I put in, “Honey, no one’s ever happy every minute, and there’s never anything wrong with happy.”
“Except I feel I’m like one of those guys, those athletes of Dad’s. I’ve had it all handed to me. And I didn’t live up to it.”
“Honey, you’ve worked as much as most people for what you got. And you paid for what you did wrong.”
“Well, I suffered. I suffered a little. I should have suffered a lot more. Because what I did was horrendous. I know I owe more. I want to use what I went through for something positive, not just have it be the dark place I go to in my mind.”
His therapist, whom he’d been talking with every week now, would agree with us, Stefan went on. The psychologist didn’t think that The Whole Blooming World was a trivial endeavor, especially given how it had opened Stefan’s eyes to his joy in something he’d never considered before—color, design, the living world. The therapist further didn’t believe Stefan’s quest to make amends needed to be commensurate with the relative size of the wrong he had done. Even Stefan knew this challenge was his own magical thinking. （He just wanted us to know that he knew.） And yet, if some sort of redemptive action, some sort of atonement, could shield Stefan from the deep despair he felt at times, even the psychologist admitted it would be as effective as the antidepressants and the pills he prescribed for Stefan to calm down and sleep.
Gradually, especially with the physical nature of his work, the ratio of Stefan’s sleeping to waking had started to regularize, and he no longer jumped out of his skin every time one of us walked up behind him.
“Do you have time right now for me to explain my idea?”
We had time.
* * *
Setting up one of the ubiquitous easels Jep used to map out his team’s plays, Stefan brought down flip charts he’d been working on in his room, drawing them on Jep’s huge pads of paper. My son was taking on the role of the teacher; we were his students. He would share the bones of implementing his idea. But he wasn’t ready to do that yet. He needed to give us background first. We sat in the breakfast room, Jep and me on one side of the table, Stefan facing us.
“We’re starting with the premise that my life is worthless,” Stefan said.
I personally had no use for that premise. I knew that Stefan was still haunted by Belinda’s death, by what happened to Nightclub Owens and by a hollowed-out feeling of unearned forgiveness. The latter was a subject he told us he’d chewed over with his therapist, then tried to explain its burden to Will. Everybody else could forgive you, he believed, but if you felt you didn’t deserve it, you might lose your will to live.
“Will got the whole thing,” Stefan told us. “He’s an ordinary guy. He’s never been in any real trouble. He’s like I used to be. And he saw my point. He said if it were him, he would do whatever it took to give life a solid try.”
“A solid try?” I said. “Just a try? You’re not fully committed to living?”
I remembered again the words I’d overheard my son confide into his laptop late at night. Again, I thought of a shadow cast against a door, the impossible slow swing of tennis shoes with the toes pointed down. I turned to face my husband and son just at the moment that Stefan’s face literally slid out of the happy-boy lineaments he’d clearly been putting on for us. What we saw instead was similar to one of those optical-illusion drawings of an Edwardian lady that, when you study it, reveals a skull.
“Of course,” Stefan said. “Sure I am.”
Then he explained the evolution of his thinking.
“The repentance you do in prison doesn’t really signify anything,” he said. In prison, people who did wrong still felt wronged themselves. The confinement was awful. The smears on the wall were awful. No matter how hard he scrubbed the experience from his memory, vestiges of his being another person, probably a much worse person, remained.
“The sight of even one cockroach in my cell panicked me,” he said. “If I saw more than one, I couldn’t sleep. I wanted to work more hours than were required, but that made me stand out, and I didn’t dare stand out.” （“If you figured out that working harder passed the time, you probably wouldn’t be in prison.”） Stefan thought that working in the laundry might make him feel cleaner, too, but the sight of other prisoners’ sheets roused in him almost a disgust. The prison kitchen was mostly appalling, too, although he liked baking bread and even unpacking canned goods.