I’m fascinated by the changeable nature of what we perceive as normal behavior and by our willingness to accept abnormal behavior in the name of love and attachment. Does creating a unique relationship inevitably imply shunning some notions of the normal, and to what extent can the human psyche survive the dismantling of boundaries?
Watching the angular shape of his shoulders shift under the weight of his pack, I followed Jacob along the trail. The tops of his pale arms were a raw, violated pink from yesterday’s sunburn, and his breathing was labored as he made his way up the rocky path. Even from behind, my stepson looked like he needed my protection. Jacob was seventeen and asthmatic, and we had been on the mountain for five days. I knew if he turned around I would not be able to avoid staring at the unnatural cavity in his chest: a cup-shaped depression where his breastbone dipped suddenly in. The sunken part of him was about the width and depth of an apple. Before I met Jacob, his father warned me about his strange appearance. A harmless, congenital defect of the sternum is how Stephen described his son’s deformity. It frightened me at first, and even after knowing Jacob for seven years looking at it made me uneasy.
Jacob thought his father’s disappearance was my fault, but he didn’t know anything. How can any one person ever be responsible for another? I wanted to explain this to him, but every time I went over what I might say to him in my head, it sounded like a list of excuses. So instead I fell back on the now-familiar phrases the cognitive therapist told me to say when the accusations that I drove Stephen off came fast and furious from this boy who was not my son. I loved your father. I don’t know why he left. If all else failed, I’d try telling the boy that Stephen could still come back. I knew this was unlikely, but it would shut him up for a little while, at least. It bought me time.
Before we went up the mountain, these conversations would often begin in the kitchen and finish at the edge of the forest behind our house, with me calling up into the branches of one of the dark pines he’d climbed to hide himself. Since his father disappeared, Jacob had developed a habit of starting an argument with me and then running away into the trees, forcing me to find him. I had been advised to try and break this pattern—both my therapist and Jacob’s current counselor had cautioned me about rewarding my stepson’s undesirable behavior by chasing him. But I always followed anyway.
*
In the sporting goods store where we purchased our supplies for the hiking trip, people looked at us strangely. No doubt this was because I was almost fifty and Jacob, who was still a boy but not a child, insisted on being too close to me in the store. He wanted to hold my hand so I let him, his slim fingers cool against my palm. When he spotted something he liked, a small but expensive camp stove or a hi-loft down sleeping bag, he would put his arm around my waist and draw me toward the item in an overly intimate manner, as if it were his lover instead of his father’s former wife. When we finally assembled our haul of gear at the counter, the sales clerk, a bearded man in his sixties with thick fingers, jerked his head in Jacob’s direction and asked me skeptically, “He’s your son?”
Wishing for the thousandth time that his real mother was available to take him off my hands, I gave the clerk what Stephen had referred to as the look and slapped down my credit card.
*
The first summer I lived with Jacob, he had just turned ten and refused to wear shoes. Stephen and I were moving into the house we had bought after knowing each other for six months. A big A-frame with exposed beams and a massive kitchen with lots of windows, it looked like a house where anything would be possible—even a marriage to a man I had known less than a year with a son who I feared would never truly be mine. The morning we pulled up to the house in the rented moving truck, Jacob jumped from the cab before the engine was off and ran to the back edge of the property. I ran after, just in time to see him climbing the largest pine behind the house, a hunting knife gripped between his teeth. Stephen said nothing, did nothing—like this was normal—so I followed his lead. Jacob carved shallow notches in the branches of the tree, and then set up little buckets under the cuts. The next day he collected the sap and rubbed the soles of his feet with it. I was alone in the kitchen when he came in, tracking sticky, pine-smelling footprints on the floor. He announced that he was conditioning his feet to be tough, like an animal’s. Shirtless, the hollow in is chest rising and falling with the rhythm of his breath, he already looked feral. It seemed like a bad idea to upset him—Stephen had warned me that Jacob was prone to crippling asthma attacks when he became agitated.
“If you want your feet to become strong, like an animal’s, just pine sap won’t be enough.”
“What do you know about it?” he said.
“You need to wash them in the cold water from the stream that comes down the mountain.” His eyes were locked on me, so I kept going. “And you should mix the sap with the red clay from the creek bank before you put it on.”
“Bullshit,” he said, smiling. I was sure I’d blown it, that he’d seen through my clumsy attempt to win him over. But for the rest of the summer he left clay-crusted footprints all over the house and deck.
