The Stardust Lounge_ Stories From a Boy's Adolescence - Deborah Digges [66]
We celebrated Stephen's graduation. His father and grandparents flew in from Missouri, and Stanley came up from Maryland. Charles, who had moved back to Russia in January of 1996 to work as a journalist, returned to see his brother graduate. Charles brought with him many friends who had known Stephen in Brookline, and who, over the years, came to understand the portent of the event.
Trevor returned for the celebration, bringing with him jerk chicken and beans for the party we threw the next day. My sister Eve drove up from Connecticut to help prepare for the all-day event we planned for Stephen, his guests, and his friends.
A subtext of possibilities went unspoken. But the alternative story with its different trajectory ghosted, even intensified our celebration. It offered that Stephen's graduation from high school was not the moment that he and we who loved him had been waiting for.
Rather, it was a moment, like so many others, which made one kind of future more immediately accessible than another. We were not unaware of the other grueling, even tragic alternative. Inside that alternative we glimpsed ourselves as flat, dismissible characters—the helpless single mother and the rebellious teen—roles reinforced by a culture pointing fingers at us, roles that separated a son from his mother and isolated us in our confusion.
That culture judged me harshly while it allowed my young son, lost in adolescent grief, easy access to guns. Stephen's graduation from high school exemplified our tenuous connection to a system that insisted on itself as the only way, though we knew it was not the only way at all. Trevor had taught us that, and Eduardo, and our animals.
Under the circumstances, Zeek's mother's pleas in District Court that day, pleas for the judge to take him— yes—put him in jail or he'll be dead before his sixteenth birthday …, might be a way, too, to see a child safely through the dark regions of adolescence.
I follow the dogs into the woods toward the river, meeting as we go other dogs and their people, meeting kids, who in spite of the warmth, wear ball caps and huge jackets over their baggy jeans. It's midday, a weekday. They've probably skipped school. The boys stop to watch my dogs dive into the river to retrieve the sticks I throw. They hold cigarettes down close to their sides, wary that I might be someone they know, or someone who knows them.
“Want to throw one?” I offer.
“Na-a,” one answers, taking a nervous drag from his smoke. But they linger awhile watching the dogs run headlong into the water to leap and swim, then charge up the hill to drop the sticks at my feet, eager, shaking water everywhere as they insist on another plunge.
Where have the kids to go, anyway? The day is huge, full of distance and light, all the leaves down, and time seems odd inside such brilliance, something at its peripheries insisting, parents, teachers, cops at the edge of the light, but just now at the edge merely. Such light burns out memory, burns out the autumns of their childhoods, what that felt like. And what now feels like they scrawl across the asphalt.
What now will feel like later is as hard to say.
And as for how later will look back at now—who knows? The jury, as my sister and I used to say to each other, is still out. Indeed it is out—the jury is having dinner in a restaurant, then going to the opera, or it has boarded a plane, or it loads its trunks onto a ship, drags great “Bon Voyage” wreaths up the gangplank, then appears at the rail to wave back at us as the ship backs out of the harbor.
The jury is blessedly out on all of us, and if and when it comes in with its verdict, let's hope that we've grown up, that we've escaped, somehow, that we've beat it into years in which life appears to make sense, years in which we finally, for the first time, catch up to ourselves, and that the charges brought against us long ago, in that other life