Chapter 62
Mary can only assume that the police have become focused elsewhere. She’s not heard from them since Sunday.
It should be a relief, although there remains a sense of peril in the air within her house.
She tries to ignore it, to assure herself that if her boy has done nothing wrong, she has nothing to worry about, and that all she can do is focus on preparing the house for the sale and the move, for their fresh start, for their new life together, in a place where her son will sit at the same table while he eats the meals she makes and permit her a hug at bedtime, a kiss on the cheek before she leaves the house.
She wishes she were naive enough to believe any of this in her core.
Her new knives are working out nicely. She has just finished cleaning out the family room, putting books and board games and DVDs no one has used for years into boxes, and is using the small paring knife to hull strawberries, preparing for a midmorning snack, when her doorbell rings.
She wonders whether Owen can hear it. She wonders whether he, like her, knows immediately who it is, feeling the peril grow heavier and more odorous, like smoke thickening.
“Come in,” she wants to call merrily, welcoming, throwing them off guard, although she knows she bolted her front door.
She’s been trying to keep everything locked since Saturday night.
She’s been too lax with that in the past, but she’d always felt safe here, ever since Ed died.
She had always assumed that her husband’s death would be the only crime ever committed here on this quiet street.
Mary goes to the door and finds that it’s just Detective Scott this time.
“Just a quick word, please,” Scott says. “With you.”
This relaxes Mary slightly, and she invites the detective inside.
“Coffee?” Mary asks. “It’s still warm.”
“Why not?” Scott settles herself at the kitchen table, in the same spot where she’d sat before, without waiting to be invited.
“Where’s your partner?” Mary asks conversationally as she pours a cup for Scott. She pours a half cup for herself, too, even though she’s had enough. She uses her favorite mug, one Owen painted for her when he was little, still unwashed from this morning, then joins Scott at the table.
“Chasing down other leads,” Scott says flatly. Mary allows this to lift her slightly—that Owen is not their only interest. Although, of course, Scott could be lying.
“So,” Scott continues, “we’ve arranged for an interview between your son and a psychiatrist for Thursday morning. Ten o’ clock, at the station. Will you bring him?”
Mary takes a sip of the coffee, which is actually no longer warm, but she’s only stalling. “Do I have a choice?” she asks.
“Of course,” Scott replies, in a way that very much conveys What do you think?
“Owen won’t talk to a psychiatrist. He won’t say anything. It’s a waste of time.”
Scott shrugs and looks around the room.
“He doesn’t trust police people. He won’t speak to you or to a police psychiatrist. Not after everything he’s been through. Who could blame him?”
Scott’s eyes return to Mary with an abruptness that makes her startle. “Does he not trust you, Mrs. Irvin? It’s my understanding he doesn’t speak to you, either.”
Mary swallows. “He’s in pain.” She’s irritated now.
Irritated that she invited Scott inside.
Irritated that she offered her coffee, and in the Bethany Beach mug.
She and Ed went there with Owen, when Owen was ten or so.
One of the only family vacations they ever took.
Mary remembers standing at the water’s edge, clapping, watching Owen boogie board, crashing into the waves again and again.
Ed sat in a folding beach chair behind them, cap low on his head, hands folded across his belly, and napped, sleeping off his hangovers.
“It’s interesting, Mrs. Irvin, the way you seem to be in denial, even after all these years, about what your son did.” Scott doesn’t sound accusatory when she says this. Merely interested, perhaps a touch bewildered.
“Denial,” Mary repeats. “I don’t think so.”
“He killed your husband. He stabbed him six times.”
“My husband could have killed me that night, Detective. Owen saw that. He did it to protect me.”
“Your husband slapped you, isn’t that right, Mrs. Irvin? What Owen did, it wasn’t self-defense or defense of another. Not in the eyes of the law. He did not use the least force necessary. He murdered him.” Scott’s tone is even, and her eyes bore into Mary’s deep-brown pools that look bottomless.
“He was strangling me. That’s why Owen stabbed him.”
There’s a pause. “That’s what you told the police, after they didn’t accept your confession, wasn’t it? But there was no evidence of that. There was no physical evidence to support the claim that he strangled you.”
Mary feels her fingertips reaching for her throat, grazing the skin there, which has become so thin. It’s been so many years. The line between what really happened that night and what Mary believes has blurred.
She shakes her head. “It wasn’t just a single incident of violence.
” She squeezes her eyes closed, trying not to see the images or hear the sounds of that night.
But they rush in. She never has been able to stop them.
Ed’s raised voice. The sting of his palm against her cheek.
Her own words, bold and foolish—This is your fault.
Then his hands around her throat, the silence that followed.
The rush of footsteps—Owen’s. Although she couldn’t make a sound, couldn’t take a breath, he knew that she was screaming for help.
He’d hurtled into the room, slid a knife from the block on the counter.
He’d stabbed Ed twice in the upper back before Ed could even react.
He’d been drinking, and his agility was inhibited, not that he was or ever had been an agile man.
“My husband, Owen’s dad—it wasn’t like he was a good person, that it came out of nowhere. He’d made things miserable for us for years. Owen snapped. It just as easily could have been me who’d done it.”
“Is that why you confessed to the crime?” asks Scott. “Even though your husband’s blood was all over your son. His prints were all over the knife. Yet when the officers arrived on the scene, you told them it was you who’d stabbed him.”
