“I’m sorry. I just got here,” Jep said.
“Dad, oh, Dad, no, you just shocked me a little,” Stefan said as he rolled down his window and Jep reached through to cup the back of Stefan’s head in his hand. He kissed him on the forehead, and then stood back. The marchers shouted, “Say, say, say her name!”
“Awww, Dad,” Stefan breathed, barely a whisper. “I can’t get out.”
“I’ll be right here. You can do it,” Jep said.
Her claws clattering on the door, our dog, Molly, came rushing out the front door, then tried to hoist herself through the window to get to Stefan. He opened the car door to pull her in and stroked her gray muzzle, his tears spilling. “Molberry, you got old.” As she always has, Molly brought in calm along with a sifting of dusky gray fur.
I gave the top half of the driveway another try, but the car slipped and skidded on the mush. I couldn’t make it up the incline to the garage. We had to park right there.
Then they were on us.
3
When I was a young mother, I believed that if Stefan was ever in danger of choking to death and the Heimlich maneuver didn’t work, I would snatch up a paring knife and perform a tracheotomy to save him. I had no training. I had no idea how it was done. Did I think there’d be an online video? I was later to learn that I wasn’t the only woman crazy enough to have nurtured this kind of fantasy. The fury of mother love is so formidable that it seems to scoff at the limits of known reality and confer abilities befitting a god. Now, the arrow of my own future was aimed at a fight for Stefan’s future. What good would it have done Stefan—or Belinda, or the world?—for hard times to destroy him? No good. I hadn’t reckoned on how shattered Stefan was. I thought he would feel safe once he was home, as though he’d finally reached dry land. But he seemed instead to be drifting in dark water.
His first days were a revelation.
He wouldn’t even consider walking across the living room where he might be glimpsed through the bay window. He knelt on his bed and watched through his bedroom porthole window the marchers and the comings and goings of traffic. Sometimes, he did nothing but stare out of that window for two hours. He asked me if I thought they could see him, telling me that they seemed to be pointing their signs at him directly. I said that was impossible: his window, like all the bedroom windows in the house, had a lower pane of thick, frosted glass. The next day, he asked me again. Once he had something in his mind, he couldn’t put it aside. He reminded me of me.
One morning, Stefan was coming out of the upstairs bathroom when Jep, exiting our bedroom a few paces in front of me, affectionately clapped him on the back. Stefan whirled and dropped into a crouch, fists up. From the snarl on his face, I knew that whomever he was seeing, it wasn’t his father. Within a couple of seconds, Stefan’s eyes cleared and then filled with the tears that always seemed ready. “Jesus, Dad, Jesus, I’m so sorry,” he said, creeping back into his room, locking the door. Another morning before 6:00 a.m. Stefan had gone outside and was picking up the newspaper from in front of the house when he heard the roar of the garbage truck pulling up to the driveway. He advanced on the poor guy, shaking the paper and threatening to call the city on him for disturbing the peace. I couldn’t imagine what the fellow thought—and what Jill’s troops would have thought had they been there.
Stefan had trouble eating, often saying his throat was blocked by something. Jep arranged for Elliott Andreekov, the doctor who doubled as the team physician, to see Stefan for a physical, double-quick. With Stefan’s permission, Elliott assured us that while Stefan was losing weight, this would improve when his anxiety settled down. The sensation of being unable to swallow was mostly psychological, for which he prescribed an antidepressant and a low dose of Xanax short-term. What Stefan had gone through, Elliott said, felt like the stress of wartime: In other words, he had symptoms of PTSD. Until he got this under control, we had to understand that his brain was telling him that every noise or motion could be a threat. We should understand that the outbursts weren’t personal and to avoid anything that would aggravate the humiliation he already felt. He used the word fragile four times. I thought again of Nightclub Owens.
Medicine and time alone wouldn’t restore the factory settings. I had to. That was that. For the past three years, I’d made his mood and survival my personal goalpost, with daily letters and weekly visits, first to the prison hospital and rehab, then prison, refusing to miss once, not even the time that I had a fever so high I hallucinated a herd of elk crossing the road. I just needed a lever and a place to stand.