The Fantasy of Escape and a Fresh Start

The Fantasy of Escape and a Fresh Start is the Barbers’ recurring attempt to imagine that geography, travel, or a new life could loosen the grip of the murder case. Its meaning shifts with their circumstances: Jacob’s joking speculation about fleeing to Buenos Aires gives way to the family’s serious post-trial wish to leave Newton, then to a vacation that briefly makes escape feel real. The fantasy offers relief, but does not erase the history from which the family wants to get away.

Jacob’s imagined escape

While Jacob is awaiting the next day in court, his father asks why he had considered taking off. Jacob answers in terms of what would happen to his parents: they would lose their money, and the house might be taken away. The exchange makes his imagined flight less a solitary adventure than a fear of abandoning Laurie and Andrew to the consequences of his case.

When Laurie comes to the bedroom doorway, Jacob names Buenos Aires as his destination. He has little basis for the choice beyond thinking it sounds cool; Andrew points out that it is in Argentina and suggests he research before leaving. Jacob also wonders whether there is an extradition treaty. The practical questions puncture the glamour of escape, revealing that even his fantasy of flight is shadowed by the legal process he hopes to outrun.

Asked what he might do after school, Jacob says perhaps he will become a lawyer like Andrew. Andrew counters that a fugitive would need to keep a low profile. Laurie answers with a deliberately expansive vision of Jacob’s future: a long, happy life in Argentina, a wife who dances the tango, children and grandchildren, and a future in which he brings happiness to others. Her imagined future reverses the public story that has reduced Jacob to suspicion and stigma. Yet Jacob closes his eyes and says he does not know if he can go to court tomorrow; he is tired of enduring the case, not simply eager to travel.

A family unable to return to normal

After Jacob’s release, the family does not recover its former life. Andrew describes them as having forgotten what normal was. They settle into a narrow routine, avoiding restaurants and other public places where they feel watched. Andrew takes over grocery shopping because Laurie will not risk meeting the Rifkins again, and even ordinary errands carry the weight of the case. The family goes to midweek movies, slips in as the lights go down, exercises indoors, and spends long stretches at home. Their guarded routine feels wonderful because they are free, or something like it, but its very precautions show how little freedom has restored.

The idea of moving grows out of that mismatch between legal release and social acceptance. The Barbers consider Florida, California, Wyoming, and other places where people might reinvent themselves. Andrew becomes preoccupied for a time with Bisbee, Arizona, which he has heard is a place where it is easy to get lost and stay lost. Leaving the country also has an appeal. These possibilities turn relocation into a shared, extended discussion rather than a settled plan.

Laurie doubts that moving could outrun the publicity surrounding the case, and says that her whole life is in Boston. Andrew, by contrast, is eager to go elsewhere: he does not feel tied to a place, and thinks of home as wherever Laurie is. His wish to move therefore carries both a practical hope of escaping public attention and a personal willingness to let place follow the family. He cannot persuade Laurie to make much headway toward leaving.

The stigma that follows them

In Newton, the end of the trial does not produce a common verdict of uncomplicated innocence. Neighbors may believe Jacob did not murder Ben Rifkin while remaining disturbed by what they have heard: Jacob’s knife, his violent fantasies, and his family history. Some find the abrupt end of the trial suspicious. Even people who are kind do not necessarily want Jacob in their children’s lives; the possibility of being wrong, or of being associated with him, weighs more heavily than confidence in his innocence.

That response makes Jacob a pariah whether or not he is guilty. The family does not dare send him back to school in Newton, so they rehire Mrs. McGowan, the home tutor employed after his indictment and suspension. She returns each morning at nine to teach him at the kitchen table, the only regular visitor to a household otherwise kept largely apart from the town. The family’s wish to start over is not a response to a merely abstract discomfort: Jacob’s continued presence in Newton shapes where he can go to school and who is willing to see him.

Vacation as a temporary new beginning

As the family tries to revive its household life, Laurie proposes a vacation like the ones they used to take. Andrew and Jacob respond with immediate excitement; simply discussing the idea makes them giddy. Their choice that night is Waves, a resort in Jamaica none of them has visited or even heard of. They select it on the basis of its own website, whose extravagantly perfected images look so fraudulent that the family cannot resist them.

The resort’s fantasy landscape is part of its appeal: pools, fountains, swim-up bars, a horseshoe-shaped beach, and a small cay appear to promise an enclosed world away from ordinary reality. The family does not want a destination that would make them think about history or the real world. At Waves, they imagine, thought itself might not last long enough to spoil the fun. Escape is thus not simply a change of address; it is the hope of entering a place where attention can be redirected from the case and from the selves the case has made them inhabit.

The escape begins before they arrive. Booking a long, two-week stay lifts their spirits; the plane’s departure from Boston lifts them further; and stepping into the warm tropical air at Montego Bay makes them feel, to their surprise, happy. Jacob grins, Laurie holds Andrew’s hand, and the family calls the place paradise. Andrew acknowledges that their troubles have not become less real, but resists treating their happiness as false on that account: they have earned a vacation. The feeling of being transported is emotional as well as physical, a temporary experience of leaving their old selves behind.

The limits of starting over

The resort’s manufactured perfection and the family’s awareness of its falseness coexist. The website’s imagery is so obviously fabricated that it becomes irresistible, while the family knowingly accepts the performance of paradise. Their desire is not for an authentic new life so much as respite from having to think. The vacation works precisely because it suspends, rather than resolves, the problems that make escape attractive.

That distinction connects the trip to the earlier Buenos Aires fantasy and to Andrew’s search for a place where the family might disappear. Each version promises a future beyond the case; none establishes that the past can be left behind. The siren heard in the night before the family learns that everything has changed gives the notion of departure an ominous double meaning: Andrew ends that account with the words, “We were already in Argentina.” The phrase transforms the imagined destination into a threshold reached without the family’s knowledge, while keeping its implications unresolved. Across these episodes, escape offers a vivid counter-image to public suspicion and private exhaustion, but the hope of beginning again remains inseparable from the history the Barbers want to outrun.