Sunday, April 22, 2007, ten days after the murder.
On a raw, drizzly morning, hundreds of volunteers turned out to sweep Cold Spring Park for the missing knife. They were a cross-section of the town. Kids from the McCormick, some who had been friends with Ben Rifkin, some who were clearly from other school tribes-jocks, geeks, kittenish good girls. There were lots of young mothers and fathers. A few of the activist macher s who were constantly organizing community efforts of one kind or another. All these assembled in the morning damp, listened to instructions from Paul Duffy about how the search would proceed, then in teams they tromped off across the spongy wet ground to search their assigned quadrants of the woods for the knife. There was a determined mood to the whole adventure. It was a relief for everyone to do something finally, to be admitted into the investigation. Soon, they were sure, the whole thing would be resolved. It was the waiting, the uncertainty that was wearing them down. The knife would end all that. It would bear fingerprints or blood or some other morsel that would unlock the mystery, and the town would finally be able to exhale. Mr. Logiudice: You didn’t take part in the search, did you? Witness: No, I did not. Mr. Logiudice: Because you knew it was a fool’s errand. The knife they were looking for had already been found in Jacob’s dresser drawer. And you had already dumped it for him. Witness: No. I knew that was not the knife they were looking for. There was no doubt in my mind. Zero. Mr. Logiudice: Then why didn’t you join the search? Witness: A prosecutor never takes part in his own searches. I couldn’t risk becoming a witness in my own case. Think about it: if I were the one to find the murder weapon, I’d have become an essential witness. I’d be forced to cross the courtroom and take the stand. I’d have to give up the case. That’s why a good prosecutor always hangs back. He waits at the police station or out on the street while a search warrant is executed, he watches from the next room while a detective conducts an interrogation. That is Prosecution 101, Neal. It’s standard procedure. It’s exactly what I taught you, once upon a time. Maybe you weren’t listening. Mr. Logiudice: So it was for technical reasons? Witness: Neal, no one wanted the search to succeed as much as I did. I wanted my son to be proven innocent. Finding the real knife would have accomplished that. Mr. Logiudice: You’re not the least bit troubled by the way you disposed of Jacob’s knife? Even now, knowing what happened? Witness: I did what I thought was right. Jake was innocent. It was the wrong knife. Mr. Logiudice: Of course you weren’t willing to test that theory, were you? You didn’t submit the knife for forensic testing, for fingerprints or blood or fiber traces, as you threatened Jacob you might? Witness: It was the wrong knife. I did not need a test to confirm that for me. Mr. Logiudice: You already knew. Witness: I already knew. Mr. Logiudice: What was it-what made you so sure? Witness: I knew my son. Mr. Logiudice: That’s it? You knew your son? Witness: I did what any father would do. I tried to protect him from his own stupidity. Mr. Logiudice: Okay. We’ll leave it. All right, so while the others searched in Cold Spring Park that morning, you waited where? Witness: In the parking lot at the entrance to the park. Mr. Logiudice: And at some point Mr. Rifkin, the victim’s father, appeared? Witness: Yes. When I first saw him, he was coming from the direction of the woods. There are playing fields at the front of the park there, soccer fields, baseball. That morning the fields were empty. It was just a huge flat open grassy expanse. And he was making his way across it toward me.
This will always be my lasting image of Dan Rifkin alone in his misery: a small figure meandering across this massive green space, head bowed, arms thrust down into his coat pockets. The wind kept blustering him off course. He zigzagged like a little boat tacking upwind.
I went out onto the fields to meet him, but we were some distance apart and the crossing took time. For an awkward interval we watched each other approach. What must we have looked like from above? Two tiny forms inching across an empty green field toward a meeting somewhere in the center.
As he drew close, I waved. But Rifkin did not return the gesture. Thinking he was upset by accidentally running across the search, I made a churlish note to ream out the victim advocate who had forgotten to warn Rifkin away from the park that day.
“Hey, Dan,” I said in a wary tone.
He wore aviator sunglasses, though the weather was gray, and his eyes showed dimly through the lenses. He stared up at me, his eyes behind those lenses as huge and inexpressive as a fly’s. Angry, apparently.
“Are you okay, Dan? What are you doing here?”
“I’m surprised to see you here.”
“Yeah? Why is that? Where else would I be?”
He snorted.
“What is it, Dan?”
