As it turned out, he occupied that room for five days. He signed up for classes that he never attended. My sister was the liaison to help us get our money back; Jep and I couldn’t even bring ourselves to care, but Amelia decided wisely that this wasn’t the time to start throwing away cash. Those were the kinds of things our family did for us in those helpless months. They brought us food; they asked for our bills and the checks and debit cards we used to pay for them; they stood between us and the voracious press.
Long before Belinda’s death, we were already on high alert. When Belinda came home for Christmas, Stefan complained bitterly about her two-day visit to her grandfather’s house in North Carolina, and about all the seasonal observances she and Jill cherished together. “It’s just a bunch of church crap,” Stefan groused.
One night Jep, usually the most gentle-spoken of fathers, glowered at Stefan. “Sit down and listen for a minute, son. You know what? You’re obsessed with this girl.”
Stefan threatened his father then, saying that if he lost Belinda, he would never forgive himself and he would never forgive us. He would hate us until he died.
Now Stefan said to me, “So, instead, I lost her forever, Mom. She’s more real to me here than she was when I was inside.” Stefan wanted to go over to Belinda’s house, to look at the backyard pool where they swam together, the kitchen where they made cookies. He wanted to tell her mother Jill how sorry he was, every day.
“But you can’t,” I reminded him as we went downstairs. “You can’t have any contact with any member of Belinda’s family. That’s a condition of your parole. Think if it was the other way around, if it were you who’d been killed and the person came to me.”
“I just want Jill to believe me! I was never really that guy who would hurt Belinda.”
“Drugs change people,” Jep said. He was packing his lunch in the kitchen. For a flash moment, because I needed a rest from all-Stefan-all-the-time, I hated my dearly beloved husband for still being able to eat like an eighth-grader—two sandwiches, some leftover rice, an apple, a slice of cake.
Stefan said, “I never even had a beer before I tried coke, Dad. I never smoked a joint before I did meth. Did you know that? Dad? Huh?”
“Well, we spent a shitload of money on rehab bills for you in the hospital for a guy who was never really that guy,” Jep said, his voice dangerously low and even. “Don’t you think you should at least go to a meeting? To AA?”
“I guess maybe. I don’t know.”
“Try it and see?”
“People who go to AA in real life, some of them are probably more normal than I am.”
“Some of them are probably doctors and lawyers and schoolteachers and cops,” Jep said. “What do you mean?”
“In jail, they weren’t.”
“That was jail.”
“Well, some of those guys would have sold their kids for drug money. I’m not putting them down. For them it’s like being high is probably the only time in their lives they get to feel like everything is all great and fine, and they’re really smart and sexy and all that. Most of them never got good stuff in real life.”
“But you did.”
“I did, before things got really hard. I mean with prison, sure. But also with Belinda. Before she died.”
Jep put one hand over his eyes and pressed. “Things are hard now, Stef. What makes you think that you won’t want to take them to escape again?”
“That should be obvious,” Stefan said.
Not for the first time during these discussions, I thought that if I lifted my brain out of its carapace, it would smell like burnt hair. As far as deterrents for taking up drugs go, Stefan probably owned some prime horror real estate, even for having weathered the denizens of prison. From some of my students who stayed in touch with me after they graduated, and who’d gone on into high-pressure careers like advertising, I knew that cocaine probably had a long reach and a short memory. For a while, their blazers were Blank Check; the skirts were Ravishment. The parties were throwbacks to the millennium, at urban cloud-house condominiums in Chicago and elsewhere where sculpturally thin young women and men lived on the dime of bigwig benefactors thirty years older and where on every flat surface sat a Murano glass salt cellar brimming with coke. They told me that they controlled their use…right up until they woke up to pillowcases that looked as if they’d been used to swab off the slabs in a butcher shop and had to admit coke controlled them.