Jason smiled, but when he saw the look of fear on Anna Rapetto’s face he flushed with shame. Despite the rocky beginnings of their relationship when Vicki’s mother struggled to accept the man who got her daughter pregnant, they had become friends, allies. He liked Anna’s natural affection and common sense. She had taught him everything she could about raising a child and had fielded dozens of phone calls from him at all hours of the day and night about Rafe. Several times she had driven across the Bay to help him in person when Vicki was preoccupied with school and Rafe wouldn’t eat or sleep. They had become partners in a very real sense, but after the separation and whatever Vicki had said about him, they had clearly become something else.
“I just want to see my son,” he said quietly.
She half-turned from him, shielding Rafe. “I’m sorry it’s turned out like this, Jason.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“I don’t know what to think. I thought I knew you, then Vicki tells me these horrible things.”
“There are two sides to every story, Anna, you know that. Your daughter’s not the easiest person to get along with.”
Anna smiled ruefully. “I’ll have to call her and tell her that you’re here.”
“Go ahead. I’ve been trying to call her for a week.”
Anna disappeared into the house and returned with a cordless phone. She leaned toward Jason and Rafe slid eagerly into his father’s arms.
“Oh God, I missed you!” Jason cried. He inhaled the aroma of his son like a drug. Rafe squirmed and grabbed his father’s hair for balance, but Jason didn’t complain. He hugged Rafe as he listened to Anna’s phone conversation.
“Jason’s here, he wants to see Rafe — ”
“Don’t let him take him!” he heard Vicki shout. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes!”
A HALF hour later she burst through the front door, her eyes sweeping the room. Jason rose from his seat at the formal dining room table.
“Where’s Rafe?” she asked.
“With your mom. She took him on an errand so we can work things out.”
“There’s nothing to work out. Please leave.”
“I’m not leaving without Rafe. You can’t just take him like that.”
She faced him across the table. “What are you going to do — hit me?”
“I never hit you. I’ve never hit anybody.”
“You threw things at me! You pushed me!”
“We had an argument. I threw something at the wall. That’s no excuse to kidnap our child. You kidnapped him, Vicki!”
“I saved him! You’re a violent man. I’m not going to subject my son — ”
“He’s our son!”
Vicki swept her hand through her long dark hair, her signal of maximum impatience. Then she slowly slipped into a chair; Jason sat down across from her. “Look, you said it yourself — this marriage sucks. We make a clean break, we never have to deal with each other again. No more arguments, no more bickering, no more disappointments — for either one of us. We could pretend we never even met, if that works for you.”
Jason stared at her warily. “That’s fine with me,” he said. “But what do we do about Rafe?”
“It’s best that he stays with me. He needs his mother.”
“And his father.”
“You don’t want him to see us fighting all the time. Nobody wants that.”
“I checked some books out,” Jason said. “We need to work out joint custody.”
Vicki shook her head. “That’s not going to happen.”
“He belongs to both of us.”
“Jason, you did what you did and I appreciate that. But this is a full-time job. I mean, it’s not a job — it’s a commitment, day-in, day-out for the next eighteen years of your life. You’re not going to be able to do that — ”
“He’s my son,” Jason said firmly. “I’m not leaving without him.”
Vicki’s eyes widened, more with desperation now than anger. “You can get married again and have as many kids as you want. Rafe’s all I got.”
Jason laughed incredulously. “Are you crazy? I can’t just go out and get a child like a new shirt or something!”
“That’s not what I’m saying,” she said. “You’ll find somebody — so will I someday. And all of this will just be a bad memory.”
“It already is.”
They faced each other in familiar opposition, their faces hardened. “Please go, Jason. Just leave us alone.”
“Screw you,” he seethed. “I raised him. I took care of him while you finished school.”
“You didn’t even know how to change a diaper. My mother did all the work.”
“You’re so full of shit. You just used me!”
“I don’t have to take this.” She stood and strode into the kitchen. He was beside her instantly. They had reached that precise moment in a marriage when their dislike for each other became so thorough, so absolute that the desire — let alone the possibility — of ever working cooperatively on any problem seemed to vanish forever. Any restraint that each had employed in the past to avoid disaster was now swept aside.
“Give me my child back.” He was almost a head taller than her, and Vicki was not a small woman. She eyed the bank of carving knives beneath the cabinet. “You’re threatening me. Get away from me.”
“I’ll go when you give me my child back.”
“Tell it to the judge.”
He stepped closer and grabbed her arm. There was only winning or losing and he refused to consider the latter. “Give me my child back!”
“Let go of me,” Vicki shouted, struggling to pull away. “Get out of my house!”
He dropped her arm and strode across the living room, yanking open the front door. Far across the bay, the last glow of twilight outlined Mount Montara. “I’ll pick up Rafe tomorrow afternoon.”
“He won’t be here.” Vicki slammed the door and locked it.
CONFIRMATION THAT he needed an attorney came in the form of a four page restraining order from Superior Court. He could no longer see Rafe except in a supervised setting. He read it over several times, disbelieving his eyes. The little boy he had powdered, diapered and fed, walked, talked and sung to, carried on his back, bounced on his knee, bathed, bottled and burped now had to be shielded from him as if he were some kind of molester.
He found a lawyer through Graham Nielsen, the Pulitzer Prizewinning head of the sociology department who had gone through a legendary divorce (it seemed everyone Jason consulted on campus had gone through a divorce, legendary or otherwise) with Chilean poet Rosario Lindors. “He’s like a Navy Seal,” Nielsen described the attorney. “He works in darkness, does the job you ask him to do, and doesn’t leave a trace.”
But rather than some kind of cold-blooded demolition expert, Robert Marks was a reasonable, soft-spoken man, tall, athletic, with dark brown eyes and a neatly trimmed beard. His office was in a modern suite across from the Fairmont Hotel in downtown San Jose. A plaque on his wall identified him as a twenty-year veteran in the innocuously titled field of Family Law.
Marks listened attentively as Jason related the details of his marriage, how he had left Stanford’s baseball program for a year to care