“You know”-his tone going philosophical-“I’ve had the strangest feeling lately, like I’m onstage and all the people around me are actors. Everyone in the world, every single person rushing around me on the sidewalk, they march around with their noses up in the air pretending like nothing has happened, and I’m the only one who knows the truth. I’m the only one who knows Everything Has Changed.”
I nodded, benign, indulging him.
“They’re false. You know what I mean, Andy? They’re pretending.”
“I can only imagine how you must feel, Dan.”
“I think maybe you’re an actor too.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I think you’re false.” Rifkin took off his sunglasses, folded them carefully, and stowed them in an inside pocket of his jacket. The bags under his eyes had darkened since I saw him last. His olive skin had taken on a grayish pallor. “I hear you’re being taken off the case.”
“What? You heard that from who?”
“Doesn’t matter who. I just want you to know: I want another DA.”
“Okay, well, that’s something we can talk about, certainly.”
“There’s nothing to talk about. It’s already done. Go call your boss. You need to talk to your own people. I told you, I want another DA. Someone who won’t just sit on the case. And that’s going to happen now.”
“Sit on the case? Dan, what the hell are you talking about?”
“You said everything was being done. What was being done, exactly?”
“Look, it’s been a hard case, I acknowledge-”
“No, no, it’s more than that and you know it. Why haven’t you pressed those kids? Still, to this day? I mean, really put the screws to them? That’s what I want to know.”
“I have talked to them.”
“Including your own kid, Andy?”
My mouth fell open. I extended my hand toward him, to touch his arm, to connect, but he raised his arm as if to backhand it away.
“You’ve been lying to me, Andy. All along you’ve been lying.”
He looked off toward the trees. “Do you know what bothers me, Andy? About being here, in this place? It’s that for a while-for a few minutes, maybe just a few seconds, I don’t know how long-but for some amount of time my son was alive here. He was out there lying in some fucking wet leaves, bleeding to death. And I wasn’t here with him. I was supposed to be here to help him. That’s what a father does. But I didn’t know. I was off somewhere, in the car, in my office, talking on the phone, whatever it was I was doing. Do you understand that, Andy? Do you have any idea how that feels? Can you even imagine it? I saw him get born, I saw him take his first steps and… and learn to ride a bike. I took him to his first day of school. But I wasn’t here to help him when he died. Can you imagine how that feels?”
“Dan,” I said weakly, “why don’t I get a cruiser down here to drive you home? I don’t think it’s good for you to be here. You should be with your family.”
“I can’t be with my family, Andy, that’s the fucking point! My family is dead.”
“Okay.” I looked down at the ground, at his white sneakers spattered with mud and pine needles.
“I’ll tell you something,” Rifkin added. “It doesn’t matter what happens to me now. I could become a… a drug addict or a thief or a bum. It just doesn’t matter what happens to me from here. Why should it? Why should I care?”
He said this with a bitter snarl.
“Call your office, Andy.” A beat. “Go on, call. It’s over. You’re out.”
I took out my cell phone and called Lynn Canavan directly on her cell. It rang three times. I could imagine her reading the caller ID window, preparing herself to answer.
“I’m at the office,” she said. “Why don’t you come down here right away.”
I told her, as Rifkin looked on with satisfaction, that if she had something to say, she could say it right then and save me the trip.
“No,” she insisted. “Come to the office, Andy. I want to talk to you face-to-face.”
I snapped the phone shut. I wanted to say something to Rifkin, good-bye or good luck or some valedictory bullshit, who knew what? Something told me he was right and this was good-bye. But he did not want to hear it. His posture announced as much. He had already assigned me a villain’s role. Probably he knew more than I did, anyway.
I left him on that green field and drove across the river to Cambridge in a defeated reverie. I was resigned to the fact that I would be removed from the case; it simply did not make sense that Rifkin would have come up with that on his own. Somebody had tipped him off, probably Logiudice, whose Iago whispers in the district attorney’s ear had finally won the day. Okay, then. I would be removed for a conflict of interest, a technicality. I had been outmaneuvered, that was all. It was office politics, and I was an apolitical guy, always had been. So Logiudice would have his high-profile case, and I would move on to the next file, the next body, the next case to enter the funnel. I still believed all this, foolish or delusional or rationalizing as I was. I still did not see what was coming. There was so little evidence pointing to Jacob-a schoolgirl with a secret, some kids gossiping on Facebook, even the knife. As evidence these were nothing. Any semicompetent defense lawyer would swipe them aside like cobwebs.
