Devil House(85)

You found a bigger apartment before the baby came, and that meant Michael had to work longer hours at the garage, but he didn’t seem to mind. He slept hard when he slept, and treated you like a glass toy that would break if he treated it roughly. He paced in a waiting room while you were in labor, as was the custom then; he smiled so big when they brought him back to meet the baby.

The baby was a boy, of course, and he made you feel like your life wasn’t just a lot of waiting around to get yelled at some more. Like many women of your generation, you’d learned to sew on an old machine your mother had inherited from her own mother, and you had a cheaper, more recent-vintage machine you kept in your closet. You sewed bunting into printed patterns for stuffed animals, and you sewed darling little pants. Nothing is cuter than your own son in his fresh new pants that his mother made herself. You pushed the baby in his stroller around town, down the sidewalks of the newly sprouting malls and by the fountains of the mission. You were always home in time to heat something up for dinner; Michael was not a picky eater and was easily satisfied on that front. You ate what he ate, and the baby graduated to jars of pureed carrots or peas. There were a few other mothers in the apartment building, though Michael did not like to have company over, and preferred that you keep to yourself. Still, you made a friend or two, and had coffee in the morning with them, sometimes, at their kitchen tables.

These had been happy times, for the most part, and they did not last.



* * *



JESSE WAS TWO YEARS OLD—two and a half, to be precise—the first time Michael yelled at you loud enough to make him cry. The moment is still vivid for you, because you have sometimes wondered how things would be different now had you responded differently to it. You had served a dinner of cube steak with a baked potato. The cube steak was fine, but the middle of the potato was cold, and Michael was tired from work, or he hadn’t slept well, or something else was wrong. When he got to the part that hadn’t heated through, he spit it back out onto the plate—like a baby, you remembered—and threw his fork: not in your direction, but across the kitchen counter with such force that it broke a glass when it reached the sink. “Even I know how to bake a potato!” he shouted, which was a funny thing to hear, even in frightening circumstances, so you smiled.

You were confused, you remember, and began acting on instinct immediately; you were already smiling, so you thought you might try to sell him on the idea that he was somehow joking. “Some potatoes are colder than they look,” you ventured.

He paused, looked at his plate, and then back up at you. “Are you talking back to me?” he asked: a note of angry disbelief in his voice, an audibly present threat.

“No, dear, I—”

The yelling wasn’t new. It was just a fact of life, like disease, or traffic. But some days, like today, it seemed louder, even if it wasn’t. Maybe the cumulative effect of it had eroded your ability to withstand it. It was impossible to know how to behave with a person just an inch from your face like that, yelling.

“Don’t you talk back to me!” was all he said that time, because Jesse—two years old, in his booster chair—began to cry, his young eyes wide and filled with panic, clutching his oversized spoon so hard in his fat little fist that his knuckles went white. Both of you looked over at the baby, who began repeating, through labored sobs: “Mommy!”

You got up from the table, picked him up, and left the room with him. Michael, his loud voice following you into the hall, yelled after you: “You’re gonna use the kid against me now, is that it?” From Jesse’s room, a moment later, you could hear the sound of a dinner plate hitting something, which turned out to be the wall he’d been facing in the dining room. It did not break, but it left a stain.

You did not see the point, you said in the letter you sent to me that finally reached me in Milpitas, of dragging the story out any further; the scene more or less ended there on that occasion, but there were worse scenes to follow. I could probably guess what they were, you said, especially since I had already read a lot about them in the trial transcripts. It didn’t do any good just to keep going over the same old hurts, you said, but I wasn’t as sure as you were about that, then or now.



* * *



IT JUST KEPT GETTING WORSE, you said. A year passed, and then another. Sometimes it was so bad. You hadn’t told your parents, though you suspected they knew; they seemed to be avoiding you. It made you angry and resentful; weren’t things bad enough? Michael drank too much; mainly beer, but a lot of it, after work, every night. He broke things and he yelled. He played with Jesse sometimes, but he didn’t seem to think the way he acted around his son mattered at all. It did.

At preschool, Jesse sometimes threw toys: not merely in frustration, as children will, but at his playmates. He would panic if one of his friends got hurt, and would cry; you had to conceal this from Michael, who had markedly different ideas about what sort of person his son ought to grow up to be. Mrs. Wright, his teacher, a kind lady who had been teaching for twenty-five years, told you in conference that she was worried for Jesse. She tried to get you to open up, saying that the more she knew about Jesse’s home life, the better she might be able to help him; and you knew she was right, and you wanted to tell her everything, but you were afraid. Michael had told you directly not to go around telling stories about him. You had learned that a little foundation was useful for concealing bruises and scrapes. It can get to be like a game, you said, seeing how well you could hide it. Your life as it had turned out wasn’t much fun. Even the saddest games seemed worth playing.