Keeper of the Keys

by Perri O'shaughnessy

  Him.

  She felt the familiar terrified rush of blood through her veins. Her hand flew to her heart and landed there, feeling the thudding below the skin. They had lived here in this house on Close Street for almost an entire year without being bothered by him. She liked Whittier, she thought, pressing against the wall. She didn’t want to move again. She didn’t want to leave this town. She was sick to death of his interference in their lives! Sick of it!

  She felt rather than saw him approaching the house from the street.

  Knocking.

  He always knocked. Some vestige of civility remained, in spite of how much he must hate her by now.

  She didn’t answer. Instead, she opened the drawer in the kitchen where she kept her knives.

  A finger of feeling reached up and tried to grab her but she pushed it away. No. She had made her decision months ago. She would not succumb to sentimentality anymore.

  No more running.

  Ray deserved a normal life. He seemed happy this year and she wanted him to stay in this house, on this street where he was happy. He had friends at Ceves. She envisioned him at Hillview, then Cal High in a few years with the friends he had made.

  She peeked through the window. Nobody at the door. Henry would be seeking a way in.

  She kept all the windows of the house locked all the time, and had schooled Ray into doing the same long ago. He could not enter easily. Broken glass, she would hear.

  She listened, hearing nothing.

  But she would only hear it if something broke, something like the basement window.

  The place got dank in winter, wet, moist. Maybe years ago, a window made some kind of sense in a basement. Maybe the owners had long-term plans to turn it into a poolroom or playhouse. Whatever they had planned had caused her problems. She stored jellies down there, and a few pickles she made when they stayed somewhere long enough for her to make them. Last time she had gone down there, she noticed the thickness of the air, and had cranked open the small window. The basement room reminded her, not pleasantly, of Bright Street.

  She had not closed the window. Bad mistake.

  Walking silently toward the basement stairway, which was at the far side of her kitchen, she tried to remember exactly how big he was. Could he squeeze himself through the window?

  Mice, she had heard, needed only one-half inch to squeeze into the pantry and eat everything in sight.

  Rats, maybe an inch.

  An angry man? How much space? How fit was he these days? Henry worked out. She remembered that, how he stayed fit.

  Without turning on the light, she stepped down the thirteen stairs into the basement. Down here, she did laundry.

  She let her eyes adjust.

  Saw one foot, then the other foot push through.

  Yes, he was fit enough to squeeze himself through.

  She waited like an assassin, gearing herself up, so eager, dying to have it all over. For so many years Henry had ruled her life. She couldn’t take another minute. She could not.

  His entire body shimmied through the window. He landed on a long, rustic table that someone had built beside the washer-dryer and turned to face her.

  “Oh, Esmé,” he said.

  “Yes.” She realized the light from the hallway was leaking down the stairs behind her. She must look like a silhouette to him.

  A certain, small piece of her heart yearned for him, but the feeling concreted into confidence that she had made the correct decision when he said, “Where is he?”

  “Sleeping upstairs.”

  “I’m taking him. Get out of my way, Esmé.”

  That’s when she stabbed him with the sharp, sharp kitchen knife. Then she stabbed him again.

  “What’s this?” Ray had pulled something out of the hole behind the brick. The flashlight revealed tatters, dirt. “Cloth.” He had answered his own question.

  “His shirt, I guess.”

  Ray jumped back, knocking into the washing machine, and yelled, “What’s in there?”

  “You mean who’s in there.”

  “It’s-it’s a body!” he yelled.

  “Henry Jackson. Your father, Ray.”

  “Why? Why?”

  His mother sighed deeply. “Oh, I wish you could just let go but you’re like me, stubborn and loyal. If only I hadn’t needed to stay near my mother for all those years when she was so sick we could have moved to Australia or somewhere. None of this would have happened.”

  “You killed him! Oh, God, you did!”

  “No, Ray, I stopped him. He broke in, just like you.”

