Epilogue
Tonight, Mary tries a new recipe. For the first time in her life, she’s been finding joy in cooking.
She spent too many of her early years working in cheap restaurants, so close to the heat, the sweat, the hurried mess of the business of food preparation.
She spent too many years cooking for an unappreciative Ed, then too many years alone.
Now she spends idle minutes browsing recipes on her phone.
Instead of a weekly haul of groceries, she goes out every few days, picking up just what she needs.
And although she no longer needs it, because she brings home so much less with each trip, she has help now bringing the bags inside and unloading them.
The pan is fragrant, heat on her face, tingling the inside of her nose. She shakes it gently, food turning, then pushes it away from the burner. She removes two plates from the cabinet, but she doesn’t dish out the food. She doesn’t have to.
Mary takes a step, then the ding of her phone, which is propped on the counter, her recipe still lighting the screen, stops her.
She picks it up, feels herself flush as she reads the message and taps out her reply.
She doesn’t hold his words and wait until she’s decided on the perfect response.
They’d never needed to behave that way. Each of them, whatever they had to say, was always exactly right, unflinchingly accepted.
She’d never been a social media person, but—the new apartment, the fresh start, her courage soaring—she’d joined Facebook with a single purpose. It wasn’t difficult to find Greg. He never had remarried.
Still smiling, she puts her phone down and leaves the kitchen, warm and bright, a hundred times smaller than the kitchen in her old house. But, at least as far as she knows, no one ever died here.
Mary goes down the hall, the hall lined with art, some of it framed, some bare canvases hanging from hooks—the damage-free sort since she’s only renting. Some of the art is old, and some of it new. In the corner of each piece, the same initials: OLI.
She passes her bedroom, door gaping open, and approaches the next.
The door is shut, and she moves silently, tentatively—old habits.
But once she’s there, just outside it, her boy on the other, the relief, the golden hum of relief, and she’s brimming with it, she’s smiling, as she taps lightly on the frame.
“Owen,” she calls, and she wonders if he can hear the relief—can he feel it? Her delight, her surprise. “Dinner’s ready.”
There’s a pause, a pulse of silence. A rustle of paper. Then he speaks.
“Okay, Mom. I’ll be right there.”
Kate sits at the desk pressed against the window in the spare bedroom of her new two-bedroom condo.
The glare from her laptop screen lights her face, a siren screams in the distance, and voices and laughter rise from the sidewalk.
Everything is bright and boisterous, and Kate feels safe here in the city.
Surrounded, even when she’s still alone.
She checks the clock in the corner of her laptop screen.
Still an hour before she has to leave, a late lunch with a woman who just started working at Kate’s new company in this city where she still doesn’t know many people.
The woman is in her early thirties, childless, and perhaps a little too exuberant for Kate’s taste, a little too eager to make plans.
But Kate is trying. Maya has insisted on it.
“You need more friends in this city than just me,” she’s always saying, nudging Kate’s shoulder and grinning, so that Kate can’t be offended.
And she is right. Kate needs more friends who aren’t part of a couple, who aren’t used to Ben being there, who don’t look at her tentatively, fearfully, as though the misfortune and violence might be contagious.
If this were a movie, or maybe a book, once the police cleared her and arrested the man across the street, the one whose mother had turned him in, which had rendered Kate and Maya’s plan unnecessary, Kate would have found out she was pregnant.
She would have learned that she was carrying Ben’s child, and she’d have a successful pregnancy.
She’d give birth to a boy who would grow to look just like Ben, and although it would be difficult, raising him on her own, she’d have that piece of her husband forever.
But this is her life, and so her period had started five days after Ben died, which was almost precisely when she was expecting it. And the pain of it, the expected, the highly probable blood, hurt so sharply. She felt lost. She felt like nothing.
Because Ben wasn’t wrong. And she can only admit that now, months later, steeped in the irrevocability of Ben’s goneness.
She can acknowledge that she had become obsessed, singularly focused.
That she had lost all the parts of herself that she’d once known and cultivated and felt pride in.
That she’d been wishing away her days, clinging to the premise that she would be happy once she was pregnant.
When, not if. She’d come to believe that she and Ben needed to be parents.
That a future with children was a precondition to their present happiness, to their life together.
Yet Ben knew better. After all, for all those years, they’d almost never spoken about children.
They had things in common. They went to brunch and hiked trails identified as strenuous.
They talked about adopting a dog. They had birthday dinners.
They cleaned their bathroom together on Sunday mornings.
As the moments that comprised their early thirties ticked by, and that singular focus took hold, Kate became lost. And Ben, patient and supportive Ben, had been trying to find her.
But Ben is gone, so very gone, and so it’s easier now to admit that he wasn’t wrong.
And she misses him. The lack of him, the hole where he’d once been, screams in her ear, echoing and vibrating her core, even here in this condo he never set foot in, in this city they only very occasionally visited.
She’s pretty sure that she’s going to walk to the local animal shelter tomorrow to look at the cats.
She’s pretty sure that will help. And tonight, she’ll meet Maya and a friend from Maya’s law firm outside the American Visionary Art Museum, their bikes in tow.
