Defending Jacob (4 page)

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re staring.”

“You’re my wife. I’m allowed to stare.”

“Is that the rule?”

“Yes. Stare, leer, ogle, anything I want. Trust me. I’m a lawyer.”

A good marriage drags a long tail of memory behind it. A single word or gesture, a tone of voice can conjure up so many remembrances. Laurie and I had been flirting like this for thirty-odd years, since the day we met in college and we both went a little love-crazy. Things were different now, of course. At fifty-one, love was a quieter experience. We drifted through the days together. But we both remembered how it all started, and even now, in the middle of my middle age, when I think of that shining young girl, I still feel a little thrill of first love, still there, still burning like a pilot light.

We walked toward the school, climbing the little mound the building is set on.

Jacob sloped along between us. He wore a faded brown hoodie, droopy jeans, and Adidas Superstar throwbacks. His backpack was slung over his right shoulder. His hair was a little long. It hung down over his ears, with a wing across his forehead nearly covering his eyebrows. A braver boy would have taken this look further and flaunted himself as a goth or a hipster or some other flavor of rebel, but that was not Jacob. A hint of nonconformity was all he would risk. There was a wondering little smile on his face. He seemed to be enjoying all the excitement, which, among other things, undeniably broke up the tedium of eighth grade.

When we reached the sidewalk in front of the school, we were absorbed into a group of three young mothers, all of whom had kids in Jacob’s class. The strongest and most outgoing of them, the implicit leader, was Toby Lanzman, the woman I’d seen at the Rifkins’ shiva the night before. She wore shimmery black workout pants, a fitted T-shirt, and a baseball cap with her ponytail threaded through a hole in the back. Toby was a fitness addict. She had a runner’s lean body and fatless face. Among the school fathers, her muscularity was both exciting and intimidating, but electric either way. Me, I thought she was worth a dozen of the other parents here. She was the type of friend you’d want in a crisis. The type who would stand by you.

But if Toby was the captain of this group of mothers, Laurie was its real emotional center—its heart and probably its brain too. Laurie was everyone’s confidante. When something went wrong, when one of them lost a job or a husband strayed or a child struggled in school, it was Laurie she called. They were attracted to the same quality in Laurie that I was, no doubt: she had a thoughtful, cerebral warmth. I had a vague sense, at emotional moments, that these women were my romantic rivals, that they wanted some of the same things from Laurie that I did (approval, love). So, when I saw them gathered together in their shadow family, with Toby in the role of stern father and Laurie the warmhearted mother, it was impossible not to feel a little jealous and excluded.

Toby gathered us into the little circle on the sidewalk, welcoming each of us with a distinct protocol that I never got quite right: a hug for Laurie, a kiss on the cheek for me—
mwah
, she said in my ear—a simple hello for Jacob. “Isn’t this all just terrible?” She sighed.

“I’m in shock,” Laurie confessed, relieved to be among her friends. “I just can’t process this. I don’t know what to think.” Her expression was more puzzled than distressed. She could not make any logic of what had happened.

“How about you, Jacob?” Toby trained her eyes on Jacob, determined to ignore the age difference between them. “How are you doing?”

Jacob shrugged. “I’m good.”

“Ready to get back to school?”

He dismissed the question with another, bigger shrug—he jacked his shoulders up high then dropped them—to show he knew he was being patronized.

I said, “Better get going, Jake, you’re going to be late. You have to go through a security check, remember.”

“Yeah, okay.” Jacob rolled his eyes, as if all this concern for the kids’ security was yet another confirmation of the eternal stupidity of adults. Didn’t they realize it was all too late?

“Just get going,” I said, smiling at him.

“No weapons, no sharp objects?” Toby said with a smirk. She was quoting a directive that had gone out from the school principal via email, which spelled out various new security measures for the school.

Jacob thumb-lifted his backpack a few inches off his shoulder. “Just books.”

“All right, then. Get going. Go learn something.”

Jacob offered a wave to the adults, who smiled their benevolence, and he shambled off past the police sawhorses, joining the tide of students headed for the school door.

When he was gone, the group abandoned their pretense of cheerfulness. The full weight of worry descended on them.

