by Wendy Walker
Perhaps that is what I mean when I say I love her. She is simple. She sees things simply. I never wonder if she is hiding a secret agenda or manipulating me in ways I won’t understand for months to come. All day, I hear about lies, secrets, plots, and distrust. And those are just my days in Fairview. When I walk through my front door, feeling pride for a day of hard work, feeling satisfied that I have provided this house and all these things for my family, Julie is there, tending to our kids, tending to our house, tending to me. She generally ignores me until the kids are fed and their homework is done and we’ve done the dishes together. But then she sits with me for a glass of wine and she tells me about her simple day and I see that she is happy. The comfort this provides me is indescribable. I, in turn, feel happy in her company. I feel appreciated and cared for. And so I love her.
Before you think I am stuck in the 1950s, my wife spends her days teaching a class at the community college in Cranston, seeing her friends to play tennis or have lunch, and treating herself to a few hours of reading or a pedicure or something else that she finds enjoyable. She is not a servant in our family. She is free to do whatever she wants. In fact, I have encouraged her to pursue a master’s degree so we might engage in more sophisticated conversations.
There is one aspect of life that is not simple for my wife. I have mentioned before her fear of bad things happening to our children. How she makes herself feel the worst possible outcomes before she can move past the fear. My wife lost both her parents when she was in her thirties. They’d had her when they were in their midforties, so their deaths were not untimely. One went to heart disease. The other to a stroke. I have considered the possibility of genetic weaknesses, as these would affect my own children and might be cause for some early precautions. But I have concluded that these ailments were more a result of time and the sedentary lifestyle her parents maintained. The loss, however normal from an actuarial standpoint, was difficult for Julie. Her one brother lives in Arizona with his wife. They have no children. Our immediate family is all she has, and her parents’ deaths have made her acutely aware that people we love do in fact die. It’s amazing how we all lose sight of that. Maybe life would be unbearable if we did not.
I knew right away from the tone of her voice that she was worried. It was breathy and of a higher pitch than usual. She was trying, but failing, to hide her panic.
Hi, sweetheart. Hope your day is going well. Just wanted to know if you’d heard the news about the arrest. I’m sure you have, it’s been all over the TV. Probably on the radio as well. Anyway … apparently they now want to speak to all the kids again, you know, the ones who were at the party that night. I’m sure they just want to see if any of them can confirm that the man they arrested was the same one parked out on Juniper. No big deal, right? Call me, though. Laura Lyman said they might hire a lawyer to go in with Steven. Mark Brandino is his name. Maybe we should think about that for Jason? Anyway … call me, okay, sweetie? I love you. Drive safely. Give me a call. Okay … bye-bye.
Her words were like a cold shower. I had not thought much about Jason being at the party that night. There were over a hundred kids there, nearly half the school, including most of his varsity swim team.
Jason is a swimmer. He’s an excellent swimmer, actually. There’s been talk of an early college offer from Michigan, maybe even Penn. He’s going to need the swimming, being a B+ student. He works hard, so this really is his limit academically. I knew it might be an issue when I married Julie. I would put her IQ at around 100 to 110. I have found a negative correlation between exceptional IQ levels and emotional stability. The same is true with nurturing instincts. There seemed no point in having brilliant children if their mother couldn’t give them the proper amount of affection. And, indeed, my children are well adjusted, attractive, popular, athletic, and highly competent intellectually. I believe this will give them a kind of happiness that always evaded me.
Jason is a wonderful young man. You can believe me or not believe me. It is the objective truth. If I told you he was the greatest seventeen-year-old kid on the planet, then you could call my objectivity into question. And you would be right. I do not believe he is the greatest seventeen-year-old kid on the planet. I just feel like he is, and like everything he does and says (almost—he is a teenager, after all), is precious, and I find myself soaking it in so I have a full reserve of it when he goes off to college in a year, as my daughter did two years before. That is the parent in me. The objective person in me sees that he is a wonderful young man.
