In the last week of August—that non-week, the week of Sundays when we all move a little slower and mourn the passing of summer and get ourselves ready for fall—the temperatures climbed and the air thickened until the heat was all anyone could talk about: when it would break, how high it would go, how unbearable the humidity was. It drove people indoors, as if it was winter. The sidewalks and shops were oddly quiet. To me the heat was not an affliction, it was merely a symptom, as a fever is a symptom of the flu. It was only the most obvious reason the world was fast becoming unbearable.
We were all a little heat-crazy by then, Laurie and Jacob and I. Looking back on it, it is hard to believe how self-absorbed I had become, how this whole story seemed to be about me, not Jacob, not our entire family. Jacob’s guilt and mine were entangled in my mind, though no one had ever accused me of anything explicitly. I was coming apart, of course. I knew this. I distinctly remember exhorting myself to hold it together, to keep up appearances, not to crack.
But I did not share my feelings with Laurie, and I did not try to draw out hers either, because we were all coming apart. I discouraged any sort of frank emotional talk, and soon enough I stopped noticing my wife altogether. I never asked—never even asked!—what the experience was like for the mother of Jacob the murderer. I thought it was more important to be—at least to seem—a tower of strength and to encourage her to be strong as well. It was the only sensible approach: tough it out, get through the trial, do whatever it takes to keep Jacob safe, then repair the emotional damage later. After. It was as if there was a place called After, and if I could just push my family across to that shore, then everything would be all right. There would be time for all these “soft” problems in the land of After. I was wrong. I think about that now, how I should have seen Laurie then, should have paid more attention. She had saved my life, once. I came to her damaged and she had loved me anyway. And when she was damaged, I did not lift a finger to help her. I only noticed that her hair was getting grayer and sloppier, and her face was becoming crazed with lines like an old ceramic vase. She had lost so much weight that her hip bones protruded, and when we were together she spoke less and less. In spite of it all, I never softened in my determination to save Jacob first and heal Laurie later. I try to rationalize that merciless intransigence now: I was by then a master of internalizing dangerous emotions; my mind was overheated with the stress of that endless summer. It is all true and it is all bullshit too. The truth is, I was a fool. Laurie, I was a fool. I know that now.
I went to the Yoos’ home around ten o’clock one morning. Derek’s parents both worked, even during this pseudo-vacation week. I knew Derek would be home alone. He and Jacob were still texting regularly. They even spoke on the phone, though only during the day, when Derek’s parents were not around to hear. I was convinced Derek would want to help his friend, he would want to talk to me, tell me the truth, but I was afraid he would not let me in anyway. He was a good kid. He would do as he had been told, as he always did, always had done. So I was prepared to talk my way into the house, even to force my way in to get to him. I remember feeling quite capable of that. I came to the house wearing baggy cargo shorts and a T-shirt that stuck to my sweaty back. I had gained some weight since this all began, and I recall that the shorts shimmied down my hips over and over, weighted down by my gut. I had to hike them up constantly. I had always been fit and trim. My sloppy new body made me ashamed, but I felt no inclination to fix it. Again, there would be time after.
Arriving at the Yoos’ home, I did not knock. I did not want to give the kid a chance to hide from me, to see me and refuse to answer the door, pretend he was not there. Instead I went around to the back, past the little flower garden, past a hydrangea shooting white conical bunches of flowers in every direction like fireworks, a blossoming that David Yoo waited all year for, I remembered.
The Yoos had built an extension off the back of their house. It contained a mudroom and a breakfast room. The walls were windowed all around. From the back deck I could see in through the kitchen to the little sitting area where Derek sprawled on a couch in front of the TV. There was patio furniture on this deck, an umbrellaed table and six chairs. If Derek had refused to let me in, I might have thrown one of those heavy patio chairs through the French door, like William Hurt in Body Heat. But the door was unlocked. I walked right into the house as if I owned it, as if I had just run out to the garage to take out the trash.
Inside, the house was cool, air-conditioned.
Derek scrambled to his feet but he did not come toward me. He stood with his skinny calves against the couch, in gym shorts and a black T-shirt with the Zildjian logo across the chest. His bare feet were long and bony. His toes pressed down into the carpet, arching like little caterpillars. Nerves. When I first met Derek, he was five years old and still pudgy. Now he was another scrawny, gangly, slightly spaced-out teenage kid like my own. He was just like Jacob in every way but one: there was no cloud on Derek’s future, nothing to obstruct him. He would move through adolescence with the same zonked-out expression as Jacob, same crap clothes, same shambling, no-eye-contact manner, and he would pass right on into adulthood. He was the blameless kid Jacob might have been, and I thought briefly how nice it would be to have such an uncomplicated kid. I envied David Yoo even as I considered him, at the moment, an asshole without peer.
