I did, I said. I had just adopted one of my former students. I could see she was surprised, but she smiled, and congratulated me, and asked me about him, and how it had happened, and I told her.
“That’s great, Harold,” she said, after I’d finished. And then, “You love him a lot.”
“I do,” I said.
I would like to tell you that it was the beginning of a sort of second-stage friendship for us, that we stayed in touch and that every year, we would talk about Jacob, what he could have been. But it wasn’t, though not in a bad way. I did tell her, in that meeting, about that student of mine who had so unnerved me, and she said that she understood exactly what I meant, and that she too had had students—or had simply passed young men in the street—whom she thought she recognized from somewhere, only to realize later that she had imagined they might be our son, alive and well and away from us, no longer ours, but walking freely through the world, unaware that we might have been searching for him all this time.
I hugged her goodbye; I wished her well. I told her I cared about her. She said all the same things. Neither of us offered to stay in touch with the other; both of us, I like to think, had too much respect for the other to do so.
But over the years, at odd moments, I would hear from her. I would get an e-mail that read only “Another sighting,” and I would know what she meant, because I sent her those e-mails, too: “Harvard Square, appx 25-y-o, 6′2″, skinny, reeking of pot.” When her daughter graduated from college, she sent me an announcement, and then another for her daughter’s wedding, and a third when her first grandchild was born.
I love Julia. She was a scientist too, but she was always so different from Liesl—cheery where Liesl was composed, expressive where Liesl was interior, innocent in her delights and enthusiasms. But as much as I love her, for many years a part of me couldn’t stop feeling that I had something deeper, something more profound with Liesl. We had made someone together, and we had watched him die together. Sometimes I felt that there was something physical connecting us, a long rope that stretched between Boston and Portland: when she tugged on her end, I felt it on mine. Wherever she went, wherever I went, there it would be, that shining twined string that stretched and pulled but never broke, our every movement reminding us of what we would never have again.
After Julia and I decided we were going to adopt him, about six months before we actually asked him, I told Laurence. I knew Laurence liked him a great deal, and respected him, and thought he was good for me, and I also knew that Laurence—being Laurence—would be wary.
He was. We had a long talk. “You know how much I like him,” he said, “but really, Harold, how much do you actually know about this kid?”
“Not much,” I said. But I knew he wasn’t Laurence’s worst possible scenario: I knew he wasn’t a thief, that he wasn’t going to come kill me and Julia in our bed at night. Laurence knew this, too.
Of course, I also knew, without knowing for certain, without any real evidence, that something had gone very wrong for him at some point. That first time you were all up in Truro, I came down to the kitchen late one night and found JB sitting at the table, drawing. I always thought JB was a different person when he was alone, when he was certain he didn’t have to perform, and I sat and looked at what he was sketching—pictures of all of you—and asked him about what he was studying in grad school, and he told me about people whose work he admired, three-fourths of whom were unknown to me.
As I was leaving to go upstairs, JB called my name, and I came back. “Listen,” he said. He sounded embarrassed. “I don’t want to be rude or anything, but you should lay off asking him so many questions.”
I sat down again. “Why?”
He was uncomfortable, but determined. “He doesn’t have any parents,” he said. “I don’t know the circumstances, but he won’t even discuss it with us. Not with me, anyway.” He stopped. “I think something terrible happened to him when he was a kid.”
“What kind of terrible?” I asked.
He shook his head. “We’re not really certain, but we think it must be really bad physical abuse. Haven’t you noticed he never takes off his clothes, or how he never lets anyone touch him? I think someone must have beat him, or—” He stopped. He was loved, he was protected; he didn’t have the courage to conjure what might have followed that or, and neither did I. But I had noticed, of course—I hadn’t been asking to make him uncomfortable, but even when I saw that it did make him uncomfortable, I hadn’t been able to stop.
“Harold,” Julia would say after he left at night, “you’re making him uneasy.”
“I know, I know,” I’d say. I knew nothing good lay behind his silence, and as much as I didn’t want to hear what the story was, I wanted to hear it as well.
About a month before the adoption went through, he turned up at the house one weekend, very unexpectedly: I came in from my tennis game, and there he was on the couch, asleep. He had come to talk to me, he had come to try to confess something to me. But in the end, he couldn’t.
That night Andy called me in a panic looking for him, and when I asked Andy why he was calling him at midnight anyway, he quickly turned vague. “He’s been having a really hard time,” he said.
“Because of the adoption?” I asked.
“I can’t really say,” he said, primly—as you know, doctor-patient confidentiality was something Andy adhered to irregularly but with great dedication when he did. And then you called, and made up your own vague stories.
The next day, I asked Laurence if he could find out if he had any juvenile records in his name. I knew it was unlikely that he’d discover anything, and even if he did, the records would be sealed.
I had meant what I told him that weekend: whatever he had done didn’t matter to me. I knew him. Who he had become was the person who mattered to me. I told him that who he was before made no difference to me. But of course, this was naïve: I adopted the person he was, but along with that came the person he had been, and I didn’t know who that person was. Later, I would regret that I hadn’t made it clearer to him that that person, whoever he was, was someone I wanted as well. Later, I would wonder, incessantly, what it would have been like for him if I had found him twenty years before I did, when he was a baby. Or if not twenty, then ten, or even five. Who would he have been, and who would I have been?
Laurence’s search turned up nothing, and I was relieved and disappointed. The adoption happened; it was a wonderful day, one of the best. I never regretted it. But being his parent was never easy. He had all sorts of rules he’d constructed for himself over the decades, based on lessons someone must have taught him—what he wasn’t entitled to; what he mustn’t enjoy; what he mustn’t hope or wish for; what he mustn’t covet—and it took some years to figure out what these rules were, and longer still to figure out how to try to convince him of their falsehood. But this was very difficult: they were rules by which he had survived his life, they were rules that made the world explicable to him. He was terrifically disciplined—he was in everything—and discipline, like vigilance, is a near-impossible quality to get someone to abandon.
Equally difficult was my (and your) attempts to get him to abandon certain ideas about himself: about how he looked, and what he deserved, and what he was worth, and who he was. I have still never met anyone as neatly or severely bifurcated as he: someone who could be so utterly confident in some realms and so utterly despondent in others. I remember watching him in court once and feeling both awed and chilled. He was defending one of those pharmaceutical companies in whose care and protection he had made his name in a federal whistle-blower suit. It was a big suit, a major suit—it is on dozens of syllabi now—but he was very, very calm; I have rarely seen a litigator so calm. On the stand was the whistle-blower in question, a middle-aged woman, and he was so relentless, so dogged, so pointed, that the courtroom was silent, watching him. He never raised his voice, he was never sarcastic, but I could see that he relished it, that this very act, catching that witness in her inconsistencies—which were slight, very slight, so slight another lawyer might have missed them—was nourishing to him, that he found pleasure in it. He was a gentle person (though not to himself), gentle in manners and voice, and yet in the courtroom that gentleness burned itself away and left behind something brutal and cold. This was about seven months after the incident with Caleb, five months before the incident to follow, and as I watched him reciting the witness’s own statements back to her, never glancing down at the notepad before him, his face still and handsome and self-assured, I kept seeing him in the car that terrible night, when he had turned from me and had protected his head with his hands when I reached out to touch the side of his face, as if I were another person who would try to hurt him. His very existence was twinned: there was who he was at work and who he was outside of it; there was who he was then and who he had been; there was who he was in court and who he had been in the car, so alone with himself that I had been frightened.