“I’m not going to wreck the car, Mom.” But he pulled over slowly anyway. I got out, and a cyclone of snow burst into the vehicle as Stefan scrambled over the console. When I was strapped back into the driver’s seat, with the zipper on my coat lowered to let my arms move more freely, I reached out and grabbed Stefan’s arm. I felt that huge muscle tense, and for a moment I was afraid. I glanced down at his hands, remembering those hands when they were tiny starfish with dimples instead of knuckles.
This is your child, I thought. You are his mother.
How dare he even hint at taking himself away from me?
“Listen, you melodramatic little jerk,” I said. “I get the worry and the regret. That’s natural. But if you think I drove up and down this road to that shitbox prison in that shitbox town every week for two years, when half the people I knew thought I was nuts, and I didn’t ever stop believing it could be better, so you could come out and kill yourself, you are sadly mistaken. If you think you have the luxury of killing yourself, after the worst is over, with all the people you’d be letting down, then get out of my car and get out of my life.”
“Did I say I was going to? I thought I was saying that I never would, hello!”
“Because of that guy you knew who killed himself?”
“Well, sure, that’s part of it! It’s over for him. He wasn’t some hardened criminal. He had a chance for it to be better, and now he’ll never know how it all comes out.”
“What’s the other part of it?”
“Because it has to be better to live. And the other part…the other part is you. You don’t have a backup child. I don’t have a better brother.”
There was only one thing I could say to that.
Just before we got off our exit on the highway, Stefan spotted the all-night mom-and-pop pancake house where my father used to take him before dawn on the mornings they went fishing. “Can we stop, Mom?” he said.
I worried that he’d get sick again, or that we might run into someone. All I wanted now was to be inside our own home. But I agreed, even though my own stomach almost gave it up when he ordered waffles with whipped cream and strawberry jam. By then, however, I realized that I was ravenous, and dispatched a bowl of oatmeal and two orders of buttered wheat toast. As I gobbled, the server shied from me in a way I didn’t understand until I looked down at my hands and was shocked by how filthy they were, one nail sheared off in a gory grin. In the bathroom mirror, my face was similarly streaked with dirt and even some blood: I had apparently bitten through my lip at some point. I wanted to apologize to the woman, but what would I say? I’m a college professor… I don’t usually have blood on my mouth.
“Why didn’t you tell me how I looked?” I asked Stefan, when I sat back down.
“You look fine,” he said, rolling his eyes and nodding when I gestured at my face. “For real, nobody in here looks that good.” In the booth opposite us, two enormous farmers, in overalls of an incalculable size, were eating identical breakfasts. In front of each one was a plate of French toast with ham, two plates of bacon, and four fried eggs.
One of them waved shyly to the waitress. “Could I get a decaf skim cappuccino?” he asked.
We laughed then. Forgive me, we laughed. I hadn’t heard Stefan laugh in years.
He smiled at his waffles, as if they were little children. “I can eat anytime I want. And the food is clean,” he said. My stomach processed what he meant by “clean,” and its opposite, about the ghastliness of the way food might be prepared in a place where punishment was the first goal.
I cast my mind back to everything Stefan had said about his life in prison. It wasn’t much. Twice, early on, he showed up in the visitors’ room with an angry bruise on his cheek; once, he was limping; another time, his arm was in a sling. But he wouldn’t talk about that. He might, he said, someday, if there was a reason. All he would tell us was, “They don’t like people who hurt women.”
For almost three years, he’d done almost nothing beyond his assigned jobs, except reading and working out, hours of running in place, of push-ups and sit-ups and leg presses. Always more interested in sports and movies and Belinda than in school, Stefan found it comical when people inevitably called him “Professor,” because he had started college there in a place where most people hadn’t finished high school. （“I read all your books, Mom, all the Russians, all the Victorians, all the American Romantics…”） The associate’s degree he’d earned was in English Lit.