self-centered. Find me a teenager who isn’t like that. It’s garbage. I don’t believe a word of it.”
“Of course you don’t! You never see these things. You’re so determined to be normal and for us all to be normal that you just close your eyes and ignore anything that doesn’t fit.”
“We are normal.”
“Oh my God. Do you think this is normal, Andy?”
“This situation? No. But do I think Jacob is normal? Yes! Is that so crazy?”
“Andy. You’re not seeing things right. I feel like I have to think for both of us because you just can’t see.”
I went over to her to comfort her, to lay my hand on her crossed arms. “Laurie, this is our son.”
She flailed her hands, batting mine away. “Andy, stop it. We are not normal.”
“Of course we are. What are you talking about?”
“You’ve been pretending. For years. All this time you’ve been pretending.”
“No. Not about the important things.”
“The important things! Andy, you didn’t tell the truth. All this time you never told the truth.”
“I never lied.”
“Every day you didn’t tell, you were lying. Every day. Every day.”
She shoved past me to confront Dr. Vogel again. “You think Jacob did it.”
“Laurie, please sit down. You’re upset.”
“Just say it. Don’t sit there and read me your report and recite the DSM to me. I can read the DSM too. Just say what you mean: he did it.”
“I can’t tell you he did or didn’t do it. I just don’t know.”
“So you’re saying he might have done it. You think it’s actually possible.”
“Laurie, please sit down.”
“I don’t want to sit down! Answer me!”
“I see certain traits and behaviors in Jacob that disturb me, yes, but that’s a very different thing-”
“And it’s our fault? Excuse me: it could be our fault, it’s possible that it might just be our fault, because we’re such bad parents, because we had the nerve, the… the cruelty to put him in day care like every other kid in this town. Every other kid!”
“No. I would not say that, Laurie. It is positively not your fault in any way. Put that thought right out of your head.”
“And the gene, this mutation you tested for. What do you call it? Knockout whatever.”
“MAOA Knockout.”
“Does Jacob have it?”
“The gene is not what you’re suggesting. I’ve explained, at the most it creates a predisposition-”
“Doctor. Does. Jacob. Have it?”
“Yes.”
“And my husband?”
“Yes.”
“And my-I don’t even know what to call him-my father-in-law?”
“Yes.”
“Well, there you go. Of course he does. And what you said earlier, about Jacob’s heart being two sizes too small, like the Grinch?”
“I should not have phrased it like that. That was a foolish thing to say. I’m sorry.”
“Never mind how you phrased it. Do you still believe it? Is my son’s heart two sizes too small?”
“We need to work on building an emotional vocabulary for Jacob. It’s not about the size of his heart. His emotional maturity is not at the same level as his peers.”
“What level is it at? His emotional maturity?”
Deep breath. “Jacob presents some of the characteristics of a boy half his age.”
“Seven! My son has the emotional maturity of a seven-year-old! That’s what you’re saying!”
“That’s not the way I’d put it.”
“So what do I do? What do I do?”
No answer.
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Shh,” I said, “he’ll hear you.”
29
Day three of the trial.
Beside me at the defense table, Jacob picked at a gristly nubbin of skin on his right thumb, near the nail. He had been scraping away at this area of his thumb for a while, nervously, absently, and had opened a little crack that extended from the cuticle down about a quarter inch toward the knuckle. He did not chew the cuticle, as kids often do. His method involved scratching the skin with a fingernail, lifting little peels and shavings until he succeeded in scooping up a substantial sliver, whereupon he would bear down and set about removing the rubbery protrusion by a battery of wiggles, tugs, and, when all else failed, slicing it with the dull edge of a fingernail. The area of these excavations never had a chance to heal. After a particularly aggressive excision, blood would seep from the wound, and he would have to squeeze his thumb with a Kleenex, if he had one, or stick the whole thing in his mouth to slurp it clean. He seemed to believe, against all logic, that no one could be bothered by this nauseating little drama.
I took the hand Jacob was punishing and moved it down into his lap, out of the jurors’ sight, then rested my arm protectively on the back of his chair.
On the stand, a woman was testifying. Ruthann Something-or-other. She was fifty years old or so. Likeable face. Short, plain haircut. More gray hair than dark, a fact she made no effort to conceal. No jewelry except a watch and wedding ring. She wore black clogs. She was one of the neighbors who walked their dogs along the trails in Cold Spring Park every morning. Logiudice had called her to testify that she passed a boy who roughly resembled Jacob near the murder scene that morning. It would have been a worthwhile bit of evidence if only this woman could deliver on it, but she was obviously suffering on the stand. She washed her hands over and over in her lap. She weighed every question before answering. Before long, her anxiety became more compelling than her actual testimony, which did not amount to much.
Logiudice: “Could you describe this boy?”
“He was average, I guess. Five nine, five ten. Skinny. He was wearing jeans and sneakers. Dark hair.”
This was not a boy she was describing, it was a shadow. Half the kids in Newton fit the description, and she was not done yet. She hedged and hedged, until Logiudice was reduced to prompting his own witness by sneaking into his questions little reminders, like cue cards, of what she had said in her initial answers to the police on the day of the murder. The prosecutor’s constant prompting got Jonathan up on his feet to object over and over, and the whole thing became increasingly ridiculous, with the witness getting ready to recant the ID, and Logiudice too dense to get her off the stand before she made it official, and Jonathan jumping up and down to object to the leading- and somehow it all faded into the background for me. I could not focus on it, let alone care about it. I had a sinking sense that this whole trial did not matter. It was already too late. Dr. Vogel’s verdict mattered at least as much as this one would.
Next to me was Jacob, this riddle Laurie and I had made. His size, his resemblance to me, the likelihood that he would fill out and come to resemble me even more-all this shattered me. Every father knows the disconcerting moment when you see your child as a weird, distorted double of yourself. It is as if for a moment your identities overlap. You see an idea, a conception of your boyish inner self, stand right up in front of you, made real and flesh. He is you and not you, familiar and strange. He is you restarted, rewound; at the same time he is as foreign and unknowable as any other person. In the push/pull of this confusion, with my arm on the back of his chair, I touched
