I remembered again the words I’d overheard my son confide into his laptop late at night. Again, I thought of a shadow cast against a door, the impossible slow swing of tennis shoes with the toes pointed down. I turned to face my husband and son just at the moment that Stefan’s face literally slid out of the happy-boy lineaments he’d clearly been putting on for us. What we saw instead was similar to one of those optical-illusion drawings of an Edwardian lady that, when you study it, reveals a skull.

“Of course,” Stefan said. “Sure I am.”

Then he explained the evolution of his thinking.

“The repentance you do in prison doesn’t really signify anything,” he said. In prison, people who did wrong still felt wronged themselves. The confinement was awful. The smears on the wall were awful. No matter how hard he scrubbed the experience from his memory, vestiges of his being another person, probably a much worse person, remained.

“The sight of even one cockroach in my cell panicked me,” he said. “If I saw more than one, I couldn’t sleep. I wanted to work more hours than were required, but that made me stand out, and I didn’t dare stand out.” (“If you figured out that working harder passed the time, you probably wouldn’t be in prison.”) Stefan thought that working in the laundry might make him feel cleaner, too, but the sight of other prisoners’ sheets roused in him almost a disgust. The prison kitchen was mostly appalling, too, although he liked baking bread and even unpacking canned goods.

“So I got permission to work outside. And that was great. I loved being outside, like I do now. You would never think of mowing the grass and shoveling the snow as a privilege, but it felt like that to me. I wasn’t free, definitely not free, but when I could look up and see the sky above me instead of a metal grate, that was everything. It could get me through the fear. It could get me through those nights of no hope.” So he mowed and weeded and watered until one of the other prisoners working with him ran away.