Devil House(90)

“The only bully is my dad,” your son told his teacher, and then, she said, he began to cry, quietly but very bitterly, trying to hold his tears back, gritting his teeth until his face shook.

He stared off into space for a whole minute, Mrs. Benson said.

These days, a teacher would probably hug him, and maybe that would help, you thought, and maybe she did hug him, and left that part out of her story; you didn’t know.

But she did call you at your apartment and ask to arrange a meeting; and Michael was home when you took the call, and although you’d been careful, in answering her questions, to speak in a neutral voice and to be as vague as you could, he got suspicious, and the rest of the night was pretty bad.

You sent a note to school with Jesse the next day, saying that you could meet after school any day this week, and that would probably be the best way.



* * *



WHEN MRS. BENSON HAD COME AND GONE, you gathered your thoughts, you wrote to me in your letter, your letter which filled a nine-by-twelve manila envelope until its fold strained against the clasp and which reached me at my house in Milpitas, the house where my renovations were already under way. It had been a bad visit, for you, though you had tried to conceal your worry as best you could. You understood well enough that Jesse’s teacher wasn’t trying to be a busybody; that she cared for him, that she wanted to help if she could. But you resented her, too, for forcing you to see the situation through the eyes of the outside world—eyes through which you could only permit yourself to gaze as an occasional luxury, a sad indulgence, a hopeless sort of daydreaming that left you feeling worse than ever.

You tried to explain your position: that Jesse and his father got along very well most of the time, and that Jesse truly loved his daddy, even if, sometimes, Daddy was mean. But Michael was trying to get better, you’d said; it had been worse before; but this was a lie, and you suspected she could see it. You could call her to talk anytime you needed, she said as she rose from her chair, by which you took her to mean that she understood the full extent of how bad it was, and would help you if you ever decided that help was what you wanted.

When you got a moment alone with Jesse in his room, you tried, as gently as you could, to ask him about Mrs. Benson, and what their conversation at school had been like.

“She was asking why I didn’t want to play outside,” he offered, his head hung.

“And you told her about your dad?”

“She asked me did I have a bully,” he answered, and then he looked up, and seemed to search your eyes: For what? you wondered, then, and, when you remember it, now.

“Your daddy is trying the best he can,” you said.

“That’s what you always say,” said Jesse. Your heart hurt; your head hurt; you didn’t know what to say, or to do; you felt like you had already ruined your own life, and maybe your son’s, too, but you did not have any idea, you said, what you were supposed to do about any of it. You thought that if you could share with him the tricks you used to get through Michael’s angry times, maybe he could learn how to use them for himself. But it was important for him to understand that if Michael found out about Mrs. Benson, and about what she knew, that would make things worse.

“It’s true,” you said. You were improvising. “Your daddy is trying. I know he can do better. So do you. But if we tell everybody about how Daddy doesn’t always do his best, it could get Daddy in trouble.”

This was a moment you remembered, you said, because out of all the moments you wished you could get a chance to do over, this was always the one that came unbidden to your mind. When Michael had come to your parents’ house begging for another chance, mightn’t you have told him, No, we’re better off this way, get out of here or I’m calling the police? You might have, but it was this moment that you always remembered first when you found yourself going over the details of Jesse’s young, wasted life, and what you might have done to protect him. Even on the very day he died, couldn’t you have done something to throw a wrench into his plans that morning, even without knowing what they were? You thought probably yes, but the day of his death wasn’t the thing that came for you at night when you were trying to sleep. It was the time after his elementary schoolteacher’s visit to the apartment, a visit during which she had expressed concern about the conditions in which Jesse lived, and about you, and your safety, and you had tried to put the best face on the situation you could without lying outright, because you hadn’t wanted to call your son, your beautiful son, a liar to his teacher. The thing that haunted you was how you’d explained to Jesse, in the most loving way you could, that he wasn’t supposed to tell people how his father behaved when he got angry with his family.

“He should get in trouble for hitting you,” Jesse said. At nine, he was beginning to resemble the young man he would briefly become: a handsome sandy-haired boy with a perpetually worried look in his eyes, an expression that suggested his expectations of both the present and the future were low.

“He’s trying,” you said, because it was all you had and you had to believe it, either because you didn’t see any alternatives, or because you were afraid of what would happen if you tried them.

Mrs. Benson approached Jesse several times over the course of the rest of the school year to ask him if things were better at home, but he refused to volunteer any further information to her, usually changing the subject by talking about hiking trips he’d taken with his father into the foothills. You knew that this was how he answered her because she contacted you one final time before the school year was out, and she said that she was happy to hear Jesse’s dad was doing better.