Defending Jacob(124)
It was already late afternoon when Logiudice finally forced me into a little harmless perjury. I had been testifying all day, and I was tired. It was April. The days were beginning to get longer. The daylight was just beginning to dim when I said, “Never heard of him.”
By then Logiudice must have known he was not going to restore his own reputation here, least of all by asking for my help. He resigned from the DA’s office soon after. He is a defense lawyer in Boston now. I have no doubt he will make a great defense lawyer too, right up until the day he is disbarred. But for now, I console myself with that image of him in the grand jury room doing a slow burn as his case, and his career, collapsed before his eyes. I like to think of it as the last lesson I ever taught him, my former protégé. It’s the policeman’s dilemma, Neal. After a while you get used to it.
39 | Paradise
It turns out, you can get used to most anything. What one day seems a shocking, unbearable outrage over time comes to seem ordinary, unremarkable.
As those first few months passed, the insult of Jacob’s trial gradually lost its power to enrage us. We had done all we could. This grotesque thing had happened to our family. We would always be known for it. It would be the first sentence in all our obituaries. And we would always be shaped by the experience, in ways we could not guess at the time. All this began to seem normal, permanent, hardly worth commenting on. And when it did—when we started to get used to our new life as a notorious family, when we finally began to look forward, not back—our family gradually reemerged.
Laurie was the first of us to reawaken. She renewed her friendship with Toby Lanzman. Toby had not reached out to us during the trial, but she was the first of our Newton friends to reconnect with us afterward. Still her old fit, commanding self—same lean runner’s face, same springy, high-rumped body—Toby guided Laurie in a fearsome exercise program that included long, cold jogs along Commonwealth Avenue. Laurie wanted to get stronger, she said. Soon Laurie was driving herself through grueling workouts even without Toby. She would come back from increasingly long runs, red-faced and glistening with sweat in the dead of winter. “Have to get stronger.”
Recovering her role as family captain, Laurie threw herself into the great project of reviving Jacob and me as well. She cooked tremendous breakfasts of waffles or omelettes or hot cereal, and now that we had no jobs to rush off to, we lingered over the newspapers, which Jacob read on his MacBook while Laurie and I shared the newsprint versions of the Globe and the Times. She organized family movie nights and even allowed me to pick the gangster pictures I love, then she suffered good-naturedly as Jacob and I repeated our favorite lines over and over: “Say hello to my leetle friend” and “I didn’t know until this day that it was Barzini all along.” She said that my Brando sounded like Elmer Fudd, which required a trip to YouTube to show Jacob who Elmer Fudd was. How strange to hear ourselves laughing again.
And when all this was not working fast enough, when Jacob and I could not seem to shake the gloom of the last year, Laurie decided that stronger medicine was needed.
“Why don’t we go away for a while?” she said brightly at dinner one night. “We could take a family vacation like we used to.”
It was one of those blindingly obvious ideas that hits you like a revelation. Of course! The moment she suggested it, we knew that of course we had to go. Why had it taken us so long to think of it? Just talking about the idea made us a little giddy.
“That’s brilliant,” I said. “Clear our heads!”
“Push the reset button!” Jacob.
Laurie raised her fists and wiggled them, she was so excited. “I am so sick of all this. I hate this house. I hate this town. I hate the way I feel all day—trapped. I just really want to be someplace else.”
My memory is that the three of us went right to the computer and chose our destination that same night. We picked a resort in Jamaica called Waves. None of us had ever heard of Waves or been to Jamaica. We based the decision on nothing more than the resort’s own website, which dazzled us with fantastically Photoshopped images: palm trees, white-sand beaches, aquamarine ocean. It was all so perfect and so obviously fraudulent that we could not resist it. It was travel porn. There were laughing couples, she toned and tan in her bikini and wrap, he gray at the temples but sporting a full rack of bodybuilder’s abs—the soccer mom and middle manager transformed at Waves into their true inner minx and stud. There was a hotel complex festooned with shutters and verandas, the exteriors brightly painted to evoke a fantasy Caribbean village. The hotel overlooked a network of cerulean swimming pools with fountains and swim-up bars. The Waves logo shimmered on every pool floor. The blue pools spilled from one down to the next until the water reached the edge of a low cliff, and over the edge an elevator descended to a horseshoe-shaped beach and a pristine little cay and, off in the distance, the blue of the ocean stretched all the way out into the endless blue of the sky with no clear horizon line, which would have spoiled the illusion that Waves inhabited the same round planet as everyplace else. It was just the sort of dreamworld we longed to escape into. We did not want to go anyplace “real”; you cannot be in a place like Paris or Rome without thinking, and we wanted most of all not to think. At Waves, happily, it seemed no thought could survive for long. Nothing would be allowed to spoil the fun.
The remarkable thing about all this emotional manipulation was that it actually worked. We actually achieved the traveler’s fantasy of leaving our old selves and all our troubles behind. We were transported, in both senses. Not all at once, of course, but little by little. We felt the weight begin to lift the moment we booked the trip, a nice long two-week stay. Then we felt lighter still when the plane lifted off from Boston, and even more so when we stepped out into the glare and the warm tropical breeze on the tarmac at the little airport in Montego Bay. Already we were different. We were strangely, miraculously, deliriously happy. We looked at one another with surprise, as if to say, Could this be true? Are we really … happy? You will say that we were deluding ourselves; our troubles were no less real. And of course that is true, but so what? We had earned a vacation.