Defending Jacob

by William Landay

And yet, despite all that, I do believe in the power of the ritual.

I believe in the religious symbolism, the black robes, the marble-columned courthouses like Greek temples. When we hold a trial, we are saying a mass. We are praying together to do what is right and to be protected from danger, and that is worth doing whether or not our prayers are actually heard.

It brimmed with test-prep centers and after-school tutors, karate dojos and Saturday soccer leagues. The town’s young parents especially prized this idea of Newton as a child’s paradise.

Most of these acquaintanceships would not survive our kids’ graduation from high school. But

Studies have shown that fathers of murdered children often die within a few years of

the murder, often of heart failure. Really, they die of grief.

“You can’t make them totally safe. It’s a big world out there. Big, dangerous world.”

School isn’t supposed to be dangerous. It’s not a place they should be afraid

of. It’s their second home. It’s where they spend most of their waking hours. They want to be there. They want to be with their friends, not stuck at home, hiding under the bed so the bogeyman doesn’t get them.”

“We’re not arguing. We’re discussing.” “You’re a lawyer; you don’t know the difference. I’m arguing.”

“I need a daughter to even things up around here, give me someone to talk to. It’s like living with a couple of tombstones.” “What you need is a wife.” “The thought has occurred to me.”

Her left hand dangled from the armrest, her long fingers and beautiful clear nails. She always had lovely, elegant hands;

good marriage drags a long tail of memory behind it. A single word or gesture, a tone of voice can conjure up so many remembrances. Laurie

At fifty-one, love was a quieter experience. We drifted through the days together. But we both remembered how it all started, and even now, in the middle of my middle age, when I think of that shining young girl, I still feel a little thrill of first love, still there, still burning like a pilot light.

They were attracted to the same quality in Laurie that I was, no doubt: she had a thoughtful, cerebral warmth.

movie reveals an essential fact only at the end, which changes or explains everything that went before—The Sixth Sense and The Usual Suspects, for example, are what Jake calls mindfuck movies.

good friendships require complementary personalities, not identical ones.

She was in her forties, attractive, smart, serious, ambitious.

I unrolled the T-shirt until it spilled onto the bureau a folding knife with a black rubberized handle. I picked it up daintily, tweezed

At some point as adults we cease to be our parents’ children and we

become our children’s parents instead.

Mount Rushmore.

no one worth knowing can be quite known, no one worth possessing can be quite possessed—but after all, we were children.

The murder gene was a lie. A lawyer’s con game.

In court, the thing we punish is the criminal intention—the mens rea, the guilty mind.

That is why we do not convict children, drunks, and schizophrenics: they are incapable of deciding to commit their crimes with a true understanding of the significance of their actions. Free

I am not a natural runner.

If I don’t, I get fat, an unhappy tendency

We tried so hard and we meant so well. We don’t deserve all this. We were good, responsible people. You know? We did everything right. We weren’t too young. We waited. In fact, we almost waited too long; I was thirty-six when I had Jacob. We weren’t rich, but we both worked hard and we had enough money to give the baby everything he needed. We did everything right, and yet here we are. It isn’t fair.” She shook her head and murmured, “It isn’t fair.”

“He’s very smart. Very funny, very charming. Handsome.”

Mother-love is love, after all.

I almost wish he would act out more. He can be very hard to communicate with. He’s hard to read. He doesn’t talk a lot. He broods. He’s very introverted.

Fourteen years old and he’s already cynical!

“So it’s like, every night you spend all this time cooking for three people. Then we sit down and eat for, like, fifteen minutes. Then we have to spend even more

time after, doing all the dishes, which we wouldn’t even have if you didn’t make such a big deal about it every night.”

“But I don’t want the whole thing to be over in fifteen minutes. I want to enjoy dinner with my family.”

“No, Jacob. It’s because I want to have my family around me. When times are tough, that’s what families do. They gather around, they support each other. Everything isn’t always about you, you know. You need to be there for me too.”

It occurred to me that she was there to witness the conversation in order to protect Jonathan, not to help us.

He’ll be your lawyer whether he believes you or not. Defense lawyers are like that.”

but the friendship between our families had been convenient for a while. That we saw them less now was not the result of a breakup. The kids had simply outgrown us. They socialized among themselves now, and there had not been enough left of the family friendship to cause either of the parent couples to seek out the other. Still, I felt we were friends, even now. I was naive.

Laurie had always been an early riser, even on Sundays, until this happened to us.

our little precious beautiful blond wide-eyed baby.

The baby did not become the boy; the baby was the boy, the same creature, unchanged at the core. This was the very baby I had held in my arms.

never even played football. My mother never let me. She knew I wouldn’t like it. She knew. There was no violence in our house. When I was a kid, do you know what I played? I played the clarinet. While all my friends were playing football, I played the clarinet.”

In the last week of August—that non-week, the week of Sundays when we all move a little slower and mourn the passing of summer and get ourselves ready for fall—the temperatures climbed and the air thickened until the heat was all anyone could talk about: when it would break, how high it would go, how unbearable the humidity was. It drove people indoors, as if it

was winter. The sidewalks and shops were oddly quiet. To me the heat was not an affliction, it was merely a symptom, as a fever is a symptom of the flu. It was only the most obvious reason the world was fast becoming unbearable.

came to her damaged and she had loved me anyway.

The wastefulness of all those pyramids of immaculate fruit and vegetables which, we knew, could only be created by throwing away enormous amounts of cosmetically imperfect food.

The bogus earthiness, an elaborate pretense that Whole

Foods was something other than a luxu...