It’s only a guess. Several things might have happened over a period of weeks, or months. I know enough, now, having been at this business of telling true stories in which people—good people, bad people, complicated people—do awful things to each other, to say that the extremes implied by your missing data are, for me, quite lucid. I even find myself growing attached to best-case scenarios, because you seem, from your letter, like a good person who has been dealt a bad hand. But at some point, anyhow, you moved back in with your parents: when the pressure, or the threat, or the danger—one of these—proved too great.
In those days, you wrote, your savor for life returned. Your mother seemed more sorry for you than angry, and you were relieved about that; you had been prepared for lectures, for penance, for pointed remarks at the dinner table. Your father, meanwhile, took great delight in his grandchild, bringing home penny candy from the corner store and doing magic tricks with pencils and coins.
Jesse thrived. He talked more, telling stories, singing songs. He asked about his daddy—all children love their daddies, even the ones whose daddies don’t love them back—and you didn’t know what to tell him, but it’s easy to change the subject with children, even if it makes you feel like a villain. You thought, and people tended to agree, that he was still young enough to forget about Michael entirely, which was your hope for yourself, too. You were too old for that to be a real possibility, but hadn’t you heard something about children not forming any real memories until they were five? It was a hopeful thing to imagine.
But Michael came by one day when both your parents were out, his face cleanly shaven, his clothes laundered, his voice full of regret; and Jesse was home at the time, and he ran to his father, and the two of them played like father and son. And you felt trapped, a rat in a maze unable to turn around and retrace your steps, wishing for a gloved hand to lift you out and set you back down at the entrance, and three weeks and a few similar visits later—I took my time. It just wasn’t enough, you wrote—you were a family again, in the apartment a mile and a half across town.
We will keep the door open for you, your parents said. Jesse hugged his grandfather as you carried the last of the few things you’d brought with you to the trunk of Michael’s car.
3.
PULLING UP CARPET IS HARD, but putting down carpet is harder. Still, I felt like the safest course of action was to keep doing everything myself. I found a library book about do-it-yourself home repair and copied the relevant pages, and I bought some cheap carpet studs. From the crime scene footage and photographs I knew the exact sort of carpet I needed, that sickening granite grey that paved office floors for most of the 1980s, its weave so dead that the eye registers it as near cousin to the sidewalk; I was guessing, I think fairly, that Evelyn Gates would have spared little effort in cutting corners.
The new apartment was nice, you wrote; it had a shag carpet, and little else in it when you first arrived. The new place was Michael’s surprise. He’d had a lot of time to think, he said, and you deserved to live somewhere nice: he spoke to you and Jesse as he said it.
Jesse, of course, was thrilled. He ran from room to room, inspecting closets, asking questions. Where would he sleep? Where did they eat? Was there a new TV?
“I thought we could pick out some furniture,” Michael said. It was plain that this was more of his planned performance, but you liked it. You wanted to believe in him, because it would make things easier. Easier like I wouldn’t have to feel like such a failure, you wrote. So you went to a place that had secondhand furniture that was nice, not ratty, and he let you pick out a table and some chairs. Michael found a big, soft sofa tucked away in one corner: it wasn’t in terrific shape, but it was comfortable, and inexpensive.
Everything was timed right, so that you’d see the new empty place—a fresh start!—and have the chance to make it yours. In future years, you couldn’t help but wonder how much insight, if any, Michael had into his own motivations. Did he understand how cruel he’d been to his family before: cruel enough that they’d fled in fear for their safety? Was he sorry for that, or mainly sorry that he’d pushed them too far? Could he talk about any of this, or did he mean to “put it all behind us”—he’d used this phrase, and it seemed a little ominous to you.
I was stupid and tired of living with my parents, you wrote in your letter to me, your long letter which I sat and read between fits of tearing up old carpet and putting older carpet down. It’s really not any more complicated than that.