One of My Babies

Twenty years ago, I found myself teaching a man who was responsible for an unimaginably horrific crime. I turned my back on him just when he needed me and have regretted it ever since.

Illustration by Julie Benbassat

What I recall about the prison is the smell. Not some dirty or rotting smell or even the fleshy old cheese odor of people who worked too hard and lacked proper access to deodorant. It was not that at all, even if that was what I expected when I was first buzzed into New Hampshire State Prison for Men to teach a class in literature and creative writing. No, the smell was clean. Too clean. Even beyond the antiseptic clean of a hospital. This was a scrubbed-too-hard-with-rendered-animal-fat-soap clean. This was a rub-the-skin-raw kind of clean. As I walked into the prison, it was everywhere. It was the kind of clean that made you feel filthy, like you could never be clean enough, scrub hard enough to be right. You could see it on the men too — their skin was dry and tough-looking, ruddy from scrubbing with the fierce, heavy waters that came out of the old pipes in this place. The correctional officers carried it on them too, but it was mixed with whatever they brought with them from the outside: a wife’s perfume, cigarette smoke or the meat sweat of some steak and cheese sub they’d eaten at a pizza place right before their shift.

I’d gotten this gig while teaching part-time at New England College, a little liberal arts college in Henniker, New Hampshire, a one-traffic-light town near Concord. The school’s few claims to fame were that Geena Davis had gone there (for less than a year), Russell Banks had taught there for a bit and Hall of Fame football player Jim Brown and his Syracuse teammates once played a riveting game against NEC’s lacrosse team. “The Only Henniker on Earth” read the sign in town that hung precariously in that liminal place where you entered and left.

NEC was the first place I really taught. Susan, the head of the writing department, had told me about the program they had with the prison. She did a lot of work with incarcerated men. She was even engaged to one. I did not dig deeper into that story. Susan, sitting in her office, told me about recidivism rates, how the more schooling an incarcerated person gets, the less likely they are to end up back in prison once they get out. So, I’d be doing “noble” work.

To be honest, I was thinking less about being noble and more about getting a paycheck. At the time I was adjuncting at a few schools, trying to piece together a living wage while building my résumé. Monday nights I was down at Harvard Extension, Tuesdays and Thursdays I was at Endicott College teaching freshman business writing, Wednesday and Fridays I taught a college comp class at NEC and Saturday mornings I’d be back down in Cambridge tutoring at the writing center for Cambridge College. I’d get in my truck some mornings not knowing what day it was until I remembered where I had to go teach. I was spending so much on gas money that I decided to sell my Bronco for a Honda. The only health insurance I had was this shady catastrophe insurance some guy sold to me in my kitchen while my girlfriend, Emily, who was going to business school, looked on skeptically.

On Wednesdays, already exhausted from the week, on the way back from NEC to where I was living in Newburyport, Massachusetts, I’d stop in Concord to teach at the prison. Getting buzzed into the prison that first time was terrifying. I couldn’t get through the metal detector because of all the crap in my cheap nylon Staples courier bag. All the stuff we don’t even realize we carry around — loose change, pens, paper clips, lip balm, all the flotsam of our careless lives that we get to keep with us — kept setting off the alarm. As it went on, the white, crew cut–sporting correctional officer behind the desk rolled his eyes, probably seeing me as a stupid wannabe college professor.

I was a big guy, 6-foot-4 and pushing 235 pounds back then, still hitting heavyweight workouts like I did in my college football days. And yet I felt tiny and ridiculous in front of these guards with their broad bellies, neck rolls, badges, clubs, sidearms and indignant side-eyes. I was never more aware of my green collared Gap shirt, my khaki pants that were just a little too short and my cheap brown dress shoes. I can still feel the guard at the front desk continuing to side-eye me as I dug through my bag, pulling out my notebooks and my thick copy of The Bedford Anthology of American Literature Volume Two, trying to find the pennies and pieces of broken Pentels that were setting off the alarm. It took forever, and I kept having to go back through the metal detector, failing several times. Either they were just messing with me, or they really were painfully particular about contraband that could upset some economic order or that could be used as a weapon. The nervousness was balling up thick in my gut by then.

