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I restart the engine and step on the gas to bring the heat up. The lights of the apartment house in which Trev's mother and siblings receive their gifts are cut almost brutally against the dark. What must Trev's mother be feeling tonight, her oldest son home for the first time in months? He wears his new Christmas jacket. And he has grown.

Maybe all I can offer Trevor is a few years off the streets and the distraction of a household he helped to create, a few years against eighteen, like the farm to which the Prodigal retreated during the famine and lived for a while until he came to himself.

Inside of Trevor's silence lives his right to privacy, his right to his own story if and when he sees fit to tell it. In the meantime I'll sit at the top of the basement steps and listen to his songs.

By now I've learned to read myself—woman and mother—relentlessly into the masculine, into the stories woven between the stars, or spun on earth: And Zebulon shall dwell at the haven of the sea; and he shall be for an haven of ships…

Only sometimes do I understand the crush of stories without us. Then we are light as a shadow, or radio static swarming the Messiah: … unto us a son is given …

But there are no fathers here.

Sybil / Photo by Stephen Digges

Winter, 1996

Nine A.M. of a weekday. Stephen is waiting his turn to see the judge. As usual the Northampton courtroom is crowded, the summoned and their parents, spouses, children, brothers and sisters standing, sitting. Every so often a court official makes his way through the rows calling out, “Any restraining orders! Restraining orders!” Some women make their way toward the official and move out the door.

The courtroom to which we've been assigned today is less austere than others we've occupied. This one's a sort of tired classroom with folding chairs skewed out of line. We are knit close to our people, to family members, lawyers.

There is little discussion between strangers, though at the moment we have much in common. But the anatomy of some personal crisis is soon to be made public, some lightning-fast calamity of events that took place time and distance from here, most likely in the dark; or events so plotted and executed they felt, however criminal—well, ordinary.

Now they are to be examined and dissected here in this unimpressive room under a fluorescence that drains color from faces and exaggerates every flaw. The air smells of coffee, anxious bodies, stale cigarette smoke clinging to hands, hair, coats, everyone drawn inward at the advent of exposure.

When we're mostly settled, a juvenile officer leads a line of boys, handcuffed and chained around their ankles, to the front pew. One of the boys scans the gallery for his mother, who sits next to us. Teary she nods to him and shakes her head. I turn to her and catch her eyes.

“It'll be okay,” I whisper. I have a sense that I'm invading her privacy, but I speak to her anyway. Likewise, Stephen engages her.

“Zeek's a friend of mine,” he says. “He's a great kid.”

As Stephen leans in front of me to quite directly comfort the woman, I can smell his cologne, his clean hair combed back neatly, his sweet breath. I'm not surprised by his spontaneous generosity, or his ease at breaking protocol. When he reaches for her hand, she responds.

“Thank you,” she says. “You look real nice today,” she adds, for the first time smiling a little.

“Not my usual.” Stephen smiles back. He is wearing a suit and tie. He's removed his ear- and nose rings for the hearing—court appearance rituals of conduct he knows well.

The judge enters the courtroom; we rise, then resettle. The familiar anxiety that has ushered us to this moment now gives way to a resigned if not giddy anticipation of an ending. This is our fifth court appearance in two years, yes, ours. Against the conventional pop psychology that would suggest I let Stephen deal with it alone …let him experience the consequences of his actions without his mother holding his hand… let him take his medicine…, I've escorted Stephen