At the courthouse, there were no fewer than four plainclothes troopers waiting at the front door to meet me. I recognized them all as CPAC guys but I knew only one very well, a detective named Moynihan. They escorted me like a Praetorian guard through the courthouse lobby to the district attorney’s office, then through cubicles and hallways abandoned on a Sunday morning, to Lynn Canavan’s corner office.
There were three people there, seated at the conference table, Canavan, Logiudice, and a press guy named Larry Siff, whose constant presence at Canavan’s side for the past year or so had been a discouraging sign of the permanent campaign. I had no beef with Siff personally, but I despised his intrusion into a sacred process to which I had devoted my life. Most of the time he did not even have to speak; his mere presence ensured that political implications would be considered.
District Attorney Canavan said, “Sit down, Andy.”
“Did you really think you needed all this, Lynn? What did you think I was going to do? Jump out the window?”
“It’s for your own good. You know how it goes.”
“How what goes? I feel like I’m under arrest.”
“No. We just have to be careful. People get upset. They react unpredictably. We don’t want any scenes. You’d have done the same thing.”
“Not true.” I sat down. “So what am I going to be upset about?”
“Andy,” she said, “we have some bad news. On the Rifkin case? The print on the victim’s sweatshirt? It’s your son Jacob’s.” She slid a stapled report toward me.
I scanned the report. It was from the State Police Crime Lab. The report identified a dozen points of comparison between the latent found at the murder scene and one of the knowns on Jacob’s print card, much more than the standard eight required for a positive match. It was the right thumb: Jacob had reached out and grabbed the victim by his unzipped sweatshirt, leaving the print on that inside tag.
I said, bewildered, “I’m sure there’s some explanation.”
“I’m sure there is.”
“They go to the same school. Jacob is in his class. They knew each other.”
“Yes.”
“It doesn’t mean-”
“We know, Andy.”
They looked at me with pity. All except for the younger troopers, now standing by the window, who did not know me and could still despise me as they would any other bad guy.
“We’re putting you on paid leave. It’s partly my fault: it was a mistake to let you have the case in the first place. These guys”-she gestured toward the troopers-“will go to your office with you. You can take your personal belongings. No papers, no files. You’re not to touch the computer. Your work product belongs to the office.”
“Who’s taking the case?”
“Neal is.”
I smiled. Of course he is.
“Andy, do you object to Neal trying the case for some reason?”
“Does it matter what I think, Lynn?”
“Maybe, if you can make a case.”
I shook my head. “No. Let him have it. I insist.”
Logiudice looked away, avoiding my eyes.
“Have you arrested him?”
More eyes darting around the room, avoiding me.
“Lynn, have you arrested my son?”
“No.”
“Are you going to?”
Logiudice cut in, “We don’t have to tell you that.”
Canavan put out her hand to still him. “Yes. We don’t have much choice, in the circumstances.”
“In the circumstances? What circumstances? You think he’s going to take off for Costa Rica?”
She shrugged.
“You already have the warrant?”
“Yes.”
“Lynn, you have my word: he’ll turn himself in. You don’t need to arrest him. He doesn’t belong in a jail, even for one night. He’s no flight risk, you know that. He’s my son. He’s my son, Lynn. I don’t want to see him arrested.”
“Andy,” the district attorney advised, waving away my pleading like smoke, “it’d probably be best for everyone if you stayed away from the courthouse for a while. Let the dust settle. Okay?”
“Lynn, I’m asking you as a friend, as a personal favor: please, don’t arrest him.”
“It’s not a close call, Andy.”
“Why? I don’t understand. Because of a fingerprint? One fucking fingerprint? That’s all there is? You must have more. Tell me there’s more.”
“Andy, I suggest you go get a lawyer.”
“Get a lawyer? I am a lawyer. Tell me why you’re doing this to my son. You’re destroying my family. I have a right to know why.”
“I’m just reacting to the evidence, that’s all.”
“The evidence points to Patz. I’ve told you that.”
“There’s more than you’re aware of, Andy. Much more.”
It took me a moment to absorb the implications of that. Just a moment, though. I folded my cards and determined that from then on, I would show them nothing.
I stood up. “Okay. Let’s get moving.”