I would soon learn that the guards were generally all nice guys, but they had a presence about them. Maybe it was one they learned on the job. Maybe they got the job because they had it. A lot of them were ex-military or active National Guard. I didn’t get to meet more than a few. Someone would buzz me in, then someone would escort me to the hall where the classrooms were. I remember that first night, following an officer up a flight of stairs. We were outside and I could see the watchtowers peeking out from the walls, and what seemed like acres of razor wire. I couldn’t see down into the yard or whatever I imagined was beyond the thick metal walls that blocked any view from the stairs. That first time walking up those steps my legs were rubbery, like I was about to play one last football game that I was not at all in shape to play. The concrete and black metal bleakness of the place was awful, and I only had to be there a couple of hours a week. What did it do to men who worked here? Who lived here, who might live here until the day they died? I thought of my department head, Susan, all 4-foot-11 of her, badassing her way into this place every week for years, and decided to get over myself and get to work.

I really only remember that first walk from the entrance, through the stairs, into the hall where the classroom was. The officer who was escorting me asked me about the class. I said it was literature, creative writing. He gave me a weird look, eyebrows bunching a bit, the corner of his mouth tightening. I want to say that it was a confused look, like he didn’t understand. But I think he was more skeptical than confused. I think if I had said I was teaching accounting or business management, he might have understood. Then again, I could have read the whole thing wrong. Maybe he was thinking about the novel he was working on at night when he got home and wondering why these guys got to take a course that he couldn’t afford on his salary.

He led me into a small room that had one big desk at the far end and a bunch of individual student desks facing it. There were shatterproof windows that faced the hallway. It reminded me of a tighter version of my homeroom at Lowell High, where on the first day of school I’d seen two boys beat up another kid with a nunchuck and a chain as students just rivered around them on their way to class. I thought, This is where all that anger ends up, and wondered how I was going to teach these men as they came in wearing their country greens. Then the officer left me alone with them.

I was nervous. I tried to hide it, but I wondered if they could see it. I wondered if they were nervous too. All these fronts of toughness and temerity we put up — to what end, and what is lost behind those painted faces? I told them to call me by my first name. Susan had told me not to ask what they were in for and to just treat the class like any other, with any other students. I told them that as far as I was concerned, this was just another college class and they were just like any college students. There seems to be something smug or sanctimonious about that now, like I had some power to make this environment not the prison where they were locked up. They were doing dark time in a dark place. My 90 minutes a week of literature could hardly throw any light on that.

It’s been 20 years now, and I have lost the faces of the students I taught in the prison. I remember one guy, just a kid, maybe not yet 20, who said he was from Southie in Boston. He said he was there because he had stolen a car. I was woefully uneducated on what crimes got you put into maximum security, but being there for boosting a car seemed extreme, and I wondered what else was inside his confession. I didn’t ask. I hadn’t asked what he had done in the first place, he’d just volunteered it. This guy was stocky and squirrely with shaggy hair and Coke-bottle eyeglasses, but I can’t see his face anymore. I can’t see any of their faces. Except for James Parker’s.

He was just this skinny, pale-faced kid back then, with dark eyes and dark hair, dealing with acne and a head that he had not yet grown into. He was handsome in a character actor kind of way. Sam Rockwell at that age could have played him.

I couldn’t get past how young James was when he introduced himself that night. By then he had turned 17. In a maximum-security prison. He’d been in for a year, and he let it drop that he was going to be in there for life. He didn’t say what he had done, but that sentence made it clear he had likely killed someone. Tried and sentenced as an adult at 16. His name rattled around in my head. Something about him was familiar, and a 16-year-old in a murder case would have been in the news. When I got home later, after the hour-long drive from Concord, I looked him up. I should not have, but I did. I knew it was going to skew my view of him, but I couldn’t help myself. And there he was. James, at 16, in white and black stripes, his hands cuffed in front of him, police officers guiding him by the arms through his perp walk. James, at 16, crying in his country greens, standing in front of a judge and jury, confessing to murder.

