ratio of Stefan’s sleeping to waking had started to regularize, and he no longer jumped out of his skin every time one of us walked up behind him.
“Do you have time right now for me to explain my idea?”
We had time.
* * *
Setting up one of the ubiquitous easels Jep used to map out his team’s plays, Stefan brought down flip charts he’d been working on in his room, drawing them on Jep’s huge pads of paper. My son was taking on the role of the teacher; we were his students. He would share the bones of implementing his idea. But he wasn’t ready to do that yet. He needed to give us background first. We sat in the breakfast room, Jep and me on one side of the table, Stefan facing us.