Chapter 69
When Henry was four, he stepped on a baby bird.
“Mommy, I want to go outside,” said Henry, tugging at Janet’s shirt. It was nearly three, and Janet was pouring marinade over a dish of chicken breasts. In a half hour, they would have to walk down to the bus stop to meet Laurel.
“Two more minutes,” said Janet, although she needed at least five.
“Now,” shrieked Henry.
“Just go,” Janet nearly shrieked back at him. “Just go out the back and be careful on the stairs. I’ll be right out.”
She knew it was wrong, but the tiny thrill that ripped through her when the back door slammed closed behind her son was too delicious to pass up.
Janet rubbed the marinade into the chicken.
She chopped a squash so that it would be ready for later, after Bill returned from work.
She and Henry had picked up fresh rolls that morning, and she’d benevolently purchased him a butterscotch-chip cookie, which had bought her ten minutes of peace as he gingerly ate, studying his treasure between bites as though he could not believe his good fortune, in a way that made her heart swell with affection.
There was laundry in the dryer, so Janet went down the basement to pull it into the hamper.
She was already pushing it, so she left the folding for later.
She went outside, through the back door in the basement, and found Henry on the patio.
He was holding the yellow wiffle bat and searching for his ball.
“I can’t find it,” he said upon seeing his mother. His tiny voice wavered with frustration.
“Okay,” she said. “Just calm down, Henry.”
Then she took another step closer to him, and she froze.
Her hands flew to her mouth. She closed her eyes so that everything would go dark, but it didn’t work.
With her eyes shut, she could see it there, imprinted like an after image, the downy gray feathers like fur, beak open but flat, crimson guts spilling.
Janet opened her eyes, looked up. There was a nest on one of the beams above. For weeks, Janet had watched the parents build it from nothing. She knew there were eggs but didn’t realize they’d hatched. Perhaps only one had been viable. A single fledgling.
“Oh,” said Henry, his own gaze on the bird.
“What happened?” she asked. She was horrified, too upset to try not to be. She was the mother. She couldn’t cry. It was her job to keep it together, to handle this. But all she could think about was the mother bird she’d been watching for weeks looking down at her dead baby.
Until Henry spoke.
“I stepped on it,” he said, sounding surprised by the admission.
“Henry,” she said, inhaling sharply.
Her son looked up at her, reading her expression, those dark and analytical eyes. “I’m sorry, Mommy. I didn’t see it. But I felt something soft under my foot so I must have stepped on it.”
Janet tried to feel relieved. It wasn’t sadism, but an accident. He hadn’t seen the bird. He had apologized.
But the coolness in his gaze, the adamant disinterest, that moment of calculation, before he told her what happened. The flatness of his tone. She didn’t believe him.
“Let’s go inside,” she said harshly, grabbing his arm, pulling him toward the door.
“But I want to hit balls,” he wailed.
“No,” she said. She pulled harder. She just needed to get him into the house.
She would put something on television for him, then go fold her laundry.
After they got home with Laurel, they would have to play in the front yard or inside.
Bill would have to deal with the bird when he got home because Janet simply couldn’t.
She has never looked at her son the same way since. And that baby bird, which Janet can still, more than two decades later, see so clearly when she closes her eyes, isn’t the reason. Not really. That was only the beginning.
Janet Lawson has never, in her entire life, been to a police station.
She tells the man seated behind the desk in the reception area that she wants to speak to the detectives leading the investigation into the murder that happened in Hawthorne Heights. She cannot bring herself to say the victim’s name.
She sits on an uncomfortable gray chair and waits until Detective Scott appears.
“Mrs. Lawson,” she says. “Thank you for coming in.” There’s interest in her eyes, but she doesn’t ask Janet why she’s here. Not yet.
Janet stands and follows the detective. Her pants are impossibly black, with a thick weave, an expensive-looking gloss. Janet wishes she had a pair. She wishes she had someplace to wear them.