James and another boy, Robert, just a couple of high school seniors, had killed two Dartmouth professors. The whole story came back to me. It had been all over the news the year before and I’d already forgotten the details. At the time, I was still in grad school, interning at Boston Magazine and working for a buddy’s landscaping company on the weekends. The story had shocked the nation. And then, like everything else, it had faded and been replaced by the next news cycle after a few weeks. Still in my coat, I hunched over my laptop, reliving the story.

James and Robert were from Vermont, just across the border from Hanover, where Dartmouth was. They got it in their heads to game the system and not do the typical college and career route.

“We thought, you know, what everybody was doing was silly. Like going to school and like wasting half your life with education that you’re not ever going to use,” James had said in an interview after his arrest.

They wanted to go to Australia and figured they needed about $10,000 to make it happen. They decided that they would attack people in their homes, take their cash and get the PINs for their ATM cards, then murder them. Their plan was to do this several times until they had the money. As I dug deeper, I even found James’s confession. I can’t find it now, but those were the Wild West days of the internet.

James said they had staked out homes. I remember reading that they’d even dug graves in the woods behind one house, but when they knocked on the door, the people who owned it weren’t home. When they knocked on the door of the Zantops, they said they were college students doing some kind of research on the environment. The boys had knives hidden on them. Professor Half Zantop started telling them to come back another time, that he and his wife were about to have lunch, but then he changed his mind. Maybe it was just the teacher in him who wanted to help a couple of kids.

Half let them in and sat them in his living room while his wife, Susanne, went to get some snacks. James stated in his confession that the Zantops were nice, that he didn’t think he and Robert were going to go through with it. Then something set Robert off, maybe his own sense of self-loathing that if he did not act right then, he would see himself as something less than a man, a coward. He attacked Half with his knife, stabbing him in the chest and face so violently that he stabbed himself in his own leg. When Susanne returned, Robert told James to get her. James restrained her and then he cut her throat as Robert jumped at her and stabbed her in the head. What I remember most about reading that confession was James saying that a knife going into a head sounds just like a knife going into a pumpkin. Every year when my kids were young, we would carve jack-o’-lanterns. Every time I made that first cut into the pumpkin, I thought of what James said. I thought of the Zantops. Then I would swallow the sick I felt with a smile for my kids.

“You’re not going back there, right?” Emily asked when I told her about my student. “He killed a teacher. You’re a teacher. Aren’t you worried?” Emily and I had been dating for almost six years. I loved her more than I thought I could love anyone. When the class at the prison had started, I had not bought the engagement ring yet. By the end of the semester, it would be burning a hole in my pocket while I thought about the right time. I hadn’t talked to her dad yet, but that was coming. I figured I should wait until after May when she graduated from business school. It occurs to me now that I hadn’t considered she would say no. I later learned she was a lot closer to a no than I thought. So much of life is a close call. I think often of those graves behind the house of the couple who were lucky enough not to be home the day James and Robert knocked on their door.

I put up a good front when I told her that of course I was going back to teach. I was a teacher, and he was my student. That’s what I told myself, and I mostly believed it. I also started talking myself out of any danger. He’s just a kid, I thought. He wouldn’t have weapons. Besides the pencil. Or the desk. I was big and could handle myself. But he had killed. He knew how to kill. I don’t know if I went back because it was the right thing to do, or because I wanted to bask in the idea that it was the right thing to do, that I was somehow “noble” and “brave,” that it wasn’t really for the money. Fifteen hundred bucks for a 15-week course was shit money, anyway, especially after taxes and the gas it took to drive there. I kept going back.

When I was at the New England College campus, I told Susan that I was teaching one of the Zantop killers. She already knew. She oversaw the program, after all. She had a good relationship with a lot of the men incarcerated there, having taught and run the program for so long. She didn’t have any kind words for James.

“Did you notice his eyes?” she asked. “He has flat eyes. There’s nothing behind them. Just coldness. No soul.” I don’t know if I bought that, but I immediately thought of Robert Shaw’s character Quint from Jaws, that scene when they are sitting around the table in the fishing boat, and he talks about being on the USS Indianapolis, the ship that delivered parts for the atomic bomb, that was torpedoed by a Japanese sub, leaving 1,100 shipwrecked men floating in the Pacific at the mercy of sharks.