  “Wait. Wait.” They stood in the semidarkness, both breathing hard.

  “He tried to hurt you, Mom? He attacked you?” Ray said at last, his voice breaking.

  “He didn’t get the chance.”

  “It was self-defense,” Ray mumbled. “He stalked you. We’ll deal with this.” He felt the tattered cloth again.

  “It won’t look that way to a judge, Son.”

  “But he broke in-”

  “Ray. Ray, precious child, your father didn’t come here for me. He came for you.”

  “He came to hurt me? Why?” A hundred possibilities flashed through his mind. “Did he think I wasn’t his?”

  “Henry,” she spat out his name, “had full legal and physical custody of you.”

  “But-”

  “Yes, it is incredible, isn’t it? Ripping a child away from his mother.”

  “But why would they do that?”

  “He faked being perfect, and I wasn’t so good at that in those days. Look, I was a young woman when I had you, only twenty-two. I wanted some fun out of life! I deserved some fun!” She cast a desperate glance at him. “And one day, one miserable day, I did something really stupid. I drove drunk.”

  He thought about that. “That was enough to cost you custody, getting caught driving under the influence? I mean, why not make sure you got some treatment and quit?”

  “You were in the car with me. We cracked up. You spent two months in the hospital. My visits to see you had to be supervised after that. He took you away from me. He divorced me. He couldn’t forgive me for what I had done.”

  Bright lights at night. A high bed. Nurses.

  “You had a head trauma. Bleeding and pressure in your brain. You have a scar under your hair. No one could believe I would stop drinking, not Henry, not the caseworkers, not the judge. But I did.”

  “Until now.”

  “Who wouldn’t? Have you thought about my life at all? Thought about anything but your obsessions and your needs and Leigh? Ray, I need you to help me now. I’ll leave this house. I’ll go away like Leigh did, and I won’t come back. Will that satisfy you and Leigh?”

  Silence lodged heavily between them.

  “So you kept the tapes in case there was another custody fight,” Ray concluded. “You wanted to prove he was some kind of angry, crazy monster to the court. You needed something against him. Is that why they were so short?” He answered his own question. “You only kept the bad parts, and there weren’t many, were there? He got frustrated and angry sometimes.”

  “Any judge would hear it in his voice. He was a dangerous man.”

  “Dangerous because he wanted his son,” Ray said. “He had a court order to take me. He wasn’t a monster.”

  “I did it out of-”

  “And so you killed him. You were the monster.” He breathed heavily, and he stepped back farther from her. Each step felt like a year of the pain she had experienced, running with him, running, trying to take care of him and her mother, no life for herself, all for him-

  “We had peace after that, didn’t we, Son?”

  “We lived on top of his body!” Ray said, backing away from her toward the stairs. “You did that to me.”

  “Where are you going? Are you leaving?”

  “You almost murdered my wife!”

  “She broke in, Son. She came down here when I was trying to fix the wall.”

  “With
a chisel?”

  “That damn leak! I couldn’t fix it, and just like you said, the water was undermining the brick wall in the basement. I mean, you always said it was a hack job. It was a hack job because I did it! I put up that wall myself, and it was crummy and starting to get dangerous, so I was going to loosen the mortar and repair everything. And then she broke in at night and surprised me. I had to protect myself! I had to protect us! Wait-where are you going? What are you doing, Son?”

  He shut the door and locked it. “I’m keeping you down here until the police come. The window is full of broken glass. Don’t try to get out that way. I’ll stand out there waiting.”

  “Let me run. Please. Ray?”

  He checked the lock. It was secure.

  EPILOGUE

  Seven months later, Ray drove up to Corona, California, the dry heartland of the state, practically at its center. He filled out a form in the entryway, showed his ID, went through the metal detector, braved the scrutiny of several guards, and finally got into the visiting area.

  He put on headphones, as did Esmé, sitting across from him and through an acrylic barrier.

  “They treating you all right?” She had aged, of course. Her jaw was set and he noticed how square and stubborn it still was.

