That had been something you looked forward to, you said, Jesse getting a chance to live life on his own, because he had always been curious about the world, and hadn’t had much of a chance to see many places.
The last time she called you had been in May, when she’d said that Jesse’s work in class showed signs of real sensitivity, and she didn’t see any reason why he couldn’t get into Cal Poly year after next, if he tried; to which you had responded, as blandly as you could so as not to arouse suspicion, that you had also heard San Diego State was nice.
You were imagining Jesse, your son, now almost grown, getting far away enough from Michael to be safe.
* * *
BECAUSE HE WAS ALMOST GROWN, you wrote. That’s the thing about it that made it worse. Just one more year and he might have saved enough money to move out; just one more year with his eyes on the goal line. You felt personally invested in this vision, because you had missed your chance, you thought. Efforts to leave always came to nothing and made matters worse, but it didn’t really matter, because you’d had your fun.
I did not feel, sitting on the floor of my house in Milpitas, that it was fair or accurate to say that you, in the years of your life since you’d met Michael Jenkins, had had your fun. You had raised a child you loved fiercely but could not protect from the violence of his father; you had learned to shrink before Michael’s anger rather than resist it, because resistance carried with it the risk of disproportionate response; you had seen the careful, methodical demolition of your every effort to carve out a small space for your own personal pleasure or growth. Coffee with friends, Tupperware parties, Avon errands—their costs had all been too great to pay over and above your daily toll. You lived in waiting: for something to happen, who could say what, that might give you relief.
But it was going to be worth it, you said, to know that you had done your best, even though, back then, you often heard a voice in your head asking whether that was really true; a mocking voice, your own but meaner, that interrogated you while you lay awake sometimes. He’s so big now, the voice said. Too late to help now, the voice said. You knew these were only your own thoughts, and you understood them as expressions of guilt or shame and not the judgment of the outside world: you weren’t crazy. But it just felt so bad, to lie there sometimes, wondering if the mocking, dismissive distance your son now kept from you was your fault, another mark against you, an indication that the hateful things Michael said to you when he was angry—which was all the time; he never got better now—were all really true.
All of this got about a thousand times worse, you said, on the morning after the night Jesse didn’t come home.
* * *
YOU HEATED UP A CAN OF BEEF STEW for Michael the following morning, you remembered. The smell of it still stuck in your brain even down to the present day, a sense memory too powerful to shake. Michael was furious, seated in his chair in the living room, yelling now at the television and now over at you, preparing himself for direct confrontation. You had called the cops, both because you were terrified that something had happened, and because Michael was afraid of the police. A call to the department would leave you with at least one chip in hand, one you couldn’t actually wager but which sat there on the table, visible to your opponent for as long as the game lasted. It wasn’t much, but it was something.
Michael kept right on yelling as you gave them the details: that you had last seen Jesse getting into his friend Gene’s car yesterday afternoon; that he’d missed dinner; that he hadn’t told you he was intending to go anywhere with anyone; that there hadn’t been any major changes or arguments recently—all this was true; the mood in the house had been one of relative calm, if not comfort. Yes, yesterday afternoon, you said again. Right outside, right here. He was getting into Gene’s car.
The more you told them, the more agitated Michael became. You knew that part of what was bothering him was the noise; his hearing wasn’t as good as it used to be, probably from all the loud machines at his work, and he didn’t like to have to turn up the television, whose speaker distorted when the volume got too high. He directed his anger at the absent Jesse for the time being; he yelled that a son shouldn’t treat his mother like shit. He said “shit” so many times, you said. You pivoted on your feet in the hope that you could direct the mouthpiece of the phone sufficiently out of the path of his voice, but you knew the operator would hear everything. Fear and shame and panic, the feeling that you’d lost control at last and would now be forced to bear witness to the extent of your failure. Years of trying. It was so much for you to hold.