Until Stefan came home from prison, unless I was at work or on my way to visit him there, I deliberately fuddled my consciousness. There was no trial as such, just a judge who heard Stefan’s guilty plea and the lawyer’s account of our son’s lack of intent and diminished capacity. When we heard the sentence, we felt relieved, lucky even. After that, I had one purpose, keeping Stefan alive until he could come home. I didn’t want to know about the rest of the world. It worked alarmingly well, as if I’d brought on my own early dementia. I even started losing things, not just the customary car keys or folder of papers, but my grandmother’s opal watch and my first edition of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Jep’s gift to me when I completed my PhD. Being a part-time eccentric during that period of time was a fair price for a mind that was free from fomenting bad thoughts. But it had its pitfalls. If it was late at night and I was vulnerable to intrusive thoughts, I could get comfortably foggy with two pills or two fingers of Scotch, or both, until I was well on my way to four pills and four fingers of Scotch and had to give that up entirely. I still tried to keep Stefan’s account of his vague memories of that night in the abstract—the screams and shadows and then one terrible, dull sound, everything happening in the time it takes to speak it, a twenty-second interval when the gleaming train of Belinda’s future slammed to a halt.
So why did I want to bring everything into sharp focus now? I didn’t, not at all. Yet how could I ever put this behind me if I didn’t first face it? I might finally need to muster the courage I lacked before—to know more, to know everything, to know the specifics of that horrific night that were as much a blur to me as they were to Stefan, who’d at least had the courage to face his journey of redemption.
The girl caller had repeatedly told me I didn’t know everything about that night. Longing Esme of Belinda’s poems, unshriven and suffering, now clearly thought she needed me. I had her number. She came and went like smoke. Maybe my husband was right, that she was no more than a fantasist or a creep. If she was, she was a fiercely persistent one. It was time to call her back. I reached down into my bag to grab my phone and texted her.
Please answer: I’m wondering if you’re safe.
My phone brrr’ed right then, and I almost dropped it.
But it wasn’t Longing Esme. It was Jep.
“I can’t talk right now,” I said, rushing into the gap after he said hello. “We’ve just seen this woman, the first one…”
“Honey, are you on your way home?”
“Why? Did something happen to Stefan?” A new hot taste of that damned cake rushed up my throat.
“Stefan is fine, and I’m fine. But something happened here.”
“What?”
“Someone’s apparently been in the house. And it’s…not good.”
What someone had done was indeed not good; it was not really damaging, but it made my home feel like it was a haunted house.
Jep met me and Julie at the door and said, in exactly the way guaranteed to make you do just that, “Now, don’t flip out.”
As my father’s daughter, I had an extravagant number of his beautiful family photos, matted at the Papierie in identical museum-quality frames. There was a lush image of me in a white dress, sitting with newborn Stefan in my arms, among fabric-draped knolls that looked like a collection of clouds. There was Stefan, at twelve, hoisting a glistening bass on a line; Jep and Stefan grinning at each other after the All-Conference football championship. And an addition that my father recently took, one with my stubborn hopefulness and my father’s tenderness on display, of Stefan in a torn tee shirt leaning out of the window of his truck, the bed of which looked like a parade float, mounded with barrels and baskets and clay pots filled with flowers. On the wall nearby was one of Jep, Stefan and me on an expanse of white steps above the blue, blue Aegean, taken in Santorini the summer after Stefan’s sophomore year of high school, a trip my parents hosted for our whole family. To each of these photos, someone had taken a black marker and blackened out Stefan’s eyes—not on the photos themselves, but on the glass covering the images. Whoever did this hadn’t stopped with the photos in the living room. Blighted also was the photo of Stefan and Belinda on Stefan’s nightstand. Circles as small as periods blackened out Stefan’s newborn eyes; bigger blots canceled his eyes in the photo with the truck. Over those other photos—of my father’s parents and of me and Alzy Hodge on election day, giant X’s were drawn in black. My first move was to check my cherished photo albums, a parade of road trips, lost teeth, first days of school, the groundbreaking for the addition to this house five years ago, all lined up in dated order on the lowest bookshelf. But the photos in those albums were unmarked.