Chapter 66
Mary works in the garage for most of the afternoon. She’s tired and distracted, disinterested in the chore, but she couldn’t continue putting it off.
Owen took the note. She doesn’t know what he did with it, whether he threw it away or simply tucked it into a drawer or pocket.
She just knows that when she opened the door to retrieve his lunch dish, the note was gone.
She paused at the top of the stairs, and he must have heard her there, must have sensed the door ajar. But he said nothing.
She does not want to look through these things, through Christmas decorations, lingering on memories, through things she never used, slow cookers and sleeping bags, through bins of toddler toys she should have donated years ago.
She pushes boxes across the cracking cement floor, organizing them by category—donate or trash.
She will call a junk-removal service next week to haul most of it away because she can’t lift the boxes herself.
Owen could help, theoretically, and she feels an uncommon flash of irritation toward him.
She shouldn’t have to clean up the contents of their lives alone.
He was gone for so long. So often it still feels like he is.
At least he took the note. She hopes that means something.
At six, Mary goes inside to make dinner. She doesn’t have the energy for anything more than a salad and a frozen pizza, although she shouldn’t be eating pizza, age and weight that she is. But Owen always loved pizza. What little boy doesn’t?
Of course, he’s no longer a little boy, and Mary has no idea which foods he loves or which he hates.
She knows so little about her son. No matter what she serves him via the basement stairs, he clears his plate.
There isn’t any gym equipment in the basement, yet she noticed on Sunday the way his shoulders strained at the seams of his shirt.
He must be doing push-ups, using the weight of his own body to grow stronger and bigger even though he’s safe now.
When she picked him up from prison, she’d noticed how much stronger he looked.
She assumed he needed to be, when he was in there, although she tried not to think about why.
Only twenty minutes later, the pizza is ready. She makes a side salad, too, with chopped cucumber and spinach. For posterity and nutrition. She doesn’t feel like eating it.
Mary leaves Owen’s dinner on the stairs.
She stands in the doorway silently, waiting.
She assumes that, again, he can hear her, that he knows she is standing there contemplating the state of things and that they have been largely the same ever since he got home.
That they could eat together, could behave as mother and son again.
That something is happening—another murder, the police circling, the appointment with the psychiatrist, about which Owen doesn’t even know.
That they need to weather this together, with honesty and communication.
How else can she protect him? But Owen doesn’t acknowledge any of this.
There is only stillness and silence. He does not come. Mary closes the door.
She almost never watches television, but tonight she turns it on. She sits on the sofa to eat and finds herself absorbed in a reality show she’s never seen before, fascinated by the young and beautiful people, their charmed lives and manufactured drama.
It’s nearly two hours later that Mary finally retrieves Owen’s dishes. When she sees what’s on the top stair, her heart sinks. Disappointment courses through her, because there’s a square of paper, aging and familiar, waiting for her beside his empty salad bowl and plate. He gave the note back.
Mary wants to cry out, to cry down to him. She is gutted that he couldn’t give her even that—the impression, even a false one, that the note and its message still mean something to him.
Then she notices the writing on the paper. It’s on the outside, exposed. At first, she thinks he folded the note the opposite way of the worn creases. Until she realizes that this is not her handwriting, and it’s not in pen. It’s faint-gray pencil, and she’d know this penmanship anywhere.
She reads what her son wrote.