“Maybe. Jep said whoever has been calling might just get bored and move on to some new craziness.”
I drifted off, with my brain for once off its customary red alert. Only a few times over the past several years had I gone to sleep when it was dark and awakened when it was light. Most often, I itched and twisted until I was nearly on the floor with my pillows or lay awake trying to convince myself that I really didn’t have to go to the bathroom. Once I was up, I had to repeat nonsense, Fee Fi Fo Fum, to the bathroom and back, or I would be quietly watching BBC reruns on my computer until the sun came up.
Physical and mental exhaustion can have their uses, and the light that awakened me was red dawn.
Sleep had also sent a letter to my subconscious, as it will. What I kept searching for was a way back to normal. Not just for Stefan, but for me. For Jep. For us as a family. The Healing Project, the TV interview, I wanted them all to do—to do the work of stain remover.
But there would be no return. No one in my family had any “before,” anymore, only after. The “before” was forfeit. Before Belinda died, not much in my life had prepared me for anything except moderate good fortune. I had good parents, good health, good teeth, a pretty good job, really good hair, an astoundingly good son and a very good marriage. My bad luck was customary bad luck, the kind a life contains, a miscarriage, a broken wrist, a coveted job that went to someone else, the rear-end smashup of a new car.
After Belinda died, the good days were the ones when I didn’t want to die. Stefan’s future was shunted onto a broken track where the stops were no longer mortarboards and first real jobs, wedding boutonnieres and champagne toasts, but sobriety tokens and perhaps a street to walk down quietly without being threatened or shunned. And that was my future too, at least, my near future. Only Jep seemed somehow absolved, and how could I be sure he wasn’t just sparing me his complaints? How did I know what kinds of looks he got, what comments broke off when he entered the room?
I had never allowed myself to consider how much I resented this pressure. How was any of it my doing? The notion that good parents could raise bad kids was increasingly out of favor. Nothing comes from nothing. So what had we permitted or forbidden that thousands of others had not permitted or forbidden without consequence?
Perhaps the worst truth was the one I failed to admit even to Julie, and barely to myself. Certainly, I was wildly grateful not to be Jill. Four years was a long time to have a pain in your tooth, but not in your heart. For almost four years, she had been without her girl. Jill’s pain was just beginning. Jill had only Belinda’s past. But I had Stefan’s past as well as his present and future. Within him, cached inside him like the rings of a tree, was still the chuckling baby with enormous feet or the six-year-old who liked his eggs sunny-side up and called me his “sunny-up egg.” I might have to contend with everything I hated about the situation, which was wound around everything I loved, but the fact remained, I could still hug Stefan, my only, my child.
And yet, to do that, I had to accept not just the child I had loved, but the man, with blood on his hands. I hadn’t accepted the fullness of his crime. I stopped just short of it. I sat up and quietly made my way to the window, looking out on a stereotypical postcard of forest majesty. I had to truly see that man and forgive him, just as the people in The Healing Project strove to do. It was time to express my remorse, and to seek renewal. I loved Stefan, but if I was honest, I had not forgiven him. Now, for his sake and mine, I would. And that would be the final step to ending the long night that had begun over three years ago, so that the rest of our lives could truly and cleanly begin, I thought. We could look toward a time when this awful time was a memory, fading slowly away.
It was too early to get up.
I slipped into the bathroom, brushed my teeth and, as the red fingers of dawn worked their way around the edges of the blinds, I got back into bed and curled up in the warm hollow next to Julie’s back.
It was in that sweet bath between sleeping and waking that the realization slammed into me like a truck through the side of a building, shoving aside or flattening everything in its path, and I sprung awake. I saw it, the reason I kept combing the riverbed for one nugget, another story or at least an additional story. Here was the meaning of all those sobbing phone calls and texts from Esme, her confession to what she had done that stopped just short of confessions, her oversized concern for Stefan’s welfare, her guilt over Belinda, the agony that went beyond loss. Here was the reason that the unidentified fingerprints on the golf club had to be hers.