Chapter 4
Owen was always a quiet boy. Even when he was a newborn, pink and wrinkled with those glassy onyx eyes, he almost never cried.
“He’s such an easy baby,” she would always tell Ed, smiling fondly, and Ed would grunt and turn the page of his newspaper.
She was so hopeful then. He was pure gold, her boy. He’d make them happy. They’d have another one, another easy baby. The children would grow, and their eyes would track her wherever she moved, and Ed would look on, thinking what a good mother she was.
She’s not sure if he ever thought that, and there never were any more babies. Which was for the best because Ed wasn’t a good person. The best thing about him was that Mary loved him, and that was the worst thing about her. The worst thing she’d done.
She was foolish to ever be so hopeful.
And everything that happened after, with Ed and with Owen, certainly wasn’t all Ed’s fault, but it wasn’t hers, either.
Nor was it Owen’s. Her quiet boy, pure gold.
Mary’s knees creak like the stairs as she ascends. She moves past the pictures that hang on the wall in their thick wooden frames: gray photos of her parents, photos of Owen when he was a baby and then a little boy. There are no pictures of Ed.
She clutches a roll of trash bags as she steps into the bedroom at the end of the hall—the bedroom she never goes into.
It’s preserved: the bedroom of a fifteen-year-old boy, which is how old Owen was when he last slept here.
But now she needs to sell the house, so everything must go. She doesn’t want to lose it, but money has become tighter than ever, and the house is the most valuable asset she has. She grabs at her throat as though that might help her breathe, because she suddenly can’t breathe at all.
She crosses the room and sinks onto the bed, and that creaks, too.
The comforter is navy and covered in a fine layer of dust. Her eyes flick around her: To the wallpaper border of baseballs, gloves, and bats she installed herself when Owen was three.
To the oak bookshelf stacked with fantasy and science fiction novels she used to vow to read, too, so that she’d have something to discuss with her son.
To the closet door, which is closed but still holds T-shirts and jeans and the black suit Owen wore when he was twelve and Mary’s parents died four months apart.
Mary unfurls a trash bag from the roll, but she goes no further than that. She’s frozen, still sitting on the bed where her son slept for nearly a decade, white plastic dangling from her fingers.
This will, she understands, be even more difficult than she thought.