Even Toby sounded beleaguered. “Has anyone reached out to Dan and Joan Rifkin?”

“I don’t think so,” Laurie said.

“We really should. I mean, we have to.”

“Those poor people. I can’t even imagine.”

“I don’t think anyone knows what to say to them.” This was Susan Frank, the only woman in the group dressed in work clothes, the gray wool skirt-suit of a lawyer. “I mean, what
can
you say? Really, what on earth can you say to someone after that? It’s just so—I don’t know, overwhelming.”

“Nothing,” Laurie agreed. “There’s absolutely nothing you can say to make it right. But it doesn’t matter what you say; the point is just to reach out to them.”

“Just let them know you’re thinking of them,” Toby echoed. “That’s all anyone can do, let them know you’re thinking of them.”

The last of the women present, Wendy Seligman, asked me, “What do you think, Andy? You have to do this all the time, don’t you? Talk to families after something like this.”

“I don’t say anything, mostly. I just stick to the case. I don’t talk about anything else. The other stuff, there’s not a lot I can do.”

Wendy nodded, disappointed. She considered me a bore, one of those husbands who must be tolerated, the lesser half of a married couple. But she revered Laurie, who seemed to excel in each of the three distinct roles these women juggled, as wife, mother, and only lastly as herself. If I was interesting to Laurie, Wendy presumed, then I must have a hidden side that I did not bother to share—which meant, perhaps, that
I
considered
her
dull, not worth the effort that real conversation required. Wendy was divorced, the only divorcée or single mom in their little group, and she was prone to imagine that others studied her for defects.

Toby tried to lighten the mood. “You know, we spent all those years keeping these kids away from toy guns and violent TV shows and video games. Bob and I didn’t even let our kids have water guns, for God’s sake, unless they looked like something else. And even then we did not call them ‘guns’; we called them ‘squirters’ or whatever, you know, like the kids wouldn’t
know
. Now this. It’s like—” She threw up her hands in comic exasperation.

But the joke fell flat.

“It’s ironic,” Wendy agreed somberly, to make Toby feel heard.

“It’s true.” Susan sighed, again for Toby’s benefit.

Laurie said, “I think we overestimate what we can do as parents. Your kid is your kid. You get what you get.”

“So I could have given the kids the damn water guns?”

“Probably. With Jacob—I don’t know. I just wonder sometimes if it ever really mattered, all the things we did, all the things we worried about. He was always what he is now, just smaller. It’s the same with all our kids. None of them are really all that different from what they were when they were little.”

“Yes, but our parenting styles haven’t changed either. So maybe we’re just teaching them the same things.”

Wendy: “I don’t have a parenting style. I’m just making it up as I go.”

Susan: “Me too. We all are. Except Laurie. Laurie, you probably have a parenting style. Toby, you too.”

“I do not!”

“Oh, yes, you do! You probably read books about it.”

“Not me.” Laurie put up her hands:
I’m innocent
. “Anyway, the point is, I just think we flatter ourselves when we say we can engineer our kids to be this way or that way. It’s mostly just hardwired.”

The women eyed one another. Maybe Jacob was hardwired, not their kids. Not like Jacob, anyway.

Wendy said, “Did any of you know Ben?” She meant Ben Rifkin, the murder victim. They had not known him. Calling him by his first name was just a way of adopting him.

Toby: “No. Dylan never was friends with him. And Ben never played sports or anything.”

Susan: “He was in Max’s class a few times. I used to see him. He seemed like a good kid, I guess, but who ever knows?”

Toby: “They have lives of their own, these kids. I’m sure they have their secrets.”

Laurie: “Just like us. Just like us at their age, for that matter.”

Toby: “I was a good girl. At their age, I never gave my parents a thing to worry about.”

Laurie: “I was a good girl too.”

I said, intruding, “You weren’t
that
good.”

“I was until I met you. You corrupted me.”

“Did I? Well, I’m quite proud of that. I’ll have to put it on my résumé.”

But the kidding felt inappropriate so soon after the mention of the dead child’s name, and I felt crude and embarrassed before the women, whose emotional sensibilities were so much finer than mine.

