“It doesn’t matter,” he told me.
“Sure it does,” I said. “What else does?”
It seemed right to offer every teaspoon of conferred civility that I could. So I pulled off at a nearby Target, and apologized for this being the only choice for haberdashery. But Stefan loved Target, he always had; he thought of it as a bazaar of consumer delights. Target, not homemade dinners or a proper bed, was what always headed the list of things he missed. His excitement was poignant. He appeared in the dressing room door, posing in a striped pullover, then a bright Green Bay Packers hoodie. I thought helplessly of Stefan as a little boy, wearing matching shorts and sailor tops from The Children’s Place, so expensive and foppish that Jep complained his son looked like one of the dolls in a Victorian child’s bedroom on Masterpiece Theatre.
He was my only. What could I do? Then and now. It is far easier to hate yourself than to hate your own child.
We bought jeans and a sweatshirt, flannel shirts and Carhartt boots and a light down parka, and he threw out the stiff black prison-sewn shirts and the two pairs of mended chinos, as well as the coat that stank of sweat and cigarettes that had once belonged to some criminal—though, of course, Stefan was a criminal, too. The only thing he kept was the pale blue sweater he had knitted himself, just in the past year when he’d been trusted with plastic knitting needles. Cheerfully disdaining the new jacket, he wore the Green Bay Packers sweatshirt out of the store, the way a child would do. When he grinned and pointed to the gold Packers logo, I took a picture and messaged it to Jep, who texted back, Yes! He then texted me privately, Is he okay? And I answered, So far so good. Who would have imagined that this was how I would communicate that news? In this new universe, the most critical exchanges—between parents, between a long-married husband and wife, new sweethearts, or a stalker and his victim—were shared on a four-inch screen, with emojis of hearts and smiley faces. This was probably a metaphor for something but I could not fathom what.
Newly outfitted, Stefan and I headed back toward the highway.
We’d driven only a few miles when the blizzard leaped upon us. We edged our way into a hotel parking lot. I couldn’t even see the sky. A check of the local weather on my phone promised hours of possible whiteout conditions.
“Did you get a good night’s sleep?”
Why was I talking to Stefan as though he were my great-aunt?
“I never slept a whole night the entire time I was in there,” he said. “The last couple of nights, I didn’t go to sleep at all. I was afraid I’d die before I got out.”
I’d never been a good sleeper, but the previous weeks—enduring Christmas, the winter break at my college, New Year’s Eve with Jep, my best friend Julie and her husband, Hal, and a few other couples, all with my mind arrowed toward this moment—had been impossible.
“Let’s just stay here until the storm eases up,” I told Stefan. “I’ll get us hotel rooms. You can…relax, have a nap or watch a movie. Later on, we’ll get a fancy meal.”
I was, as always, too optimistic. I had in mind a steak house like Bee’s and B’s, the place I took him to for birthdays when he was a kid, with the whole family, grandparents and cousins and aunts and uncles and a couple of neighbors at a table nearly as big as the room. Who knew? Three solid college campuses and a sizable airport were within fifty miles. Maybe there would be at least one luxurious hotel, with flat-screens and plunge tubs and blackout shades and a pricey, chef-owned eatery on the first floor. As it turned out, our options were limited to Pizza Hut and Panera Bread. Apparently boutique hotels were scarce near a prison. How had I not known this before?
Well, for all my weekly visits, I had never spent an overnight in Black Creek. Nor had any of Stefan’s aunts or grandparents who visited. When I came alone, which was most often, I would hit the road again right after visiting hours, bombing my way home along the back roads in the summer, the highway in the winter. Then I would slam into the house straight upstairs to sit in a tub filled with scented oil and hot water for over an hour, adding more hot as needed, an almost holy observance after the stench of the place where Stefan lived. I would sit there and cry. I cried so hard each week it seemed impossible that I did not actually lose water weight.
We were already in the parking lot of a Residence Inn on the frontage road, so we followed a smudge of light that seemed to be the lobby and parked under the portico. I booked a two-bedroom suite, but that quickly seemed like an iffy idea so I changed it to a room for Stefan to give him privacy and one for me, not even on the same floor, because why would you want to share a suite with anyone, even your mother, especially your mother, on your first night out of jail? The rooms were generous vistas of downtrodden brown tweed carpet and the kind of overly pebbly white walls that could rip an elbow out of a sweater. Down the hall from Stefan was a woman herding three little girls and three miniature greyhounds, all of them yipping up a storm. A slight, pretty girl in a crop top and squeeze-tight leggings, her extensions coiled around her regal skull, gave us handfuls of emery boards and press-on nail kits as we passed her, sweetly sharing her fear that her home-salon event was going to be snowed out. I saw her heavily-kohled dark eyes sweep appreciatively over Stefan, saw him notice how she looked at him, and wondered if anything would have happened had I not been there. I almost regretted that I was.