*
Jennifer, the cognitive therapist I’d been seeing once a week since my husband’s disappearance, tried to discourage me from going hiking with Jacob. She asked whether I thought I was validating Jacob, buying into his idea that I made his father leave by giving in to his demands to get out of town, to climb one of Stephen’s favorite mountains.
“Going hiking for a few days isn’t validation. He wants to go, and I’m taking him,” I said, eager for the session to end.
“Think about the process for identifying cognitive errors. Ask yourself, what will this trip accomplish? Is it safe for your son?” What she said made sense. Mt. Scott was one of southern Oregon’s smaller peaks, but climbing to the summit would be challenging for an inexperienced hiker with weak lungs like Jacob. She looked at me, waiting for an answer. My eyes roved around her office, landing on the words, It Is What It Is, embossed on an inspirational plaque. Stupid, I thought. I decided not to come back to her practice again.
An object on the side of the path caught the sunlight. Jacob, bent on keeping his forward momentum, didn’t notice. It was an old 2-liter soda bottle. Jacob had insisted we collect any trash we saw along the trail and carry it out with us. But when I picked the bottle up, it jumped in my hand, and I realized there was a small, brownish snake inside. I shrieked and flung it down. Jacob squatted, inspecting the bottle.
“A copperhead,” he said, his voice confident. He shook the bottle and the snake thrashed against the plastic, then shot out from the opening and into the woods. Its color was identical to the reddish-brown carpet of pine needles on the forest floor. I could easily have stepped over countless such snakes already during the trip. Crouching on the trail, Jacob stared at the place where the snake had disappeared.
“This is a sign. This means something,” he said. This last week, everything had been a sign for Jacob. When he forgot his inhaler at the beginning of the trip it was a sign: it meant he didn’t need it anymore. When we lost the trail and had to hike for a full day before finding it again, it was a sign: we should learn to be spontaneous. When he got angry with me for saying that if his father did not come back, we would both be ok eventually, and threw my iPhone into the campfire he said this was also a sign. It meant I should stop telling lies—his father was gone for good and we would never be ok.
“A sign of what?” I asked, a little sarcastically.
“A sign you should watch where you step.” He smiled, and for a minute it felt like things might be all right between us, after all.
We walked on in silence, but when we came over the crest we’d been hiking up, he saw the lake. He dropped his pack with a shout and started running for it. I helplessly watched him struggle down the side of the incline, scrabbling through the brush to get to the water. At the lake’s edge he stripped naked, his body a shocking white against the black water. It was early October, too cold to swim. I called after him to stop, but he was already in, striking out towards the lake’s center. Soon I could only see his blond head moving farther and farther from the shore. I would check the map later, but I already knew there should not be a lake here, and that we were lost again.
*
The year Jacob had started high school he wanted to join the swim team. Stephen encouraged him, probably hoping it could be a turning point—the boy had been an outcast in middle school. But Jacob was not the kind of boy who would do well on a team. He was often withdrawn, sulking into the pages of one of his science fiction books; over the summer he’d read the Dune series four times. He mostly avoided eye contact when spoken to, choosing instead to stare at some imaginary point around the speaker’s navel. Other times, he could be manic and extroverted, talking too loud and fast about whatever had excited him, pinning his audience with his gaze, his eyes dilated, staring you down. He was difficult to predict. You never knew which version of Jacob would be present on a particular day.
Both Stephen and I had gone with Jacob on the day of the swim tryout, even though we had been suffering through another bad patch, as Stephen called them. This was Stephen’s phrase for the spans of weeks where we seldom spoke, and he slept in his office in the back of the house. The pool had echoed with the voices of swimmers and parents. Chlorine burned my sinuses. We watched the older kids rip through the water, their tan, muscled bodies making Jacob look even more gangly. Stephen caught my eye, and for a moment I felt like we were a couple, united by our fear for Jacob, hoping the day would not end in humiliation for him.
Jacob’s group was called, and he took off his shirt and smiled at us before lining up at the bottom of the bleachers. The boy standing nearest Jacob stared at the depression in his chest. A girl looked at him and gasped, then nudged her friend and whispered something in her ear. Just before the starting shot, someone said the word freak. Jacob’s head whipped around. His concentration shattered, and he was last off the blocks. Halfway down the lane, he was in trouble. He choked on a mouthful of water, flailing. The lifeguard had to drag him out of the water, his breath coming in shallow gasps. I grabbed his inhaler from my bag and ran to the edge of the pool. He sucked on the inhaler, and I told him to focus on his breathing, to slow everything down.