Mary shrugs. She had, and her greatest regret is that they didn’t believe her. No. Her greatest regret is that she didn’t stab Ed. Before her son did, or after. The blood, it should have been on her hands as well.
She regrets the fight, too. But that’s disordered thinking, she knows.
It’s the sort of thinking she’d been conditioned into over the years of her relationship with Ed.
It was typical thinking in an abusive relationship, and that’s what her relationship was, although she didn’t realize that until years later.
It wasn’t violent, not until that night.
It was so quietly, so subtly abusive that it was a secret from everyone. Even her.
Until Mary met Greg Behler.
He was a science teacher at the elementary school where Mary taught.
He was three years younger and only two inches taller.
He was wiry and bespectacled, in contrast to Ed’s blond charm, his expansive shoulder span, the way he towered over her.
Greg was divorced but childless. He was kind.
He listened. When Mary spoke, he looked at her, and he laughed as though she was the funniest human in the world.
They never kissed. Mary thought that mattered.
They never kissed, and they certainly never had sex.
Mary had wanted to kiss him. At night, in bed beside Ed, she thought about kissing Greg.
She imagined how different her life could be if she was married to Greg.
She thought about packing up her things and Owen’s, and moving them into Greg’s three-bedroom townhome—which she’d never been to, but he’d described it to her in great detail—and then she’d shove those thoughts away and nudge Ed subtly, trying to get him to stop snoring without waking him.
There was no kiss, but there were letters. Letters that contemplated the things they would do if not for Ed. Letters that Mary did not hide well enough.
What Mary did was have an emotional affair.
That’s what Ed accused her of after he found the letters.
Owen was in his room, presumably asleep.
Mary had been at the school that evening.
She’d stayed late to help clean up after Back to School Night.
Greg had stayed late, too, and as much as Mary was enjoying being with him, the way their words couldn’t stop flowing, the way he smiled shyly despite their closeness, gaze to the floor, she was eager to get home to Owen.
She’d never liked it when Owen and Ed were at the house together without her.
Later, she discovered that Ed had spent the evening sitting in the family room, reading the letters he’d found and drinking beer.
Mary had kept the letters in a shoebox in her classroom.
But she’d had to bring the box home over the summer—she was moving to a new classroom in the fall and didn’t want anyone finding them while school was out.
She was planning to bring the box into her new classroom, but it was only the first week of the new school year, and she hadn’t done it yet.
When Mary got home, blissfully oblivious to what was coming, cheeks still aching, face still flushed—she’d lingered with Greg for too long—Ed was waiting for her in the kitchen. In this very room, where she now sits with the detective. He was angrier than Mary had ever seen him.
He did slap her. Wrapping his hands around her throat, lifting her up into the air, her gasping futilely for a breath—that may not have happened. But when you tell other people and yourself the same thing for so many years, it can become your truth.
“Owen!” she screamed after Ed fell to the floor. She didn’t know how many times Owen had stabbed Ed, only that Ed was no longer trying to get up.
Mary called 9-1-1. “My husband,” she told the operator.
“He’s dying.” Then she rattled off her name and address and listened to the woman’s pleas that she remain on the line, that she provide more details.
She ignored them. She hung up the phone, and they waited for the police to arrive.
She held her son’s hand, sticky with her husband’s blood.
She didn’t gather any towels or press them against Ed’s wounds.
“Your son didn’t stop stabbing him, even after he’d fallen,” Scott continues. “That he went for the knife so immediately, that he didn’t stop—that’s what made the crime so depraved.”
Mary hates that word. They used it at the time—the police, the prosecution, the media.
“Yet you lied for him.”
“You aren’t a mother, are you, Detective?”
Scott does not reply, which Mary takes to mean that she’s right.
“Then I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”
“You can bring him to the station,” Scott says, ignoring Mary. “But you can’t be in the room while he’s speaking with the psychiatrist.”
“Fine,” Mary replies. She doesn’t like it. She’s not even sure Owen will get into the car with her and go to the station. And she’s nearly certain he won’t speak to the psychiatrist. But for now, she’s not sure what else she can do but agree that they’ll try.
She collects their mugs and carries them to the sink—which is rude, perhaps, because Scott may not have finished with hers, but Mary wants her to go now. “Is that all?” Mary asks.
Again, Scott doesn’t reply, and Mary turns, curious about what has distracted the detective.
Her gaze is fixed beside Mary, to her left, to the cutting board resting on the counter, to the pile of strawberries, to the knife flat beside it.
And just behind this array is the recently purchased knife block, glossy chestnut brown, blatantly new and too small for that place on the counter, between the toaster oven and the wire rack into which Mary slides her cutting boards.
She didn’t adjust the spacing of everything to account for it being so much smaller than her previous knife block.
“That’s all,” Scott says. “For now.”
And then she stands up, thanks Mary for the coffee, and goes. Off to tell her partner, Mary suspects, She’s hiding something. She’s got new knives. She lied for her son before, and she’d do it again.
Pointedly, Mary locks the door behind the detective, then returns to her place at the kitchen counter and resumes slicing the strawberries.
Maybe she will prepare a bowl for Owen. He’s always liked them.
She remembers taking him fruit picking when he was a little boy.
Blueberries and strawberries in the summer, apples in the fall.
He always ate more than he put in his basket.
“No,” she’d tell him. “We have to pay for them first.” And he’d grin up at her, face smeared red or purple, and she’d laugh, too full of love to truly be mad.
Ed never went with them. It was always just Mary and her boy.