the highest overdose rates in the nation. But I wasn’t driving to West Virginia for epidemiological insights or even a narrative of redemption from Jones.
I’d been dispatched to prison by a specific grieving mother, clutching a portrait of her nineteen-year-old son. I wanted to understand the death of Jesse Bolstridge, a robust high school football player barely old enough to grow a patchy beard on his chin.
What exactly, his mother wanted to know, had led to the death of her only son?
I’d been trying to address that same question for more than five years, in one form or another, for several mothers I knew. But now I had someone I could ask.
*
Three months before visiting Jones, in the spring of 2016, Kristi Fernandez and I stood next to Jesse’s grave on a rolling hillside in Strasburg, Virginia, in the shadow of Signal Knob. She’d asked me to meet her at one of her regular cemetery stops, on her way home from work, so I could see how she’d positioned his marker, just so, at the edge of the graveyard.
It was possible to stand at Jesse’s headstone—emblazoned with the foot-high number 55, in the same font as the lettering on his Strasburg Rams varsity jersey—and look down on the stadium where he had once summoned the crowd to its feet simply by running onto the field and pumping his arms.
In a small town where football is as central to identity as the nearby Civil War battlefields dotting the foothills of the Blue Ridge, Jesse loved nothing more than making the hometown crowd roar.
He had always craved movement, the choke on his internal engine revving long after his peers had mastered their own. As a toddler, he staunchly refused to nap, succumbing to sleep on the floor midplay, an action figure in one hand and a toy car in the other. This restlessness was part of the epidemic’s story, too, I would later learn. So were the drugs Jesse’s high school buddies pilfered from their parents’ and grandparents’ medicine cabinets—the kind of leftovers that pile up after knee-replacement surgery or a blown back.
Jesse had been a ladies’ man, the boy next door, a jokester who began most of his sentences with the word “Dude.” When he left his house on foot, the neighbors did a double take, marveling at the trail of cats shadowing him as he walked.
Kristi pointed out the cat’s paw she had engraved at the base of Jesse’s headstone, right next to the phrase miss you more, a family shorthand they had the habit of using whenever they talked by phone.
“I miss you,” she’d say.
“Miss you more,” he’d tell her.
“Miss you more,” she’d answer. And on and on.
Kristi takes pride in the way the family maintains Jesse’s grave, switching out the holiday decorations, adding kitschy trinkets, wiping away the rain-splashed mud. “It’s the brightest one here,” his younger twin sisters like to say as they sweep away the errant grass clippings.
When I pulled into the cemetery for our first meeting, Kristi had taken it as an omen that my license plate included Jesse’s number, 55. She’s always looking for signs from Jesse—a glint of sun shining through the clouds, a Mother’s Day brunch receipt for $64.55. To her, my license plate number meant our meeting was Jesse-sanctioned and Jesse-approved.
Kristi used to think that maintaining Jesse’s grave was “the last thing we can do for him,” she told me, choking back tears. But right now she’s obsessed with the story of her son’s swift descent into addiction—the missing details that might explain how Jesse went from being a high school football hunk and burly construction worker to a heroin-overdose statistic, slumped on someone else’s bathroom floor. If she understood the progression of his addiction better, she reasons, maybe she could help other parents protect their kids from stumbling down that same path.
“I just want to be able to say, ‘This is what happened to Jesse,’ so I can be educated, so I can help others,” Kristi says. “But in my mind, the story doesn’t add up, and it drives me crazy.”
Maybe a mother’s questions about a child’s death can never be totally answered, and yet Kristi’s pain sits there between us, no less urgent today than it felt on the day he died. To comprehend how she was left with these questions—and how our country came to this moment—I needed to widen the scope of my investigation both in geography and in time. I would fold in questions from other