Chapter 39
Instead of the tea she’d planned on, Mary opts for a second glass of wine.
She figures she’s earned it. She cleaned out Owen’s bedroom, made dinner, cleared the dishes, took out the trash, and started a load of laundry.
Quite a productive day for anyone, she thinks, but particularly for her, her beaten-down, worn-thin self.
Hair still damp on the shoulders of her pajamas, she carries her wine to the family room sofa. The house is beginning to take on a desolate sort of feel, rooms gradually emptying of her things, of the possessions that have made up her life.
Her novel is resting on the end table. She picks it up, puts her wine down, then adjusts the heating pad and turns it up to high.
It’s warm in the house—she keeps the thermostat dialed up far higher than she’d like to save money—so she won’t be able to manage the heat for too long.
But for now, she needs it to soothe the pain shooting up her lower back, swirling around her tailbone.
Mary cracks her book and tries to read. From upstairs, she can hear the washing machine whirring. From downstairs, she can hear nothing. The words blur. She reads the same sentence three times.
Mary tosses the book aside.
It’s understandable, she tells herself. This was bound to be a difficult day.
Going through Owen’s things, his clothes, his art, was always going to be upsetting for her.
It was always going to stir up memories, to have them rise around her, suffocating and soft like dough.
But it had to be done. It’s not as though he could do it himself.
Across the room from the sofa where Mary is reclining is a bookshelf.
It belonged to Mary’s mother—she can picture it in the living room of the tiny rancher where she grew up—but it’s still in good shape, staining slightly faded at the corners but wood solid.
She already boxed up most of the books for donation, keeping only a few favorites she might like to reread.
There simply won’t be room for such a collection in the apartment.
But she hasn’t yet touched the bottom shelf.
White albums lie on their sides, Mary’s own writing smeared across the spines, delineating the years that they span.
She has studiously avoided these books for years, avoided them so much that she’s never moved them from the shelf or the room.
“Why not?” she asks herself. She’s already so irrevocably steeped in thoughts of her son. She might as well look through them now. There’s no risk of sending herself into distraction, into sharp and tragic reminiscence. She’s already there.
Mary retrieves the albums, two armloads of them, her back screaming, and sets them onto the coffee table. She adjusts her heating pad again, then takes a shaky breath before, with the most cautious finger, she opens the first book.
Owen. Newborn Owen. Eyes shut and mouth pursed yet slack.
How she always remembers him as a baby, peaceful and golden, the sun itself in her arms. Ed would probably insist that he cried a normal amount, but Mary didn’t think so.
He almost never cried. Things were growing more difficult by then with Ed—his moods, his temper rising from the dark recesses where it had been hiding during the first few years of their relationship.
Mary always had to do everything right, to land herself arrow straight through an ever-moving target.
Perhaps Owen sensed that. He was always exactly what she needed.
The next page, Owen older, tomato sauce smeared across his cheeks and chest, fists full of spaghetti. Owen in one of the brown rubber baby swings at the park, tiny fists gripping rusting chains.
Owen clutching an ice cream, soft serve swirled, nearly as tall as his face, his grin wide.
Owen in the backyard, a baseball glove on his hand, when he still found joy in playing catch, before Ed ruined it.
Owen with a box of crayons, scribbling a knobby red one across the table, which Mary used to cover with butcher paper so that he wouldn’t make a mess, one less thing for Ed to yell about.
Every box of crayons, he always used up the red one first.
Owen on his first day of preschool, backpack stretching down to his knees, smile tentative, nerves flickering in his eyes.
She remembers wanting to gather him up, tuck him into her, and travel back to the time when they were one.
But he was growing up, and she didn’t see, not then, how fortunate they both were for that.
Mary closes the album, reaches for the next.
She always thought that going through these pictures would defeat her. That it would make her sob and curl into herself. And Mary does cry. Of course she does. But—and she has to lift her fingers to her face, splay them across her cheeks to confirm—she also smiles.
Page after page, she turns, cheeks tugging. Tears stream, and she wipes them before they drop onto the plasticky pages. Her sweet boy, captured here. Only the best of memories maintained, pieces of a tragic life that appears, based on these alone, so joyous, so peaceful.
Then she nears the middle of the fifth book. Owen’s fifteenth birthday, sitting behind an ice cream cake she’d made herself, tongue out because he’d refused to smile. Owen at the head of a hiking trail in Patapsco Valley State Park. That’s where the pictures stop.
She remembers going on that hike with him.
Saturday morning, the weekend before everything happened.
There was a sudden, drenching rain shower when they were almost back to the car, and they ran the rest of the way to the parking lot, Owen slowing his pace to match his mother’s.
Sodden and laughing, they’d slammed the car doors.
“Well, if only we’d hiked a little faster,” Mary said. “We could’ve avoided that.”
On the way home, they stopped for sodas, burgers, and fries, clothes still damp, skin itching, but Mary wasn’t ready for the outing to end, clinging to every last moment with her son. As though she knew that in just a few days, everything would change.