“Jesus,” Ryan would lament from the depths of his criminal-defense practice. “A lot of my clients are getting charged for doing the same types of shit we used to do.” It was difficult for him to reconcile how the state felt compelled to incarcerate or “supervise” his clients while we were looked upon as examples of professionalism and good parenting. How many years in jail or prison might we get, or better yet, how many years didn’t his clients deserve? At the same time, however, Ryan’s clients turned him into the kind of overprotective parent I never imagined he’d become. He defended his clients but refused to let our children fraternize with theirs. He’d cite meth labs in basements and handguns in unlocked drawers.
We realized we’d be stuck in our house on Hazel Street until we could bail out of debt and afford a home in a safer neighborhood. Exposed every day to the underbelly of our community, he overreacted, and I underreacted. In many ways, we were revealed as products of our own parents’ styles. “I’m surprised you’re not living in a bubble!” I’d scream at my helicopter husband, who was raised by hypervigilant, arguably alarmist parents. “Really . . . really?” he’d retort. “Well, I’m surprised you’re not dead, facedown in a ditch somewhere!” Our marriage and teamwork in child-rearing dangled precariously over some abyss.
In the flow of genetic information, long, long beforehand, I’d received instructions to be skeptical of marriage. My dad married three times, and my mom, upon divorce, made clear she’d never tie another knot. Before our wedding, my heart was as cold as my feet. Marriage would be nothing but taxing and painful, according to the stories on which I’d been reared, which my parents learned from observing their own mothers and fathers. My dad once intercepted a note from his father’s mistress, and my mom was often charged with supervising children at her mother’s childcare center, the Teddy Bear Nursery, while my grandmother, Jean, for whom I was named, excused herself for mysterious hours-long lunch dates. To believe in marriage was to be sweet and gullible, nothing more than a babe in the woods.
My partnership with Ryan begged the question: how do we adjudicate our family’s patterns, not to mention those of other families? Criminal minds were frighteningly identifiable, and when crimes bewildered others, they secretly made sense to me. Although not yet one of Ryan’s clients, Tina Last, a mother of one of Irelyn’s classmates, fascinated me. With ear piercings, eyebrow piercings, nose piercings, lip piercings, and chin piercings, she was like a voodoo doll, pins protruding from her burlap skin, invoking evil. She was beyond eye contact, hypnotized by the flurry of parents and teachers, high on marijuana. She was how I imagined myself if I’d gone wayward longer.
In early elementary school, a teacher said I was mean. I received D grades in citizenship. My mom repeated this word—mean—maybe to remind me I was the opposite of what we valued, which was, of course, kindness. Around the same time, other teachers said, “There she is with a smile on her face!” Was I smiling? I hadn’t even realized my outward expression, but somehow the repetition of these mixed messages confused me. When I felt sad, why did I smile? And when I felt happy, in what ways was I mean? Did I feel threatened or jealous, as my psychoanalytically inclined parents told me, and if so, by whom or of what?
Even if I looked pretty on occasion, I’d imagine these sharp protrusions inside me, like the barbed triangle teeth glinting from wolves’ mouths in fairy tales. My outsides were soft, but my insides were metallic and hard. People with good eyesight—teachers, coaches, friends’ parents—could see them the way X-rays detected metal plates used to reconstruct bones. Maybe this was the depression talking. It’s hard to know, but certainly, when I laid eyes on Tina Last, I identified her as me, turned inside out. Even our children had been linked. Irie, my daughter, and Xavier, her son, were the naughty kids of Miss D’s kindergarten room—babies we’d produced separately but then combined five years postpartum.
Ryan and I were not yet willing to concede, in those early years, that the good judgment required of responsible parents contained, inevitably, a degree of judging others. Parents of modest means who didn’t steal bread to keep their children nourished gave up entirely instead, and Tina Last was one of them. I wavered between identifying with her and worrying about keeping my children safe from the likes of her. As for Ryan, the further he submerged himself into the lives of his clients, the more desperately he wanted to provide better lives for our children, which meant, in true American fashion, earning more money.
On Saturday nights, when we’d hear police sirens, the first thing I’d do was a head count. So long as everybody in my family was safe, I could laugh and say, “Thank God for job security.” Truthfully, just as many crimes happened on weekdays, after school, when children—including our very own—returned home, sweaty, hungry, excited, and exhausted, and the witching hour commenced. They dumped their backpacks, ransacked cupboards, and foamed at the mouth with repressed speech, metamorphosing into beasts, testing our love and patience. Some of us rose to the occasion, just barely, and others, like Tina Last, would break under the pressure.
Derek Green, the first parent Ryan represented in his criminal-defense career, was not a father so much as a child himself. Two weeks into his eighteen-month term of probation, after being released from jail for the Walmart heist, he returned to the same Walmart on a June day, mounted a shiny new bicycle for sale in the Sporting Goods
