The Death Class: A True Story About Life (10 page)

Jonathan’s eyes darted from his escape route to his brothers to his dad, whose jeans shone with blood. Josh was asleep in their dad’s arms. Chris trailed behind in a clueless zombie state. Maybe, Jonathan thought, if he acted quickly he could pull Chris aside and whisper in his ear, “Dad stabbed Mom!” He could quietly tell Chris how he’d seen and heard it all. He wanted to convince Chris to run away with him, run as fast as they could. But the sight of Josh asleep in their father’s arms stopped him.

Jonathan couldn’t do it. He couldn’t leave either of his brothers.
Maybe he could convince Chris to run too, but he just couldn’t leave Josh behind.

He climbed into the backseat of the car, sitting right behind his dad.

“Don’t put your seat belts on,” he told the boys. “You don’t need them.”

Jonathan put his on anyway. His brothers still had no clue what was going on, and they seemed too sleepy to notice the blood smears or wonder why they were getting into their mom’s car with their dad in the middle of the night.

Jonathan stayed wide-eyed and awake, as Chris fell asleep in the seat to his right. Josh dozed off in the front passenger seat. Their dad didn’t put his seat belt on either. He drove for what seemed like hours. Jonathan stared at the back of his dad’s head, his pale blond hair. His dad kept looking back at him in the rearview mirror, and Jonathan couldn’t avoid his dad’s gaze, the blue eyes and eyebrows light as his hair. “We’re going to the hospital,” he told him.

Let’s just get there, Jonathan thought. He knew he needed to tell somebody what had happened. A police officer. A doctor.

The car approached a bridge. It had metal barriers along its side. Jonathan noticed his dad speeding up, gripping the steering wheel and veering to the right, charging straight for the bridge barrier. Was he attempting to drive right off of it?

The vehicle rammed into the metal, skidding and screeching for about five hundred feet. His dad lost control, and the car spun.

Jonathan grabbed Chris and held him until they came to a halt. The smell of hot metal and burned tires filled the air. Jonathan’s hips hurt from the seat belt, but Chris seemed unscathed. When it seemed safe to move, Jonathan and Chris peered over to the front seats, where they caught a glimpse of their dad. His head had a giant gash in it, with blood pouring out of it. His right ear seemed to be hanging off. He kept slipping into and out of consciousness.

“Dad, wake up!” Jonathan shouted.

He saw Josh. His little brother was trapped underneath the dash, wailing in pain about his shoulder. His brothers couldn’t pry the mangled door open. It was compressed against the bridge barricade.

“Get me out!” Josh screamed at his brothers. “I’m gonna die!”

Jonathan looked down the road and saw truck headlights coming in their direction.

T
HE BOYS DID
not see their father again until the murder trial, when Jonathan had to give a statement during the sentencing. In the court, he looked at his dad, who was wearing a prison uniform and had chains around his ankles. Jonathan would later remember the people in the court asking him to respond in a letter to questions such as “How long do you think he should be in prison for?” and “How has this affected your life?” Jonathan pulled out his letter and told the court through his tears that there was no amount of time that his father could go away for. Time would not bring his mother back.

When it was over, the judge asked his father if he had anything to say. His dad was weeping too. He looked at Jonathan and answered, “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”

He was sentenced to thirty years in prison, with parole possible after fifteen years.

Jonathan and his two brothers moved in with their aunt and uncle, who like their mother had come to New Jersey from Uruguay, but it was not an easy transition. Their uncle had never planned on staying in the United States forever, and now he was stuck taking care of his nephews. If Jonathan’s younger brother had been reclusive and uptight as the youngest among them before his mother’s death, he was even worse now, always angry. He would throw dirt into his aunt and uncle’s bed. He would wander off and they’d find him hours later, walking along a highway alone.

The boys stayed with their aunt and uncle for two years. When Jonathan was in eighth grade, the brothers moved to Uruguay to live with their grandmother. None of them really wanted to leave their friends and move to a country they barely knew, but it seemed that the aunt and uncle could not handle all of the extra responsibility. Chris seemed the most upset about it. He emailed his girlfriend and called her long distance regularly, and he talked of getting adopted and moving back to New Jersey.