They’ll ride to Fort McHenry, and Kate will feel her heart pumping; she’ll feel alive.
She’ll think of Ben, and doing so won’t make her unable to breathe.
Not anymore. She’ll be home before dusk, as the city’s smog sits low around the bellies of the high-rise buildings.
Before it gets too dark, she’ll go inside.
She’ll turn on every light in the condo.
She’ll play music, and she’ll feel something close to content.
And she’s lucky, really, that their plan didn’t pan out. That Henry was arrested instead—justice in the more ordinary sense. It’s not lost on her that she should feel lucky to have her freedom. Even though there are still moments when she believes she might’ve preferred revenge.
Before closing her laptop, Kate scrolls to the beginning of her document and adds two blank pages. On the first, in all caps, she types the title: OURS IS A TALE OF MURDER.
On the next page, she writes the dedication. This is probably premature and presumptuous because only published novels have dedications, and this is merely the beginnings of a manuscript. But she doesn’t care.
For Ben, she writes.
She’d thought she was finished writing for the day, but suddenly, she’s scrolling downward furiously, fingertips to mouse pad.
She’s trying to be gentle with herself. No pressure.
No word-count goals. Yet she realizes that she wants to keep going.
For the first time in so long, there’s so much she wants to say.
She’s been waiting for the words to flow. Here, at last, they come.
She continues to type. No more Klara or Troy. Instead, she’s telling their story, hers and Ben’s. A tale of murder. But not always. First, it was a tale of love.
The police and their questions kept her there for hours.
Janet told them that she didn’t want to see her son. She didn’t want to be home when they arrived to take him away. So she waited in the interview room until they’d secured the warrant for his arrest and transported him to the station.
Detective Scott had rapped sharply on the interview room door. “We’ve brought him in,” she said softly, sympathy in her voice.
Janet collected her purse and stood. Her legs felt weak. Henry was there, which meant she could go.
She’d have to tell Bill what she did—what Henry did.
Janet wondered if her husband also knew precisely what their son was.
She wondered if he’d be upset with her, or would he, beneath the heaviness of the shame and the disappointment, taste just the sweetest hint of relief?
The sense that with time, that taste would only grow stronger?
As she swung her car into the driveway, she reached up to press a finger into the garage door opener.
She noticed something resting on the front porch and suspected it was a package.
Something Bill or Henry ordered, because Janet herself still preferred going to a store when there was something she wanted or needed, and she knew that made her unusual and perhaps a bit old-fashioned.
She thought about the detectives arriving and pounding on her front door, of Henry answering with his calm confidence. Did they use handcuffs? Did he resist?
She shook her head. It was done now. It was over.
Once parked in the garage, Janet climbed out of her car, trying to release the stiffness from her bones, trying to stretch the humming ache out of her lower back.
The chair in the police station interview room was terribly uncomfortable, and she felt dirty and stale, like the odor, the very essence of all the bad people who had ever passed through the station’s doors, had permeated her skin and clothes.
She would shower and change into something fresh, and then she’d speak to Bill.
But first, she moved to the front porch to retrieve the package, which, she saw now that she was closer, wasn’t a package at all.
Rather, it was a round tin, red, as though intended to store Christmas cookies, but new-looking, as though purchased for the purpose of being left on Janet’s front porch, for the purpose of being gifted to Janet.
She picked up the tin, turning it in her hands, looking for a note, but there was none, only a piece of tape fluttering forsakenly, half stuck to the lid, indicating that there may have been a note at some point but the wind took it away.
The front door was locked, and Janet didn’t bother with digging through her purse for her keys.
Despite that she only just dropped them inside a minute earlier, her bag had almost certainly devoured them, and to find them would require some digging and some patience.
At the moment, Janet was fresh out. She stepped off the porch, returning to the garage, and entered the house that way.
In the kitchen, Janet eased a finger beneath the rim of the lid and popped it open, and she was met with warm and welcoming scents, odors of nostalgia, of banana, like the bread her mother used to make, of cinnamon and sugar. And something else, but she couldn’t quite identify it.
Janet removed a muffin from the tin and peeled away the paper wrapper. She was in the police station for so long, and she was starving. She accepted their third, or maybe it was the fourth, offer of something to drink, but they never gave her anything to eat.
She’d taken a bite of the muffin, then another, before it occurred to her that she shouldn’t be eating it at all. Food that had mysteriously appeared on her front porch, no note—it might not be safe.
She dropped the muffin back into the tin and wandered into the living room, looking out at the house across the street. The home of the man who her son killed. They couldn’t be from the wife. That wouldn’t make sense at all.
She wondered whether they were from Mary, a thank-you for turning in her own son. But would a thank-you be appropriate? Janet knew Owen had been under suspicion, but that wasn’t why Janet did what she did. Besides, Mary couldn’t yet know.
Peanut butter, she realized suddenly, bringing her fingertips, still lightly crumbed, to her nose and inhaling. That was what she could smell when she opened the tin, what she could still taste on her tongue.
And she no longer thought the muffins might be poisoned. Not for her. Not for most.
But Henry. Well, a bite could have killed him.