He wouldn’t even consider walking across the living room where he might be glimpsed through the bay window. He knelt on his bed and watched through his bedroom porthole window the marchers and the comings and goings of traffic. Sometimes, he did nothing but stare out of that window for two hours. He asked me if I thought they could see him, telling me that they seemed to be pointing their signs at him directly. I said that was impossible: his window, like all the bedroom windows in the house, had a lower pane of thick, frosted glass. The next day, he asked me again. Once he had something in his mind, he couldn’t put it aside. He reminded me of me.

One morning, Stefan was coming out of the upstairs bathroom when Jep, exiting our bedroom a few paces in front of me, affectionately clapped him on the back. Stefan whirled and dropped into a crouch, fists up. From the snarl on his face, I knew that whomever he was seeing, it wasn’t his father. Within a couple of seconds, Stefan’s eyes cleared and then filled with the tears that always seemed ready. “Jesus, Dad, Jesus, I’m so sorry,” he said, creeping back into his room, locking the door. Another morning before 6:00 a.m. Stefan had gone outside and was picking up the newspaper from in front of the house when he heard the roar of the garbage truck pulling up to the driveway. He advanced on the poor guy, shaking the paper and threatening to call the city on him for disturbing the peace. I couldn’t imagine what the fellow thought—and what Jill’s troops would have thought had they been there.

Stefan had trouble eating, often saying his throat was blocked by something. Jep arranged for Elliott Andreekov, the doctor who doubled as the team physician, to see Stefan for a physical, double-quick. With Stefan’s permission, Elliott assured us that while Stefan was losing weight, this would improve when his anxiety settled down. The sensation of being unable to swallow was mostly psychological, for which he prescribed an antidepressant and a low dose of Xanax short-term. What Stefan had gone through, Elliott said, felt like the stress of wartime: In other words, he had symptoms of PTSD. Until he got this under control, we had to understand that his brain was telling him that every noise or motion could be a threat. We should understand that the outbursts weren’t personal and to avoid anything that would aggravate the humiliation he already felt. He used the word fragile four times. I thought again of Nightclub Owens.