Later that night, Stephen would claim that he hadn’t heard anyone say anything, that Jacob had just cracked under pressure. Stephen had chosen not to hear. I had known it, and so had Jacob.
*
I abandoned my pack at the top of the ridge. Moving fast down the incline, I half ran, half slid toward the lake. My hip caught the side of a young pine, knocking me off balance. I put my hands in front of me to break my fall, and pain shot up my right wrist. Turning my hand over to examine the damage, every nerve screamed. My chest heaved and I heard blood rushing in my ears. From my position on the slope, I couldn’t see Jacob anymore, so I kept going.
I reached the edge of the water, my wrist already twice its normal size and turning blue. I scanned the surface; the lake was huge. Finally, I saw his head rising and falling between the waves, yellow hair plastered to his skull. He was treading water fifty yards out. I called to him, my voice unfamiliar to me, cracked and broken. Jacob looked in my direction but wouldn’t acknowledge me, wouldn’t speak or wave. I hated him for it. The mountains rose up around us in all directions. Jacob had been in the lake about twenty minutes, and I considered going in after him. If he had an asthma attack, I would not be able to swim to him in time from the shore. I plunged my wrist into the freezing water, which made the pain worse. Finally, he started to swim back. As he got closer I saw that his lips were blue, and he was breathing hard, moving slowly.
Twenty feet from the shore he started choking, looking wild and frightened. I waited on the shore, holding his clothes in one hand, my broken wrist hanging stupid and hot at my side. He stumbled coming out and vomited onto the sand. I’d never seen him completely undressed before. With my good hand, I tried to help him pull his shirt over his head. He looked stronger than I expected, the muscles in his thighs long and tight. The only thing I recognized about him was the hollow depression in his chest. I could have been helping some strange man who had washed ashore, not Jacob. His skin was ice; each breath shook him. I worried about hypothermia. I unbuttoned my flannel shirt and slid it off, bumping my wrist in the process and making my stomach churn with pain. I wrapped the shirt around the tops of his legs and told him to take deep breaths, to slow down. I pressed my body close to his.
I was soaked through, and wind off the lake rushed into my ears and brought a metallic seaweed smell with it. The sun was setting, and soon the temperature would drop. I vowed to never go camping with him again.
*
After Jacob was breathing normally, I stood and turned away. With the peak of the crisis over, his nakedness was distracting. Past the sunburned arms, his shoulders were white and smooth, flawless. His light hair was drying, sticking up in a rakish, insolently sexy way. I wanted to look him over, to study him. I shouldn’t have to tell him to get dressed, but he just sat there on the sand, staring at the water like an idiot.
“Put your fucking pants on, Jacob,” I said. I walked away from him toward the base of the ridge. He could follow me for once. After a minute he caught up, wearing clothes. He was still shaking a little, and he looked again like my son. He eyed my bulging wrist.
“I’ll go back up alone. Get our gear,” he said. I felt weak, and the ridge looked formidable. Angry as I was with Jacob, I was afraid of being separated from him. He stepped in front of me and put his hands on my shoulders. When he spoke, he sounded completely rational. He talked like someone who wanted to protect me, someone on my side.
“I’ll make it back before dark. Promise.” I nodded, and he tried to draw me to him, but I made my body rigid and turned away. I wasn’t ready to be nice to him just yet. He turned and began to lope up the hill. Even after his attack, his youth gave him a physical advantage in this environment. I could never have kept up with him, even without the injury. Soon he had disappeared in the trees. The waves lapped the shore, rhythmic and uncaring.
*
Two years ago Jacob was prescribed Adderall. He started acting more “normal,” making more eye-contact, sulking less. He built a large, odd-looking structure behind the house, woven from thin tree limbs and saplings. One afternoon, he came home with a girl, Candy. She was not the kind of girl I would have chosen for him. Silly name, average looks, too much makeup. Jacob brought her into the kitchen to say hello, and she stared at the floor like a cowed animal. She was probably the kind of girl who gave blowjobs to any boy who would let her. Jacob said he wanted to show her his project, and I watched through the kitchen window as the two of them disappeared into the structure. It wasn’t long before I heard Candy scream. She came running out with blood pouring from her nose. One pale, fleshy breast flopped free, liberated from her ripped tee-shirt. As she fled down the driveway, Jacob emerged from the shelter, shirtless and calm. He looked at me and smiled—I was sure he could see me staring at him through the window—then turned and went back inside the shelter. I could have told Jacob’s father, but I didn’t. And I never spoke with Jacob about it, but it was there, our secret, something that held the two of us together. A few days later, Jacob began dismantling the structure as deliberately as he had built it. When he was done, there was not a trace of it left. It was like it was never there.