“You know the thing about a shark,” Quint says. “He’s got ... lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eyes. When he comes at ya, doesn’t seem to be livin.”

James did have dark eyes, and I couldn’t help looking at them. I was trying to see if Susan was right. Were they really flat and soulless? Were they the eyes of a psychopath? Was I seeing them as flat because Susan had said they were? I don’t know. He was a kid. He was 17. He was going to spend most of his life in here. And yet, he was very nice, very polite. He did his work, spoke well in class, had good insights into the poems and stories we read. He tutored other inmates in math and English. He laughed easily and liked to joke around. He had also murdered someone. It’s so hard to reconcile all of that.

I went back to the class. We started by reading and discussing short stories. Most of these guys had little schooling. James had been an honor student. There was a big difference in their skill levels, but he never lorded it over them and always showed deference for their ideas. It was difficult to match up this kid with the person who had cut a woman’s throat. Then I had them try writing and workshopping their own work. The class got thinner as we went along. Guys would come sporadically or not at all. Some couldn’t go because they had a visitor from the outside. Some couldn’t make it because they were in protective custody, a euphemism for solitary confinement. I think some lost hope and quit on themselves. I’m sure a few sized me and what I was trying to do up and were like, Fuck this guy. James never missed a class.

Then there was the night when, for whatever reason, only James showed up. It was just me and him. I recall the anxiety of that moment when I realized it would just be James and me alone in that classroom. The image of Susanne Zantop’s terror when James sprung at her flashed and refracted through my mind. As did the thought of him leaping at me with a sharpened pencil or a desk chair. I had 100 pounds on him and had been in enough scraps that no skinny 17-year-old should have worried me. Still, he knew what it was like to kill. And he had nothing to lose.

That was only part of the reason I was anxious. It wasn’t even the biggest part. Mostly I felt a teacher’s anxiety. How the hell was I going to fill up 90 minutes of time with only one student? It’s one thing when you have a full class and you can get them talking or doing some exercise together, but it was just James and me. This is the same dread I still feel before every class, even full classes, even classes full of good students: How am I going to fill up the time? Why do I teach? How do I teach? I can’t teach! I’m a fraud and they know it!

I still feel it even with prep school students who want nothing more than to please their teacher, get the A, then march off to some Ivy enclave. After enough years on the job, you learn how to pivot, how to pull from a bag of tricks that will make the class a good experience. There’s stuff they need to learn, but there needs to be some joy for them in doing it, some kind of play that makes the grind palatable. I always seem to find a way to make it work but then become terrified again the next day that I won’t. I wonder often about why I picked a job that strikes me with such constant fear.

I am trying to remember how that night went down. We talked about stories and poetry. We talked about the story he was writing. I was friendly. I was encouraging. And then we got into a discussion about Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” In the story, set in the 1950s American South, this grandmother tries to persuade her son, Bailey, to drive the family to East Tennessee for vacation instead of Florida. She points out an article about the Misfit, an escaped convict who is heading toward Florida. She adds that his children have already been to Florida. The story famously begins with the line, “The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida.” In a narrative turn of dark irony, she will get her wish. We see during their drive how mean and critical and prideful the grandmother is. She does not treat others with the kindness she thinks she deserves. She is wretched. And we are meant to see our own very human acts of pettiness and selfishness in her and her family.

I had assigned the story because it is a hell of a story, and it always makes for a good discussion with students. It has action and intensity, but also lots of things bubbling under the surface to talk about. I hadn’t really thought about the context of my students and this story of a mass murderer. Not that I wouldn’t assign it again to students. I would. But now I am more deliberate and thoughtful about the texts I choose and the circumstances under which my students are reading them. I just didn’t know or think about that back then.

If you don’t know this story, this is how it goes. After we live through some of how awful this grandmother is, the family has a car accident because of the cat the grandmother insisted on bringing along. Then the Misfit and his gang come upon them. The grandmother realizes who he is, which may or may not be the reason that the Misfit has his men lead the family members, in some kind of bastardization of the biblical story of Noah, out to the woods to be shot. Meanwhile, the Misfit expounds his philosophy to the grandmother.

