He took me to see it one morning, melodramatically insisting I cover my eyes. When he gave the word, I stared, then gasped.
“It’s stunning.”
“Most of this stuff is salvaged,” Stefan said. “I literally got it free and cleaned it up. I’m going to rent a storage shed when the season changes and keep the decorations there, so I can reuse them.”
“The grow lights must have been expensive.”
“They were, but Luck Sergenian approved them since I can use them again for the fall display!”
“Luck is her real first name?”
“Yep. She told me she was born three months early and her parents were superstitious.” He added, “I wondered how many people she’s had to tell that to. She actually said the same about me, asked me how many people did I have to tell that yes, I am that guy, and no, I am not dangerous.”
I thought about why Luck, a local celebrity in her own right who at the age of thirty-one was a home-grown legend as a businesswoman in Madison—first this, wealthiest that, youngest-ever the other thing—was not only trusting when it came to my son, but sufficiently urbane to be able to crack wise about it. “She told me she actually had to do some community service herself for possession with intent when she was in college,” Stefan told me. “Ten months. It was cocaine. The amount she had, it could have been prison time.”
“No wonder they call her Luck…”
“That’s exactly what she says.”
So maybe, this…this chance, this piece of luck, as it were, finally, would be the opening door. Stefan could walk through; we would stumble after him. We would try not to look back. An addict for hope is like an addict for anything: It only takes a taste to get a jones going. And so I let myself think that maybe my son had really turned a corner.
There were still two sides to the life he lived. I would hear him trading playful insults on speakerphone with Will as he got ready for a night out, and he would sound like every other guy his age—bombastic, silly, lobbing testosterone grenades into the air.
But even when I would hear his low voice coming from his room late at night, the sound of his crying, I let myself bless those noises, too. Even grief is feeling, I thought. And feeling outflanks numbness. It is a start: An embryo is an egg is a chick is an eagle. I let myself bless those sobs, awful as they were to hear.
Sometimes I would also hear him talking into his laptop microphone.
“It was her favorite ice cream, but I just throw it up, like how can I eat it if she can’t eat it?”
And…
“I think about it and, if I was sure I would get to be with her, but I don’t believe that way about after you die.”
And…
“I wish I could be a kid, like eight years old. You don’t know about the pain of love yet, and you just want a puppy or something.”
And…
“It’s the first thing you think of when you open your eyes, then you can’t stop thinking about it, I lost her, I hurt her, it’s all my fault.”
And…the worst…
“If I was sure that there was really a heaven, and she would be there, and everybody there was all happy, maybe I would end it. But I have to give this world a chance. I have to give my future a chance. That’s only right.”
* * *
If women waiting for their number to be called in purgatory would be talking about shoes, men in purgatory would definitely be talking about sports. I remembered how, for an anniversary long ago, I had given Jep a list I had made when we were just dating, which I’d kept in an old cigar box of letters.
After Jep stopped laughing, his comment was, “Enthusiastic?”
I’m sure Jep never imagined struggling to try to bond with Stefan after some traumatic estrangement. Never imagined struggling to try to bond with Stefan at all—or with anyone else. For Jep, the world threw open its arms. He never fretted his looks or his style or his goals. My father called him “Everybody’s All American,” with just a slight sizzle of sarcasm, although my family embraced Jep as their own from day one. Jep’s own parents, John and Paula Christiansen, lived in England for most of Jep’s adult life, where Paula taught at the London School of Economics, and the Demetriou family became his default clan. My sister Phoebe always said that if Jep hadn’t been a coach, he should have been a priest, like in an old Bing Crosby movie. People who came into his harbor felt graced. He had so many Coach of the Year plaques from his different schools, he could have built a shed out of them. He kept every single one. Over the years, many times, he turned to me at night and said in a tone of wonder that he still couldn’t believe that he had the great privilege of doing what he loved for money.