“Just like that?”
“Was there anything else you wanted to say to me? You, Neal?”
Canavan said, “You know, we’re still concerned about you. Whatever your son… may have done, he’s not you. You and I go back a ways, Andy. I don’t forget that.”
I felt my face go hard, as if I was peering through the eye-holes of a stone mask. I looked only at Canavan, my old friend whom I still loved and still, despite everything, trusted. I did not dare glance at Logiudice. There was a wild energy rushing into my right arm. In that moment I felt that if I so much as looked at him, my hand would flash out, snatch up his throat, and crush it.
“Are we done here?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I have to go. I have to find my family right away.”
District Attorney Canavan’s face was wary. “You okay to drive, Andy?”
“I’m fine.”
“All right. These guys will go with you to your office.”
In my office I tossed a few things into a cardboard box, papers and desk-debris, pictures plucked off the wall, the little souvenirs of years of work. An axe handle, evidence from a case I had never been able to push through the grand jury. It all fit into one cardboard box, all the years, the work, the friendships, the respect I had accumulated by little spoonfuls in case after case. All gone now, no matter how Jacob’s case turned out. For even if Jacob was cleared, I would never escape the stain of the accusation. A jury could only declare my son “not guilty,” never “innocent.” The stink would never leave us. I doubted I would ever walk into a courtroom again as a lawyer. But things were racing too fast to linger over the past or future. There was only now.
I was not panicked, oddly. I never did lose my nerve. Jacob’s homicide charge was a grenade-we would all inevitably be destroyed by it; only the details remained to be worked out-but a strange, calm urgency came over me. Surely a search warrant team was already on its way to my home. That may even have been why the DA had brought me all the way down here: to keep me out of that house before it could be searched. It was exactly what I would have done.
I bolted out of the office.
I called Laurie’s cell from the car. No answer. “Laurie, it’s very, very important. Call me back right away, the second you get this message.”
I called Jacob’s cell phone too. No answer.
I got home too late: four Newton cruisers were already parked outside, watching, freezing the house while they waited for the warrant to arrive. I continued around the block and parked.
My house is adjacent to a train stop on the suburban commuter-train line. An eight-foot fence separates the platform from my backyard. I spidered over it easily. There was so much adrenaline in me, I could have clambered up Mount Rushmore.
In my yard, I pushed through the arbor vitae at the edge of the lawn. The leaves flicked and needled across me as I bodied through the bushes.
I ran across my backyard. My neighbor was in his backyard, gardening. He waved to me, and out of neighborly reflex I waved back as I sprinted by.
Inside, I called out quietly for Jacob. To prepare him for what was coming. No one was home.
I bolted up the stairs, into Jacob’s room, where I yanked open drawers, the closet, tossed up the laundry piles on the floor, desperate to find anything remotely incriminating and get rid of it.
Does that sound awful to you? I hear the little voice in your head: Destruction of evidence! Obstruction of justice! You are naive. You imagine the courts are reliable, that wrong results are rare, and therefore I ought to have trusted the system. If he truly believed Jacob was innocent, you are thinking, he would have simply let the police sweep in and take whatever they liked. Here is the dirty little secret: the error rate in criminal verdicts is much higher than anyone imagines. Not just false negatives, the guilty criminals who get off scot-free-those “errors” we recognize and accept. They are the predictable result of stacking the deck in defendants’ favor as we do. The real surprise is the frequency of false positives, the innocent men found guilty. That error rate we do not acknowledge-do not even think about-because it calls so much into question. The fact is, what we call proof is as fallible as the witnesses who produce it, human beings all. Memories fail, eyewitness identifications are notoriously unreliable, even the best-intentioned cops are subject to failures of judgment and recall. The human element in any system is always prone to error. Why should the courts be any different? They are not. Our blind trust in the system is the product of ignorance and magical thinking, and there was no way in hell I was going to trust my son’s fate to it. Not because I believed he was guilty, I assure you, but precisely because he was innocent. I was doing what little I could to ensure the right result, the just result. If you do not believe me, go spend a few hours in the nearest criminal court, then ask yourself if you really believe it is error-free. Ask yourself if you would trust your child to it.
