He sniffed. He’d heard me complain about money a thousand times. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t do it, I swear. I know I’m not, like, a perfect kid, okay? But I didn’t do this.”
“I believe you.”
Laurie added, “You are perfect, Jacob.”
“I didn’t even know Ben. He was just, like, this kid from school. Why would I do this? Huh? Why? Okay, why are they saying I did this?”
“I don’t know, Jake.”
“This is your case! What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“I just don’t know.”
“You mean, you don’t want to tell me.”
“No. Don’t say that. Jake, do you think I was investigating you? Really?”
He shook his head. “So just for no reason-for no reason-I killed Ben Rifkin? That’s just-that’s just-I don’t know what it is. It’s crazy. This whole thing is totally crazy.”
“Jacob, you don’t have to convince us. We’re on your side. Always. No matter what happens.”
“Jesus.” He raked his fingers through his hair. “This is Derek’s fault. He did this. I know it.”
“Derek? Why Derek?”
“He’s just-he’s like-he gets freaked out by stuff, you know? Like, the littlest things and he freaks out about them. I swear, when I get out, I’m going to fuck him up. I swear it.”
“Jake, I don’t think Derek could have done this.”
“He did. You watch. That kid.”
Laurie and I exchanged a puzzled look.
“Jake, we’re going to get you out of here. We’ll put up the bail, whatever it is. We’ll find the money. We’re not going to let you sit in jail. But you’re going to have to spend the night here, just until the arraignment in the morning. We’ll meet you at the courthouse first thing. We’ll have a lawyer with us. You’ll be home for dinner tomorrow. Tomorrow you’re going to sleep in your own bed, I promise.”
“I don’t want a lawyer. I want you. You be my lawyer. Who could be better?”
“I can’t.”
“Why not? I want you. You’re my father. I need you now.”
“It’s a bad idea, Jacob. You need a defense lawyer. Anyway, it’s all taken care of. I called my friend Jonathan Klein. He’s very, very good, I promise you.”
He frowned, disappointed. “You couldn’t do it anyway. You’re a DA.”
“Not anymore.”
“You got fired?”
“Not yet. I’m on leave. They’ll fire me later, probably.”
“ ’Cuz of me?”
“No, not ’cuz of you. You didn’t do anything. It’s just the way things go.”
“So what are you going to do? Like, for money? You need a job.”
“Don’t worry about money. Let me worry about money.”
A cop, some young kid I did not know, knocked and said, “Time.”
Laurie told Jacob, “We love you. We love you so much.”
“Okay, Mom.”
She wrapped her arms around him. For a moment he did not move at all, and Laurie stood there hugging him as if she had embraced a tree or a building column. Finally he relented and patted her back.
“Do you know it, Jake? Do you know how much we love you?”
Over her shoulder, he rolled his eyes. “Yes, Mom.”
“Okay.” She pulled herself away and swiped the tears from her eyes. “Okay, then.”
Jacob seemed to tremble on the verge of crying as well.
I hugged him. I pulled him close, squeezed hard, then stepped back. I looked him over from head to toe. There was mud ground into the knees of his jeans from the hours he had spent hiding in Cold Spring Park, in a rainy April. “You be strong, okay?”
“You too,” he said. He grinned, apparently catching the dopiness of his answer.
We left him there.
And still the night was not over.
At two A.M. I was in the living room, slumped on the couch. I felt marooned, unable to move my body up to the bedroom or to fall asleep where I was.
Laurie padded down the stairs barefoot, in pajama bottoms and a favorite turquoise T-shirt that was now too threadbare for anything but sleeping in. Her breasts drooped inside it, defeated by age, gravity. Her hair was a mess, her eyes half shut. The sight of her nearly brought me to tears. From the third step she said, “Andy, come to bed. There’s nothing more we can do tonight.”
“Soon.”
“Not soon; now. Come.”
“Laurie, come here. There’s something we have to talk about.”
She shuffled across the front hall to join me in the living room, and in those dozen steps she seemed to come fully awake. I was not the type to ask for help often. When I did, it alarmed her. “What is it, sweetheart?”
“Sit down. There’s something I have to tell you. Something that’s going to come out soon.”
“About Jacob?”
“About me.”
I told her everything, all that I knew about my bloodline. About James Burkett, the first bloody Barber, who came east from the frontier like a reverse pioneer bringing his wildness to New York. And Rusty Barber, my war- hero grandfather who wound up gutting a man in a fight over a traffic accident in Lowell, Massachusetts. And my own father, Bloody Billy Barber, whose shadowy climactic orgy of violence involved a young girl and a knife in an abandoned building. After thirty-four years of waiting, the whole story took only five or ten minutes to tell. Once it was out, it seemed like a puny thing to have found so burdensome for so long, and I was confident, briefly, that Laurie would see it that way too.
“That’s what I come from.”
She nodded, blank-faced, doped with disappointment-in me, in my history, in my dishonesty. “Andy, why didn’t you ever tell me?”
“Because it didn’t matter. It was never who I was. I’m not like them.”
“But you didn’t trust me to understand that.”
“No. Laurie, it’s not about that.”
“You just never got around to it?”
“No. At the beginning I didn’t want you to think of me that way. Then the longer it went, the less it seemed to matter. We were so… happy.”
“Until now, when you had to tell me, you had no choice.”
“Laurie, I want you to know about it now because it’s probably going to come out-not because it really has anything to do with this, but because shit like this always comes out. It has nothing to do with Jacob. Or me.”
“You’re sure of that?”
I died for a moment. Then: “Yes, I’m sure.”
“So sure that you felt you had to hide it from me.”
“No, that’s not right.”
“Anything else you haven’t told me?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
She thought it over. “Okay, then.”
“ Okay meaning what? Do you have any questions? Do you want to talk?”
She gave me a reproachful look: I was asking her if she wanted to talk? At two in the morning? On this morning?
“Laurie, nothing is different. This doesn’t change anything. I’m the same person you’ve known since we were
