“Do you? I don’t think you do. All you ever had to do was be the good girl and life just unfurled in front of you.”

I struggled to breathe deeply and stay quiet and just let my son vent. I pictured my stomach like a beaker into which an incendiary acid fell drop by drop, until the bubble quickened to a boil. He was wrong, of course, in part because he was young; to any kid, it might seem that life for his parents fell easily into a smooth sequence. What I couldn’t say, wouldn’t say, was that our path, Jep’s and mine, was probably smoother because we didn’t stop to get hopelessly screwed up on drugs and kill somebody.

“Stefan, it probably seems that way. But don’t make us out to be the bad guys. We’ve been your biggest fans.”

He sank down to his haunches in the grass outside the fence and put his hand through the black spikes until he could just touch the soft pink stone, in the shape of a heart, that read:

BELINDA LOWELL McCORMACK

BEAUTIFUL DREAMER

“You’re my only fans,” he said, after a moment. “The thing is, you really don’t get it. Dad doesn’t get it. The only one who would get it was her. Not how she ended up here. Can you imagine her, Bindy, all bright and shiny like she was, here? Under the dirt? I don’t mean that. But she would get how I feel. I shouldn’t say that, right? But you know what? I don’t even care. Bindy, sleep tight baby. You were all I ever wanted.”

I reached for compassion. What came instead was scorn.

I said, “Maybe you should have wanted something more than only her. Maybe you should want something more now, in fact.”

“Gee, thanks.” He said then, “That’s what the therapist says. He says I have faulty thoughts and I acted on them in the past, and I still act on them.” In cognitive behavioral therapy, Stefan went on, you learn to question irrational beliefs and try to uproot them. One was that he could only be happy with Belinda or someone just like Belinda. Another was that he could never do anything he really wanted to do.

“Well, that much is true. Whenever I ask you what you want to do, you say you don’t know.”

“A lot of people don’t know, at my age. That’s why they’re living with their parents.”

“They know what they’re interested in.”

“I actually want to be a firefighter,” he said.

“It’s an honorable profession.”

“But I can’t, because I’m a felon.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So I guess I’ll just work at Target the rest of my life if I can get hired there.”