“Hello, Derek.”
“Hi.”
“You’re not supposed to be here.”
“I’ve been here a hundred times.”
“Yeah, but you’re not supposed to be here now.”
“I just want to talk. About Jacob.”
“I’m not supposed to.”
“Derek, what’s wrong with you? You’re all … flustered.”
“No.”
“Are you afraid of me?”
“No.”
“Then why are you acting like this?”
“Like what? I’m not doing anything.”
“You look like you just shit a brick.”
“No. It’s just, you’re not supposed to be here.”
“Relax, Derek. Sit down. I just want to know the truth, that’s all. What on earth is going on here? What’s really going on? I just wish someone would tell me.”
I moved through the kitchen into the TV room cautiously, as if I were approaching a skittish animal.
“I don’t care what your parents said, Derek. Your parents are wrong. Jacob deserves your help. He’s your friend. Your friend. I am too. I’m your friend and this is what friends do, Derek. They help each other. That’s all I want, is for you to be Jacob’s friend, right now. He needs you.”
I sat down.
“What did you tell Logiudice? What could you possibly have told him that would make him believe my son is a murderer?”
“I didn’t say Jake is a murderer.”
“What did you tell him, then?”
“Why don’t you ask Logiudice? I thought he had to tell you?”
“He’s supposed to, Derek, but he’s playing games. He’s not a good guy, Derek. I know it might be hard for you to understand that. He didn’t put you in front of the grand jury because then he would have to provide me with a transcript. He probably did not have you talk to a detective either, because then the cop would have written a report. So I need you to tell me, Derek. I need you to do the right thing. Tell me what you said to Logiudice that made him so sure Jacob is guilty.”
“I told him the truth.”
“Oh, I know, Derek. Everyone tells the truth. It’s so tiresome. Because it’s never the same truth. So I need to know exactly what you said.”
“I’m not supposed to—”
“Dammit, Derek! What did you say!”
He recoiled then plunked down on the couch, as if the shout had blasted him backward.
I calmed myself. I said in a soft voice just short of despair, “Please, Derek. Please tell me.”
“I just told him, you know, some things that have been going on in school.”
“Like what?”
“Like Jake was getting picked on. Ben Rifkin was, like, the leader of this group of kids. Like slacker kids. They were kind of giving Jake a hard time.”
“About what?”
“Like saying he was gay, that was the main thing. Just, like, rumors. Ben just made stuff up. And, you know, I don’t even care if Jake is gay. I really don’t. I wish he’d just say it if he was.”
“Do you think he’s gay?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. But it doesn’t matter, because he didn’t do any of the things Ben said he did. Ben just made it up. He just liked tooling on Jake for some reason. Like it was a game for him or something. He was kind of a bully.”
“What did Ben say?”
“I don’t know. Just, like, starting rumors. Like he said Jake offered to blow a kid at this party—which he didn’t. Or that he got a boner in the shower after track one day. Or that one of the teachers went back into school during recess one day and caught Jake jerking off in one of the classrooms. It was all totally not true.”
“ ’Cause Ben was a dick. There was just something about Jake that Ben didn’t like, and that kind of got him excited, you know? It was like he couldn’t help himself. If he saw Jake, he gave him a rash of shit. Every time. I guess he figured he could get away with it too. He was just a dick. To be honest? Nobody likes to say it because he got killed and everything? But Ben was a mean kid. Whoever did this—well, I don’t know, I don’t want to say—whatever. Ben was just a mean kid.”
“But why was he mean to Jacob? I don’t get that.”
“He just didn’t like him. Jake is like—I mean, I know Jake, okay? And I like him. But come on. I mean, you have to know Jake isn’t, like, a normal kid?”
“Why not? Because kids thought he was gay?”
“No.”
“Then what does ‘normal’ mean?”
He gave me a searching look. “Jake has a mean streak of his own.” Derek held his eyes on me.
I tried not to betray any emotion. Tried to stop my Adam’s apple from bobbing down and up.
