Chapter 8
She starts with the clothes.
Mary slides a hand into the trash bag, separating the clingy plastic.
She tells herself not to look at the clothing.
Don’t even consider it. Everything must go.
She’ll donate it all. Owen always wore basic, timeless clothes.
He was a peaceful boy, and he wasn’t rough on his things.
No smears of mud or tears in the knees of his pants.
No yellow stains under the arms of his shirts.
The clothes are old but in decent shape.
Another boy could wear them. All Mary needs to do is grab them from the drawers, tug them from the hangers, and shove them into the bags. She doesn’t even need to look at them.
She opens the top dresser drawer. Socks, which makes things easy. Who ever gets nostalgic over socks?
She does. She did. She can remember clutching handfuls of his baby socks, white and balled up like used tissues, and holding them to her chest, crying because he was too big to wear them. She thought that was sadness. She had no idea back then how completely her heart would break.
Mary does not let herself do that now. She moves as quickly as she can, dropping handful after handful into the bag. She moves on to the next drawer, then the next. She breathes quickly, heaving, so close to dry sobs, and her shoulders shake with the effort not to cry.
Once the dresser is empty and two trash bags full of clothes rest on the floor beside her feet, she goes to the closet.
She unfurls another bag and begins to pull the clothes from the hangers, ashamed about the roughness with which she’s pushing them into the bag, that they’re not rolled or folded neatly, but this is all she can manage.
Her breathing has evened out, her mind nearly blank, and she’s doing fine.
She’s doing quite well, all things considered.
Until she reaches for the caps on the top shelf of the closet—two Orioles hats, one black and one white, yellowed around the bill—and a piece of paper flutters down with them, lands on the floor, tented and small.
The paper is flimsy and old, and Mary crouches down, knees and hips protesting wildly. She picks it up and stares at the words on the page. It’s her own handwriting, her own words.
Owen,
My love for you is the biggest thing in the world. Never forget that.
Love,
Mommy
And beneath that is a little picture she drew of herself. A stick figure with a lopsided smile, black button eyes, strings of hair that curl under around at the height of her shoulders, the way she used to wear it before it became so sparse and gray.
She remembers writing Owen this note. She wrote many such notes for Owen throughout his childhood, yet this one strikes a particular chord of pain.
It was always a balancing act, being Owen’s mother.
Things would have been so much easier if that had been her only role.
But she was a teacher, too. And she cared about that, about her work.
Not as much as she cared about her son, but she did care.
And she was Ed’s wife. She and Ed had been together since she was sixteen years old.
His temper was fiery and Mary’s loyalty ardent, which ultimately made for a deadly combination.
But for all the years up until that impossibly horrible night, Mary tried to make Ed think she was on his side sometimes.
As a result, there were many times she needed to keep her mouth shut when all she wanted was to defend Owen.
This was for Owen’s sake, she’d tell herself.
It was for his safety. Because there was a line in their family.
It was Ed on one side, and Mary and Owen firmly on the other.
But Ed couldn’t see it that way. She couldn’t let him think that his wife was against him.
Mary runs the pad of an index finger across the faded ink. My love for you is the biggest thing in the world.
When Owen was ten, Ed wanted him to try out for a summer baseball league.
Ed had played baseball all through high school, and Owen was tall and strong.
He was left-handed. He’d make a great pitcher, Ed used to say, and Mary would smile because that was as close as Ed ever came to expressing affection toward their son, even if it was only hypothetical—affection for a person Owen might potentially be, rather than for who he was.
And who he was was an artsy boy, who preferred heading into the backyard with a sketch pad rather than a ball and glove.
But Owen enjoyed the attention from his father, too.
For several months before the tryout, he did go out back with his dad to practice pitching.
Mary would stand at the kitchen sink and look through the window above it.
Occasionally, she’d hear Ed’s voice rising.
A few times, Owen stormed into the house, face streaked with tears, leaving Ed to lean against the siding, smoke a cigarette, and mutter angrily to himself.
But most evenings, things went fine. They’d come inside together, cheeks flushed, hungry for Mary’s cooking.
The morning of the tryout, Mary knew immediately that something was wrong. Owen was slow to rise, and once he finally did, he shut himself in the upstairs bathroom. She lingered in the hall, hearing the toilet flushing, the water running. The sounds ceased; the door remained closed.