He is kind to others. He sits with us at dinner and talks about the world with compassion and understanding. We discuss everything from the Middle East and terrorism to the economy. Sometimes I smile at the conclusions he’s come to because he is so young and has so much to learn. But at least he cares enough to think and draw conclusions. He gets up every morning with a smile on his face, cracking jokes at breakfast, humming some new song he’s downloaded. He goes to school, goes to swim practice, comes home for dinner and then to study and sleep, only to start all over again. Yes, he is sometimes glued to his phone on the social media or video games, but this does not alarm me the way it does some people. This is their world, and they might as well become acclimated to it. It will not serve them well to treat their technology like a vice and limit their exposure. They will end up without the skill set that is already becoming necessary for the workplace and social environment of their generation.
I know I belabor this analogy, but I have come to see these teenage years as a construction project. I tell my young patients, and my own children, that this is not their life. Not yet. What they are doing now is building a house. It is a house they will have to live in for the rest of their lives, so they’d better get it right. They will be able to remodel, redecorate, and repair. But they can never rebuild. Everything they put into this house, every emotional scar from a bad relationship, every sexual perversion they give in to, every opportunity they secure for themselves, every drug they allow to interrupt the maturing of their growing brains, will be forever in the foundation of that house. The neuroscientists keep moving their conclusion, but the human brain winds down its developing around age twenty-five. What happens between puberty and the midtwenties in the brain, while it is finishing its development—its hardwiring—involves increased risk taking and peer influence. The reward center is trying to sort out what behaviors lead to rewards so it can lay down some wires, some bricks. Those bricks become part of the foundation, and they are there to stay. If those bricks tell you to like alcohol or cocaine or deviant sex acts, you will be fighting those cravings for the rest of your life. And of course, a child who blows off her grades and winds up at a subpar college will have to move to the back of the line when it comes to finding a job. It all matters.
If I have a patient who can’t get an erection with his wife, my first question is whether he uses pornography. My second question is when did he start. Invariably, when he was a teenager. If I have a patient who is an addict, my first question is when did she start. Answer—when she was a teenager. If I have a patient who is abused by a spouse, my first question is when was she abused by her parent? Answer—before she left home at eighteen.
My son is building a solid house. I know he drinks on the weekends. I am certain it is moderate. He does not use drugs. I know this because I know drug users. I can tell in thirty seconds when someone is high. I see them enough to know. It’s not rocket science, just experience. My daughter, whom I also love deeply, built her own good house, though she is more like her mother. She doesn’t want to be bothered thinking about things that do not have an immediate impact on her life. But she is funny and fun loving and brought a lightness to our family before she left for college.
My wife keeps a close eye on our son. She is more suspicious than I. If he is doing something to undermine his house building, she will find it. So far, her covert operations have revealed nothing more than some Internet pornography. She set up various Internet restriction
s. I had a long talk with Jason. That was that. Julie’s diligence gives me great comfort. And when she is worried, I know there is cause.
I turned off the radio and let my wife’s fears enter me. I felt them trickle in and then multiply until my mind was reeling. Jason had already been interviewed by the police. We had spoken to him as well about that night and what it meant and how he needed to be safe—both from being harmed and from harming others. We spoke to him about consent and about being with girls who are intoxicated. When it happened, when we learned of the rape of Jenny Kramer, my wife was thinking about our daughter off at college, and what we would do if this had happened to her. I had not thought about this until Julie put the idea in my head, and it stayed there for weeks as a most horrific, unbearable thought. She was also the one who was thinking about Jason, and what if he knew who did it but didn’t want to say, or what if he was falsely accused? This thought had been less troubling. I knew my son. He would be the last person on anyone’s list of suspects. Still, my wife’s fears were contagious.
