Devil House(89)

4.


THE FRESHLY BROKEN GLASS outside was soaking up the sun; on the table in the dining room was a small box of my most treasured eBay finds—the exterior crime scene photographs—and, alongside it, your letter. I resented the letter, a little, because I felt obligated to read it all the way through, even though I wasn’t sure what it might tell me that I didn’t already know. I had done my research before publishing The White Witch; I knew the break-in hadn’t been Jesse’s idea. He was a kid who had bad luck most of his life. There hadn’t been anyone to help him, and then it was too late. There was a case to be made that it wasn’t his fault that he ended up in Diana Crane’s apartment, but this didn’t feel like the case you were making.

I did believe you were building toward something; your letter was meticulous, even when your sentences ran on or your spelling flagged. You had been waiting for a very long time to get your message to me. Every time I turned over another page, I could feel the weight of all that time, the shape it had taken around the parameters of your life, its ever-gathering presence.

What would my work be like if I had to keep returning to the same story every time, I wondered. If, instead of hunting down sad places where people’s lives had been ruined, there was only the one place, a place where, every time I told the story again, there was some new thing to learn about it, some overlooked ripple or wrinkle or speck that fleshed out the details, that brought them more fully to life: but with the provision, present in the process, that nothing could help, nothing would change, no one would be unburdened, or healed, or made whole. My methods: How fine might their focus grow if they had but the one object, a moment and its consequences? And if I were somehow drawn inside that moment, me myself, not as an observer but as someone touched by it: What then? These moments are tidal in their force, I knew from long study: those unsteadied by their flow come to think of them as inevitabilities, as natural forces, energies whose actions can be resisted no more profitably than the rising of the sun. And still, sometimes, when they can’t sleep, those once visited by these moments ask themselves, bargaining for some vision of a second chance: What might I have done differently? Aren’t there infinite possibilities present in any given situation? What was I supposed to have done?

When he was nine years old, you wrote, that was when things seemed to get a lot worse.



* * *



JESSE WAS NINE when a teacher at his school asked him what he was sad about and he told her the truth. It was different then, you said in your letter: it was a different time, people had different standards, people had different ideas about how to do things. It wasn’t just that people drove different cars or wore different clothes, you said; there was a lot more to it than that. People talked different, and people acted different, and people expected different things from their wives and from their husbands and from their parents and from their children. From schools and from hospitals. From the police. To you, it felt, back then, like these expectations were, if not set in stone, then certainly beyond repair as far as a person like you might be concerned: there wasn’t anything, you said, that you could have done about any of it, so you did your best to take care of yourself and of your loved ones within the boundaries of the rules as you understood them. At some point, those boundaries shifted, and things got a little better, but all that was after, and too late for you, and for Jesse. You weren’t sure when things had changed; you thought maybe things were always changing, but there are some changes you barely notice until a lot of time passes, you wrote, and other things where when the change comes it feels like a whole big thing. Like when the divorce laws changed in California, you said. That was a big thing that changed.

But that change hadn’t come yet when Jesse told his teacher about his father getting mad over dinner. The teacher, Mrs. Benson, was fond of Jesse, who seemed to love being in school most days: he and a pod of other boys roved the schoolyard at recess, laughing and yelling at high volume; Jesse wasn’t a leader among this group, but a very faithful follower. The boys played rough: they pushed each other into a ditch at the edge of the playground over and over, and they played contact football. On most days, Jesse couldn’t get enough.

But lately he had started sitting out of recess entirely; he volunteered to stay in the classroom with his teacher, cleaning erasers and sharpening pencils. Mrs. Benson had taken a careful approach in trying to find out what was going on; she could see that he was bothered about something, and wanted to let him tell her about it at his own pace. So she waited a couple of days, and then a third, and then, on the fourth, when the day outside was too nice for a child to be cleaning erasers, she thought she’d prod as gently as she could, just to try to let him know she was there to listen if he needed.

Back in your day, you wrote, a teacher would have just minded her own business, because a teacher’s job was to get the kids to behave, and to get them ready for a world where they’d better behave. It wasn’t like that anymore, you said. Teachers take all kinds of interest in their kids. And that was mainly good, you said, but could also cause trouble. You didn’t want to sound like somebody always complaining about people who are just trying to make the world better. You weren’t like that. You were glad Jesse had somebody, one person, at least, trying to watch out for him when he was nine years old, someone who could see that something was wrong, and who cared enough to ask him why he didn’t want to go outside and play with his friends. Maybe one of the kids was being a bully, Mrs. Benson had wondered aloud, trying to leave a door open in case that was the one he needed.