In any event, I did not find anything even remotely worrisome in Jake’s room, just the usual teenage junk, dirty laundry, sneakers molded to the shape of his enormous feet, schoolbooks, video-gamer mags, charging cables for his various electronics. I don’t know what I expected to find, really. The trouble was that I did not know what the DA had yet, what made them so anxious to charge Jacob, and it made me crazy wondering what that missing piece could be.
I was still tossing the room when my cell phone rang. It was Laurie. I told her to get home right away-she was visiting a friend in Brookline, twenty minutes away-but I did not tell her anything more. She was too emotional. I did not know how she would react and I did not have time to deal with her. Help Jacob now, fix Laurie later. “Where’s Jacob?” I asked. She did not know. I hung up on her.
I took a last glance around the room. I was tempted to hide Jacob’s laptop. God only knew what was on his hard drive. But I worried that stashing the computer would hurt him either way: if the computer went missing, that would be suspicious, given his online presence; on the other hand, if found it might contain devastating evidence. In the end I left it-unwisely, maybe, but there was no time to consider. Jacob knew he had been publicly accused on Facebook; presumably he had been wily enough to scrub his hard drive if need be.
The doorbell rang. Game over. I was still breathing heavily.
At the door, none other than Paul Duffy was there to hand me the search warrant. “Sorry, Andy,” he said.
I stared. The troopers in their blue windbreakers, the cruisers with their flashers on, my old friend extending the trifolded warrant toward me-I simply did not know how to react, so I barely reacted at all. I stood there, mute, as he pressed the paper into my hand.
“Andy, I have to ask you to wait outside. You know the drill.”
It took a few seconds to rouse myself, to come back into the moment and accept that this was really happening. But I was determined not to make the amateur’s mistake, not to stumble and give them anything. No dumb statements blurted out under pressure in the critical early moments of the case. That is the mistake that puts people in Walpole.
“Is Jacob here, Andy?”
“No.”
“Do you know where he is?”
“No idea.”
“Okay, come on, buddy, step out, please.” He put his hand gently on my upper arm to encourage me, but he did not pull me out of the house. He seemed willing to wait till I was ready. He leaned in and said confidentially, “Let’s do this the right way.”
“It’s okay, Paul.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Just do your job, okay? Don’t fuck it up.”
“Okay.”
“You dot those i ’s and cross those t ’s, or Logiudice’ll throw you under the bus. He’ll make you look like Barney Fife at the trial, mark my words. He’ll do what he has to do. He won’t protect you like I would.”
“Okay, Andy. It’s all right. Come on out.”
I waited on the sidewalk in front of the house. Gawkers accumulated across the street, drawn by the cruisers out front. I would have preferred to wait in the backyard, out of view, but I had to be there when Laurie or Jacob got home, to comfort them-and to coach them.
Laurie arrived just a few minutes into the search. She wobbled when she heard the news. I steadied her and whispered into her ear not to say anything, not even to show any emotion, not fear or sadness. Give them nothing. She made a scornful sound, then she cried. Her sobbing was honest, uninhibited, as if no one was watching. She did not care what people thought, because no one had ever thought badly of her, not for one moment in her life. I knew better. We stood together in front of the house, I with my arm around her in a protective, possessive way.
When the search stretched into its second hour, we retreated to the back of the house and sat on the deck. There Laurie cried softly, gathered herself, cried again.
At some point Detective Duffy came around back and climbed the stairs to the deck. “Andy, just so you know, we found a knife this morning in the park. It was in the muck next to a lake.”
“I knew it. I knew it would show up. Are there any prints, blood, anything on it?”
“Nothing obvious. It’s at the lab. There was this dried algae all over it, like green powder.”
“It’s Patz’s.”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“What kind of knife was it?”
“Just, like, a regular kitchen knife.”
Laurie said, “A kitchen knife?”
“Yeah. You guys got all yours?”
I said, “Come on, Duff, be serious. What are you asking a question like that for?”
“All right, sorry. It’s my job to ask.”
Laurie glared.
“You guys heard from Jacob yet, Andy?”
“No. We can’t find him. We’ve been calling everyone.”
Duffy stifled a skeptical look.
“He’s a kid,” I said, “he disappears sometimes. When he gets here, Paul, I don’t want anyone talking to him. No questions. He’s a minor. He has a right to have a parent or guardian present. Don’t try and pull anything.”
“Jesus, Andy, nobody’s going to pull anything. We would like to talk to him, though, obviously.”
“Forget it.”