“Yeah, but you’re
our brother,” Jonathan said to him. “Who cares about a girlfriend?”

Chris ended up moving back and living with his girlfriend’s family anyway. Then it was just Jonathan and Josh.

They made the most of their time in Uruguay, spending summers on the beach. But when Jonathan turned eighteen, he decided to move back to New Jersey too. He knew he wanted Josh to be with him. The brothers were a trio, regardless of whether Chris kept on ditching them for his girl.

It turned out that Chris agreed with Jonathan, and they petitioned for custody of Josh. They wanted him to finish high school in the United States. He’d have a better chance of getting accepted into an American university. Jonathan and Chris rented a three-bedroom apartment in Linden for $900, and Josh was eventually allowed by the courts to move in.

Josh was seventeen when they adopted him. He had enrolled in Linden High School. They had stepped in to father Josh as best they could, even though Jonathan felt as though he was the most involved with Josh’s life, the most protective. Chris had grown closer to his girlfriend and still spent most of his time with her.

Not long after, their dad wrote them a letter from prison, explaining that he had heard that Jonathan and Chris had applied for custody of Josh. He asked the boys to visit him in East Jersey State Prison. Chris chose not to go.

Jonathan took Josh to visit their father. It was an awkward meeting. Jonathan remembered his dad singing a song he had written himself, something about being sorry. They sat in a visiting room separated by glass as their dad belted into a telephone receiver. When he was done, Josh turned to Jonathan and said, “He sings pretty good.”

Their father had a job in prison at the time and told his sons he would send them money. But Jonathan made it clear they didn’t need his money or his help. None of his sons had turned into drug addicts or delinquents. They had gone to school, held jobs.

“We came here to let you know your kids are good kids,” Jonathan told his dad. “We’re going to succeed, and we’re going to be fine.”

Jonathan would make sure of it.

Seven years after his mother’s death, the brothers still didn’t know why their father had snapped and killed her that night. Jonathan did not ask. Maybe his dad had been jealous of her new relationship. Or maybe he had been stressed about money. Jonathan didn’t really care anymore.

In February 2006, a few weeks after saying good-bye to him during their prison visit, Jonathan received a call informing him that their dad had slit his throat with a razor.

And that was that. Jonathan didn’t feel too hurt by it. After all, Brett Steingraber was their father, but he had not been a part of the boys’ lives for a long time.

His sons had already let him go.

B
Y THE TIME
Jonathan met Caitlin, he had his survival method down to a science: First, don’t dwell on the past; don’t even discuss it unless you have to. Second, the most reliable person in this life is yourself. Third, know how to fix problems. Others depend on you to set goals, so meet them. That’s exactly what he did.

Ever since his father had murdered his mother, Jonathan had figured out a way to negotiate the world with no parents and no road map—all under his own terms. He had learned that there was no advantage to being vulnerable or weak, and he kept that defense up even as he found himself starting to trust this eye-catching girl who had strolled into his life one afternoon in the middle of the high school parking lot. It wasn’t easy to be guarded and in a romantic relationship at the same time, but she seemed worth the effort to at least try to strike a balance. Caitlin was beautiful even in her boyish tank tops and sweats. That image of the rain drenching her hair that day as she stood in front of the school and asked him to come to her party was forever seared in his mind.

They lost their virginity to each other, and just as he was her first true love, she was also his. Once when they were cuddled up together, he could remember feeling so connected to her that he couldn’t imagine ever feeling this way again with anyone else.

Yet for all his adoration of Caitlin, her anxiety irritated the heck out
of him. The random light switch flicking, the fear of germs, the incessant worries about death. Sometimes she would call him on his cell phone and hear sirens from passing emergency vehicles in the background. “Where are you?” she would demand in a panic, assuming he had been hurt. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he would groan.

Caitlin explained to him that she had figured out, after taking classes with Norma, that she had obsessive-compulsive disorder. Jonathan was glad that the professor’s lessons had helped his girlfriend get a handle on her “issues.” But the truth was, he didn’t entirely buy that Caitlin was ill in some way. He didn’t really know if he believed in mental illness at all. She just needed to get a grip on herself. There was no reason to worry, he assured her over and over again. No reason at all.