*
When it grew dark and Jacob had not returned, I began thinking about what must be done to get back home. If we followed the edge of the lake in one direction, we would surely come to a road. Looking at the map, which was in the gear, would help.
As long as I kept my wrist perfectly still, I could almost forget about the injury, but it didn’t look good. The blue areas of skin had turned almost black, and my hand was puffing up alarmingly. The stars were coming out when Jacob finally emerged from the forest with our gear. He coughed continuously. He tossed the bags down, and I saw that he had already retrieved my sweater from inside the bag. He probably knew I would have trouble rummaging for it with my injury. We didn’t speak as he helped me slide the sweater on over my head. He stretched the cuff of the sleeve out so I could slide my fattened wrist through more easily. I felt my anger towards him soften a little.
“We’ll stay here tonight,” he said, and started setting up the tent. He laid out our expensive down sleeping bags. We had bought them a week ago, but that day in the camping goods store was a remote memory. He got out the camp stove and started cooking some of the dehydrated beef stew we brought with us. Slow and intent, he seemed focused on caring for us and nothing else. How could he have been so wild just a few hours ago, risking everything by swimming out in the freezing water? Before the lake, I’d hoped as Jacob grew from a boy to a man he would shed his adolescent strangeness, that he would have an adulthood where he was more whole, not more fractured. Now that outcome felt unlikely. I pushed it all aside in exhaustion, grateful that for now, the Jacob I was dealing with was not throwing himself in a lake.
In the tent, I couldn’t get my sleeping bag zipped. Jacob offered to do it for me and I let him. We were lying there in the dark, the silence punctuated by his coughs, when he started talking.
“I need to tell you something, Lauren.” Oh God, I thought. There was only one subject he could possibly want to talk about.
“I know why he left.” I kept quiet, hoping he’d lose interest. This was how all of our conversations about Stephen began, and I didn’t have the patience to listen to Jacob accuse me, again, of driving his father away.
“I think he found someone else.”
“Go to sleep, Jacob.”
“You don’t want to hear this, but it’s true. He had a file on his computer with tons of photos of the same woman in it. Younger than you. Like, twenties.” This was the first time Jacob had said anything like this. He was trying to get under my skin, making things up. He moved close to me, the funk from the lake water rising off his skin.
“Before he left he told me. He only married you so he’d have someone to take care of me. He said you were a dead lay.”
“Get out of the tent,” I said, but I heard the weakness in my voice. I didn’t want to be alone with him, in this small dark space with no people for miles around. In one quick movement Jacob shifted his body and was on top of me, pinning me under him in the sleeping bag. His face was inches away from mine, his mouth close enough to kiss or bite me. His rasping, moist breath was sour from the beef stew. His erection pressed into my thigh. I am not afraid of him, I told myself over and over. But then he started coughing. He pulled himself off me and turned away, like he was embarrassed by it, the weakness of his lungs. I heard him walk away, but I couldn’t be sure how far he’d gone, or when he’d come back. My wrist burned, but my fingers had gone numb.
*
I don’t remember falling asleep. When I woke up, there was no sign of Jacob. My little finger and ring finger had turned black, and the rest of my hand was mottled, greenish. The wrist was huge. Using my good hand, I searched my pack for the maps, calmly at first and then frantically, but I couldn’t find them. I emptied the contents of the bag in the dirt. Nothing. I stuffed my sleeping bag and the rest of the food and water back into my pack. There was no way to break down the tent or pack up the stove with one hand; I left both behind. The long, inky crescent of the lake stretched out on either side of me, identical in either direction. I turned left and started walking along the shore.
*
That night I laid out the sleeping bag beside a large rotting log a few yards inside the trees, far enough in to feel hidden but close enough to the water so that I could hear and smell the lake. Sleeping in the tent, I had thought the mountain was quiet, even peaceful. Sleeping outside, the trees were full of noises. Some were recognizable, like the swoosh of a large owl swooping down to capture an unlucky mouse, or the swishing of the wind in higher branches, saying hush, hush, hush. But other sounds were undefined and foreign, scurrying, crunching sounds that rustled too close to my sleeping bag. There were far-off low booms that could have no logical explanation.
