William Landay - Defending Jacob

Laurie gave me an exasperated look.

“Jake, your mother asked you a question. It wouldn’t kill you to answer.”

“I’m fine.”

“I think your mother was looking for a bit more detail than that.”

“Dad, just-” His attention drifted back to his computer.

I shrugged at Laurie. “The child says he’s fine.”

“I got that. Thanks.”

“No worries, mother. Hunky-dory, end of story.”

“How about you, husband?”

“I’m fine. I don’t feel like talking now.”

Jacob shot me a sour look.

Laurie smiled reluctantly. “I need a daughter to even things up around here, give me someone to talk to. It’s like living with a couple of tombstones.”

“What you need is a wife.”

“The thought has occurred to me.”

We both accompanied Jacob to school. Most of the other parents did the same, and at eight o’clock the school looked like a carnival. There was a little traffic jam out front, heavy with Honda minivans and family sedans and SUVs. A few news vans were parked nearby, barnacled with dishes, boxes, antennae. Police sawhorses blocked either end of the circular driveway. A Newton cop stood guard near the school entrance. Another waited in a cruiser parked out front. Students wended their way through these obstacles toward the door, their backs bent under heavy packs. Parents loitered on the sidewalk or escorted their kids all the way to the front door.

I parked our minivan on the street almost a block away and we sat gawking.

“Whoa,” Jacob murmured.

“Whoa,” Laurie agreed.

“This is wild.” Jacob.

Laurie looked stricken. Her left hand dangled from the armrest, her long fingers and beautiful clear nails. She always had lovely, elegant hands; my own mother’s fat-fingered scrubwoman hands looked like dog’s paws beside Laurie’s. I reached across to take her hand, lacing my fingers in hers so that our two hands made one fist. The sight of her hand in mine made me briefly sentimental. I gave her an encouraging look and jostled our knotted hands. This was, for me, a hysterical burst of emotion, and Laurie squeezed my hand to thank me for it. She turned to gaze through the windshield again. Her dark hair was threaded with gray. Faint wrinkles branched from the corners of her eyes and mouth. But, looking across, I seemed to see her younger, unlined face too, somehow.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re staring.”

“You’re my wife. I’m allowed to stare.”

“Is that the rule?”

“Yes. Stare, leer, ogle, anything I want. Trust me. I’m a lawyer.”

A good marriage drags a long tail of memory behind it. A single word or gesture, a tone of voice can conjure up so many remembrances. Laurie and I had been flirting like this for thirty-odd years, since the day we met in college and we both went a little love-crazy. Things were different now, of course. At fifty-one, love was a quieter experience. We drifted through the days together. But we both remembered how it all started, and even now, in the middle of my middle age, when I think of that shining young girl, I still feel a little thrill of first love, still there, still burning like a pilot light.

We walked toward the school, climbing the little mound the building is set on.

Jacob sloped along between us. He wore a faded brown hoodie, droopy jeans, and Adidas Superstar throwbacks. His backpack was slung over his right shoulder. His hair was a little long. It hung down over his ears, with a wing across his forehead nearly covering his eyebrows. A braver boy would have taken this look further and flaunted himself as a goth or a hipster or some other flavor of rebel, but that was not Jacob. A hint of nonconformity was all he would risk. There was a wondering little smile on his face. He seemed to be enjoying all the excitement, which, among other things, undeniably broke up the tedium of eighth grade.

When we reached the sidewalk in front of the school, we were absorbed into a group of three young mothers, all of whom had kids in Jacob’s class. The strongest and most outgoing of them, the implicit leader, was Toby Lanzman, the woman I’d seen at the Rifkins’ shiva the night before. She wore shimmery black workout pants, a fitted T-shirt, and a baseball cap with her ponytail threaded through a hole in the back. Toby was a fitness addict. She had a runner’s lean body and fatless face. Among the school fathers, her muscularity was both exciting and intimidating, but electric either way. Me, I thought she was worth a dozen of the other parents here. She was the type of friend you’d want in a crisis. The type who would stand by you.

But if Toby was the captain of this group of mothers, Laurie was its real emotional center-its heart and probably its brain too. Laurie was everyone’s confidante. When something went wrong, when one of them lost a job or a husband strayed or a child struggled in school, it was Laurie she called. They were attracted to the same quality in Laurie that I was, no doubt: she had a thoughtful, cerebral warmth. I had a vague sense, at emotional moments, that these women were my romantic rivals, that they wanted some of the same things from Laurie that I did (approval, love). So, when I saw them gathered together in their shadow family, with Toby in the role of stern father and Laurie the warmhearted mother, it was impossible not to feel a little jealous and excluded.

Toby gathered us into the little circle on the sidewalk, welcoming each of us with a distinct protocol that I never got quite right: a hug for Laurie, a kiss on the cheek for me- mwah, she said in my ear-a simple hello for Jacob. “Isn’t this all just terrible?” She sighed.

“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.”