Devil House(93)
Michael made a big deal about it a couple of times and then seemed to decide that he didn’t really care.
Jesse was adrift like a leaf in the wind, you said.
Did I even understand what it takes to know that about your very own son? you said in your letter, whose remaining pages formed a stack which diminished a little every time I turned one of them over, and whose cumulative effect within me was registering with unignorable force.
* * *
BY THIS TIME I had started in on the walls inside Devil House, which, owing to the nature of walls and their ubiquity in the visual field, were going to require the utmost attention to detail. The amount of guesswork needed to get it right irritated me; I knew that at some point in the 1980s, possibly especially in California, the chemical composition of spray paint had been altered to keep kids from huffing it. When I started replicating the photographs, would the drip come out wrong? It’s an affectation, I know; I don’t include any of my restagings in the books I write. But they are important to me, and the idea that a detail isn’t right can fester in my brain like an unbidden thought.
Mercifully, you had begun to gloss over periods of time in your account of Jesse’s life. It seemed that Michael’s violence had become more calculating, and that Jesse had begun avoiding him in the evenings; Michael didn’t like it, and his focus returned to you some nights. But you didn’t want to dwell on this, you said, because this story wasn’t about you.
When you said that, for the third or fourth time, I wished we could meet again, so that I could tell you that this story is about you: or that it’s also about you; that stories in which something ugly bursts out from the confines of its sac are necessarily about every person inside the blast area. But you were patient with your point. Jesse, you said. The boy he had been, the friend to his mother, the companion you’d had on your errands. The one who did his best to keep the secrets you hated having to ask him to keep. The one who, when he grew up, would be free in a way that you probably would never be free, you’d thought: there had even been a weekend, when Jesse was fifteen, when you’d tried running away again, but after a weekend in a motel room you’d had visions of Michael finding you and killing you both, and you’d gone home and taken your lumps and moved on with your life.
Jesse was home a lot less after that time, you said. Michael seemed to sense that his time of hitting without being hit back was growing short, and eased back a little, becoming more hateful with his words.
The words were worse in some ways, you said, because you could tell they reached Jesse in a way physical force couldn’t, but there was no way for the two of you to talk about it anymore, so you just watched, and hoped he’d be able to leave as much of his life with his father behind as possible when he finally set out on his own.
Then it was junior year, you said, and you knew I already knew a little about that: but you were going to tell me anyway, you said, because it was too late to turn back now.
6.
DIANA CRANE CALLED YOU, you told me in your letter, more than once. She was not a stranger to you; she cared about Jesse, and had tried to let you know that her concern for him was real. It is hard, you said, to always be getting calls from your son’s teachers: kind people who tell you about the problems your son is having, with whom you always have to feign incomprehension: when, actually, you do understand, with a type of perfect understanding inaccessible to those on the outside, what the problems are, and what has caused them, and why their solutions, while known, feel inaccessible, walled off, out of reach. Over the years, you had fielded enough such phone calls that your response, at this point, felt rehearsed: never tell the teachers the whole truth, always trying not to see the openings they leave in the conversation for you to tell on Michael, to say something that might allow them to file a report with the police. It takes a lot of energy to listen in this way, and to playact at answering; it wears you down.
She would probably have gotten you to talk, to tell the truth, if she had lived, you said: or if the school year had been a little longer, or if you’d met with her, either at her home or at yours, as she’d requested. But you gave her some reason, you no longer remembered what, for not being able to have visitors at the house just now, and you’d said talking on the telephone was best for you, if that was all right.
You remembered four calls: that first one, and then monthly for three months; it emerged at the trial that she’d scheduled those calls on her desk calendar at school, and you imagined her placing them from a phone at her desk at the end of the day. It made you sad, a very painful kind of sad, you said, to think of Diana Crane’s desk calendar, full of weekday errands from Monday through Friday, with Call Jana Larson written on some weekday once each month. You didn’t remember whether they’d been on the same weekday each time or not. In the end it did not matter.
What was important was that Diana Crane had understood Jesse to be in danger—from the way he acted in class, from the way he answered her questions, from his weird proximity to Gene Cupp, who, as all the teachers knew, had no friends, and probably no future, and whose body, during his second attempt at completing his senior year, was now visibly too big for the high school desks. She had made the effort to connect with you, and you had resented her for it, because you had tried, more than once, to better your situation, but did not seem able to do so under your own power, so you hoped that your son would just get a job after he graduated and move out of the house, and then at least one of you would be able to live in peace.