Thankfully only a few weary-looking marchers were standing there in front of our house, so I rushed out and grabbed the dry cleaning from the back seat and then the mail. I didn’t even notice the red-haired woman with a shy, sweet smile waiting on the porch. “Hi, Thea,” she said. “They’re giving you a little peace today, huh?”
“Yes. So what’s up? Do I know you?” I said and reached past her to put my key in the lock, a lock I’d never bothered with until a few years ago. The way she spoke, distancing herself from the protestors and press, I thought maybe she was from the local Democratic party or something. So I wasn’t ready for what came next.
“Just give me thirty seconds and if you don’t want to talk to me afterward, I’ll leave.” She held out a press pass from the local public TV station. “No one else is going to give you the time to tell your side of it.”
“Oh, come on! I don’t have a side of it that anyone could ever care about!”
“Let’s make them care,” said the woman, looping her thumb and index finger around her long hair and pulling it back, the way some women do. “And if you try and they’re still like this, you’re no worse off.”
“People would blame me even for talking,” I said.
From the street, someone jeered, “Do a little shopping on the way home, Mrs. Christiansen? Get some nice things for Stefan?” Then from nowhere, a tomato came splatting against the porch pillar, then another one hit the bay window.
“Sorry,” I said. “Tomatoes are a favorite. The police tell them not to do it, but they do anyway. They hit my husband in the back of the head once. He thought he’d been shot.”
“Just take my card. You don’t have to call me if you don’t want. We are looking to do a series that highlights the social issues impacting our communities. Not an exposé. We’d come here and talk, and you could explain what good can come out of something bad. It wouldn’t just be about Stefan. It would be about what can happen to people as a result of their being involved with drugs. Other guests would be profiled, too. We envision it being multi-part.”
I took her card just to get rid of her then slipped inside, glad to have the safety of the door against my back, protecting me from them. It was such a small thing, an inch of wood that could probably be dislodged with a single kick. A small wastebasket sat just to the right of the door, and I flicked the card into it. Over the years, I had thrown dozens of messages of hatred there that had been taped to our garage door and porch railings before I took the time to throw them out. Messages like: STOP STEFAN and LOOK BEHIND YOU…
Stefan was up in his room and Jep came home early, so I decided to postpone talking about what happened at work and try for at least the appearance of a normal night. That seemed to work.
Next morning, I kept busy with one thing and another until after eleven. At last, I went up and knocked on Stefan’s closed door, my breath coming in gasps when there was no sound. I finally heard a rustle as he got up. He had been setting up a new study space and taking down some of his teenage things we’d enshrined. We’d given him a new Mac laptop with all the trimmings to make up for the Christmases we’d just had to give him money for the commissary.
“I know I should be up by now,” he said. “But it’s easier to sleep.”
Then he put his hand over his eyes. He told me that he felt haunted. Every front door and light post on the street reminded him not—as I expected—of the carefree child he had been, but instead of Belinda, at fourteen, at sixteen, dropping by, inviting him to her pool to swim, trying to talk him into coming along and getting on a horse when she took riding lessons, posing in a tulip of satin for the prom. He had taken out one of the framed photos of them on graduation day, of Stefan tipping her mortarboard over her eyes while she laughed.
She left for school that August. We knew before then that Stefan wasn’t ready to go away to college just yet; he was a young seventeen and not a particularly good student. Belinda was nearly a full year older. So we convinced him to enroll in a few classes locally for at least a semester and then re-evaluate, and he did. But that fall turned out to be a torment for all of us. When he left to drive up to Black Creek every Friday night, driving back exhausted every Sunday night, when he begged Jep and me to let him quit the stupid junior college classes and just move up there to work in a pizza place or a grocery store for now, to be near Belinda; when he grew gaunt and monosyllabic as he pushed himself harder during the weekdays at home, falling asleep over his books at two in the morning, to get the grades he needed for a college acceptance starting in January. My plan had been for him to transfer to Thornton Wilder. He had another plan. I thought he would be jubilant when he was accepted at UW–Black Creek, but he wasn’t, and it would be years before we would really understand why. The only suggestion we dared was that living with Belinda might put too much of a strain on their relationship, so we offered to pay for a dorm room. All of them were already filled. But Stefan found a room in an old house that was affiliated with the college and we agreed to pay for that. It was on the fourth floor and Stefan, always fastidious, recoiled from the discolored sink in the shared kitchen, the crust of grime on the refrigerator shelf where he would have to store his milk and his juice. But it was only a mile from Belinda’s apartment.