There is one kind of love that is not amorphous, and that is the love of one’s own child. I spoke about this when discussing Tom Kramer’s childhood, if you recall. Both from an experiential standpoint as well as a clinical one, I know—it’s not just a belief—that we are genetically designed to die for our children. And if we are willing to die for them, we must feel in our bones that they are worthy of our death. And by the course of reason, we must see them as more worthy than everyone else we are not willing to die for. For most of us, with the exception of soldiers who are trained to die for others, that “everyone else” is truly everyone else in the world. We say we would die for our spouses, or at least some people say this, but I do not believe it is true. I do not believe, in that moment of truth, there is any husband who would throw himself in front of that proverbial bus to save his wife. Nor is there a wife who would jump out to spare her husband. Only for a child.
Only for a child.
This is what I was thinking as my wife’s fears grew inside me. Jason. I have to protect my son. From what, I did not yet know.
Chapter Fourteen
I did not call my wife. Instead, I called Detective Parsons. I have his private cell phone, and he always picks up when he sees my number. For the first time, I lied to him.
“I heard you’ve made an arrest. That’s wonderful news,” I said. He confirmed the reports. He was beside himself with relief.
“I was hoping you could fill me in on everything you know. I’m sure you can imagine how important this could be for Jenny.”
This was not untrue. The lie was in the motivation my words implied. I was not unconcerned with Jenny. But my wife’s fear was raging inside me.
Parsons told me about the arrest, about Cruz Demarco and how he’d “lawyered up.” They were waiting for him to get an assignment from the public defender’s office. I told him I did not want any of the Kramers to see his face, either in person or in a photograph. He said there’d been no release of Demarco’s name or picture. He promised to speak to the Kramers before releasing any information to the press. I agreed to call them as soon as we hung up to take added precautions. Jenny could not have her memory compromised by suggestive influences.
Then he told me about his reinterview of the neighbor’s kid, Teddy Duncan, who’d spotted the blue Civic the night of the rape.
Teddy. What a piece of work. But then you meet his mother and you get it, you know? He was a brat last time I met with him, but now that he’s a teenager, what a little asshole. Thinks he’s some kind of celebrity because he spotted a car while chasing his dog. Sat there like I was doing an interview for People magazine or something. Anyway, the kid tells me the same story as last time. His parents got him a puppy for Christmas. A little beagle. The mom says the thing’s been a nightmare, chewing up all the furniture, pissing and shitting all over the house. The deal was that Teddy was supposed to take care of it. That was the whole point. Kid’s been getting in trouble at school, bad grades, skipping classes. The whole nine. Counselor suggested getting him a pet that he is responsible for. Convinced them it would do the trick. But little Teddy couldn’t give a shit, you know? They got a fence around the property. Mom doesn’t believe in the electric ones. Says it’s creating force fields that will give them cancer. I didn’t have the heart to tell her the extra fifty pounds on her ass was more likely to kill her than a doggie fence. So the dog keeps digging holes under the fence and getting out to chase things, squirrels and shit. The day of the party, the landscaper comes and fills the holes, so they think they’re good to go. Mom lets the dog out, and an hour later, he’s gone again. Guess there was a hole that had some dead leaves and stuff covering it. So the mom yells at Teddy to find the dog. And that’s when he goes out looking.
Now, that was around eight forty-five. Kid is in the woods maybe a few minutes calling for the dog, but he doesn’t come. He listened for rustling. I guess that sometimes works, you know, he can hear the dog running around. But that night he can’t hear anything, because there’s all this noise from the party next door. Music, kids laughing and cheering. They were playing drinking games, so that all made sense. So he gives up and heads back to the road, to Juniper. He walks on the inside of the car line, so he’s in the middle of the road, walking toward the party house. That’s when he saw the Civic. Said it stuck out because it was “ghetto.” Can you believe that? What a little prick. I asked him if he looked inside. He swears there was no one in the car. Said he could see just fine because he saw two kids “mashing” in the back of a Suburban, which was also parked on Juniper. They have streetlamps on Juniper. They were all working that night. Then we showed him photos of blue Civics from the back, with different plates and slightly different colors. He picked Demarco’s. Said he remembered some of the plate numbers.
