Defending Jacob(34)

“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.”