Defending Jacob(116)

“No.”

“And Jacob never said anything to you about intending to use the knife on Ben Rifkin, because of the bullying?”

“Intending? No, he didn’t say that.”

“And when he showed the knife to you, it never occurred to you that he planned to kill Ben Rifkin? Because if it did, you would have done something about it, right?”

“I guess.”

“So, as far as you knew, Jacob never had a plan to kill Ben Rifkin?”

“A plan? No.”

“Never talked about when or how he was going to kill Ben Rifkin?”

“No.”

“Then, later, he just sent you the story?”

“Yeah.”

“He sent you a link by email, you said?”

“Yes.”

“Did you save that email?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“It didn’t seem smart. I mean, for Jake—from Jacob’s point of view.”

“So you deleted the email because you were protecting him?”

“I guess.”

“Can you tell me, of all the details in that story, was there anything that was new to you, anything you didn’t already know either from the Web or from news stories or from other kids talking?”

“No, not really.”

“The knife, the park, the three stab wounds—that was all well known by then, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Hardly a confession, then, is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“And did he say in the email that he’d written the story? Or just found it?”

“I don’t remember exactly what the email said. I think it was just, like, ‘Dude, check this out’ or something like that.”

“But you’re sure Jacob told you he wrote the story, not that he just read it?”

“Pretty sure.”

“Pretty sure?”

“Pretty sure, yeah.”

Jonathan went on in this way for some time, doing what he could, shaving away and shaving away at Derek Yoo’s testimony, scoring what points he could. Who knows what the jurors were really making of it. All I can tell you is that the half dozen jurors who were furiously taking notes during Derek’s direct testimony had put down their pens now. Some were no longer even looking at him; they had dropped their eyes to their laps. Maybe Jonathan had won the day and they had decided to discount Derek’s testimony entirely. But it did not seem that way. It seemed like I had been fooling myself, and for the first time I began to imagine in realistic terms what it would be like when Jacob was in Concord prison.





35 | Argentina


Driving home from court that day I was morose, and my sadness infected Jacob and Laurie. From the start, I had been the steady one. It upset them, I think, to see me lose hope. I tried to lie for them. I said all the usual things about not feeling too up on a good day or too down on a bad day; about how the prosecution’s evidence always looks worse on first sight than it does later, in the context of the whole case; about how juries are impossible to anticipate and we should not read too much into their every little gesture. But my tone gave me away. I thought we had probably lost the case that day. At a minimum, the damage was enough that we would have to present a real defense. It would be foolish to rely on “reasonable doubt” at this point: the story Jacob had written about the murder read like a confession, and try as he might, Jonathan could not disprove Derek’s testimony that Jacob wrote it. I did not admit any of this. There was nothing to gain by telling the truth, so I didn’t. All I said to them was that “It wasn’t a good day.” But that was enough.

Father O’Leary did not appear to watch over us that night, or anyone else. We Barbers were left in complete isolation. If we had been shot out into space, we could not have felt more alone. We ordered Chinese food, as we had a thousand times the last few months, because China City delivers and the driver speaks so little English that we did not have to feel self-conscious opening the door for him. We ate our boneless spare ribs and General Gao’s chicken in near silence, then slunk off to opposite corners of the house for the evening. We were too sick of the case to talk about it anymore but too obsessed with it to talk about anything else. We were too gloomy for the idiocies of TV—suddenly our lives seemed finite, and much too short to waste—and too distracted to read.

Around ten, I went into Jacob’s room to check on him. He lay on his back on the bed.

“You okay, Jacob?”

“Not really.”

I went over and sat on the side of the bed. He hoisted his butt over to make room, but Jake was getting so big there was hardly enough space for both of us. (He used to lie right on my chest for naps when he was a baby. He had been no bigger than a loaf of bread.)

He rolled onto his side and propped his head on his hand. “Dad, can I ask you something? If you thought things were looking bad, like the case was about to go the wrong way, would you tell me?”

“Why?”

“No, not ‘why’; just, would you tell me?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Because it wouldn’t make sense to—well, if I took off, what would happen to you and Mom?”

“We’d lose all our money.”