“Andy, it might help him.”
“Forget it. He’s got nothing to say. Not one word.”
In the middle of the yard, something caught our eyes and all three of us turned. A rabbit, tree-bark gray, sniffed the air, twitched its head, alerted, relaxed. It hopped a few feet, stopped. Motionless, it blended into the grass and the gloomy light. I almost lost sight of it until it hopped a little more, a gray ripple.
Duffy turned back to Laurie. Only a few Saturdays before, we had all gone out to a restaurant for dinner, Duffy and his wife and Laurie and I. It seemed like another lifetime. “We’re just about done here, Laurie. We’ll be out of here soon.”
She nodded, too pissed off and heartbroken and betrayed to tell him it was all right.
“Paul,” I told him, “he did not do it. I want to say that to you in case I don’t get another chance. You and I aren’t going to talk for a while, probably, so I want you to hear it right from me, okay? He did not do it. He did not do it.”
“Okay. I hear you.” He turned to go.
“He’s innocent. As innocent as your kid.”
“Okay,” he said, and he left.
Over by the arbor vitae, the rabbit hunched, jaws munching.
We waited until after dark for Jacob, until the cops and the voyeurs had all drifted away. He never came.
He had been hiding for hours, mostly in the woods of Cold Spring Park, in backyards, and in the play structure behind the elementary school he had once attended, which is where the cops found him at around eight o’clock.
He submitted to the handcuffs without complaint, the police report said. He did not run. He greeted the cop by saying “I’m the one you’re looking for” and “I didn’t do it.” When the cop said dismissively, “Then how did your fingerprint get on the body?” Jacob blurted-foolishly or cannily, I am still not sure-“I found him. He was already lying there. I tried to pick him up so I could help him. Then I saw he was dead, and I got scared and ran.” It was the only statement Jacob ever gave the police. He must have realized, belatedly, that it was risky to blurt out confessions like that one, and he never said another word. Jacob knew, as few boys do, the full value of the Fifth Amendment. Later, there would be speculation about why Jacob made this singular statement, how complete and self-serving it was. There were intimations he had crafted the statement beforehand and conveniently let it slip-he was gaming the case, launching his defense as early as possible. All I know for sure is that Jacob was never as smart or as cunning as he was described in the media.
In any case, after that, the only thing Jacob told the cop, over and over, was “I want my dad.”
He could not be bailed that night. He was held in the lockup in Newton, just a mile or two from our house.
Laurie and I were allowed to see him only briefly, in a little windowless visiting room.
Jacob was obviously shaken. His eyes were watery and red-rimmed. His face was flushed, a single horizontal slash of red across each cheek, like war paint. He was obviously scared shitless. At the same time he was trying to stay composed. His manner was clenched, rigid, mechanical. A boy imitating manliness, at least an adolescent’s conception of manliness. That was the part that broke my heart, I think, the way he struggled to hold it together, to keep that storm of emotion-panic, anger, sorrow-all siloed up inside himself. He would not be able to do it much longer, I thought. He was burning fuel fast.
“Jacob,” Laurie said in a wobbly voice, “are you all right?”
“No! Obviously not.” He gestured at the room around him, the situation he was in, and made a sardonic face. “I’m dead.”
“Jake-”
“They’re saying I killed Ben? No way. No way. I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe this.”
I said, “Hey, Jake, it’s a mistake. It’s some kind of horrible misunderstanding. We’ll work it out, okay? I don’t want you to lose hope. This is just the beginning of the process. There’s a long way to go.”
“I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. I’m just, like”-he made an exploding sound and with his hands he sculpted a mushroom cloud-“you know? It’s like, it’s like, who’s that guy? In the story?”
“Kafka.”
“No. The guy from, whatsit? The movie.”
“I don’t know, Jake.”
“Where the guy, like, finds out the world isn’t really the world? It’s just, like, a dream? Like a simulation? A computer made it all? And now he gets to see the real world. It’s, like, an old movie.”
“I’m not sure.”
“ The Matrix!”
“ The Matrix? That’s old?”
“Keanu Reeves, Dad? Please.”
I looked at Laurie. “Keanu Reeves?”
She shrugged.
It was amazing that Jake could be goofy, even now. But he was. He was the same dorky kid that he had been a few hours before-had always been, for that matter.
“Dad, what am I supposed to do?”