Derek said, “I think maybe Ben didn’t know that. Ben kind of picked the wrong little freak to pick on. He had no clue.”
“So that’s why you went on Facebook and told everyone about the knife?”
“No. It was more than that. I mean, it was like, the whole reason he got the knife was he was afraid of Ben. He thought Ben was going to go after him someday and try to mess him up, and then Jake was going to have to defend himself. You never knew about any of this?”
“No.”
“Jacob never told you about any of this?”
“No.”
“Well, I told because I knew Jake got the knife and I knew it was because he was afraid Ben was going to try something. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. I don’t know. I don’t know why I told.”
“You told because it was the truth. You wanted to tell the truth.”
“But that knife wasn’t the murder weapon. The knife you saw, that Jacob had? It’s not the one that killed Ben. They found another knife in Cold Spring Park. You know that, right?”
“Yeah, but who knows? They found a knife.…” Shrug. “Anyway, it was like, at the time everybody was still talking about ‘Where’s the knife?’ And Jake always used to say, like, ‘My dad’s a DA and I know about the law,’ like he knew what he could get away with. Like, if anyone ever accused him? You know?”
“Did he ever say that?”
“No. Not exactly.”
“So is that what you told Logiudice?”
“No! ’Course not. ’Cause, like, this isn’t stuff I really know, you know? This is just, like, what I think.”
“So what exactly did you tell Logiudice?”
“Just that Jacob had a knife.”
“The wrong knife.”
“Well, if that’s what you want to say, whatever. I just told Logiudice about the knife and that Ben was kind of bullying him. And that the morning it happened, Jake came into school with blood on him.”
“Which Jacob admits. He found Ben. He tried to help him. That’s how he got the blood on him.”
“I know, I know, An—Mr. Barber. I’m not saying anything about Jake. I’m just telling you what I told the DA. Jake came into school and I saw blood on him, and he told me he had to clean it up because people wouldn’t understand. And he was right: they didn’t.”
“Derek, can I ask you something? Do you really think it’s possible? I mean, is there anything else you’re not telling me? Because what I’m hearing, it still doesn’t make sense that Jacob did this. It just doesn’t add up.”
Derek squirmed. His body corkscrewed away from me.
“You think he did it, don’t you, Derek?”
“No. I mean, there’s like a one percent chance, you know? Just, like, a little bit of”—he held up his fingers a millimeter apart—“I don’t know.”
“Doubt.”
“Yeah.”
“Why? Why would you have even a little bit of doubt? You’ve known Jacob most of your life. You’ve been best friends.”
“Because Jake—he’s just kind of a different kid. You know, I’m not saying anything, all right? But he’s just kind of—I said he had, like, a mean streak but that isn’t really it. I don’t know how to say it. It’s not like he has a temper or he gets mad or anything. He doesn’t get mad, you know? He just—he’s kind of mean. Not to me, ’cause I’m his friend. But to other kids sometimes? He just says weird things. Like racist stuff, just jokes. Or he calls fat girls fat or he says inappropriate stuff about them, like about their bodies. And he reads these stories on the Net? Kind of porn, but about torture. He calls it ‘cutter,’ like ‘cutter porn.’ He’ll say, like, ‘Dude, I was up so late reading cutter on the Net last night.’ He showed me some of the stories? Like, on his iPod? And I’m like, ‘Dude, this is sick.’ You know, it’s like stories about … you know, cutting people? Like tying women up and cutting them and killing them and stuff? And tying up men and cutting stuff off and”—he grimaced—“you know, castrating them? It’s totally sick. He still does it.”
“What do you mean he still does it?”
“He reads it.”
“That’s not true. I’ve been checking the computer. I put a program on it that tells me what Jacob does and where he goes on the Internet.”
“He uses his iPod. That iPod Touch?”
For a moment I was the stupid, out-of-touch parent.
Derek said helpfully, “He finds them on these forums on the Net. This site called the Cutting Room. People trade stories, I guess. They write them and post them for other people to read.”
“Derek, kids look at porn. I know that. You’re sure that’s not just what we’re talking about?”
“I’m totally, totally sure. This is not porn. Anyway, it’s not even just that. I mean, he can read whatever he wants. It’s none of my business. But he just has this thing where he kind of doesn’t care.”
“Doesn’t care about what?”
“About people, about animals, about anything.” He shook his head.
I sat silent, waiting.