  “I’ve applied for kitchen duty,” Esmé said. “The food is too high-carb. I’ve decided to become a vegetarian. I don’t trust the meat.”

  She didn’t ask about how Ray was doing, he thought with a twinge. Esmé was thinking about herself. Maybe she always thought of herself. It felt like a wind had swept through the big depressing room, blowing away his illusions. “I left some money for you for the canteen.”

  “Did you bring my magazines?”

  “You bet.”

  “My roommate needs a kidney transplant. She’s back in the hospital. I sleep so much better now that she’s gone but I think they’re bringing in a new inmate next week.”

  “That have you nervous?”

  “They’re not as bad as you might think. Mostly abused women, druggies.”

  She had never used that word before. Ray sat up straighter.

  “It’s so unfair. I had that one lapse. That one time when you were in the car, and I drove drunk. So should I spend the rest of my life paying for that?”

  And what about killing his father and attacking his wife? Esmé continued to have blind spots big as tunnels that would fit a big rig. “Mom, maybe you should listen to what they say. It’s not all stupid.”

  “It’s so galling. Me, here. Do you blame me for things I had to do?”

  “Yes,” Ray said.

  “All I can say is, you’re not a parent yet. Someday you might understand better.”

  Ray, now three months along on the road to becoming a parent, said nothing about Leigh’s pregnancy. “Do you blame me for the things I had to do to stop you?”

  Esmé paused, wet her lips. “You were the center of my existence for most of my life, honey. Lately I don’t worry about you anymore, about how well you’re eating, if your work is going well. I suppose it’s one way to cut the apron strings.” She smiled. “But of course I blame you. You’re ungrateful. That’s how it is.”

  “Try to understand what you did, Mom. After I found those tapes, I decided my father was some kind of stalker,” Ray said. “I thought he tracked you down and we moved because you needed to hide from him.”

  “You should never have gone back to those places. Wasn’t it sad?”

  “Yes.”

  “You must understand why I had to hide you. I needed you close. You were just a baby, Ray.”

  “Henry had custody, Mom.”

  “So? Did I raise you badly? Did I ever take a drink while you were growing up?”

  “You stole me from him. You stole him from me.”

  She considered this. Then she sighed. “Here we go again. After all I did for you, you blame me.”

  “You robbed me of the truth.” Henry Jackson would have been sixty-two this year, not old. His remains had now been officially interred at Memory Gardens in Brea.

  “Would you rather he had robbed you of your mother? I doubt that.” Esmé changed the subject and talked about all the wonderful things she planned to do when she finished serving her time, eight to ten years. She would renovate her house at last, she said, not asking but assuming Ray would keep it for her. She didn’t know yet that the house had already been sold to pay her legal fees. Where she would go when she got out was something Ray didn’t want to think about. She told him she would quit her job at the market and do volunteer work in the schools.

  Quit her job! She had been terminated long before her guilty plea to second-degree murder.

  Esmé rambled on. She loved kids. She needed kids in her life. But Leigh and Ray had decided their baby wouldn’t be visiting Esmé at the prison. Ray didn’t want to hurt his mother, so he might never tell her until the day she walked through the locked gates to whatever was left of her existence.

  He let her meander on, worrying about her. Mainly, as always, he felt amazed that this woman had loved him so fiercely that she had killed his father.

  He listened, took her in, and felt so sad.

  Beau smiled, waving his arms. He kicked his round legs all day long. After Raoul finished changing his diaper, he quieted, lying peacefully down against the bold blue bolsters edging his crib. Kat came in to finish cleaning up the changing table. Raoul leaned over the crib, playing with Beau’s little fingers.

  He and Kat had found Jacki some help, and Jacki was back to working part-time.

  Kat was seeing a lot of Zak.

  After several weeks of silence between them, Zak had finally called. “Hiya.”