Even as James and I were starting to talk about the story, its plot and characters, its setting and subtext, I was wondering how close this story may have been hitting home for him. There is a man ordering the deaths of this family. I wondered, while reading this story alone in his cell at night, squeezed between the brick of tight walls and the cold linoleum floor, if James saw any parallels to his own story. Did he hear Robert telling him to kill Susanne Zantop when the Misfit told his men to murder the family? Did he hear the thunk of the knife? Did he see her expression when he cut her throat as he read O’Connor’s story? Or was it just a story to him? Did he not see the connection to himself and what he did? It occurred to me then that maybe this was not the best story to have this particular set of students read. It also occurred to me that it could have been the best story to have them read.

The grandmother, still thinking only about herself, tells the Misfit that Jesus wouldn’t want him to shoot an old lady. As gunshots ring out in the woods, the Misfit says that Jesus confused everything by raising the dead.

“He shouldn’t have done it,” the Misfit says. “He thown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but thow away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can — by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him.”

Then the grandmother has some kind of revelation. As O’Connor writes, “The grandmother’s head cleared for an instant. She saw the man’s face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, ‘Why you’re one of my babies.’” She reaches out to him and touches him on the shoulder. Then he shoots her three times in the chest, killing her.

I knew the story, but I had never slowed down like this and talked to someone about it for an hour. I certainly had never talked about a character who was a murderer with a student who was a murderer. We talked about why the Misfit kills the grandmother when he seemed right on the verge of letting her go.

“He kills her because she touched him,” James said.

“Yeah, that was what he couldn’t take,” I said, agreeing.

“Someone showing love like that.”

“He probably would have let her live if she hadn’t shown that tenderness,” I said.

“But that love messed with how he wanted to see the world,” James added.

“Like when he talked about Jesus coming down and messing the whole thing up.”

I think back now on how we taught each other that story. I see the grandmother’s redemptive moment when she admits, in her way, to having created the world that created the Misfit. “Why you’re one of my babies,” she says, and finally sees within herself all her own hate and meanness and selfishness. She reaches out in love and tenderness, too late to save her family but perhaps just in time to save her soul. And the Misfit is not the same after. He shoots her because he’s terrified of opening himself up to that love, because he is trying to stay mean in a world that has only been mean to him. Now someone has tried to love him, and he kills her for it to maintain his mastery over his own emotions.

We talked about how while O’Connor’s story ends there, the Misfit’s does not. That love messes with the Misfit. He won’t be the same after that touch, those words. The grandmother has infected him, with love or empathy or some kind of confusion about whether being mean is right or wrong. He may never be a good man, but he will never truly be the villain he is trying to play, either. And in that crack of light, maybe someone’s life is spared. In that, maybe that life reaches out to another with tenderness. And then that life does the same. By this the grandmother is not just redeemed but raised. Her touch of tenderness, her moment of honesty and empathy spreads beyond the dust and ditch of a Georgia road. We might have been pushing a little hard at that idea of what happens after, but that’s where O’Connor and James led me that night.

In 2003, the U.S. went to war. “Payback,” we claimed, for 9/11. “Protection,” we claimed, from weapons of mass destruction. Seemed even then that the motivation for the war was “no pleasure but meanness,” to quote the Misfit. Nothing. Anyway, after saccharine choruses of Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to Be an American” and a massive deployment of U.S. military forces, a lot of the National Guard also called up to serve. That meant less staff at the prison. That meant low-priority programs that reformed and educated people who were incarcerated got cut. I was on the campus of NEC when Susan told me my class was over. There were only a couple of weeks left anyway, but it did feel weird to suddenly not have to go back and finish up with the students. I never even got a chance to say goodbye.

Before we knew the semester would be canceled, we had a class in which everyone read stuff they had been working on. They read poems and stories and personal narratives they’d scratched into notebooks or on loose pieces of paper over the term. I was thinking we’d finally hear the end of the story James had been working on, about this guy with an antique decorative spoon collection who was living in his car. The story had been all set up, and I didn’t think it was going to go anywhere. I mean, the writing was good. It was just out there and disconnected from the world. I think that was what was going on with James. He wasn’t connecting with the world. With what he had done. Maybe I should have pushed him to dig into it, but I didn’t know how then. Even now I struggle with how much to walk that line, how to nudge a student into the pressure points of their writing in a way that will help them get better without hurting them in the process.