“One time we were out, a group of us, and we were just kind of sitting on this wall, like hanging out. It was the middle of the afternoon. And this guy goes by on the sidewalk and he has these, kind of like, crutches? Like, you know those kind that go up over your arm and there’s like a ring that goes over your arm? And he couldn’t really control his legs. He just sort of dragged them like he was paralyzed or he had some disease or something. And this guy goes by, and Jake just starts laughing. I mean, not like quiet laughing but really loud, like crazy laughing, like ‘HA HA HA.’ He wouldn’t stop. The guy must have heard him; he went right past us, right in front of us. And we’re all just kind of looking at Jacob like, ‘Dude, what’s wrong with you?’ And he’s like, ‘Are you guys all blind? Didn’t you even see that guy? He’s a total freak show!’ It was just … mean. I mean, I know you’re Jacob’s dad and all, and I don’t like to say this, but Jake can be just mean. I don’t like being around him when he’s like that. I get a little scared of him, to tell you the truth.”
Derek made a sad little grimace, as if he was making a difficult admission to himself for the first time. His friend Jake had let him down. He went on in a less disgusted, more mournful tone.
“Once—this was like last fall, I guess?—Jake found this dog. Just, like, a little mutt. He was lost, I guess, but he wasn’t a stray because he had a collar on. Jake had him on, like, a string? You know, instead of a leash?”
“Jacob never had a dog,” I said.
Derek nodded at me with that same sad expression, as if it was his duty to explain this to Jacob’s poor, clueless father. He seemed to know, finally, how oblivious parents can be, and it disappointed him.
“I saw him later and I asked him about the dog, and Jake was like, ‘I had to bury it.’ So I was like, ‘You mean, it died?’ And he wouldn’t really answer. He was just like, ‘Dude, I had to bury it.’ I didn’t see Jake for a while after that, ’cause I sort of knew, you know? Like I knew it was bad. And there were these posters. Like the family that owned the dog, they put up these posters all over the place, like stapled on phone poles and trees, you know? Like with pictures of this dog? And I never said anything about it, and finally the family stopped putting up the posters, and I just kind of tried to forget about it.”
A moment passed in silence. When I was sure he had nothing more to add, I said, “Derek, if you knew all this, how could you and Jacob still be friends?”
“We’re not friends like we used to be, like when we were kids. We’re just kind of old friends, you know? It’s different.”
“Old friends but still friends?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I think it’s like he was never my real friend, you know? He was just kind of this kid I knew from school. I don’t think he ever, like, cared about me. Not that he didn’t like me or anything. He just didn’t care either way, most of the time.”
“And the rest of the time?”
Derek shrugged. His answer was a bit of a non sequitur but I’ll put it down here just as he said it. “I always figured he’d get into trouble someday. I just figured it would be when we were grown up.”
We sat there awhile, Derek and I, not saying anything. We both understood, I think, that there was no going back, no un-saying the things he had just said.
I drove home slowly through the town center, savoring the ride. Maybe it is only an error of hindsight, but it seems to me now that I knew what was coming, I knew this was the end of something, and it was a tiny pleasure to prolong the car ride, to be “normal” awhile longer.
At home, I continued to move in that deliberate way, up the stairs to my son’s room.
His iPod Touch was on the bureau, a sleek glassy little slab that came alive in my hand. The iPod was password-protected, but Jacob had surrendered the password to us as a condition of keeping the iPod. I entered the four-digit password and opened the Web browser. Jacob kept only a handful of obvious sites bookmarked: Facebook, Gmail, a few blogs he liked about technology and video games and music. There was no trace of a site called the Cutting Room. I had to do a Google search to find it.
The Cutting Room was a message board, a place where visitors could post plain-text messages for others to read. The site was filled with stories that were essentially what Derek had described: extended sexual fantasies involving bondage and sadism, even mutilation, rape, murder. Some—a tiny fraction—seemed to have no sexual element; they described torture for its own sake, rather like the ultra-gory spatter-horror movies that fill the theaters now. The site had no images or video, only text, and even that was unformatted. From the stripped-down browser on the iPod, it was impossible to tell which of these stories Jacob had read or how long he had spent on the site. But the page did show that Jacob was a member of this message board: his screen name, Job, was displayed at the top of the page. I presume “Job” was a play on his first name or his initials (though Jacob’s middle initial was not O), or maybe it was a sly reference to the trials he was enduring.