She grips the straps of her purse, has a sudden fear that someone will ask to search it. But no one does. Scott leads her into the bowels of the station, her heels tapping on the cheap, laminate tile.
Janet declines the detective’s offer of water, coffee, or soda. Her heart is in her throat; she just wants to get this over with.
“What can I help you with?” Scott asks once they’re both seated in a private interview room. She throws one long leg across the thigh of her other.
“Before I say anything,” Janet says, “I want to make sure that I can’t get into trouble for it.”
Scott’s eyes narrow. “Well, I can’t promise you that, Mrs. Lawson. Not without more information. For instance, if you’re going to confess to murdering Ben Harvey, I can’t promise you immunity.”
Janet’s purse is heavy on her lap. She clutches it, arms grasping tight, as though it’s her baby.
She thinks of Henry as a baby, red-faced; he always seemed to be crying.
But when he wasn’t, when he fell asleep at her breast and his face went slack, he was the most gorgeous thing she’d ever seen.
The weight of him against her. She could cry, the weight of the love too much.
The euphoria of his sleep was perhaps the sweetest thing she’d ever tasted.
But that was before. That was long before.
“What if it wasn’t me?” Janet asks now, fingers digging into worn leather. “But I know who it was?”
There’s a charged pause. It feels like neither of them is breathing.
“That would be different.”
Janet wants to be sure, but she understands that she will have to share what she has before they promise her immunity.
She doesn’t think it’s likely that they’d charge her with a crime.
It’s completely understandable that it took her so long to say anything.
In fact, she will probably be lauded as a hero for coming forward at all.
For being restless and unsettled—the way Henry had sat with her and Bill when he never did—and unable to fall asleep on Saturday night.
For hearing the slam of the basement door, the way it rattled the house, past midnight.
For listening for more, curious, perhaps a little fearful, then hearing the rush of water through the pipes, the way it sounded when the washing machine was running, and seconds later, more water, still distant—the basement shower.
For creeping down two flights of stairs with practiced silence, the way she used to when Henry was an infant and she’d finally got him to sleep.
For pausing the machine, for lifting the lid. The smell of blood, the clothes black.
What had he done?
The woman across the street, she thought. The one he’d been watching.
The shower was still running.
He’d get rid of the clothes after he washed them.
Burn them, throw them in a neighbor’s bin?
She wasn’t sure, but she knew he wouldn’t keep them.
He was too smart to keep them. She also knew she couldn’t take them.
Yet something as insistent and sure as only a mother’s instincts could be was telling her to do something.
On the shelf above the machines, behind the detergent, she found an empty plastic bag. A pair of scissors. She carefully made a cut in the shirt, then tore across the hem. She shoved the trail of fabric into the plastic bag, tied the handles in a knot.
She rushed upstairs into the powder room. There was a smear of blood on her fingers. Janet vomited into the toilet before she washed the blood away.
Then she returned to bed, slipped onto the mattress beside Bill who was still snoring obliviously. He’d always been oblivious when it came to Henry.
It was the most difficult thing she’d ever done. Until now.
Janet has no idea what her next-door neighbor knows; she knows nothing of the sacrifice Mary is trying to make for her, protecting Henry.
She unzips her purse. Scott’s eyes flick toward the source of the sound.
Janet thinks of him. Henry. He believes he’s going to come to Pennsylvania with them.
He has no idea she’s here. But the move is supposed to be Janet’s fresh start.
She’s going to live near Laurel and help with the baby.
Maybe she’ll even be able to see her grandson every day.
Henry will not ruin that for her. He’s ruined enough.
She’s been a mother for thirty-two years.
And now she’s a grandmother to a perfect, full-cheeked baby.
To whom, she wonders, does she owe most?
Her daughter, or her daughter’s son? Her own son, who’s failed her so?
To what does she owe herself? Is she, a mother, worth anything at all, independent of them?
She reaches into her purse, grips the filmy, thin plastic.
“This is a piece of my son’s shirt,” says Janet, shoving the bag across the table. “The one he wore the night he killed our neighbor.”