Defending Jacob(9)

“I’m in shock,” Laurie confessed, relieved to be among her friends. “I just can’t process this. I don’t know what to think.” Her expression was more puzzled than distressed. She could not make any logic of what had happened.

“How about you, Jacob?” Toby trained her eyes on Jacob, determined to ignore the age difference between them. “How are you doing?”

Jacob shrugged. “I’m good.”

“Ready to get back to school?”

He dismissed the question with another, bigger shrug—he jacked his shoulders up high then dropped them—to show he knew he was being patronized.

I said, “Better get going, Jake, you’re going to be late. You have to go through a security check, remember.”

“Yeah, okay.” Jacob rolled his eyes, as if all this concern for the kids’ security was yet another confirmation of the eternal stupidity of adults. Didn’t they realize it was all too late?

“Just get going,” I said, smiling at him.

“No weapons, no sharp objects?” Toby said with a smirk. She was quoting a directive that had gone out from the school principal via email, which spelled out various new security measures for the school.

Jacob thumb-lifted his backpack a few inches off his shoulder. “Just books.”

“All right, then. Get going. Go learn something.”

Jacob offered a wave to the adults, who smiled their benevolence, and he shambled off past the police sawhorses, joining the tide of students headed for the school door.

When he was gone, the group abandoned their pretense of cheerfulness. The full weight of worry descended on them.

Even Toby sounded beleaguered. “Has anyone reached out to Dan and Joan Rifkin?”

“I don’t think so,” Laurie said.

“We really should. I mean, we have to.”

“Those poor people. I can’t even imagine.”

“I don’t think anyone knows what to say to them.” This was Susan Frank, the only woman in the group dressed in work clothes, the gray wool skirt-suit of a lawyer. “I mean, what can you say? Really, what on earth can you say to someone after that? It’s just so—I don’t know, overwhelming.”

“Nothing,” Laurie agreed. “There’s absolutely nothing you can say to make it right. But it doesn’t matter what you say; the point is just to reach out to them.”

“Just let them know you’re thinking of them,” Toby echoed. “That’s all anyone can do, let them know you’re thinking of them.”

The last of the women present, Wendy Seligman, asked me, “What do you think, Andy? You have to do this all the time, don’t you? Talk to families after something like this.”

“I don’t say anything, mostly. I just stick to the case. I don’t talk about anything else. The other stuff, there’s not a lot I can do.”

Wendy nodded, disappointed. She considered me a bore, one of those husbands who must be tolerated, the lesser half of a married couple. But she revered Laurie, who seemed to excel in each of the three distinct roles these women juggled, as wife, mother, and only lastly as herself. If I was interesting to Laurie, Wendy presumed, then I must have a hidden side that I did not bother to share—which meant, perhaps, that I considered her dull, not worth the effort that real conversation required. Wendy was divorced, the only divorcée or single mom in their little group, and she was prone to imagine that others studied her for defects.

Toby tried to lighten the mood. “You know, we spent all those years keeping these kids away from toy guns and violent TV shows and video games. Bob and I didn’t even let our kids have water guns, for God’s sake, unless they looked like something else. And even then we did not call them ‘guns’; we called them ‘squirters’ or whatever, you know, like the kids wouldn’t know. Now this. It’s like—” She threw up her hands in comic exasperation.

But the joke fell flat.

“It’s ironic,” Wendy agreed somberly, to make Toby feel heard.

“It’s true.” Susan sighed, again for Toby’s benefit.

Laurie said, “I think we overestimate what we can do as parents. Your kid is your kid. You get what you get.”

“So I could have given the kids the damn water guns?”

“Probably. With Jacob—I don’t know. I just wonder sometimes if it ever really mattered, all the things we did, all the things we worried about. He was always what he is now, just smaller. It’s the same with all our kids. None of them are really all that different from what they were when they were little.”

“Yes, but our parenting styles haven’t changed either. So maybe we’re just teaching them the same things.”

Wendy: “I don’t have a parenting style. I’m just making it up as I go.”

Susan: “Me too. We all are. Except Laurie. Laurie, you probably have a parenting style. Toby, you too.”

“I do not!”

“Oh, yes, you do! You probably read books about it.”

“Not me.” Laurie put up her hands: I’m innocent. “Anyway, the point is, I just think we flatter ourselves when we say we can engineer our kids to be this way or that way. It’s mostly just hardwired.”

The women eyed one another. Maybe Jacob was hardwired, not their kids. Not like Jacob, anyway.