“That’s what you always say,” said Jesse. Your heart hurt; your head hurt; you didn’t know what to say, or to do; you felt like you had already ruined your own life, and maybe your son’s, too, but you did not have any idea, you said, what you were supposed to do about any of it. You thought that if you could share with him the tricks you used to get through Michael’s angry times, maybe he could learn how to use them for himself. But it was important for him to understand that if Michael found out about Mrs. Benson, and about what she knew, that would make things worse.
“It’s true,” you said. You were improvising. “Your daddy is trying. I know he can do better. So do you. But if we tell everybody about how Daddy doesn’t always do his best, it could get Daddy in trouble.”
This was a moment you remembered, you said, because out of all the moments you wished you could get a chance to do over, this was always the one that came unbidden to your mind. When Michael had come to your parents’ house begging for another chance, mightn’t you have told him, No, we’re better off this way, get out of here or I’m calling the police? You might have, but it was this moment that you always remembered first when you found yourself going over the details of Jesse’s young, wasted life, and what you might have done to protect him. Even on the very day he died, couldn’t you have done something to throw a wrench into his plans that morning, even without knowing what they were? You thought probably yes, but the day of his death wasn’t the thing that came for you at night when you were trying to sleep. It was the time after his elementary schoolteacher’s visit to the apartment, a visit during which she had expressed concern about the conditions in which Jesse lived, and about you, and your safety, and you had tried to put the best face on the situation you could without lying outright, because you hadn’t wanted to call your son, your beautiful son, a liar to his teacher. The thing that haunted you was how you’d explained to Jesse, in the most loving way you could, that he wasn’t supposed to tell people how his father behaved when he got angry with his family.
“He should get in trouble for hitting you,” Jesse said. At nine, he was beginning to resemble the young man he would briefly become: a handsome sandy-haired boy with a perpetually worried look in his eyes, an expression that suggested his expectations of both the present and the future were low.
“He’s trying,” you said, because it was all you had and you had to believe it, either because you didn’t see any alternatives, or because you were afraid of what would happen if you tried them.
Mrs. Benson approached Jesse several times over the course of the rest of the school year to ask him if things were better at home, but he refused to volunteer any further information to her, usually changing the subject by talking about hiking trips he’d taken with his father into the foothills. You knew that this was how he answered her because she contacted you one final time before the school year was out, and she said that she was happy to hear Jesse’s dad was doing better.
For people on the outside, either you’re doing things with your son and trying to be a good father, or you’re a monster twenty-four hours a day, you said. They don’t actually know what it’s like.
If they knew, they would know, you said. Twice, in consecutive, identical sentences.
If they knew, they would know.
* * *
THE OTHER THING THAT HAPPENED when Jesse was nine, besides all the other things that kept happening and why dwell on them, they are what they are, you said, you can’t fix the past, was that he met Gene Cupp. Gene’s family had moved from Arizona to California in the middle of the school year; it’s hard for children to be uprooted from their environment and have to make new friends, though Gene, at eleven, had already been through the process several times.
He lived with his father, which was unusual. You learned about Gene and his father early on because Jesse had befriended him on the playground the week he got to school; Gene had been playing tetherball by himself in a far corner of the playground, hitting the ball as hard as he could in one direction, then pivoting on his heels to hit it back after it had circled the pole a time or two.
His father, you said, was a biker. He had a beer belly and a brown beard and a leather jacket, and a Harley-Davidson, which was what most of the bikers rode. He dropped Gene off at school from his motorcycle; Jesse thought it was the coolest thing he’d ever seen. Gene would lift the helmet off his head and hand it back to his father, who would then lower it onto his own head and roar off. Gene’s dramatic drop-off routine had made him the subject of rumors from his first day at school, most of them whole-cloth playground inventions based on how bikers looked on TV.