Chapter 68
Mom, I know something.
Will she keep it forever? Tuck it onto a shelf in her closet? Her son’s first words to her in so many years, nearly as precious as when he first said “Mama,” when he was thirteen months old, with plush cheeks and corn-silk hair, quick to smile, chubby hands always reaching for her.
Mary clutches the paper between her fingertips as she tentatively descends the stairs. The note is an invitation, yet she still feels like she’s intruding. She has respected his desire for silence, solace, with great diligence, and she would have preferred that he went upstairs to her.
But it’s clear that Owen is expecting her. He’s not sitting at the desk, back to her, but on the sofa, waiting for her to join him.
As soon as she sits, he speaks.
“This is difficult.” His voice is raw, cracked like something used too much rather than the opposite.
Immediately, Mary begins to cry. Her son hasn’t spoken to her for three years.
“I’m sorry,” she says, wiping her eyes and nose furiously with her sleeve. “Please go ahead.”
“The night before the man was killed, someone was in the house.” Soft, rushed, no time wasted. She can tell he doesn’t want to do this; he wants it to be over.
Mary stares at him, trying to digest his words while she’s still so stuck on the fact that he’s speaking at all. And he’s so near. Not close enough that she can feel his warmth, but close enough that if she just lifted an arm, extended it toward him, she could.
“Who?” she asks, the weight finally registering, settling heavily into her mind. Someone in the house.
“I don’t know.”
“What did he look like? What did he do in the house?”
“It was dark, but I could tell that he had a beard. He was average height and build. I think he was wearing a hood, or maybe it was a hat. He came in through the front door. I don’t know how he got in.”
Mary feels her cheeks flush, but she simply shakes her head.
She doesn’t admit her propensity for failing to lock the doors.
She’d open the front one to retrieve a package or to go out to the mailbox, then forget to lock it behind her when she returned.
It could be unlocked for days, sometimes, until the next time she left.
She’d only become more careful about that since Saturday night.
She feels violated—someone in their house while she was upstairs asleep and oblivious. Someone who could have hurt her, or her son.
“He took a knife.”
Mary nods—of course he took a knife. The missing knife that never did turn up.
Mary had disposed of the rest of the set, thinking—what?
That Owen had used the missing one to kill the man across the street?
She never really thought that. She’d thought very little.
She’d acted instinctively, protectively.
As it turned out, she’d been protecting a stranger.
“He took a knife, then left,” says Mary, fitting the pieces together. “He used it to kill the man across the street. I wonder if he was trying to…frame you.” She feels ridiculous saying it.
“Would he have even known I was here?” Owen’s gaze flicks away from her face to the nothingness behind her, as though her eye contact is too much.
“No,” says Mary firmly, but she knows that’s not true.
She has tried to conceal Owen’s presence in the house, but when he was released on parole, there was a blurb in the news.
The neighbors knew, and they didn’t like it.
Those who were here at the time hated that there was a murder on their quiet street, and they’d seemed to hate it more when he returned.
“A man with a beard,” she says thoughtfully. Average height and build. That could be almost anyone.
“I was in the doorway of the basement stairs when I heard the front door open. I was coming up for some food. I was in the dark, and I stood there and watched. Then, when he left, I went to the front windows. He was rushing around the back of the house next door.”
There’s a gray hair in Owen’s beard and a smattering at his temples, so improbable, so difficult for her to accept.
“Henry,” she says. “The boy next door.”
Although Henry is no longer a boy, either.
He is—maybe—five years younger than Owen?
His family had moved to the house when he was just a toddler, he and Owen too far apart in age to play together.
Henry had an older sister, but Mary never saw her playing outside with the other neighborhood kids.
She seemed to be a more introspective child, like Owen.
She knows almost nothing about Henry. Only that he’d moved out of the house for college, disappearing with the car his parents bought him, returning home during the holidays.
At some point, he’d returned for good, with a different, more expensive car which he parked at the curb out front.
She assumed he’d fallen upon relationship or job problems, or both, and was trying to put himself back together.
And for some reason, he had killed the man across the street. He’d used Mary’s knife to do it.
He’d always seemed like a quiet boy, polite and inoffensive. She wonders what drove him to murder. Mary knows better than most people that everyone is capable of it. Everyone has a breaking point. She was so close to her own, but Owen reached his first.
“Why didn’t you tell the police this?” she asks.