I clicked on the user name “Job” and a link took me to a page where Job’s favorite stories on the site were saved. A dozen stories were listed. At the top of the list was a story called “A Walk in the Woods.” It was dated April 19, over three months earlier. The fields for the author and uploader both were blank.
It began, “Jason Fears took a knife into the woods that morning because he figured he might need it. He kept the knife in his sweatshirt pocket and as he walked he curled his fingers around the grip and the knife in his fist sent a surge up his arm and through his shoulder and into his brain and lit up his solar plexus like a firework going off in the sky.”
The story went on in long, unfurling, purple sentences like that one. It was a lurid, barely fictionalized account of the murder of Ben Rifkin in Cold Spring Park. In the story the park was renamed “Rock River Park.” Newton was called “Brooktown.” Ben Rifkin became a shifty, villainous bully called “Brent Mallis.”
I assumed Jacob wrote it, but there was no way to be certain. There was nothing in the story that gave away the writer’s identity. The voice did sound like an adolescent, and Jacob was a bookish boy who had been lurking in the Cutting Room long enough to learn the genre. The author had at least a passing knowledge of Cold Spring Park, which was described pretty accurately. Still, the most I could say with certainty was that Jacob had read the story, which proved nothing, really.
So I got on with the business of lawyering away at the evidence. Minimizing it. Defending Jacob.
The story was no confession. There was nothing in it that I recognized as nonpublic information. The whole thing might have been pieced together out of newspaper clippings and a vivid imagination. Even the most chilling detail, when Ben—or “Brent Mallis”—cried, “Stop, you’re hurting me,” had been widely reported in the newspapers. As for the nonpublic information, how accurate was any of it? Even the investigators had no way of knowing whether Ben Rifkin really said “Hey, faggot” when he saw his killer in the woods that morning, as “Brent Mallis” said to “Jason Fears.” Or whether, when the killer stabbed Ben in the chest, the knife slipped in with no resistance, no bump of bone, no sticking on skin or rubbery organs, “like he was stabbing into the air.” These things were unwitnessed, unconfirmable.
Anyway, Jacob would have realized it was idiotic to write this trash whether or not he was actually guilty. Yes, he had posted the Psycho photo on Facebook, but surely he would not go this far.
Even if he had written it, or just read it, what did it prove? It would be stupid, yes, but kids do stupid things. The interior of a teenager’s mind is an endless war between Stupid and Clever; this was just a case of Stupid winning a battle. Considering the pressure Jake was under and the fact he’d been practically locked up in the house for months, and now the growing clamor as the trial approached, it was understandable. Could you really hold the kid responsible for every tasteless, tactless, brainless thing he said? What kid would not begin to act a little crazy in Jacob’s situation? Anyway, who among us would be judged by the dumbest things we did as teenagers?
I told myself these things, I marshaled my arguments as I’d been trained to do, but I could not get that boy’s cry out of my head: “Stop, you’re hurting me.” And something in me tore open. I don’t know how else to put it. I still would not admit doubt into my thinking. I still believed in Jacob and, God knows, I still loved him, and there was no evidence—no real proof—of anything. The lawyer in me understood all this. But the part of me that was Jacob’s father felt cut, wounded. An emotion is a thought, yes, an idea, but it is also a sensation, an ache in your body. Desire, love, hate, fear, repulsion—you feel these things in your muscle and bones, not just in your mind. That is how this little heartbreak felt: like a physical injury, deep inside my body, an internal bleeding, a nick that would continue to seep.
I read the story again, then I cleared it from the browser’s memory. I put the iPod back on Jacob’s bureau and I would have left it there and never said anything to him about it, certainly never would have said anything to Laurie either, but I worried there might be danger in the iPod. I was familiar enough with the Internet and with police work to know that digital footprints are not easily erased. Every click on the Web creates a record, on servers out in the ether and also on the hard drives of individual computers, and these records persist no matter how you try to delete them. What if the DA somehow found Jacob’s iPod and scoured it for evidence? The iPod was dangerous in another way too, as a portal to the Web for Jacob that I could not police as easily as the family computers. The iPod was small and phonelike, and Jacob used it with the same expectation of privacy that he would if it were a phone. He was careless with it, and maybe sneaky too. The iPod was a leak. It was a danger.
I brought it down to the basement and laid it on my little worktable, glass side up, and I got a hammer and smashed it.