J
ONATHAN DIDN’T FEEL
the need to solve the mystery of why his dad had murdered his mom. He accepted that he had no real answer. There had been no previous signs of depression or even rage from his dad. He couldn’t remember his father having a drinking problem.

One day, he found an Associated Press article about his mother’s murder on the Internet. The AP story had also been printed in
The New York Times.
But the headline didn’t make sense to Jonathan: “Man Who Feared Alien Takeover Pleads Guilty to Killing Ex-wife.” The story stated, “Brett Steingraber believed extraterrestrials were about to take over the planet, and he killed his ex-wife, Suraia Sadi, to save her from the pain of the alien takeover, prosecutors said.”

It went on, “Sadi, 36, was stabbed 12 times in the chest in March 1996, at her ex-husband’s apartment. Steingraber, 39, later drove around with his three sons until crashing his car in Westchester County, N.Y.”

Extraterrestrials? What kind of ridiculous story had this reporter made up? Jonathan had seen the murder. His dad had confessed to investigators. But aliens? What an idiotic story.

Jonathan never doubted that his dad had known exactly what he was doing that morning. That was why he had kept staring at him through the rearview mirror before he crashed. If his dad had made up a story
about alien invasions to the cops, he was just trying to wiggle out of responsibility for his crime. An insanity plea or something.

That was what Jonathan told himself for all of his teenage years. He kept thinking it right up into his twenties, until the summer of 2008. For weeks, Caitlin had been expressing worries about Jonathan’s father and Josh’s mental stability. Jonathan brushed her comments off as exaggerated anxieties. Then the couple woke up in Jonathan’s bedroom one morning to a loud noise and found his brother wild-eyed in the kitchen.

Summer 2008

If perfection existed, Caitlin imagined it must look a lot like this moment. She glanced around the banquet hall, inhaling the whole scene, the shimmering crystal canopy chandelier that seemed as big as the sun, the Venetian plaster walls, the party revelers clinking their wineglasses and beer bottles. There were mirrors everywhere, even on the cathedral-style ceilings, as if carefully placed to remind everyone at every turn of how much fun they were having.

It was all for her, mostly. Jonathan had gone to the trouble of organizing and planning this elaborate joint celebration for Caitlin, and also for his buddy, since both had just graduated in Kean University’s 2008 class. He’d paid for the buffet, rented the hall, brought in a stand-up comedian, and invited all of their mutual friends, as well as Caitlin’s family and her favorite professor, Dr. Norma Bowe.

It had been a perfect morning for the graduation ten hours earlier too, with blue skies, warm sunshine, and the greenest trees. “All eyes are on the future!” shouted the keynote speaker, the guy who’d created Monster.com, to 2,100 graduates. Norma posed after the graduation ceremony for a couple of shots with Caitlin. There was the professor in one photo, with her burgundy lipstick smile, aviator sunglasses, and doctoral gown, topped off with a floppy velvety cap. She stood about five inches shorter than Caitlin, who wore a gold 2008 charm on the yellow tassel of her flat cap. A cluster of long ropey cords hung around Caitlin’s neck, representing all of the honors she’d received, like for her
3.85 grade point average. Caitlin would later frame that photo and give it to Norma as a gift, which the professor would keep in her office.

Now that she’d earned her bachelor’s degree, Caitlin was on track to becoming one of only twelve students selected for the master’s program in the school of psychology at Kean. She’d still be able to attend her own therapy sessions with the counselor on campus while working to get control of her anxiety and OCD, and she could visit Norma, who had given her a part-time job as her research assistant, whenever she wanted.

By sunset, everyone including the professor had changed into cocktail party attire and headed to the Galloping Hills banquet hall in a gleaming white Colonial Revival–style building in Union, New Jersey. Caitlin slipped into a white strapless dress with black flowers embroidered along one side. It hugged her tiny waist, flowing out slightly at her hips, making them appear fuller than they actually were, stopping a few inches past her wispy thighs. She’d put on a pair of sparkling dangly earrings and pulled the sides of her blond hair up, letting a long chunk of it droop across her left cheek, while the rest fell down her back in loose ringlets.