Page 51 of What Boys Learn

“That’sthe way you get people to make a confession?”

He looked at Wood. He looked at Hernández. He looked at the one-way mirror at the back of the room.

“Fucking amazing. No, I didn’t go to any motel. Not that afternoon, not any night, not ever. I don’t know which motel she went to, but you do, because you found the body. So, you know that the guy you should be looking for recently ‘got out’ and you know he drove a noisy car and you should probably be able to figure out who checked them in to the motel or even if she used a fake ID, someone probably saw them together, right?”

Benjamin nodded. Finished. Confident. Triumphant.Notquiet this time. Not quiet at all.

“Okay!” Wood said a moment later, dotting a period at the end of the sentence he was writing. “Well. That was all very helpful.”

Hernández, standing with his back up against the far wall, said, “Good job, Benjamin. We appreciate it.”

I still felt stuck to my chair. “Can we go now?”

“You can, Ms. Rosso. But we’re placing your son under arrest.”

He began to read Benjamin his Miranda rights. I watched as Benjamin’s look of triumph was replaced by disbelief.

Hernández said, “Ms. Rosso, I recommend you go home, get a night’s sleep, then come back in the morning. Your son isn’t going home tonight.”

19

In one moment—that moment when Benjamin wouldn’t catch a yawn—Hernández had seen something that trusted friends, including Robert, refused to see.

Do you feel that way sometimes, Benjamin? Like you can’t read people? Or you can, but you don’t want to? Stuff just rolls off your back? Other people’s needs don’t concern you?

Something was different. Something wasoff. It wasn’t that I refused to see. If anything, I looked too hard, with the outline of Ewan’s face forever in the back of my mind.

And then again, Ewan had been so extreme, so recalcitrant, so determined to seek out trouble, that anyone else seemed comparatively stable and empathetic. Knowing Ewan helped me see. Knowing Ewan made it impossible to see.

Teachers, doctors, and friends knew that Benjamin provoked other children into fights. They agreed he was mouthy or glib. But no one was ready to give it a label, not even the child-development specialist I brought him to when he was eleven. I’d told Curtis that Dr. Adelman wasn’t a “good fit” for us. He never asked what she said or refused to say about my son’s personality and behavior.

Her name was Raveena Adelman, a sixty-something woman with a bright silver bob and reassuringly refined clothes, and she had just signed on as my undergraduate thesis advisor. After reading a journal article she’d written about conduct disorder, I asked if she’d be willing to meet Benjamin, and she agreed. I remembered sitting in the campus café because her office had no reception area, opening the detailed form she asked me to fill out, while she met privately with Benjamin.Grandiosity, Lying, Manipulation, Remorselessness, Unemotionality, Impulsiveness, Irresponsibility, Thrill Seeking.

It was hard to be honest, but I chose to be. Not many parents are, I learned later, as a graduate school student. Given this sort of checklist, many parents just leave a psychologist’s office and never come back. But I stayed. I checked the boxes and in longhand, I wrote out my concerns, even going so far as to mention the fact that my own brother was serving time in prison and had been aggressive, charming, and manipulative from a very early age—a real terror, not just a “handful” or a “growing problem,” as teachers often called my son.

After Dr. Adelman had spent an hour with Benjamin, she’d sent him to the waiting room, took a long moment to resettle her jewel-tone pashmina scarf around her broad shoulders, then asked me to stay behind to discuss certain behavioral episodes. I treated her questions like the most important exam I’d ever take.

“Does he mistreat animals?”

“We don’t have pets. But that’s because we’ve always lived in apartments that don’t allow them.”

“Is he aggressive with siblings?”

“He’s an only child.”

“Does he wet the bed?”

“No. But isn’t bed-wetting involuntary? Do researchers still think that matters?”

I wasn’t pushing back. I honestly didn’t know.

“Not much, but we still ask.”

“Has he ever stolen?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“Does he light fires?”