As for James, I wondered if that was just who he was, that he saw the whole world as some simulation he was living through, and things like morality and goodness were just empty abstractions. He was a nice kid. Even kind. I read in his confession that after what he and Robert did, they read books about soldiers and PTSD and how to cope with the aftermath of killing people, with the guilt. I don’t know what to make of that. Did they feel bad and want to learn how to deal with it? Did they think they should feel bad and so they looked for ways to feign contrition? It was so clinical, such a logical move, that I questioned if there was genuine human emotion behind it. Of course, I’m reading this in the news and the news is shaping how I see it. What did they think about before they did this? Where was their emotional fragility then? I can’t be sure he really felt the gravity of his crime and the lives he destroyed, including his own.

I have no real memory of what the other students read in that last class. It was two decades and a whole hell of a lot of student writing ago, and not much of the work, although sincere, was all that strong. For most of them, it was the first writing class they had ever taken. While I don’t remember James’s exact words, I remember what he shared. It was not the ending of his story about a man with a collection of decorative antique spoons living in a car. Instead, he read a poem he had just written that week. It was about him. It was about love. And sex.

In the poem, he spoke about how he would never be with a woman. Ever. This kid, certainly a virgin when he went to prison at 16, was suddenly looking at what his life was now. What it was going to be for as long as he lived. It was sad, heartbreaking even, if only because it was so maddening. This did not have to happen. He did not have to be here. But he was. For the rest of his life. And he would never know love the way he’d imagined he would. That was gone. Along with the two people he murdered. People who were loved and who are still loved by the family that mourns them. And now James seemed to be seeing it at last. In this little poem, he looked at the reality of what he had taken. Maybe if the class had not been canceled, if the war had not shot down the program, he would have started to really write about the world and his place in it. Maybe he did anyway. But I never saw him again.

It did not end there though, not quite. A few weeks after the program ended abruptly, I got a letter from James. He was sad about the class ending. He sent some revisions and some new work for me to look at. I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I can’t remember if I even read it. But I know I never wrote him back. I can make excuses that the class was over, that I was tired after a long year of itinerant adjunct work, that I was in the middle of a move with my girlfriend who I was just about to propose to. I could rationalize that he had murdered someone and so he didn’t deserve my extra compassion, my extra time. That I had every right to move on and not deal with one more student looking for a little extra advice about their writing. All of that is true. But it’s also bullshit. I didn’t do it because I didn’t want to do the work, and that makes me a bad teacher. I’ve spent the bulk of James’s sentence thinking about this. I let this student down. I didn’t finish the job. I bet he hasn’t thought about it for a second, but I feel like I turned my back on him. I feel like I treated him like the grandmother treated the world in O’Connor’s story.

I’m sure I could have written a letter to him up in Concord at any point since then to say I was sorry. But who would that really be for, me or him? I didn’t do the job I was supposed to do. I was supposed to teach my student, not just about how to read literature or how to write a story or poem. I was supposed to teach him how we are supposed to be there for each other, no matter what we have done. I didn’t do that. I was as selfish as the grandmother the Misfit blew away. But I have no redemptive moment. I didn’t reach out. Worse, I wrote an essay, this essay, that parasites the tragedy of others.

It is April 21, 2024. Three days ago, right after teaching my last class of the day, a group of ninth graders discussing Akira Yoshimura’s Shipwrecks, I got in my car to drive to Saratoga Springs, New York. My daughter was racing the next day in a crew regatta. My mother and her friend were driving up from Lowell, and I was going to meet them for dinner. On the ride, I passed by the exit for Concord. I thought of James. I wondered what he was doing. At a rest stop, I got gas and coffee and I looked him up on my phone, on this ubiquitous technology that did not exist the last time I saw him. What I did not realize was that he was not in Concord on that day. He was at a parole hearing.