There was a moment’s silence then Wendy blurted, “Oh my God, those poor, poor people. That mother! And here we are, just ‘Life goes on, back to school,’ and her little boy will never, never come back.” Wendy’s eyes became watery.
The horror of it: one day, through no fault of your own
—

Toby came forward to hug her friend, and Laurie and Susan rubbed Wendy’s back.

Excluded, I stood there a moment with a dumb, well-meaning expression—a tight smile, a softening around the eyes—then I excused myself to go check on the security station at the school entrance before things devolved into more weepiness. I did not quite understand the depth of Wendy’s grief for a child she did not know; I took it as yet another sign of the woman’s emotional vulnerability. Also, that Wendy had echoed my own words from the night before, “Life goes on,” seemed to align her with Laurie in a tiff that had only just been resolved. All in all, an opportune moment to take off.

I made my way to the security station that had been set up in the school foyer. It consisted of a long table where coats and backpacks were inspected by hand and an area where Newton cops, two male, two female, swept the kids with metal-detecting wands. Jake was right: the whole thing was ridiculous. There was no reason to think anyone would bring a weapon into the school or that the murderer had any connection to the school at all. The body had not even been found on school grounds. It made sense only as a show for the anxious parents.

As I arrived, the Kabuki ritual of searching each student had come to a stop. In a rising voice, a young girl negotiated with one of the cops while a second cop looked on, his wand held across his chest at port arms as if he might be called upon to club her with it. The trouble, it became clear, was her sweatshirt, which read “
F-C-U-K
.” The cop had deemed this message “inciteful” and thus, according to the school’s improvised security rules, forbidden. The girl explained to him that the initials stood for a brand of clothing that you could find at any mall, and even if it did suggest a “bad word” how could anyone be
incited
by it? and she was not giving up her sweatshirt which was very expensive and why should she let some cop throw an expensive sweatshirt in a Dumpster for no good reason? They were at an impasse.

Her adversary, the cop, had a stooped posture. His neck craned forward so that his head rode out in front of his body, giving him a vulturous look. But he straightened when he saw me approach, drawing his head back, causing the skin under his chin to fold over itself.

“Everything okay?” I asked the cop.

“Yes,
sir
.”

Yes,
sir
. I hated the military mannerisms adopted by police departments, the bogus military ranks and chain of command and all that. “At ease,” I said, intending it as a joke, but the cop looked down at his feet, abashed.

“Hi,” I said to the girl, who looked like she was in seventh or eighth grade. I did not recognize her as one of Jacob’s classmates, but she might have been.

“Hi.”

“What’s the problem here? Maybe I can help.”

“You’re Jacob Barber’s dad, aren’t you?”

“That’s right.”

“Aren’t you like a cop or something?”

“Just a DA. And who are you?”

“Sarah.”

“Sarah. Okay, Sarah. What’s the trouble?”

The girl paused, uncertain. Then another gush: “It’s just, I’m trying to tell this officer he doesn’t have to take away my sweatshirt, I’ll put it in my locker or I’ll turn it inside out, whatever. Only he doesn’t like what it says, even though no one will even
see
it, and there’s nothing wrong with it anyway, it’s just a
word
. This is all so totally—” She left off the last word:
stupid
.

“I don’t make the rules,” the cop explained simply.

“It doesn’t
say
anything! That’s, like, my whole thing! It doesn’t say what he says it says! Anyway, I already told him I’ll put it
away
. I
told
him! I told him like a million times but he won’t listen. It’s not fair.”

The girl was about to cry, which reminded me of the grown woman I had just left on the sidewalk also near tears. Jesus, there was no escaping them.

“Well,” I suggested to the cop, “I think it’ll be okay if she just leaves it in her locker, don’t you? I can’t imagine what harm could come of it. I’ll take responsibility.”

“Hey, you’re the boss. Whatever you want.”

“And tomorrow,” I said to the girl, to make it up to this cop, “maybe you’ll leave that sweatshirt at home.”

I winked at her, and she gathered up her things and quick-marched away down the hall.

I took a position shoulder to shoulder with the affronted cop and together we looked out through the school doors toward the street.