Owen still isn’t looking at her. His right hand is squeezing the left. There’s a scar running along his wrist, raised, pale, and unfamiliar. Mary wants to lean over and kiss it, the way she had his skinned knees and scraped elbows when he was small.
“I don’t want to talk to the police.”
Mary presses her lips together. She should tell him about the appointment with the psychiatrist tomorrow morning—she must tell him—but that would feel like a betrayal. It might make him shut down again, and she doesn’t want him to stop talking.
“So don’t tell them,” she says. “You don’t have to speak with them. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. You’ve done nothing wrong.”
She’s thinking of her neighbor now. Not Henry, but his mother. They never were friends—Mary didn’t have friends—but Janet was one of the more accepting people in the neighborhood. She was quiet about everything after Owen was paroled, and that was exactly what Mary had wanted.
The week after Owen got home, Mary was getting her mail when Janet was out front watering her pansies. Janet didn’t look at her with hatred, with disgust, with blame—you raised a murderer. There was sympathy in her eyes. Mary recognized it immediately, although she saw it so infrequently.
“All right, Mary?” Janet had asked, and Mary wasn’t, but she’d nodded.
And that was that. Two words, almost nothing, between mothers. Yet it was more kindness than anyone else in the neighborhood had offered her.
She is thinking, now, that if Owen reveals what he saw, people will be looking at Janet the way people have, for almost two decades, looked at Mary.
Because it’s always the mother’s fault, isn’t it?
It crosses everyone’s mind when they hear about a horrible man doing a horrible thing.
At some point or another, they will think that his mother must have done something wrong.
And Mary doesn’t want another mother to face that. She doesn’t want another mother to lose her son. Not Janet.
There’s been enough loss, has there not? Stop the bleeding.
And Mary doesn’t want to help the police. She wants nothing to do with the system that insisted her boy needed to be tried as an adult and that so badly failed him. Owen needed help, not prison. They both needed help.
“Innocent people sometimes do get arrested,” Mary continues, thinking out loud. “And, of course, if the police had real reason to suspect you were involved, you would have to tell them what you saw. But for now, they don’t, do they? They can’t make you talk at all.”
Owen is looking at her now, finally, the unfamiliarity of his adult face so wrong.
“They might not even believe you.” She hates to admit this, but she fears it’s true. The police had always seemed to be against them. “Is that what you want?” she continues. “To stay silent? Or do you want to tell them what you saw?”
She must let him decide anyway. It’s not her information to hold or to share.
He blinks at her once, twice, then shakes his head. To anyone else, perhaps it wouldn’t be clear what he means, but Mary is his mother, and so she knows.
“You’ve done nothing wrong,” she says again, and she hopes he understands that she means that broadly. “I’m just so happy that you spoke to me.”
Owen shrugs, looking at his hands. Mary is desperate to press him. They talked, and what does that mean? Does it mean he will keep speaking to her? Has he made an exception, out of necessity? Or is this the start of a new normal?
She does not allow herself to question him. She has always believed that he would come to her when he was ready. As it turns out, she was right. She knows that he will continue to give her more as he’s capable.
And her heart—Mary knew it broke that night. She’s known ever since that it was broken. And she feels it now, more acutely than ever before. The crack, the blood, the spill.
“I couldn’t tell you, Mom,” he says abruptly, a mere whisper, and she’s clinging to that word, its gravity—Mom. “I couldn’t tell you about everything that happened in there. So I couldn’t talk at all. It was easiest that way.”
“You don’t have to tell me a thing,” she says firmly. Is that a gift to him or to herself? Because would she want to know? Any of it?
“I love you so much, Owen,” she says, instead of all the questions hammering at her mind.
One corner of Owen’s mouth tips upward. “I know that, Mom. I never doubted that.”
His acceptance, his trust, his forgiveness—all of it winds her.
“I made so many mistakes,” she says. “I know that I did. Things were hard when you were a kid, and I know it was worse, living here. The other families in this neighborhood weren’t like ours.
But I hope you know that I was always doing what I thought was best for you.
Sometimes I was wrong. But everything I did was out of love.
It’s—” Mary swallows, wetness spilling down her cheeks.
She tries to take a breath, but it’s choppy and sodden, and she can’t continue. She can’t say anything more.
“It’s the biggest thing in the world,” Owen says, finishing for her. “Right?” he adds.
Mary uses the backs of her hands to blot her face. Then she smiles. Her sweet boy, pure gold. “Right,” she tells him. “You’re absolutely right.”