There was a clip of the hearing online, and I saw his face. It was plumper than before. He was on the cusp of middle age. He had grown into his body, slim still but fit and tall. My hand shook a bit as I played the clip of his statement. Maybe it was the iced dark roast I had bought. Maybe it was my own self-serving guilt of not writing him back all those years ago. I hit the Play button and heard his voice. The same voice of the kid I taught 20 years ago, if a bit thicker. It was the voice of a kid talking about Flannery O’Connor. It was the voice of a kid reading a poem about a woman he will never get to love. It was the voice that was one of the last the Zantops heard before they were murdered. Someone offscreen asked James to recount what happened that day. He said that they were talking to Half Zantop and when he pulled out his wallet, Robert attacked him. Then Susanne Zantop walked in.

“I restrained her, and then,” James said, his voice low, wavering, “I cut her throat. She fell to the floor.” In his testimony, he apologized for what he did and said he knew that no amount of time could change or alleviate the pain he caused. I guess a few years ago, around 2019, he’d been up for parole. But the daughters of the Zantops had raised opposition. They did not feel that he deserved to be free after all he had taken from them. I can’t imagine them not feeling that way. How do you forgive someone who has taken everything from you in such a cowardly and reproachable act of selfishness and violence? I hope to never have my mercy tested like that. James pulled his parole request in 2019 when he heard about the pain he was causing the Zantops.

James will be 40 soon. A middle-aged man. Just like me. He was a kid then and I was a young teacher. Neither of us knew shit about the world. Now maybe we both know too much. Such is the burden of age. I wonder what he has been doing in there, all these years. I read that he finished his undergraduate degree in creative writing and a graduate degree in nonprofit management. He worked in prison sports programs and helped educate inmates. He organized a job fair for other inmates, underwent mental health counseling, painted murals throughout the prison and worked to bring theater programming to the prison. And he’d moved into traditional housing, usually the first step before parole. Although he had received a life sentence in 2002, a 2012 Supreme Court case made it illegal for minors to be sentenced to life. And thus, the parole hearing.

On Friday, April 18, while I was driving to see my daughter, to have dinner with my mother, James Parker was granted parole. The Associated Press reported that when questioned about how people could feel safe now that he was about to go free, James said, “I’m going to continue living my life the way I lived it in the prison and during this transition. It’s become very important to me to stay connected to family and friends. I look to them for support and advice all the time. And I’ll just keep being the man I’ve been trying to become — trying to become a better man than when I was that kid.”

The Zantop family did not make a formal objection to his release this time. But this must have unearthed so much hurt and trauma to have James back in the world, to have these headlines back in the world. “This is a hard one to make a statement about,” said Veronika Zantop, one of the Zantops’s two daughters, in an email to the AP. “I miss my parents and am deeply sad for everything they — and we — have missed out on. I miss my father’s sense of humor and kindness and my mother’s sharp wit and tenacity in all things.”

Then she finished with an act of grace. A touch of tenderness.

“I wish James Parker and his family the best and hope that they can heal.”

That is a voice reaching out past the horror and offering this man love.

I was a green and clumsy teacher when I worked with James Parker and his classmates. I could not excuse them from what they had done, nor change the place they’d ended up. But maybe a couple of hours a week did throw some light into that dark place. Not because I did anything great as a teacher, but because I showed up and gave a shit about what they wrote and showed them stories and poems that I loved. Maybe I just kicked some coals around to keep a little bit of a fire going, a touch of tenderness we all need sometimes.

James continued studying creative writing. I would like to think that something must’ve clicked during that class. Something he read or wrote made him want to keep going, keep writing. If all I did was care about something he said, if all he did was care about something I said, well, maybe that was enough to turn him from who he might have ended up as into who he could one day be. So much of life is a close call. Maybe by reading about a touch on the shoulder, he didn’t get mean and hard while serving time and fully become the monster he was on the day he killed those people. And maybe feeling my failure to reach out keeps me from getting cocky or patting myself on the back for thinking I know how to do any of this so-called life well.

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Matt W. Miller is the author of Tender the River, winner of the Independent Publishers of New England Book Award, a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Provocateur Award and the Jacar Press Julie Suk Award. Other books include The Wounded for the Water, Club Icarus and Cameo Diner. He lives in New Hampshire with his family.

Julie Benbassat is an award-winning illustrator, painter and animator.