Chapter 19
It was such a shocking thing for Hawthorne Heights, a quiet neighborhood, a peaceful neighborhood, a family neighborhood.
Middle class back then, upper-middle now, two decades later.
Home prices have soared and school ratings have improved.
It never was the sort of place where a murder might happen.
But domestic disputes, as people refer to them, really do happen everywhere. Mary read something in the news recently, a father shooting his two teenage children and then himself in a town just ten miles away.
People hear the news of such tragedies, and they feel the cool plunge of horror.
How awful. How sad. But such things make a strange sort of sense.
The targeted nature of the deaths makes them somehow less horrible, creates the illusion of distance when there’s truly very little of it.
It’s startlingly easy for people to move on, to still consider Hawthorne Heights a safe and desirable place to live.
Even in this room—this young boy’s room, the bedroom of her sweet boy—Mary can feel the terror of that night.
She can taste it like something sour and rotten coating her tongue.
While outside, in the other brick-front colonials, up and down this tree-lined street, boring and pleasant life moves on.
Parents register their children for activities and sports for the fall.
People log on to virtual meetings. They take chicken out of the freezer to thaw.
They water their flowers and pull weeds.
They wave to each other while they retrieve their mail, their thoughts so far from that blood-soaked night twenty years ago, in this particular house, when Mary’s life shattered.
“That’s right,” Mary says to herself as she settles onto the thinning carpet beside Owen’s bed. She reaches beneath it to remove the plastic bin—long and low, with small gray wheels. She slides it out and opens the lid.
This was where she stored his art.
This isn’t productive. It’s not why she’s here. But Mary can’t stop herself. Not now. She removes paper after paper. She spreads them out across the floor.
Owen favored an abstract style. Ed never understood his work.
Mary studies it now, searching for some hint at the violence that was lurking inside her sweet golden boy.
But she sees nothing. The art is gorgeous—colorful and urgent and gripping.
She wonders whether everyone would think so.
Art is subjective, yes, but some garners mass appeal.
Would Owen’s? Or is Mary the only one who can see its beauty, who could see Owen’s potential?
Was she always blinded by her motherly love?
Was the art really just scribbles and chaos, the work of a child avoidant of physical activity and useful subjects that might one day lead to boring and comfortable financial stability?
She inspects each piece, trying to remember when he did them.
Her favorite was completed shortly before that night.
It’s on a thin, hard canvas. He’d painted it black, then layered colors over it, striking fluorescent slashes.
Mary runs her fingers along the bottom of the painting where Owen had painted his initials: OLI.
His art was his escape. It wasn’t enough.
She stacks everything back up, fits it tidily into the plastic bin. She’ll keep this, too. It will come to the new apartment. Perhaps she’ll hang her favorite pieces on the walls. Why hadn’t she done that here, she wonders? Why had she kept it hidden away, beneath his bed?
Ed’s influence, she assumes. Silent and unrelenting even now, all these years later.
She’d met Ed when she was sixteen years old, and her life became a riddle. Anticipating his moods, his irritations. At first, it was thrilling and endearing. It was brutally dysfunctional.
He was five years older, and she’d tumbled into his life still a girl. But he was a man. He had a job, possessed the promise of a new life; someone who could pull her out of girlhood, which she was in such a rush to leave.
She was a waitress at the local diner, and he was a regular who paid for his meals with cash he seemed to unthinkingly unfold from a thick black wallet.
He always dined alone. He was handsome and alarmingly tall, and the other girls whispered about him in the kitchen, argued over who could cover his table.
They all wanted him to choose them, and he chose Mary.
When his company transferred him down to the Maryland office, Mary was eighteen, applying for college.
She went with him. She took a gap year and settled into domestic life in a two-bedroom rancher.
She painted the front door herself, daffodil yellow.
She found a new waitressing job and went to college at night.
Ed helped her pay her tuition. Eventually, they traded up to a bigger house, then an even bigger one, the one in Hawthorne Heights.
Mary became pregnant, and they both followed along the tracks that stretched ahead of them, seemingly predestined.
Her life with Ed had afforded Mary some of the highest of highs, but as the years passed, those became fewer and fewer, the lows spreading, dampening, like sea foam soaking into the sand.
What had once felt like intensity and love was abuse, and by the time she saw that, it was far too late. She had Owen, and from the moment he entered the world, everything she did was for him. She tried her best.
Mary sits there on the floor a moment longer, steeling herself to stand.
After so many years working as a teacher, spending hours on her feet, these days she spends too much time sitting.
She’s traveled from one discomfort to another.
Besides, her joints are aging, cartilage thinning.
She doesn’t take care of herself the way she should.
She reaches for the edge of the bed, preparing to use it to pull herself upward.
Then she freezes. There’s a gentle creaking from downstairs.
She recognizes it, knows the exact board in the kitchen that always makes that sound.
He knows it, too, and he’s usually sure to avoid it.
He must think she’s not home. But he’s wrong.
He does this on occasion, when she’s been silent and still long enough.
Sometimes, when he thinks she’s out, he ventures up from the basement.
He’ll look through the kitchen cabinets and the pantry.
He’ll peruse the fridge. She’ll find a few things missing when she goes back downstairs or returns home.
He’ll help himself to what he wants and needs. She doesn’t mind.
Mary thinks about going downstairs—moving as quickly as she can and catching him. But it would hurt to see him. It wouldn’t be like she imagines it might be.
So she sits on the floor and waits. Not until she hears the squeal of the basement door’s hinges, as it’s pulled firmly closed, does Mary move again.