Defending Jacob(120)

We turned slowly to meet them. We must all have had the same expression, puzzled but pleased to see this man who should naturally have been our friend now, despite the pain he had been through, graciously coming to welcome us back into his world, into the real world. But his expression was strange. Hard.

Laurie said, “Dan?”

He did not respond. He took from one of the deep pockets of his trench coat a knife, an ordinary kitchen knife, which I recognized, absurd as this sounds, as a Wüsthof Classic steak knife because we have the same set of knives in a knife block on our kitchen counter. But I did not have time to fully fathom the sublime weirdness of being stabbed with such a knife because almost immediately, before Dan Rifkin got within a few feet of us, Father O’Leary grabbed Rifkin by the arm. He banged Rifkin’s hand once on the hood of the car, which caused the knife to clatter down to the concrete garage floor. Then he flipped Rifkin’s arm behind the little man’s back and easily—so easily he might have been manipulating a mannequin—he bent him over the hood of the car. He said to Rifkin, “Easy there, champ.”

He did all this with expert, graceful professionalism. The whole transaction could not have lasted more than a few seconds, and we were left gaping at the two men.

“Who are you?” I said finally.

“Friend of your father’s. He asked me to look out for you.”

“My father? How do you know my father? No, wait, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

“What do you want me to do with this guy?”

“Let him go! What’s wrong with you?”

He did.

Rifkin straightened himself up. He had tears in his eyes. He looked at us with helpless impotence—apparently he still believed Jacob had killed his son, but he could not do anything about it—and he staggered off, to what torments I cannot imagine.

Father O’Leary went to Jacob and extended his hand. “Congratulations, kid. That was something in there this morning. Did you see the expression on that * DA’s face? Priceless!”

Jacob shook his hand with a bewildered expression.

“Helluva show,” Father O’Leary said. “Helluva show.” He laughed. “And you’re Billy Barber’s kid?”

“Yeah.” I had never been proud to say that. I’m not sure I had ever actually said it out loud in public before. But it gave me a connection to Father O’Leary and it seemed to amuse him, so we both smiled at it.

“You’re bigger than him, that’s for sure. You could fit two of that little shit inside a you.”

I did not know what to do with that comment so I just stood there.

“Tell your old man I said hello, all right?” Father O’Leary said. “Jesus, I could tell you stories about him.”

“Don’t. Please.”

Finally to Jacob: “It’s your lucky day, kid.” He laughed again and ambled away and I have never seen Father O’Leary again to this day.





Part

FOUR


“Precisely how the electrical signals and chemical reactions occurring second by second in the human body make the leap to thought, motivation, impulse—where the physical machinery of man stops and the ghost in the machine, consciousness, begins—is not truly a scientific question, for the simple reason that we cannot design an experiment to capture, measure or duplicate it. For all we have learned, the fact remains that we do not understand in any meaningful way why people do what they do, and likely never will.”





—PAUL HEITZ,

“Neurocriminology and Its Discontents,”

American Journal of Criminology and Public

Policy, Fall 2008





37 | After-Life


Life goes on, probably too long if we’re being honest about it. In a long life there are thirty or thirty-five thousand days to be got through, but only a few dozen that really matter, Big Days when Something Momentous Happens. The rest—the vast majority, tens of thousands of days—are unremarkable, repetitive, even monotonous. We glide through them then instantly forget them. We tend not to think about this arithmetic when we look back on our lives. We remember the handful of Big Days and throw away the rest. We organize our long, shapeless lives into tidy little stories, as I am doing here. But our lives are mostly made up of junk, of ordinary, forgettable days, and “The End” is never the end.

The day Jacob was exonerated, of course, was a Big Day. But after it, remarkably, the little days just kept on coming.

We did not return to “normal”; we had, all three of us, forgotten what normal was. At least, we had no illusions that we would ever get back to it. But in the days and weeks after Jacob’s release, as the euphoria of our vindication receded, we did fall into a routine, if a barren one. We went out very little. Never to restaurants or other public places where we felt leered at. I took over the grocery shopping, since Laurie would not risk running into the Rifkins at the market again, and I picked up the wifely habit of planning the week’s dinner menus in my head as I shopped (pasta Monday, chicken Tuesday, hamburgers Wednesday …). We went to a few movies, usually midweek when the theaters were less crowded, and even then we made a point of slipping in just as the lights went down. Mostly we loafed around the house. We surfed the Web incessantly, entranced, glassy-eyed. We exercised on the treadmill in the basement rather than jog outside. We upped our Netflix plan so that we had as many DVDs on hand as possible. It sounds dismal, looking back on it, but at the time it felt wonderful. We were free, or something like it.