Chapter 57
Mary hasn’t seen her son since the day she picked him up from prison. That was three years ago. And it was the last day she spoke to him.
Rather, it was the last day he spoke to her. As she told the detectives, she continued to try for months after he got home.
“I can’t talk about any of it,” Owen told her once he was buckled into the front passenger seat of her aging Civic and the distance between him and the prison where he’d been for the past fifteen years slowly grew. “I’ll stay in the basement. I need to be alone.”
The comfort she’d felt because he was out of there, that detention center, had turned cooler as he’d failed to reply to her follow-up questions: What do you mean, you’ll stay in the basement? Do you want to move a bed down there? How will you eat?
She didn’t need his answers to those questions. But she did need something. His touch. His voice. Evidence that he was okay.
He wasn’t okay. But they figured it out.
At first, Mary would knock on the basement door, then call down to her son.
She went down to tell him about doctor’s appointments she’d scheduled.
On several occasions, she’d grown frustrated.
She’d lost her temper and shouted at him.
Other times, she cried. It didn’t matter what she did; Owen ignored her.
Or he shut himself in the bathroom and stayed there until she was gone.
They’d fallen into a bizarre and dysfunctional rhythm.
Mary made meals for him and bought him the things he would need, leaving them on the stairs.
She bought sketchbooks and colored pencils, drawing charcoal and watercolors with soft bristled brushes.
She assumes he’s been using these things, but she hasn’t had the opportunity to see anything he’s created.
A rhythm. Silent and strange, but Mary hoped that she was building trust with her son, that he would speak to her again soon.
But money was growing tight. The house needed a new roof.
The furnace and air-conditioning systems were nearing the end of their life expectancies.
The hot-water heater acted up sometimes.
Ed’s savings were gone. Mary’s pension from her years working as a public-school teacher wasn’t enough to pay their living expenses and maintain the house.
Mary knew she’d allowed things to fall into disrepair.
She knew the gardens were overgrown, the branches of the cherry tree in the front yard bowed low to graze the ground, the shutters needed painting.
The neighbors didn’t like the disarray. They didn’t like her. It was time to go.
She wrote a note to Owen explaining that she had to sell the house.
She’d found an apartment they could rent, which would be easier.
No upkeep, the landlord would take care of everything.
It had a balcony and two bedrooms. He would come with her, of course.
She would be cleaning out the house, getting it ready for photos and listing.
She would leave the basement for last. They could move into the apartment before the house went on the market so that they didn’t have to deal with people coming in.
She left the note on the top step with Owen’s dinner one night. In the morning, his empty plate was there, and the note was gone. But she never got a reply.
Now her son is sitting at the elderly desk across the room. The screen of the tired, old desktop computer is alight. Mary had moved it down here when it became too slow, and she bought herself a new laptop from Costco. Perhaps Owen had found a way to clean up the computer, to suit his needs.
“I’m sorry, Owen,” Mary says again, voice wobbling.
The room smells musty. It needs to be dusted and vacuumed. Mary wonders whether Owen has been cleaning the bathroom with the spray and brush she left for him.
Over the years, the basement became a place for their rejected furniture and things.
They filled it slowly, as Ed approved replacements in the other parts of the house.
The green leather sectional, worn in places, stretches across the room like a parenthesis, several rumpled pillows and blankets on top.
Across from the sofa is a television that probably doesn’t work, and the wheeled office chair, cracked black leather, is pressed against the desk.
That is where her son sits, back still to her and tight with tension.
His hair is long, gathered into a bun at the base of his skull. Her heart aches.
“There are two detectives here,” Mary continues. “They need to speak to you.”
Owen turns.
Her sweet boy. Pure gold. She hasn’t seen his face in 1,092 days.
His skin is more lined than she’d remembered, around his eyes, across his forehead, and he has a dark beard. Razors. She’s forgotten to buy him razors. He must be trimming it with something he found, because it’s not long enough that he’s been growing it out for years.
She feels tears coursing down her cheeks. “I’m sorry,” she tells him again as she brushes them away.
He doesn’t reply.
“They want to speak to you. A man across the street, he was stabbed in his backyard last night.” She studies Owen’s face for something—anything—but he’s looking at his lap.
Then he nods once. He knows. He must have heard the vehicles and commotion, too. He probably found the same article she did. Mary tells herself that must be it. That is how he knows. That’s all.
“I have to let them come down,” she says. “I don’t have a choice.”
She sounds defensive. Owen’s gaze remains fixed on his thighs. His jeans are worn at the knees, and they seem too tight.
“I’ll get them,” she continues. “Sorry.” She’s saying it too much, but she can’t say it enough.
She should have left Ed. She thought staying was safer for Owen.
She thought she could protect him that way.
If she’d left, her son might have a job and a life.
He might be married. Maybe he would even be a father himself, one who was nothing like Ed.
She would see him at Christmas and for Mother’s Day, the days other women saw their adult sons.
When she held him, she would feel so small and she would remember when he fit perfectly into the crook of her arm.
She would remember the way his scalp smelled and the petal softness of the backs of his hands.
How she would stroke the pad of fat there as he drifted off, the quiet stillness in the perfection of his face as sleep took hold.
Instead, this.
Mary turns and goes back upstairs. The detectives are standing near the open doorway. They were listening. Of course they were listening. Perkins’s arms are crossed, and Scott is studying something on the screen of her cell phone.
“Go ahead,” Mary says icily. She wants it to be clear that her permission is not quite the same as consent.
Scott nods and slides her phone into the pocket of her blazer, which gapes open enough that Mary can see the gun on her belt. They disappear through the door, down the stairs.
The entire time the detectives are in the basement with her son, Mary paces.
She knows they can hear her footsteps, the creak of the floors.
She knows that she’s revealing her nerves to them, but she can’t stop moving.
She listens to the hum of their voices, and she strains for the sound of her son’s, but she doesn’t hear him.
It’s only ten minutes later, and their footsteps are heavy on the stairs again. Heavy with defeat and irritation.
“He will have to talk to us,” Perkins says as he steps into the kitchen, eyes meeting Mary’s, anger glaring.
Mary simply shrugs. She isn’t sure what this man wants her to do. If she could get her son to speak, she would. Doesn’t he understand that?
“We can bring him into the station,” Perkins continues. “Put him in an interview room. Maybe the same one that they used the night he stabbed his dad.”
Detective Scott places a palm on her partner’s back.
“We’ll be back,” she tells Mary. She is calmer, more controlled, and this neatness, this precision and patience, worries Mary more than Perkins’s palpable frustration.
The detectives leave. For now. But they will be back, just as they said. Although they didn’t say when. This, Mary understands, was by design. They don’t want her to know when, only that she should expect them, and that she should be scared.