“We’re starting with the premise that my life is worthless,” Stefan said.
I personally had no use for that premise. I knew that Stefan was still haunted by Belinda’s death, by what happened to Nightclub Owens and by a hollowed-out feeling of unearned forgiveness. The latter was a subject he told us he’d chewed over with his therapist, then tried to explain its burden to Will. Everybody else could forgive you, he believed, but if you felt you didn’t deserve it, you might lose your will to live.
“Will got the whole thing,” Stefan told us. “He’s an ordinary guy. He’s never been in any real trouble. He’s like I used to be. And he saw my point. He said if it were him, he would do whatever it took to give life a solid try.”
“A solid try?” I said. “Just a try? You’re not fully committed to living?”
I remembered again the words I’d overheard my son confide into his laptop late at night. Again, I thought of a shadow cast against a door, the impossible slow swing of tennis shoes with the toes pointed down. I turned to face my husband and son just at the moment that Stefan’s face literally slid out of the happy-boy lineaments he’d clearly been putting on for us. What we saw instead was similar to one of those optical-illusion drawings of an Edwardian lady that, when you study it, reveals a skull.
“Of course,” Stefan said. “Sure I am.”
Then he explained the evolution of his thinking.
“The repentance you do in prison doesn’t really signify anything,” he said. In prison, people who did wrong still felt wronged themselves. The confinement was awful. The smears on the wall were awful. No matter how hard he scrubbed the experience from his memory, vestiges of his being another person, probably a much worse person, remained.
“The sight of even one cockroach in my cell panicked me,” he said. “If I saw more than one, I couldn’t sleep. I wanted to work more hours than were required, but that made me stand out, and I didn’t dare stand out.” (“If you figured out that working harder passed the time, you probably wouldn’t be in prison.”) Stefan thought that working in the laundry might make him feel cleaner, too, but the sight of other prisoners’ sheets roused in him almost a disgust. The prison kitchen was mostly appalling, too, although he liked baking bread and even unpacking canned goods.
“So I got permission to work outside. And that was great. I loved being outside, like I do now. You would never think of mowing the grass and shoveling the snow as a privilege, but it felt like that to me. I wasn’t free, definitely not free, but when I could look up and see the sky above me instead of a metal grate, that was everything. It could get me through the fear. It could get me through those nights of no hope.” So he mowed and weeded and watered until one of the other prisoners working with him ran away.
“It had nothing to do with me. I was just standing there when the guy took off running. I almost puked because I thought the guard in the tower was going to shoot at him, but the guy wasn’t a violent guy, just a petty burglar. The sirens, like, exploded, and I couldn’t tell if the sound was inside me or outside me. Guys literally crouched on the ground with their hands over their ears. And suddenly, this big porker guard is dragging me inside like it was my idea and they’re asking me, what did you know about this escape and when did you know it? I said, nothing! Nothing! Not a fucking...sorry, Mom. Not a thing! I don’t even know that guy! and they believed me but it was still ruined for me. I had to be inside all the time except for rec time.”
So Stefan made the best of that. At recreation, he started organizing guys who had any concept at all of team sport. He realized he had become a coach by osmosis from his dad; within a few months, he had trained a prison football team that was the envy of the Great Lakes region. (“These are very aggressive guys, you know. You had to watch them like they were attack dogs. It was called touch, but it was really tackle,” he told us.)
Eventually, it got too cold even for Stefan to do more than take a brief jog about the yard every day.
In the kitchen now, he drew two large ovals on the flip chart.
“So I thought, what do I want? What can I get other people to want?”
He drew an arrow from one oval to the other.
“I knew I wanted to eat good food once in a while. Basically, they feed you slop. I was living on canned carrots and bread.”
Once a month, the inmates got the chance to use hot plates and toaster ovens to make some of the food they remembered from home. So Stefan called restaurants and talked chefs into coming in and teaching a cooking demonstration. The cooking demonstrations soon became an institution, every couple of weeks, which even the most hardened guys loved. As the organizer, Stefan had his pick of everything—from linguine and bracciole to homemade tamales.
“I want you to know that the potatoes and carrots and stuff were cut up by the trusties in the kitchen. They most definitely did not give us guys knives. And you would have to be pretty crafty to hurt somebody with a hot plate. I was shocked that nobody tried. The worst was the guy who threw hot pepper sauce in the eyes of his sworn enemy. That was way worse than it sounds.”
Stefan then got permission, he told us, to call public libraries to ask them to donate their oldest used books. He stamped and cataloged hundreds of books and organized dozens of library shelves and a big roving book cart.
“But even that didn’t fill up all the time there was,” he said.
Stefan stood up then and squeezed his temples. I had never seen his expression so sad, not even on the day we left him at rehab on the psych floor.
“Dad, you never realize, in real life, how much time there is in the world. In real life, you’re always wondering how can you cram one more thing into this day that is already crammed full of stuff you have to do? But I guess that’s why they call it doing time. Time is all you’re doing. Time is passing. Your life is passing. Time is terrifying if you can’t be useful.”
He did all his college coursework in a couple of hours each day, spreading it out over several days between classes so that it would sustain him. He wrote ten letters every week, at least two pages to us every day—the ones he wrote to my sisters were virtually a diary, but, probably wisely, he didn’t share as much with us. When he could no longer write or type because his hands cramped, he “became a cliché,” doing hundreds of pull-ups and push-ups. He practiced yoga. He broke up Snickers bars to feed a sparrow that lived inside the cell block, thrilled when it hopped onto his palm, believing the little bird was somehow more alive than all the men who snored and sang and screamed all around him. At night, he prayed to die in his sleep. He prayed not to die in his sleep. He was afraid that the prayers, on the way to heaven, would get mixed up. In the mornings, through a kind of meditation, just as he awakened, he could imagine himself a child again, curled in his bed with puppy Molly snuggled against his back, where she now snuggled again each night, although now he had to lift her elderly body up. She had abandoned her spot at the foot of our bed the first night Stefan was home.
Every morning in prison he wished everyone he saw a good day and said not one other thing.
“I had to be strategic. I had to bar myself from the bad guys, the real scary guys. That’s what you call it. They respect that you want to bar yourself from white supremacists and black supremacists and the real nutters, like rapists.”
He made sure to be the last one leaving the block or leaving any room so that no one was behind him. He made sure to stand at the end of the shower and complete his ablutions in two minutes.
“I have to tell you the worst thing I ever did.”
“No,” Jep said, crossing the room in two steps. “You don’t have to tell us that.”