When we got back to the city, I stood in front of the open refrigerator while Panda rubbed against my shin and Ethan checked out the options over my shoulder. Unexpired milk and an enviable collection of condiments, but no food except a jar of pickles, a mystery brick of tinfoil, and four pieces of string cheese.
“Good job, Betty Crocker.”
“How do you even know who Betty Crocker is?” I asked.
My son smiled for the first time that day. “I actually have no idea.”
“We’ll get takeout.”
“Just let me go downstairs.” There was a Greek deli beneath our building. The owner, Kostas, continually flouted the city code “fascists” by allowing dogs inside. He also, in my opinion, flouted gender discrimination laws by only hiring his sons and women with a minimum C cup.
Ethan must have sensed my reluctance to let him leave on his own, because he added, “It might be the last time I get to go outside before everyone starts treating me like ‘that poor kid.’”
So I wasn’t the only one wondering what our lives would be like once the news of Adam’s murder broke. All any teenager ever wanted was to blend in with the crowd, and Ethan already had a hard time fitting in.
I put in my order for a Reuben and handed him a fifty from my wallet. Once he was gone, I poured myself three fingers of scotch and downed it. No amount of the stuff was going to help. I laughed to myself as I realized that Ethan’s mention of marijuana was stuck somewhere in the back of my mind.
Adam had found the bag of pot last summer when he went wading through the swamp of accumulated clothes, soda bottles, textbooks, and game controllers on Ethan’s bedroom floor, in search of the tennis racket I thought Ethan had used last. We had three others in the closet, but Adam was adamant that he needed the Yonex. The summer tournament had him going up against Colin Harris, a handsome lawyer who had a way of bringing out my husband’s competitive side.
We never did find that stupid tennis racket, but Adam emerged from Ethan’s bedroom carrying a freezer bag of weed. He was screaming out the back door for Ethan to get out of the pool before I even registered what he was holding. I still remembered Ethan standing on the bluestone deck, water dripping from his swim shorts, while Adam threatened to drive him to the doctor right then and there for a drug test.
I finally convinced Adam to keep his cool while I gave Ethan a towel so he could come inside. The neighbors didn’t need to hear every word of what was about to happen.
Ethan swore up and down he was only holding on to the pot for a friend. He said his unnamed friend worked as a cashier at a store where “they search the employees’ stuff when they leave, like for shoplifting and stuff.”
“Which friend?”
Ethan had never had a particularly active social life, but it was easy enough to keep track of the people he knew in the city—same private schools, same circle of parents who kept each other in the loop. But East Hampton was another story. There, he could befriend whatever group of kids he happened upon at the beach for the afternoon. Some stuck, while others washed away.
It was clear to me from Ethan’s crossed arms and pursed lips that he had no intention of answering his father’s question. Ethan could be more stubborn than Adam and me combined when he wanted to.
“Seriously?” Adam had asked. “You’re acting like a lowlife criminal right now. Snitches get stitches? Is that it?”
When Ethan started to smile, the veins in Adam’s neck flared and he balled his fists. “That was my fault,” I said. “I made a face. I’m sorry, Adam.”
Adam turned toward me, but his expression didn’t soften. “Come on, babe,” I said. “That was a little bit funny, okay?”
He told us there was nothing funny about it. That the quantity involved was serious—right around half a pound, by his estimate. He said that amount would be a felony under New York law, not to mention the penalties for distribution, which that quantity probably indicated. “Is this how you paid for those goddamn shoes?”
He disappeared into Ethan’s room again, reemerging with a high-top sneaker in each hand, slamming them down on the dining room table next to the bag of weed. He was still screaming, but at least he was in something of a comfort zone at the moment—building an argument using laws that he knew and we didn’t.
“I swear to you, Dad, I am not selling pot. I told my friend I didn’t want him to put that in my bag, but he had to leave for work. I didn’t even touch it. He stuck it in there and left. What was I supposed to do?”
“I don’t believe you, Ethan. Not until you tell me the name of the friend.”
“No way. You’ll call the cops or whatever. Just, please, Dad. Can you just let me leave it there until I see him later? It’s only pot.”
I continued to hear Adam haranguing Ethan as I carried the pot, unnoticed, to the kitchen and stuffed it down the garbage disposal. Holding the empty bag open as I returned to the room, I announced that there was nothing more to discuss. I told Ethan to go to his room, and then Adam continued to take his anger out on me. He must have told me ten different times that he had been a federal prosecutor and that it was hypocritical to allow his son to wriggle out of a position that would land a poorer, darker kid in a cell. I eventually got him to see that the two of them had been at a standstill and that my approach had solved the problem. “What were you going to do?” I asked him. “Ethan’s as headstrong as you . . . when he wants to be. You can’t waterboard him into giving you a name.”
The next day, I handed Ethan $500 to give to his friend and made him promise he’d never do anything so stupid again. No parent wants their kid around drugs, I explained, but his father was a former prosecutor. Of course he was going to be tougher than the typical dad. Ethan had no way of knowing that Adam’s sensitivity about law-and-order issues might stem from his own family’s history in that arena.
Now, nearly nine months later, I found that same backpack in Ethan’s bedroom and unzipped that same front pocket. On the one hand, I didn’t want to think he’d broken his promise to me. On the other hand, I couldn’t remember a time when I would have been so happy to stumble upon a joint. The pocket was empty. As I was zipping it back up, something inside the main compartment of the backpack shifted. It was open. Without meaning to, I saw a glimmer of silver inside. I reached for it and found a flip phone.
For half a second, I felt pain in my lungs, wondering how Ethan had found the burner phone I had disposed of earlier that day. Then I realized that this was an entirely different device. I flipped it open and scrolled through the recent calls. I didn’t recognize the numbers, almost all of them with 631 and 516 area codes—Long Island numbers. The contacts were stored with initials only—J, M, N, and P.
Just like I had told Adam: “Ethan’s as headstrong as you . . . when he wants to be.” It would have been just like him to get a second phone after his father threatened to report one of his friends to the police. Now that he had made some connections to kids on the East End, all Ethan wanted was to keep them. I of all people knew how strident his father could be. I couldn’t blame him for going behind Adam’s back to have a private way of contacting people that his father might label “bad influences.”
Ethan was sixteen years old and knew ten times more than I did about technology. He would find a way to talk to anyone he wanted to talk to, regardless of what I did with his secret phone. I started to return the phone to the backpack, but then I heard Adam’s voice in my head, telling me that I was enabling Ethan. Giving him too much slack. Ignoring warning signs. Being one of those parents.
Then I heard myself arguing that Ethan was a good kid, but also stubborn. That the more we tried to control him, the more he’d do the exact opposite.
I could hear every word of a fight I’d never have with Adam again. I turned the phone off, carried it to my office, and dropped it in the top drawer. It wasn’t what Adam would do, but at least it was more than nothing.
It never dawned on me to wonder why Ethan had been carrying around a backpack with nothing in it but a tiny phone.