“My tree!” Stefan said, looking down the road. “It’s taller. Is anything else different?”
We’d planted an apple tree in the yard when Stefan was born. As an intrepid eight-year-old, he used to open his second-floor window, hang by his fingertips from the sill, drop into its branches and climb down. Once we thought that there might be a little grove—another apple, perhaps, or maybe a pear tree for a little girl. But Jep found himself overwhelmed by the day-to-day reality of fatherhood and the ways it changed me, changed us, changed all our priorities. I was barely twenty-one when Stefan was born, twenty-three when I lost my next pregnancy. Plenty of times, even very recently, I brought up us having another child. Jep never quite said no, and he never quite said yes. The time for a pear tree came and went. Our family tree remained tiny, all our hopes on one branch.
But...wait...was someone sick? I expected the protestors. But why was there also an ambulance in front of the house? I thought immediately of our neighbor next door, Miss Hennessey, easily eighty now. Stefan’s childhood babysitter, she’d mailed him pound cakes that the authorities at Belle Colline confiscated (although Stefan wrote to her praising their delicate lemon flavor). Lights were spinning; trucks and cars were angled up on the curb.
No one was sick.
We would find out later that the ambulance was there because one of the demonstrators had forgotten to eat and had fainted.
As if to open an exhibit, the snow then completely stopped.
There, on the sidewalk, standing impeccably in a long white coat and hat, was Jill, a Stop Abuse Young banner draped across her midriff like a shield. All around her, people crowded in the anemic glow of the streetlights. Among them were Stefan’s fifth-grade teacher; his T-ball coach; a priest from St. Michael and All Angels Anglican Church down the block; Luda, from the Russian bakery; and Frank Timms, who taught creative writing at my school, Thornton Wilder College, his office just across the hall from mine. And there were young women, college-age, high-school age, all rhythmically hoisting SAY signs and chanting, “Say, say, say her name. Belinda! Say, say, say her name!” The trucks were news vans, from WMOO, WLAK, all the network affiliates, and a few radio stations with musical notes sprinkled over the van doors.
I rolled the window down a crack and heard an earnest young man say, “We’re here in Portland, Wisconsin, where even in single-digit weather, activists against domestic violence are picketing the home of convicted killer Stefan Christiansen, who got out of prison just hours ago. While they say everyone deserves another chance, these people believe that Christiansen’s chance should not be so close to home, specifically to the family home, only a block away, of Belinda McCormack, the girl he admits to beating to death.”
This must have been why Jill had been at the prison, to make sure today was the day, to be sure of the timing. How, I thought, as we pulled past the people and into our snow-banked driveway, as I fumbled for the garage-door opener, did she know we would come back here tonight, in a snowstorm, when I had not even known that myself? Next to me, Stefan cringed back against the seat, his feet braced as if he were stomping on the brakes.
“What’s all this? What’s going on?” he asked.
“It’s usually not this bad, honey. It’s probably because you got out today.”
Stefan was no fool; he heard the syntax. “How bad is it usually?”
“Well, they generally gather and chant and wave their signs.”
“When?”
“A lot.”
“How much?”
“Every day pretty much.”
“Jesus Christ.” Stefan stared out the car window at the group of young women, older women and a few men, Jill moving among them, stopping to speak to each one or to bestow a hug. On the seat between us, my phone pinged a text message, and Stefan snatched it up before I could stop him.
It was all in capitals, like a tabloid headline: TELL HIM TO KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT OR IT WILL BE BAD FOR HIM.
“Mom, is this about me? Keep my mouth shut about...?”
“It’s some crank, Stefan. It happens all the time. Different cranks with different messages.”
“Are these people, are they going to kill me?”
“Stefan, no, it’s only...” Something slapped hard against the passenger side of the car and Stefan screamed, crouching and curling his arms over his head. It was just Jep, still in his travel uniform of sport coat and khakis, his grin breaking apart as he saw what he’d done.
“I’m sorry. I just got here,” Jep said.
“Dad, oh, Dad, no, you just shocked me a little,” Stefan said as he rolled down his window and Jep reached through to cup the back of Stefan’s head in his hand. He kissed him on the forehead, and then stood back. The marchers shouted, “Say, say, say her name!”
“Awww, Dad,” Stefan breathed, barely a whisper. “I can’t get out.”
“I’ll be right here. You can do it,” Jep said.
Her claws clattering on the door, our dog, Molly, came rushing out the front door, then tried to hoist herself through the window to get to Stefan. He opened the car door to pull her in and stroked her gray muzzle, his tears spilling. “Molberry, you got old.” As she always has, Molly brought in calm along with a sifting of dusky gray fur.
I gave the top half of the driveway another try, but the car slipped and skidded on the mush. I couldn’t make it up the incline to the garage. We had to park right there.
Then they were on us.
3
When I was a young mother, I believed that if Stefan was ever in danger of choking to death and the Heimlich maneuver didn’t work, I would snatch up a paring knife and perform a tracheotomy to save him. I had no training. I had no idea how it was done. Did I think there’d be an online video? I was later to learn that I wasn’t the only woman crazy enough to have nurtured this kind of fantasy. The fury of mother love is so formidable that it seems to scoff at the limits of known reality and confer abilities befitting a god. Now, the arrow of my own future was aimed at a fight for Stefan’s future. What good would it have done Stefan—or Belinda, or the world?—for hard times to destroy him? No good. I hadn’t reckoned on how shattered Stefan was. I thought he would feel safe once he was home, as though he’d finally reached dry land. But he seemed instead to be drifting in dark water.
His first days were a revelation.
He wouldn’t even consider walking across the living room where he might be glimpsed through the bay window. He knelt on his bed and watched through his bedroom porthole window the marchers and the comings and goings of traffic. Sometimes, he did nothing but stare out of that window for two hours. He asked me if I thought they could see him, telling me that they seemed to be pointing their signs at him directly. I said that was impossible: his window, like all the bedroom windows in the house, had a lower pane of thick, frosted glass. The next day, he asked me again. Once he had something in his mind, he couldn’t put it aside. He reminded me of me.