“He told you about it. He had to see that kid in Louisville one more time,” I told him reluctantly. “The running back with the very protective grandmother. He couldn’t get out of it. But he cut it short and he’ll be home when we get back, if he beats the weather out of Kentucky this morning, that is.” Jep was in only his second season as football coach at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater, a Division II team with significant chops and national esteem. We didn’t really think he would get the job, given our troubles, but the athletic director had watched Jep’s career and believed deeply in his integrity. Now he was never at rest: His postseason recruiting trips webbed the country. Yet it was also true that while Stefan’s father longed equally for his son to be free, if Jep had been able to summon the words to tell the people who mattered that he wanted to skip this trip altogether, he would have. But he couldn’t quite bring himself to say it’s a big day, our son’s getting out of prison.
Now, it seemed important to hurry Stefan to the car, to get out of there before this new universe recanted. We had a long drive back from Black Creek, where the ironically named Belle Colline Correctional Facility squatted not far from the campus of the University of Wisconsin–Black Creek. Stefan’s terrible journey had taken him from college to prison, a distance of just two miles as the crow flies. I felt like the guard: I never wanted to see the place again. I had no time to think about Jill or anything else except the weather. We’d hoped that the early-daylight release would keep protestors away from the prison gates, and that seemed to have worked: Prisoners usually didn’t walk out until just before midday. There was not a single reporter here, which surprised me as Jill was tireless in keeping her daughter Belinda’s death a national story, a symbol for young women in abusive relationships. Many of the half dozen or so stalwarts who still picketed in front of our house nearly every day were local college and high-school girls, passionate about Jill’s work. As Stefan’s release grew near, their numbers rose, even as the outdoor temperatures fell. A few news organizations put in appearances again lately as well. I knew they would be on alert today and was hoping we could beat some of the attention by getting back home early. In the meantime, a snowstorm was in the forecast: I never minded driving in snow, but the air smelled of water running over iron ore—a smell that always portended worse weather.
Once outside the gates, we headed for the highway and a restroom where Stefan could change outfits.
He had asked me only one thing—to bring shoes and clothes and a coat. And I had. But although over the course of more than a hundred visits it should have been obvious to me, I had never fully realized until now how, when he went in, he was only a boy of seventeen, five-ten, a hundred and sixty pounds. And by now he had grown three inches taller. The flight parka that seemed so huge on him the last Christmas he spent at home wouldn’t even close over shoulders hardened by intervening years of obsessive solitary exercise. His feet were probably a size bigger, too. In my eagerness to bring Stefan things that were his own, familiar shirtsleeves I had rubbed between my hands when the days and nights were too long, I had not stopped to consider just how ruthlessly time had passed. Maybe I didn’t want to know that.
“It doesn’t matter,” he told me.
“Sure it does,” I said. “What else does?”
It seemed right to offer every teaspoon of conferred civility that I could. So I pulled off at a nearby Target, and apologized for this being the only choice for haberdashery. But Stefan loved Target, he always had; he thought of it as a bazaar of consumer delights. Target, not homemade dinners or a proper bed, was what always headed the list of things he missed. His excitement was poignant. He appeared in the dressing room door, posing in a striped pullover, then a bright Green Bay Packers hoodie. I thought helplessly of Stefan as a little boy, wearing matching shorts and sailor tops from The Children’s Place, so expensive and foppish that Jep complained his son looked like one of the dolls in a Victorian child’s bedroom on Masterpiece Theatre.
He was my only. What could I do? Then and now. It is far easier to hate yourself than to hate your own child.
We bought jeans and a sweatshirt, flannel shirts and Carhartt boots and a light down parka, and he threw out the stiff black prison-sewn shirts and the two pairs of mended chinos, as well as the coat that stank of sweat and cigarettes that had once belonged to some criminal—though, of course, Stefan was a criminal, too. The only thing he kept was the pale blue sweater he had knitted himself, just in the past year when he’d been trusted with plastic knitting needles. Cheerfully disdaining the new jacket, he wore the Green Bay Packers sweatshirt out of the store, the way a child would do. When he grinned and pointed to the gold Packers logo, I took a picture and messaged it to Jep, who texted back, Yes! He then texted me privately, Is he okay? And I answered, So far so good. Who would have imagined that this was how I would communicate that news? In this new universe, the most critical exchanges—between parents, between a long-married husband and wife, new sweethearts, or a stalker and his victim—were shared on a four-inch screen, with emojis of hearts and smiley faces. This was probably a metaphor for something but I could not fathom what.
Newly outfitted, Stefan and I headed back toward the highway.
We’d driven only a few miles when the blizzard leaped upon us. We edged our way into a hotel parking lot. I couldn’t even see the sky. A check of the local weather on my phone promised hours of possible whiteout conditions.
“Did you get a good night’s sleep?”
Why was I talking to Stefan as though he were my great-aunt?
“I never slept a whole night the entire time I was in there,” he said. “The last couple of nights, I didn’t go to sleep at all. I was afraid I’d die before I got out.”
I’d never been a good sleeper, but the previous weeks—enduring Christmas, the winter break at my college, New Year’s Eve with Jep, my best friend Julie and her husband, Hal, and a few other couples, all with my mind arrowed toward this moment—had been impossible.
“Let’s just stay here until the storm eases up,” I told Stefan. “I’ll get us hotel rooms. You can...relax, have a nap or watch a movie. Later on, we’ll get a fancy meal.”
I was, as always, too optimistic. I had in mind a steak house like Bee’s and B’s, the place I took him to for birthdays when he was a kid, with the whole family, grandparents and cousins and aunts and uncles and a couple of neighbors at a table nearly as big as the room. Who knew? Three solid college campuses and a sizable airport were within fifty miles. Maybe there would be at least one luxurious hotel, with flat-screens and plunge tubs and blackout shades and a pricey, chef-owned eatery on the first floor. As it turned out, our options were limited to Pizza Hut and Panera Bread. Apparently boutique hotels were scarce near a prison. How had I not known this before?
Well, for all my weekly visits, I had never spent an overnight in Black Creek. Nor had any of Stefan’s aunts or grandparents who visited. When I came alone, which was most often, I would hit the road again right after visiting hours, bombing my way home along the back roads in the summer, the highway in the winter. Then I would slam into the house straight upstairs to sit in a tub filled with scented oil and hot water for over an hour, adding more hot as needed, an almost holy observance after the stench of the place where Stefan lived. I would sit there and cry. I cried so hard each week it seemed impossible that I did not actually lose water weight.