The speech we were to give was in two days’ time. What if it wasn’t relevant at all anymore? Why should we do this?
Pete Sunday asked the substance of what we were to address and I told him that it was the challenges Stefan faced coming out of prison.
“Well, that’s still something you faced, right?” he said.
It was. With a promise to try to speed things up, Pete Sunday left, the box tucked under one arm.
It’s really almost over, I told myself. Almost really over for good.
* * *
We arrived at the hotel in Milwaukee early in the morning that weekend, although the speech was not scheduled to start until that night at six. I was practically teen-like in my relief when Jep was able to come with us. Curt Cowrie met us in the lobby of The Nines, the very kind of hotel I’d dreamed of last January when Stefan came out of prison, with a rooftop restaurant where we lunched on Thai barbecue until my stomach literally protruded. He said we were welcome to stay overnight in the suite booked for us, dine out, have brunch the next day, whatever we wanted, and we agreed to take him up on that. We went to the theater and did a sound check. How many seats there were, how long it took to walk from the back of the theater to the stage, these things literally nauseated me, or maybe it was all that barbecue. Forty minutes, an hour with questions, I told myself. It couldn’t last forever. Be brave and be seated.
After lunch, a stylist showed up to do hair and makeup. Stefan looked like old money in a slate-blue Marc Jacobs sport coat over a gray checked shirt with a dark green tie. He told me that he’d gone swimming in the indoor rooftop pool and then took a nap. At four, we showed up at the theater. We sat side by side on the stage in big wing-back chairs. The sound technicians inserted the mics, clipped them and turned them on. When it was time for each of us to speak, we would get up and stand in front of a slender podium on which we’d set our notes.
An hour until the curtains would open. A half hour. Five minutes.
As the lights went down, I looked out over the crowd, which was startlingly vast, and reminded myself not to think too much. I began, “Today, you’re going to feel the whole range of emotions, from outrage to pity. When you leave, I hope that you will also feel understanding and compassion, even if that surprises you. I can assure you that this whole range of emotions is something that everyone who knows me and who knows my son Stefan has felt...”
Suddenly, a line of bright lights flipped on, along the first row of the mezzanine. A whole row of young women stood, fifteen? Twenty? Some were holding large flashlights, others leaning out over the railing, unfurling a canvas the size of a putting green, imprinted with the morgue photo of Belinda’s face.
“Say, say, say her name,” they began to chant. “Say, say, say her name.”
For twenty minutes, the rest of the audience watched aghast as extra security grappled with the girls, who were modestly attired in red or pink jumpsuits so that they could fall limp to the floor. Each time the guards gently wrestled one of them into the aisle, she ran back and began chanting again. Finally, using zip ties, they secured the young women’s wrists to the railings so tightly that it was necessary for police to turn on the auditorium lights and use delicate surgical scissors to free them.
As soon as police were able to get the girls out of the auditorium, we went on, probably less shaken by the familiar chants than the rest of the audience was.
I finished up by saying, “People always ask, how could you not have known your son was in so much trouble emotionally? What kind of parent are you? That’s a legitimate question. Until this happened, I would have said that I was a good parent, raising a loving and responsible son. I would have said that my son was the last person to be violent or to have a serious struggle with depression or mental illness or drugs. So I wasn’t really looking for any other possibility. And maybe that’s the only lesson I can leave you with.
“Each of us owes the people we love and the people they love, or the people they could hurt, the responsibility to look without favor or prejudice. Maybe there was a sign in my son’s propensity to fall in love so madly he couldn’t see anything but the girl he loved. Maybe there was a sign in the way he seemed to cut off almost all communication with us when he went to college. We just thought he was trying to experience himself as a young man who didn’t need to report his every move to his mother and father, and we didn’t want to interfere with that. We weren’t with him every day, as we had been when he was younger, and we definitely would have seen changes in him if we had gone up there, or cajoled him into a visual phone call.
“We second-guessed our impulse to reach out. We should have reached out. I’m not suggesting that you have to question every move someone makes, but then again, it doesn’t hurt to question. The worst that could happen is that we irritate or offend someone, and that seems a very small price to pay. We loved him, and we knew that he knew it. You know, if love alone was enough to prevent a suicide, almost no one would ever die by suicide. If love alone was enough to deter someone from violence, there would be a whole lot less violence in our violent world.”
Stefan spoke then, briefly. “I never imagined myself to be the kind of person who could violently hurt someone I loved, and it doesn’t matter that it was an accident. But I had to go on and I still want my life to matter for something, which is why I started The Healing Project.” He talked about its aims and goals. “Everybody has the obligation to do good, like John Wesley said, as much as we can for as many people as we can. But if you’ve done wrong, you have even more of an obligation. It’s the most important thing.”
Then we took questions. One woman, not unkindly, asked me how I coped with the inevitable shame:
I told her, “I wanted to hide away. I wanted to die at first. But like Stefan said, the most important impulse you have, along with the guilt, is you want to do something good. It wouldn’t do anybody any good if I just hid away. I really didn’t want to even do this speech, not even for money, since it was too painful to even think about. But I became convinced that there was a good reason to do it, that maybe at least it would give somebody the insight to help another family along.”
An older man raised his hand and got up. He turned to Stefan. “What about you? You paid your ‘debt to society.’” The sneering quotation marks hung invisible and heavy in the air. “Do you feel like you should go on and just have a jolly life now?”
“No,” Stefan said. “I don’t. But even people like me have families, my grandparents and my parents who need me too. I’m all they have, and maybe I don’t deserve for them to love me, but I want to try to deserve it.”
When we finished, there was a sprinkling of applause, then a great boom of applause. I could see Jep in the back, making the clasped-fists signs of congratulation, and then gesturing to let us know he would go to get the car.
We walked out through the lobby, where several people stopped us to murmur approval for the talk and for our grace under the pressure of the protest. As we neared the door, I heard someone behind me, “Wait, dear, just a moment!”