“Which he couldn’t do before, right?” I asked.
Yeah, but I guess seeing them jogged his memory. We showed him ten cars with ten plates.
“Were they all blue? The cars? If the others were the wrong color, surely that could have been why—”
Fuck that, Doc. Let the PD come up with the defense. We have a kid who saw his car and no one inside, right around the time of the rape. The car was there but empty.
“But even if it was this guy, Demarco, he could have been inside, selling drugs. I’m sure that’s what he’s going to claim.”
It’s starting to sound like you don’t think this is our guy. Did Jenny remember something?
Parsons was defensive. Too defensive, like he had some kind of personal stake in nailing Demarco. I had never seen him as an ambitious man. I suppose he wanted this to be over, the relentless badgering from Tom, the lingering suspicions that the rapist was walking around Fairview in plan sight. But his eagerness appeared to be affecting his attention to detail. I wanted the charges to stick. I wanted this all to go away. But even I knew how many holes this story had.
I had to stop myself from answering the question about Jenny. She had remembered some things, but that was not why I had asked the question.
“No—and I have no opinion on this man except to foresee the next steps in the investigation. You’ll have to verify where he was, inside or outside the house, I imagine.”
We’ve already started. Every kid is getting a fresh interview. Even if he never stepped foot in that house, someone had told him about the party and that he should come by to sell them shit. Only way this guy knows where to be and when. And I’d bet he made a few sales before he saw Jenny in the woods. That’s the other thing. Teddy showed us about where the Civic was parked. You can’t see into the woods from there. There’s a row of bushes. He would have had to have been walking to or from the house or, worse, looking out from inside the house, to see her going across the lawn. But I’m not giving up on him. No way! Last thing I want to do is have this lead go away.
“I see.” I was lost then, in my thoughts and my wife’s fears.
Alan? You still there?
“Yes. Sorry about that. I’m on the road. I thank you for your time. I should call the Kramers now.”
Parsons said good-bye and hung up. I cleared his number, then made a call. It was not to the Kramers.
The phone rang. A woman answered.
“Law office of Mark Brandino. Can I help you?”
I almost hung up. My heart was pounding. The thoughts were absurd. The fears irrational. None of that mattered. This was my child.
Chapter Fifteen
You want to know what happens with my son. But you would not understand anything that happened without knowing about Jenny’s therapy. And for that we must start again with Sean Logan.
I began working with Sean a few months before Jenny’s rape. It was toward the end of winter. Sean never wore a coat. He said he was always hot. Yet when he came through my door the first time we met, he was shivering. I remember this with exceptional clarity.
Sean had come to me out of desperation. As you already know, Sean had lost his right arm in a bomb explosion in Iraq. His comrade died beside him. He was given the treatment, and he now had almost no memory of the event. He suffered from severe depression and anxiety, which were exacerbated by his underlying anxiety condition. He did not have the traditional PTSD pathology that most people have been made aware of through movies and magazine articles—the overreacting to stimuli reminiscent of combat. Do you recall how I explained to you the brain’s filing system? How emotional responses to events cause the brain to categorize memories? Simply put, the extreme emotional experience of combat causes the memories from that event to be filed in the metal cabinet—with neon lights and alarm bells. It’s the brain’s way of telling you, Do not forget that when these things happen, you could die! And so any stimuli that enter the brain that remotely resemble combat trigger the fight-or-flight chemical response, the flood of cortisol and adrenaline that make you react, or overreact. And when you are placed in a constant state of chemical panic, your “nerves fray.” That’s the colloquial expression. Your body is physically altered—heart pounds faster to get blood to muscles, pupils dilate to focus attention, sugar is produced for immediate energy consumption. It is physical stress. We need not get more complicated than that.