Ten minutes before it was time to leave, Ed came upstairs, second cup of coffee in his hand. His mustache was neatly combed, and he was wearing a red cap Mary couldn’t remember seeing before.
“Where is he?” he asked Mary, who was still loitering outside the bathroom, hoping to catch Owen, to have a moment with him, before Ed did.
Mary sighed, tipped her head toward the closed door. She tapped on it gently. “Owen, honey, it’s almost time to go.”
“Come on,” Ed called. “You need to eat before we leave. Something hearty, with protein.”
“I’m not going,” said Owen, words tumbling like they’d been waiting to fall. But only Mary could hear him.
“What?” Ed said. “What did he say?”
There was the tiniest hint of worry in his voice, and for a second, Mary thought it would all be okay.
“I don’t want to play baseball,” Owen said with a boldness that stunned Mary. “I hate it. I don’t want to make the team. I’m not going.”
There was a second of silence. Then, in an eerily calm voice Mary had heard many times before, Ed said, “Come out and tell me to my face.”
If Mary’d had a moment alone with her son, she might have pleaded with him to go to the tryout anyway. Just go and don’t pitch very hard. Then you won’t make the team, and Dad will accept it better than if you don’t even go.
She wasn’t certain that was the truth, but she knew instinctively that refusing to try at all was worse.
“Maybe we should let it go,” said Mary. We. Like she was on his team.
But too late—the bathroom door swung open, and Owen was there. He stared at his father with a defiance only a child would be naive enough to exhibit.
“All those nights practicing?” Ed said. Each word was clipped and controlled. “Hours and hours of time wasted.”
“That was your idea,” said Owen. “Not mine.”
Fortunately, Ed’s coffee wasn’t terribly hot. When he flung the cup at the wall, the liquid arced and splattered, more of it soaking Mary than Owen. The mug hit the hardwoods with a dull thud. It didn’t even break. Mary watched it roll a few feet down the hall.
“What is the point?” Ed said. “What is the point of you? I might as well not even have a son.”
Mary wanted to charge toward him. She wanted to run straight into him and shove him down the stairs. Obviously, years later, she’d wish that she had. That would have been as good a moment as any to end things.
“Oh,” she said automatically, weary and not as surprised as she should have been. She sighed, looking at the coffee soaking her dress and pooling on the floor, as though the mess was the worst thing about what had just happened.
Ed thundered down the hall, into the primary bedroom. The door slammed; the house rattled.
Owen’s eyes met Mary’s briefly, but he said nothing. He knew the routine. He stepped past her, returning to his own bedroom. Mary heard the lock click.
Mary used a spare towel from the linen closet to sop up the coffee. Soon, she’d have to go into the bedroom to talk to Ed. But not yet. He needed some time.
Her tears were hot on her cheeks, and she felt saturated with shame, with sorrow, as though she needed to be wrung out and hung to dry. He deserved better, her boy. Her sweet boy. This was his father. It wasn’t fair.
She found a clean dress hanging in the laundry room, so she put that on and dropped her stained one into the machine.
She went into the kitchen and started a fresh pot of coffee so she could bring a new cup to Ed.
And while it dripped, she thought about leaving him.
About collecting some clothes and her boy and driving away.
But the truth was, she was scared of what Ed might do if she did that.
And wouldn’t Ed be entitled to see his son?
He’d claim he wanted to, if only to spite her, and then she’d be away from her boy every other weekend, or perhaps even more than that.
He’d be with his dad, and Mary wouldn’t be there to protect him.
The carafe was nearly full. While the machine steamed and expelled its last gurgles, Mary slipped a piece of scrap paper and pen from the kitchen drawer where they kept such things, and she wrote her son a note.
She drew a little picture of herself, as she always did when she left a note for him, although she wasn’t sure why and she wasn’t a very good artist.
Her throat felt thick; it wasn’t nearly enough, but she hoped he understood that it was all she could do at that moment.
She carried the paper and a fresh cup of coffee upstairs, and as she passed Owen’s room, she slid the note under the door.
Then she kept walking, down the hall, to her own bedroom, to her husband.
To the man she’d once loved but now despised with a passionate and vehement sort of hatred that could only be love’s successor.
Owen had saved the note. It had meant something to him. She could see him lying in his bed, tracing his fingers over the letters she’d written, finding comfort in them.
Mary folds the paper along the familiar creases, then slides it into the pocket of her pants. She’s not sure what to do with it, just that it doesn’t belong in the trash.