Defending Jacob(67)
“And the rest of the time?”
Derek shrugged. His answer was a bit of a non sequitur but I’ll put it down here just as he said it. “I always figured he’d get into trouble someday. I just figured it would be when we were grown up.”
We sat there awhile, Derek and I, not saying anything. We both understood, I think, that there was no going back, no un-saying the things he had just said.
I drove home slowly through the town center, savoring the ride. Maybe it is only an error of hindsight, but it seems to me now that I knew what was coming, I knew this was the end of something, and it was a tiny pleasure to prolong the car ride, to be “normal” awhile longer.
At home, I continued to move in that deliberate way, up the stairs to my son’s room.
His iPod Touch was on the bureau, a sleek glassy little slab that came alive in my hand. The iPod was password-protected, but Jacob had surrendered the password to us as a condition of keeping the iPod. I entered the four-digit password and opened the Web browser. Jacob kept only a handful of obvious sites bookmarked: Facebook, Gmail, a few blogs he liked about technology and video games and music. There was no trace of a site called the Cutting Room. I had to do a Google search to find it.
The Cutting Room was a message board, a place where visitors could post plain-text messages for others to read. The site was filled with stories that were essentially what Derek had described: extended sexual fantasies involving bondage and sadism, even mutilation, rape, murder. Some—a tiny fraction—seemed to have no sexual element; they described torture for its own sake, rather like the ultra-gory spatter-horror movies that fill the theaters now. The site had no images or video, only text, and even that was unformatted. From the stripped-down browser on the iPod, it was impossible to tell which of these stories Jacob had read or how long he had spent on the site. But the page did show that Jacob was a member of this message board: his screen name, Job, was displayed at the top of the page. I presume “Job” was a play on his first name or his initials (though Jacob’s middle initial was not O), or maybe it was a sly reference to the trials he was enduring.
I clicked on the user name “Job” and a link took me to a page where Job’s favorite stories on the site were saved. A dozen stories were listed. At the top of the list was a story called “A Walk in the Woods.” It was dated April 19, over three months earlier. The fields for the author and uploader both were blank.
It began, “Jason Fears took a knife into the woods that morning because he figured he might need it. He kept the knife in his sweatshirt pocket and as he walked he curled his fingers around the grip and the knife in his fist sent a surge up his arm and through his shoulder and into his brain and lit up his solar plexus like a firework going off in the sky.”
The story went on in long, unfurling, purple sentences like that one. It was a lurid, barely fictionalized account of the murder of Ben Rifkin in Cold Spring Park. In the story the park was renamed “Rock River Park.” Newton was called “Brooktown.” Ben Rifkin became a shifty, villainous bully called “Brent Mallis.”
I assumed Jacob wrote it, but there was no way to be certain. There was nothing in the story that gave away the writer’s identity. The voice did sound like an adolescent, and Jacob was a bookish boy who had been lurking in the Cutting Room long enough to learn the genre. The author had at least a passing knowledge of Cold Spring Park, which was described pretty accurately. Still, the most I could say with certainty was that Jacob had read the story, which proved nothing, really.
So I got on with the business of lawyering away at the evidence. Minimizing it. Defending Jacob.
The story was no confession. There was nothing in it that I recognized as nonpublic information. The whole thing might have been pieced together out of newspaper clippings and a vivid imagination. Even the most chilling detail, when Ben—or “Brent Mallis”—cried, “Stop, you’re hurting me,” had been widely reported in the newspapers. As for the nonpublic information, how accurate was any of it? Even the investigators had no way of knowing whether Ben Rifkin really said “Hey, faggot” when he saw his killer in the woods that morning, as “Brent Mallis” said to “Jason Fears.” Or whether, when the killer stabbed Ben in the chest, the knife slipped in with no resistance, no bump of bone, no sticking on skin or rubbery organs, “like he was stabbing into the air.” These things were unwitnessed, unconfirmable.
Anyway, Jacob would have realized it was idiotic to write this trash whether or not he was actually guilty. Yes, he had posted the Psycho photo on Facebook, but surely he would not go this far.
Even if he had written it, or just read it, what did it prove? It would be stupid, yes, but kids do stupid things. The interior of a teenager’s mind is an endless war between Stupid and Clever; this was just a case of Stupid winning a battle. Considering the pressure Jake was under and the fact he’d been practically locked up in the house for months, and now the growing clamor as the trial approached, it was understandable. Could you really hold the kid responsible for every tasteless, tactless, brainless thing he said? What kid would not begin to act a little crazy in Jacob’s situation? Anyway, who among us would be judged by the dumbest things we did as teenagers?
I told myself these things, I marshaled my arguments as I’d been trained to do, but I could not get that boy’s cry out of my head: “Stop, you’re hurting me.” And something in me tore open. I don’t know how else to put it. I still would not admit doubt into my thinking. I still believed in Jacob and, God knows, I still loved him, and there was no evidence—no real proof—of anything. The lawyer in me understood all this. But the part of me that was Jacob’s father felt cut, wounded. An emotion is a thought, yes, an idea, but it is also a sensation, an ache in your body. Desire, love, hate, fear, repulsion—you feel these things in your muscle and bones, not just in your mind. That is how this little heartbreak felt: like a physical injury, deep inside my body, an internal bleeding, a nick that would continue to seep.