How much Jill had suffered.
How much more than I she had suffered.
I could not even imagine my way into Jill’s deracinated world, stripped of everyone she loved, even her musical cousins, her aging father, a minister who, well into his seventies, still rang the bells himself, evenings and Sundays in a green, fog-shrouded North Carolina hollow where Jill went to church three days a week and never suspected there were little girls who only went once—if at all.
For a moment, I wondered if Jill might not go back to the South now; but I put that speculation quickly aside. Her advocacy against dating violence—and, if I am honest, I thought as well, her hatred of Stefan—were the beacon in her life now.
At the cemetery, I was astonished at the number of cars on a weekday until I realized with a shock that this was Memorial Day.
The caretaker advised us that we’d see a flowering redbud tree and then a small wrought-iron fence on a knoll far back, not visible from the winding little road. We parked the car at the curb near that section and slowly walked up the gentle hill. The fence wasn’t as small as I imagined. It was waist-high and about four by six feet. Inside it rested a few bedraggled teddy bears and a few tiaras, and a large SAY sign laminated against the weather. We stood there quietly, and then, impossibly, simply not possibly, I heard, and I hoped that Stefan didn’t hear, a treble voice say, “It is so him! I saw him on the news.”
Stefan tried to shrink. He would have loped back toward the exit if it didn’t mean passing the members of a small family group who were now all frankly staring at him.
“Maybe they didn’t even mean you.” I cast around for a possible loophole.
“Sure, Mom. There are probably a lot of people in this cemetery right now that somebody saw on the news.” His lip jutted and his elaborate slouch was almost risible, a cartoon of disgruntlement. “You know, this is bullshit.”
“What is?”
“My coming here today. Trying to make anything better. What am I, an idiot? A child? No one’s ever going to believe a word I say ever again. Nothing is ever going to change. Everybody will always think I’m a stone-cold killer who likes to hit girls. I’m a real model for rebuilding your life, huh? Broke and now, wow, probably half-blind, no future, living with my parents and sleeping in the bed I slept in when I was twelve?”
“Stefan, half the people you know your age are still living with their parents. Give it time.”
“Give it time! More time! More time! More time won’t change anything. I’ve been home months now.”
“I get how hard it is to keep starting over.”
“Do you? I don’t think you do. All you ever had to do was be the good girl and life just unfurled in front of you.”
I struggled to breathe deeply and stay quiet and just let my son vent. I pictured my stomach like a beaker into which an incendiary acid fell drop by drop, until the bubble quickened to a boil. He was wrong, of course, in part because he was young; to any kid, it might seem that life for his parents fell easily into a smooth sequence. What I couldn’t say, wouldn’t say, was that our path, Jep’s and mine, was probably smoother because we didn’t stop to get hopelessly screwed up on drugs and kill somebody.
“Stefan, it probably seems that way. But don’t make us out to be the bad guys. We’ve been your biggest fans.”
He sank down to his haunches in the grass outside the fence and put his hand through the black spikes until he could just touch the soft pink stone, in the shape of a heart, that read:
BELINDA LOWELL McCORMACK
BEAUTIFUL DREAMER
“You’re my only fans,” he said, after a moment. “The thing is, you really don’t get it. Dad doesn’t get it. The only one who would get it was her. Not how she ended up here. Can you imagine her, Bindy, all bright and shiny like she was, here? Under the dirt? I don’t mean that. But she would get how I feel. I shouldn’t say that, right? But you know what? I don’t even care. Bindy, sleep tight baby. You were all I ever wanted.”
I reached for compassion. What came instead was scorn.
I said, “Maybe you should have wanted something more than only her. Maybe you should want something more now, in fact.”
“Gee, thanks.” He said then, “That’s what the therapist says. He says I have faulty thoughts and I acted on them in the past, and I still act on them.” In cognitive behavioral therapy, Stefan went on, you learn to question irrational beliefs and try to uproot them. One was that he could only be happy with Belinda or someone just like Belinda. Another was that he could never do anything he really wanted to do.