“We’re going to fight. We’ll fight this every step of the way.”
“No, I mean, like, not generally. Now. What happens next?”
“There’ll be an arraignment tomorrow morning. They’ll just read the charge and we’ll set bail and you’ll come home.”
“How much is bail?”
“We’ll find out tomorrow.”
“What if we can’t afford it? What happens to me?”
“We’ll find it, don’t worry. We have some money saved up. We have the house.”
He sniffed. He’d heard me complain about money a thousand times. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t do it, I swear. I know I’m not, like, a perfect kid, okay? But I didn’t do this.”
“I believe you.”
Laurie added, “You are perfect, Jacob.”
“I didn’t even know Ben. He was just, like, this kid from school. Why would I do this? Huh? Why? Okay, why are they saying I did this?”
“I don’t know, Jake.”
“This is your case! What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“I just don’t know.”
“You mean, you don’t want to tell me.”
“No. Don’t say that. Jake, do you think I was investigating you? Really?”
He shook his head. “So just for no reason-for no reason-I killed Ben Rifkin? That’s just-that’s just-I don’t know what it is. It’s crazy. This whole thing is totally crazy.”
“Jacob, you don’t have to convince us. We’re on your side. Always. No matter what happens.”
“Jesus.” He raked his fingers through his hair. “This is Derek’s fault. He did this. I know it.”
“Derek? Why Derek?”
“He’s just-he’s like-he gets freaked out by stuff, you know? Like, the littlest things and he freaks out about them. I swear, when I get out, I’m going to fuck him up. I swear it.”
“Jake, I don’t think Derek could have done this.”
“He did. You watch. That kid.”
Laurie and I exchanged a puzzled look.
“Jake, we’re going to get you out of here. We’ll put up the bail, whatever it is. We’ll find the money. We’re not going to let you sit in jail. But you’re going to have to spend the night here, just until the arraignment in the morning. We’ll meet you at the courthouse first thing. We’ll have a lawyer with us. You’ll be home for dinner tomorrow. Tomorrow you’re going to sleep in your own bed, I promise.”
“I don’t want a lawyer. I want you. You be my lawyer. Who could be better?”
“I can’t.”
“Why not? I want you. You’re my father. I need you now.”
“It’s a bad idea, Jacob. You need a defense lawyer. Anyway, it’s all taken care of. I called my friend Jonathan Klein. He’s very, very good, I promise you.”
He frowned, disappointed. “You couldn’t do it anyway. You’re a DA.”
“Not anymore.”
“You got fired?”
“Not yet. I’m on leave. They’ll fire me later, probably.”
“ ’Cuz of me?”
“No, not ’cuz of you. You didn’t do anything. It’s just the way things go.”
“So what are you going to do? Like, for money? You need a job.”
“Don’t worry about money. Let me worry about money.”
A cop, some young kid I did not know, knocked and said, “Time.”
Laurie told Jacob, “We love you. We love you so much.”
“Okay, Mom.”
She wrapped her arms around him. For a moment he did not move at all, and Laurie stood there hugging him as if she had embraced a tree or a building column. Finally he relented and patted her back.
“Do you know it, Jake? Do you know how much we love you?”
Over her shoulder, he rolled his eyes. “Yes, Mom.”
“Okay.” She pulled herself away and swiped the tears from her eyes. “Okay, then.”
Jacob seemed to tremble on the verge of crying as well.
I hugged him. I pulled him close, squeezed hard, then stepped back. I looked him over from head to toe. There was mud ground into the knees of his jeans from the hours he had spent hiding in Cold Spring Park, in a rainy April. “You be strong, okay?”
“You too,” he said. He grinned, apparently catching the dopiness of his answer.
We left him there.
And still the night was not over.
At two A.M. I was in the living room, slumped on the couch. I felt marooned, unable to move my body up to the bedroom or to fall asleep where I was.
Laurie padded down the stairs barefoot, in pajama bottoms and a favorite turquoise T-shirt that was now too threadbare for anything but sleeping in. Her breasts drooped inside it, defeated by age, gravity. Her hair was a mess, her eyes half shut. The sight of her nearly brought me to tears. From the third step she said, “Andy, come to bed. There’s nothing more we can do tonight.”
“Soon.”
“Not soon; now. Come.”
“Laurie, come here. There’s something we have to talk about.”
