“I’m also just shaky. I still feel like I’m too close to The Hill.”
I flinched at the convict talk: The Hill was what prisoners called Belle Colline. Going down the hill, they said, when someone was freed. Jack and Jill went up the hill, they said when a convict got married. “What I really want is, I want to go home. Mom, please. Right now.”
I put on my shoes and jacket, unplugged my phone and charger, grabbed my purse and we left.
The blizzard wasn’t really letting up, but I thought the weather might get better the farther south we got. So we inched along the 320 miles at twenty miles an hour.
I will never be able to think of that nightmare trek as a “ride.”
A “ride,” even a long one, seems to me like something you do with cheerful purpose, like a biking event to raise money to defeat a disease—just as a “drive” is something you do with your grandparents on a summer Sunday.
This felt like a sort of rolling brawl, studded with strange thoughts and incidents.
At first, Stefan was chattering, apologizing over and over for wasting the hotel room and the food, me reassuring him, promising to make chicken noodle soup and homemade rye bread when we got home, although I could think of nothing more than lying flat on clean sheets when we got there. We stopped every torturous twenty or thirty miles, and I fell into frantic short bouts of sleep, then wakened to find snow mounded like bolster pillows against the windshield. We would get out and push the accumulation away with a plastic windshield brush until that soon broke. Then with the corner of a cardboard box I found in the trunk, and then when that got soggy, with our hands, because somehow, no one ever prepares for such a storm. The dashboard indicator read two below. So much for it being too cold to snow.
Start, then stop. Start, then stop, from noon until six that night.
Once, on a break at a truck stop, Stefan fell asleep too, and it was when a semi gave out a long blast on its air horn that we sat upright, sweating in our winter coats, spooked by how easily we could have slept on forever, our car a potential crypt flooded with carbon monoxide, banked in snow and etched with filigrees of frost. We set out again, and I told Stefan to go ahead and nap. It was only with all that suspended time that I let my mind drift back to Jill McCormack. The victim’s mother, as she was always referred to in court and on news broadcasts when she gave all those wrenching interviews about domestic violence against young women, when she first founded the organization SAY, Stop Abuse Young. I thought about what she was doing there this morning, how she must have known about the timing of Stefan’s release, wondered if she meant to speak to him or to me, then ended up driving all that long way for nothing.
I wondered what Jill did now. She was one of only two women pros at Little Wood Country Club. Was SAY a full-time job for her by now? I thought back to our meeting the first time, that athlete’s posture and ease, the kind of woman who would never loosen the top button on her pants. How years later, Belinda, then a high school sophomore, giggled when she confided how horrified her mother was that her daughter would decide to give up varsity tennis for cheerleading. It had been a rebel move that united us—Belinda, Stefan and me. Jep was equally nonplussed when Stefan, a running back who as a junior was already being scouted, let it be known that he wasn’t interested in making a film reel of his best action because he was not going to play college ball. In fact, he had decided that junior year would be his last season. I remembered the night that it all came to a head: Stefan finally said, “Dad, I love football. But I don’t love it enough. Guys in college, they’re going to be bigger and stronger not to mention meaner than me, and I don’t even want to think about getting hurt or hurting somebody else. I just don’t have that killer instinct.”
Those last words would echo back to us in the years that followed.
I thought more about Jill. If my prayers were answered and the attention to Stefan’s case melted away with time, would the purpose of Jill’s life melt away as well? Belinda had been her only. Her husband, a minister, died years ago when Belinda was small in a skiing mishap just after a big financial scandal broke at his church. For every hour I’d cursed my literature students as spoiled illiterates back when I was a newly-minted PhD, I now blessed my teaching position that had at least given me a handhold in the ordinary world. I still had that job and my son, still had my husband and my family, mostly nearby, however fraught the circumstances. So I still had cause for hope. And when it came to hope, I was hopeless. Optimism was my opiate. Obsession was my default. I would will things to go my way. I would muster every known force to make it so.