The night was a physical thing, a cloth pressed to my eyes. I drifted between wakefulness and sleep. There was a dream, an apparition, of someone walking out of the trees and standing a yard away. The sense of a silhouette, faceless and close. The dream repeated, drawing me out of unconsciousness each time to find myself alone and breathing hard in the darkness.
*
The next day there was no sign of Jacob. My wrist was heavy and hot, and the nail fell off my little finger. There were flashes of light at the periphery of my vision, and I told myself this was exhaustion. My body remembered being pinned under Jacob, and I had a physical need to walk, to be moving under my own will. I tried not to think about what he said about the woman. Was he lying? It did not matter, I told myself. I had never thought of Jacob as threatening before—we were always on the same side. I thought of that girl, Candy, who ran from our house two summers ago. I started at every sound—the snapping of a branch, the thud of something falling from a tree. I told myself Jacob was not following me, but how could I be sure? I had been between the expanse of blue-black water on my right and the steep slope on my left for miles, and there was almost no variation in the landscape. Wall of pines on one side, dark water and the incessant waves on the other, speaking the language of insanity. How long could I survive alone here if Jacob never came back, and how would I deal with him if he did?
It was late afternoon when I saw it: a small structure ahead of me. A ranger station, no more than a shack, really, and a road leading away from it, switching back and forth up the incline. The door was closed, the handles circled with thick chain and a padlock. Leaning against the door, the flashes of light pressed at the corners of my vision. A wave of dizziness pulled me downward, and I curled onto the dusty ground in front of the locked entrance.
*
I woke up in the hospital room. Metal encircled my wrist halfway to the elbow, and I slowly became aware that there were pins going into my arm. A gauze dressing covered my hand. This was Bend, Oregon, I was told, and I had suffered a compound fracture in my wrist that cut the blood supply to my little and ring fingers. The ring finger had nerve damage, and the small finger was amputated. The young doctor who explained this to me was apologetic, his gaze seemed shifting between my face and his polished black shoes.
“Did you find my son?” I asked, and his face got even sorrier. The two aides in the room glanced at each other nervously.
“My stepson. Jacob. We were on the mountain together,” I said.
“No. You were alone.” He looked at me with arched eyebrows, not caring to hide his thoughts—this woman has clearly lost her mind. When the police came to my hospital room, I told them about Jacob, about how he got into the lake. I told them we had an argument in the tent, about his father. I did not tell them about him climbing on top of me.
*
I have been home for a month, and there has been no sign of Jacob. My arm is still in the cage that holds my bones together, but it is scheduled to come off next week. The place where my little finger had been continues to throb, and I would think it was still attached if I couldn’t see the purple stump where the proximal phalange should be. The rangers who looked for Jacob did not find the tent I left behind or Jacob’s pack, and this raised suspicions. A detective has been assigned to Jacob’s case, a wiry little man with nervous hands. He has a thousand questions. Could Jacob have located his father? Did I have any idea where Stephen was? He seems to find it hard to believe that I could completely lose both a husband and a son within a year’s time. Did Jacob have a girlfriend? Could he be hiding with her? I’ve told him it was just the two of us—we were all each other had left. I was told not to leave town. The detective came back several times, always wanting to talk about the last place I saw Jacob, as if trying to catch me in a lie. I told him it couldn’t be my fault he disappeared—how could I ever have really been responsible for someone who was out of my control? I hired an attorney, just in case.
The day after Jacob’s eighteenth birthday, I looked through Stephen’s computer, for the pictures of the woman Jacob talked about. I found nothing, of course. Just the same files I went through after Stephen disappeared. I walked out behind the house where Jacob’s structure used to be, amazed at how both it and he seemed to have been erased. I ran my good hand over the ground and came across a small, unexplained depression in the earth. It was about the width and depth of an apple. I went back inside and bolted the door. Since I made it back from the mountain, I always lock up—even in the daytime. The phone rang that day, and I half expected to answer and hear the voice of a stranger tell me that my son’s body had been recovered from a ravine on Mount Scott, or from the lake, or from some motel room in a town I’d never heard of. At the same time, I half expected it to be Jacob, telling me he was sorry, and he was on his way home.
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