She shuffled across the front hall to join me in the living room, and in those dozen steps she seemed to come fully awake. I was not the type to ask for help often. When I did, it alarmed her. “What is it, sweetheart?”
“Sit down. There’s something I have to tell you. Something that’s going to come out soon.”
“About Jacob?”
“About me.”
I told her everything, all that I knew about my bloodline. About James Burkett, the first bloody Barber, who came east from the frontier like a reverse pioneer bringing his wildness to New York. And Rusty Barber, my war-hero grandfather who wound up gutting a man in a fight over a traffic accident in Lowell, Massachusetts. And my own father, Bloody Billy Barber, whose shadowy climactic orgy of violence involved a young girl and a knife in an abandoned building. After thirty-four years of waiting, the whole story took only five or ten minutes to tell. Once it was out, it seemed like a puny thing to have found so burdensome for so long, and I was confident, briefly, that Laurie would see it that way too.
“That’s what I come from.”
She nodded, blank-faced, doped with disappointment-in me, in my history, in my dishonesty. “Andy, why didn’t you ever tell me?”
“Because it didn’t matter. It was never who I was. I’m not like them.”
“But you didn’t trust me to understand that.”
“No. Laurie, it’s not about that.”
“You just never got around to it?”
“No. At the beginning I didn’t want you to think of me that way. Then the longer it went, the less it seemed to matter. We were so… happy.”
“Until now, when you had to tell me, you had no choice.”
“Laurie, I want you to know about it now because it’s probably going to come out-not because it really has anything to do with this, but because shit like this always comes out. It has nothing to do with Jacob. Or me.”
“You’re sure of that?”
I died for a moment. Then: “Yes, I’m sure.”
“So sure that you felt you had to hide it from me.”
“No, that’s not right.”
“Anything else you haven’t told me?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
She thought it over. “Okay, then.”
“ Okay meaning what? Do you have any questions? Do you want to talk?”
She gave me a reproachful look: I was asking her if she wanted to talk? At two in the morning? On this morning?
“Laurie, nothing is different. This doesn’t change anything. I’m the same person you’ve known since we were seventeen.”
“Okay.” She looked down at her lap where her hands were wrestling. “You should have told me before, that’s all I can say right now. I had a right to know. I had a right to know who I was marrying, who I was having a child with.”
“You did know. You married me. All this other stuff is just history. It’s got nothing to do with us.”
“You should have told me, that’s all. I had a right to know.”
“If I’d told you, you wouldn’t have married me. You wouldn’t have gone out with me in the first place.”
“You don’t know that. You never gave me the chance.”
“Oh, come on. If I’d asked you out and you knew?”
“I don’t know what I would have said.”
“I do.”
“Why?”
“Because girls like you don’t… settle for boys like that. Look, let’s just forget it.”
“How do you know, Andy? How do you know what I’d choose?”
“You’re right. You’re right, I don’t. I’m sorry.”
There was a lull, and it could have been all right still. At that moment we could still have survived it and moved on.
I knelt in front of her, rested my arms on her lap, on her warm legs. “Laurie, I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry I didn’t tell you. But I can’t undo that now. The important thing is, I need to know you understand: my father, my grandfather-I’m not them. I need to know you believe that.”
“I do. I mean, I guess I do- of course I do. I don’t know, Andy, it’s late. I have to get some sleep. I can’t do this now. I’m too tired.”
“Laurie, you know me. Look at me. You know me.”
She studied my face.
From this close I was surprised to discover she looked rather old and exhausted, and I thought it had been selfish of me and a little cruel to unload this on her now, in the middle of the night after the worst day of her life, just to get it off my chest, to ease my own mind. And I remembered her. I remembered the girl with brown legs sitting on a beach towel on Old Campus freshman year, the girl so far out of my league that she was actually easy to talk to because there was nothing to lose. At seventeen, I knew: my entire childhood had been just a prelude to this girl. I had never felt anything like it, and still haven’t. I felt changed by her, physically. Not sexually, though we had sex everywhere, like minks, in the library stacks, in an empty classroom, her car, her family’s beach house, even a cemetery. It was more: I became a different person, myself, the person I am now. And everything that came after-my family, my home, our entire life together-was a gift she gave me. The spell lasted thirty-four years. Now, at fifty-one, I saw her as she actually was, finally. It came as a surprise: no longer the shining girl, she was just a woman after all.