While Stefan was in prison, the time came to renew his driver’s license, which set off a firestorm of emotion for him. When Stefan first got his license, Belinda, a few months older and already in proud possession of her own license, accompanied us to his road test. She lectured him sternly: You better do this the first try, Christiansen, is all I can say. He did. And his laminated driver’s license lasted longer than the girl.
“I miss her so much already,” he said to me that fatal night at the hospital. “She’s the one who told me that I should mark the organ-donor box, just in case. Nothing would ever happen, but just in case...”
I thought of myself, that night three years ago, speeding the long distance nonstop, running into the hospital so frantic I forgot to close the driver’s side door, after a call that told me only that there had been “a serious accident.” I pictured his car accordioned against a tree. Studying the impassive faces directing me to the fifth floor, I found a detective named Pete Sunday who told me Belinda was in surgery. He told me what kind of surgery she was in, and my legs began to wobble. It was the kind of surgery that happened when you were a good girl and marked the organ-donor box... Then he led me to Stefan, in the hospital’s locked ward, chained to a bench behind a grill and sobbing, only half-conscious. His body was turned away from me, the pelt of dark hair at the back of his head matted with blood.
“He needs a doctor,” I said. “He’s bleeding.”
“It’s not his blood,” Pete Sunday told me.
I sat down, hard, on the floor. Stefan turned. He saw me. He didn’t know me.
Willing that vision to recede, I glanced at Stefan now and he turned to me as if I’d called his name. “What?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“I just heard you,” he said, and then added, “Is Dad scared about me coming home?”
“Sure. Scared, happy, confident, nervous.” Scared for you, or of you? I looked at the muscles bunched in Stefan’s forearms. My boy. My child. My only.
“It’s when people come out that they get in trouble. They realize that the whole world has passed them by. That’s why they end up back inside,” he said.
“But you’re not worried about that.”
“Committing a crime? No. Jeez. Does Dad think I can have a real life? Do you think I can have a real life? Do you think the whole world has passed me by?”
I had considered this, oftener than I wanted to admit. If only we could leave, all of us, move away...anywhere... But Jep had his career. I had tenure. And without special permission, Stefan couldn’t travel more than fifty miles while he was on parole. So I made a careful abstract of my words before I answered. “No. You’re twenty years old. Life hasn’t passed you by. Maybe it’s going to be harder than we’d like to believe, though, at first. Maybe a lot harder than we think.” Maybe harder than I think, I admitted, and my heart began to tap-dance. “Getting out is supposed to be the beginning of the good part, the part we’ve all been waiting for. But some people may be against you, Stefan. I’ve told you that some people still stand outside our house. Talking about that isn’t the same as it’s going to be to really see that. It can be scary. And you know Jill’s position.”
“It’s not true. I mean, the worst part is true. But about Belinda being abused...no. Never. I never would.”
“Well, not everyone believes that. If it were just me and Dad, we’d say, only look ahead. But you’re going to have to keep fighting the things other people may say, at least for a while. That’s probably why people get in trouble when they come out of jail. The things people say get into their hearts.”
“All I can do is try. Right?”
“You can’t not try. I’m not Dad. I’m not a coach. But Dad says that there’s only one way to succeed in anything, and that’s to give it everything.”
“Dad didn’t say that. Vince Lombardi said that.”
“Well, Dad said it, too. I thought he was a genius.”
We stopped for another break. Another cup of foul coffee. My guts felt like I was coating them with some sort of engine cleaner. How did people drink shit like this and live past the age of forty? Stefan drove when we got back into the car, his first time behind the wheel.
“How I feel is, she died, but it should have been me. I have no right to be alive.”
“I’m thrilled that you’re driving then.”
“I think you worry that I’m going to kill myself. I don’t think Dad does, but you do.”
I said nothing. The wind shoved the car back and forth like a bear rocking a cradle. “Mom, think. If I wanted to kill myself, I could have killed myself in prison. They say they do all kinds of prevention, but they don’t. A guy I knew did it when I was in there.”
“He did? Why?”
“A weird reason. His cellie said it was because the sister of the woman he shot forgave him. He couldn’t handle it.” Stefan stopped talking for a moment and looked into the middle distance. “He was a nice guy. I know what you think, Mom, but he wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger. It was a robbery, and he said he didn’t even know his friends had a gun. Yeah, I also know everybody says that shit. Everybody in there is an innocent man. His name was Nightclub Owens. He had a beautiful voice. He sang this old song called, ‘Up on the Roof.’ It made hard guys cry.”
“Did you ever consider it?” I hated myself for asking, but to stop myself from asking, I would have had to stop breathing.
“I thought about it. It’s not that hard, if you hang yourself. It’s getting over the fear. Belinda lost everything, all because of me. Belinda wanted to do something in the world. And what am I ever going to be in the world? I’m no genius. I look like every other guy. I’m another ex-druggie. I’ve never figured out what I want to do. It would be easy, just to give it up, just to let it go.”
“Pull the car over,” I said.
“What?”
“Pull the goddamn car over.”
“I’m not going to wreck the car, Mom.” But he pulled over slowly anyway. I got out, and a cyclone of snow burst into the vehicle as Stefan scrambled over the console. When I was strapped back into the driver’s seat, with the zipper on my coat lowered to let my arms move more freely, I reached out and grabbed Stefan’s arm. I felt that huge muscle tense, and for a moment I was afraid. I glanced down at his hands, remembering those hands when they were tiny starfish with dimples instead of knuckles.
This is your child, I thought. You are his mother.
How dare he even hint at taking himself away from me?
“Listen, you melodramatic little jerk,” I said. “I get the worry and the regret. That’s natural. But if you think I drove up and down this road to that shitbox prison in that shitbox town every week for two years, when half the people I knew thought I was nuts, and I didn’t ever stop believing it could be better, so you could come out and kill yourself, you are sadly mistaken. If you think you have the luxury of killing yourself, after the worst is over, with all the people you’d be letting down, then get out of my car and get out of my life.”
“Did I say I was going to? I thought I was saying that I never would, hello!”
“Because of that guy you knew who killed himself?”
“Well, sure, that’s part of it! It’s over for him. He wasn’t some hardened criminal. He had a chance for it to be better, and now he’ll never know how it all comes out.”
“What’s the other part of it?”
“Because it has to be better to live. And the other part...the other part is you. You don’t have a backup child. I don’t have a better brother.”
There was only one thing I could say to that.