  “Hiya.” Kat had been attempting a chicken curry, chopping onions in her kitchen, holding the phone to her ear against her scrunched-up shoulder. She had a special new knife they sold on television, a big book of recipes, and a hobby, being a homebody who liked her own company better than almost anyone else’s.

  Although tonight Leigh and Ray were coming over. They saw a lot of each other these days. Ray was going to tell her that they were pregnant, and she was going to look surprised, as if Leigh hadn’t told her that a month ago during one of their long lunches.

  Zak said, “So-”

  Kat picked up the board full of chopped onions and dumped them into the wok. “So-”

  “I’ve tried to work out why things haven’t worked between us, and I want to clear the air.”

  “Okay.”

  “I hadn’t had a date in two years when I met you. I have a brother who’s a little like Jacki, concerned about me becoming a creepy bachelor. Sometimes that makes me nervous and it made me really nervous because-I like you, and you don’t seem very responsive. So I’m going to lay it on thick, and tell you everything and that way I’ll know I’m being rejected for myself, and not for the image. You know what? I hate Rollerblading. You just sounded like such a fun-loving person, it seemed like the right thing to do. I’m a reader, mostly nonfiction, but I can get into a thriller. I’ll go to any movie ever made, and eat a large popcorn clogged with butter. I like to take walks in my neighborhood. And I basically like my life the way it is. It’s-contented. Wonderfully boring.”

  “Oh, Zak!” How bizarre. He had a dating game, too. “We did start out awkward, didn’t we?”

  “You surprised me, though, talking about yourself. And I felt you deserved the same from me. A little bit of the truth. I see other people bogged down in mortgages and babies and-that’s not for me right now, Kat. So now you know.”

  She smelled the curry, then reached to pull the cloves down from the shelf. Nobody else liked cloves the way she liked cloves. “You like cloves in curry? I mean lots? Don’t lie to me now, Zak.”

  “Love them. I swear.”

  “Want to go out with me Friday night? We won’t get tattoos. We won’t skate. And we won’t shop for rings. Anything else suits me, too.”

  “You have a deal.”

  Kat sm
iled, thinking back to their conversation. Then Jacki came into the nursery, real pearls on her neck, looking older in the most lovely way, made somehow more sophisticated by her recent motherhood.

  “We’ll be back by midnight. You sure you can do this?”

  “I look forward to it.” That was true. Jacki gave her a hug and she and Raoul departed, leaving Kat with Beau.

  He willingly came out of his crib and Kat sat in the rocking chair, resting him on her legs. “I hope you’re feeling amusing,” she told him. “Gum display. I guess that means you’re happy? You like the mother and father you picked? Oh, good. I totally agree. And what about me? Am I the world’s most fabulous aunt?”

  Beau followed her lips with his all-out blue stare. She gazed down at him and something happened which had not happened before. They really looked at each other. Beau didn’t blink. He had the Tinsley glare down already. He looked and looked and Kat felt that she was being sucked into his new-old soul.

  She leaned down close and whispered, “You’ll forget it all soon and this’ll be the only world for you. But before you do I have to ask you a question. Okay?”

  His eyebrows raised. He waited with milk-scented, bated breath.

  “Have you met your uncle Tom at any point?”

  No change in his expression, but he continued fascinated. No kicks, no waves. He listened intently.

  “No?” Kat said, disappointed.

  “Aaah,” Beau said, suddenly opening his mouth hugely.

  At that moment Kat understood. She just hadn’t phrased the question properly. Beau’s scanty hair, soft brown, smelled good as she lowered her head and rubbed her cheek against his. His ears were going to be big, and the nose had the Tinsley crook.

  “I get it,” she said. “I think I’ve suspected it for some time. You look at people with the same…perspicacity. Right through me, just like him. He knew I meant no harm. He knew how much I loved and admired him.”

  Beau brayed at her. A couple of brand-new baby teeth poked through his bottom gums like kernels of fresh corn.

  “I’m going to take such good care of you this time, little buddy.”