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.
My husband called it the First Law of Thea-dynamics: I could take anything and transform it into energy that could then never be destroyed. And he was right. I would never admit it, but my personality was such that once I got involved with something, it was like hearing a fragment of a song you knew and having no choice but to sing the whole thing in your head, over and over, for days, until something blessedly intervened and bore it away. I’d once raised three baby robins from turquoise eggs no bigger than the tip of my thumb to fledglings that took wing to the sky behind our garage. When I couldn’t find a couch I liked, I built one and upholstered it. I would turn that tenacity to Stefan now. I would apply it to the future, and to the past. If it had been the drugs for Stefan, well, then, he didn’t use them anymore. If Belinda’s death had truly been an accident, well, even the most wretched accidents are accidental, and they happen in the world.
I never fully realized that others lived like I did, and that some of them were people I knew, people who would never give up unless the choice was death or ruin. Months after Stefan’s conviction, after I gave a talk, I was approached by a woman who said that the belief that things would somehow always get better was a character flaw particular to Americans and American culture, and especially to American parents. They stand shivering in the dark forest but insist the sunny plain is just ahead, she said. Why, I asked the woman, do you think? She was Chinese, a pediatric hematologist, and she smiled sadly when she told me: Why, what else would you expect when their own parents ruined them for reality by raising them on the sweetened milk of hope?
My thoughts were interrupted when my cell phone sang out, Debussy’s Clair de Lune. It was a local Madison number, not that this meant anything. Stefan was asleep in the passenger seat. Even though I had to take a quick glance away from the road, I picked up.
“You don’t know the real truth,” said a young female voice. “But I do.”
“What truth is this?” I asked. Unless I was much mistaken, her answer would have God in it.
“I saw what happened that night,” she said. “The night Belinda was killed. I was there.”
“You weren’t,” I said.
“I was.”
“And you waited until now to reveal this.”
Then the voice on the other end of the phone started to cry and cried so hard that for a moment, all I could hear was the bellows of her breathing. “I had to! But I can’t stand it anymore. Nobody knows the truth except me.” Then she hung up.
Did I recognize her voice? I thought I did. But I still got crazy calls all the time from psychics, psychologists, and, for all I knew, psychotics, most of whom had something urgent to tell me—or sell me. Sometimes, it was burial insurance, or pet insurance, or a new mortgage rate. Sometimes, all I could hear was a growl or a scream or a sigh before the receiver on the other end crashed down. Sometimes strangers wanted to excoriate me for having given birth to a demon. But often, they had a message from Belinda or from Jesus and it was just for me, for $120 only to cover their time, and ZipCash would be fine. I’d given up trying to figure out how they got my cell-phone number. It was probably published in some dark web chat forum.
But this one...this was the repeat caller who would usually ask, How is Stefan? Then she’d hang up almost before I finished my answer. Last year, I stopped hearing from her. Now, here she was again. There was something naked in her voice that made her seem valid and caught my attention. For the hundredth time, I thought I would get a new phone number. For the hundredth time, I decided why bother—why confuse the people who actually knew me for the sake of crazies who would somehow find me anyhow?
We inched off the road to a rest stop, and Stefan woke up. He got out to fill up the car and buy more plastic window scrapers.
I won’t ever know why I took that call. The way the girl sounded, so desperate and young, lit some tuft of kindling in me. It reminded me of Belinda’s voice. The girl called again and I answered. I said, “Who are you? Do you need something from me?”
“I know everything she did. I know everything they did,” she said. “And I know about the drugs.”
She meant the drugs Stefan used on the night Belinda died, a combination that could have killed him and, indirectly, killed her. The paramedics told me later my son might easily have suffered a heart attack from all those toxins, but he was rescued by his own youth. But the other thing the girl said was a fishhook that snagged. Whoever she meant by “they,” could it possibly matter, today of all the days? Then it occurred to me, and a hot stout taste forced its way up my throat when I wondered if Stefan realized, because of course he did know, that this glacial January day, was the three-year anniversary of Belinda’s death? How, in the accumulation of all the incidents and images, the words spoken and suppressed, the events seen or sensed, from the dank meaty stink of the prison visiting room to the peachy aura of Belinda’s cologne that floated around her everywhere she went, from my son’s blood-crusted palms to my mother’s white gloves beside her on the bench in the courtroom, from the harsh voices of the protestors, Stefan’s hoarse shouts for me from the locked ward, Jep’s strong hands under my elbows when I stumbled the morning we returned from a walk to find the word MURDERER scrawled in red paint on our garage door, to the heft of the loaf of homemade bread I pushed through the car window as Stefan set out to join Belinda at college, all towed behind me like shells and weeds in a huge strange net through a tidal flow. How, through these years to this glacial day, had I managed to forget the anniversary of that singular event?
“I was right there,” she said.