Chapter 13
Finished with the dresser, the closet with its accordion doors, Mary turns to Owen’s desk.
She has no idea what to do with his computer.
She’s not even sure it works. It’s not been turned on for nearly twenty years.
But she doesn’t try, doesn’t press her finger to the power button or wait for that familiar sigh as the fan whirs to life.
That would feel like too much of an intrusion, which doesn’t exactly make sense, considering what she’s doing to Owen’s room and to his things.
But the computer was always Owen’s alone, a gift for his tenth birthday.
Ed had reluctantly agreed to the gift. “Hopefully, he’ll get into coding.”
“Yes,” said Mary, but she didn’t care. She just wanted her boy to be happy, and the things that made him happiest were the games he played on that computer and his art.
Mary sits on the floor, knees bent, legs tucked to the side.
She carefully unplugs every cord from the power strip, lets the wires dangle.
That’s as far as she goes. She’ll have to research what she can do with old electronics, but she has a feeling she’ll simply put the machine into a box and seal it, bring it to the new apartment.
She’ll put it in a closet and never use it, and one day she’ll die, and it will no longer be her responsibility.
In the top drawer, Mary finds exactly the sorts of things one would expect to find in the top drawer of a desk: paper clips, pencils, binder clips, index cards, pens, and permanent markers.
Things Owen would have used for his schoolwork.
He always did his homework at this desk.
Every day after school, he was here. She never had to ask him.
When he was older, and his school let out before the elementary school where she taught, she’d head upstairs to find him sitting in the black office chair, faux-leather seat worn.
It groaned when he swiveled it side to side, and the height was once adjustable, but it would only lock in the lowest or highest settings.
Ed had brought the chair home from his office one day and given it to Owen, and the gesture nearly made Mary cry.
It was one of so few kindnesses he ever showed their son.
After she returned from work, Mary would always find Owen right here, head tipped down as he wrote in a spiral notebook, a browning apple core resting on a plate beside him.
She’d kiss the top of his head, and his hair always smelled like sweat and freshly cut grass because he was the sort of boy who’d spend his lunch break at school lying on the ground, staring up at the clouds.
If it rained or was too cold, he’d go to the art room.
He never had enough friends, just a handful of boys he was friendly with, but he seemed to be excluded from after-school and weekend plans.
Mary opens the drawers at the side of the desk.
One of the pulls is missing, another is loose.
She finds empty pencil cases, scrap paper, binders, and spiral notebooks from his last year in school.
She finds his colored pencils, the set she bought him several months before that night.
She was the one who’d put the set in the drawer.
She remembers in the weeks after, she’d come into his room.
The set was resting on top of his desk then, with an open sketchbook.
That’s all she finds there, in the desk. It’s almost nothing. Not enough to make him feel real, to conjure his smell and the feel of his skin beneath hers. She doesn’t have nearly enough memories of him. She was cheated out of so much. It makes her want to scream.
After a few weeks, she stopped coming into his room.
Stopped trailing her hands along the colored pencils, turning the pages of his sketchbooks, pressing her cheek into his pillow.
These things only made her feel worse. Everything she had with Owen only made her think of everything she didn’t have.
All the things they’d missed. So she shut the door and told herself, firmly, No.
No more. The pain was unimaginable either way.
And she never did open the door again. Until today.
The rush of water through pipes pulls Mary from the depths of her fruitless thoughts. The house is aging, and it seems like with each year that passes, the floorboards creak more, the pipes become louder. This time, it’s a gentle stream, telltale and brief.
She knows that two floors below her, in the basement, a toilet has flushed.