She steps inside farther, her senses alive. How did she not notice the musty smell her first time here? She peeks into the kitchen, which looks like a flashback frozen from a time of bad decorating ideas: the floor is carpeted, the counter covered in linoleum tiles held in place by a row of ancient appliances: a toaster, a blender, a rusting silver bread box. Nailed to one wall is a wood-stained box holding a miniature decoupage scene of a kitchen. Cara tries to imagine Kevin’s mother in better days, constructing this box, which looks eerily like a small coffin. After a few minutes, she wonders if it’s possible to leave without saying anything more, slip back outside, shutting the door soundlessly behind her.
Just as she decides she will let herself do this—it’s been too long a day, this house is too sad for her to think about the lives of its inhabitants—she hears a sound in the foyer. A key turning in the lock on the front door.
She spins around to see Mrs. Barrows in the kitchen doorway. Cara had assumed she was getting dressed, putting on her face, attending to the hair that Cara remembers always being styled or in the process, but now she stands before her unchanged, except that over her nightgown she wears a bathrobe. “Have they arrested Kevin yet?”
Cara’s breath goes shallow. “No. They’re not going to. He hasn’t done anything wrong.”
She hears this and nods carefully. “That’s right. He hasn’t. That’s what’s important. Why don’t you come into the living room? There’s something I want to show you.”
Cara follows her into the living room, which is in slightly better shape than the other rooms she’s seen, but not by much. The furniture is still intact, if twenty years old, but the far wall of the room has been used for miscellaneous storage—a pair of skis lies on the floor, an old guitar leans against the wall, a pile of dresses still on their hangers lies across a cardboard box that seems, from the glimpse inside that Cara gets, to be filled with more mail.
“Come sit, I want to show you something.” She walks over to the bookshelf and pulls out a stack of photo albums. “I’ve got some pictures here. You’ll like them. The top three are Glenn, my older boy, the bottom three are Kevin.”
Cara stares at her, then turns back to the front door. Is she serious? “I wish I could, Mrs. Barrows, but I can’t stay too long. I have a little boy waiting for me at home. I just wanted to check in and see if you’d heard from Kevin.”
The woman sits down on the sofa, opens the top photo album. “Oh, don’t go. Look at my pictures for a minute.” She opens the book and pats the sofa beside her. “Please.”
Cara walks over and sits down beside her.
“This is Kevin’s book. It starts after the accident.” She opens it to a montage of gory hospital photos: Kevin, eleven years old and lying in bed, his face and head covered in bandages stained in quilted patches of pale yellow and orange disinfectant. One picture, a close-up, is all pillow and bandages, the only recognizable feature, Kevin’s lips, cracked with dried blood. Silently, his mother touches each picture and then turns the page. “This is after the bandages came off.”
Cara forces herself to look, though the second page is, if anything, grislier than the first. Kevin’s head is shaved, a line of black staples runs a train track across his scalp. His face is misshapen, both sunken and swollen, colored in shades of yellow and burgundy. “Why are you showing me these?”
Mrs. Barrows lifts her eyebrows in surprise. “I don’t think they’re so awful, do you? Look at where he was and look at him now. He’s beautiful, isn’t he? You think he’s beautiful, don’t you?”
It’s terrifying to sit here, to see what a lifetime of caretaking can do. Mrs. Barrows looks like a shadow of the woman Cara remembers— erased of all color, even her hair is a strange silver-flesh-gray, a mane of curls that’s no color at all. Sitting beside her, so close, Cara notices something strange: her hair has shifted—the part in her tangled curls sits a little closer to one ear. My God, she thinks, she’s wearing a wig.
The woman nods and turns another page to photos that chronicle Kevin’s therapy: Kevin standing between two parallel bars, two aides on either side; Kevin on a floor mat wearing matching green sweatpants and sweatshirt, one leg lifted to touch the flat, hovering hand of a therapist. More pages, more pictures, many now with Kevin’s mother in the background. Though Kevin sometimes does, she never looks at the camera, never takes her eyes off of whatever Kevin is doing, even if it is only sitting and smiling. For Cara, the pictures are unsettlingly familiar. She has books like this at home because she, too, has chronicled the minutiae of Adam’s life. His first five years are pasted laboriously into a dozen different scrapbooks they used to bring to speech therapy because photographs were so crucial in teaching Adam the components of his own life: Here’s your bedroom, your kitchen, your grandparents. She still remembers this: the first time he said Mom, he was pointing to a picture.
As the woman turns the pages, touching each image—Kevin drinking from a cup held by a nurse, Kevin asleep in a wheelchair—Cara recognizes more details: the same fine-motor pegboard she used with Adam; the animal lacing cards she used to make him sew. In one picture, Kevin even looks the same age as Adam now, looks exactly like him, staring into a mirror on a speech therapist’s table, making his mouth an O.
“I wanted to remember all of this,” Mrs. Barrows says, as they near the end. “As hard as it was, I knew I’d look back on it as the best thing I’d ever done. And it is.” She nods with great certainty. “I did as much as I could. I stopped at nothing. Of course now Kevin is so angry with me he doesn’t remember any of this.”
Cara gets up; she can’t sit any longer beside this woman, can’t look at these pictures for another minute. “Why is he angry with you?”
“He thinks I do too much for him. But I have to. He doesn’t realize. He wants to feel independent. He says, ‘Mom, I need to take care of myself.’ Meanwhile, when’s the last time he’s been inside a grocery store? Ask him that.”
Cara moves around to the back of the sofa. She doesn’t know what to say or where to stand. “A long time, I bet.”
“Years. That’s all I’ll say. Years. All I’ve done is tried to ensure that he has the best life possible.”
“You’ve done a good job,” Cara says, because she wants to get out of here, get home to Adam, and she feels like she will need to earn this sad woman’s permission before she’ll be allowed to leave this house. “You’ve been a good mother…” she says and then looks down to see, beneath the window, leaning against the wall, several flattened sheets of muddy cardboard, crisscrossed by tire prints. “What are these?” she asks, pointing to them.
“Oh those,” Mrs. Barrows looks and waves a hand. “We have to use those or Kevin’s chair will get stuck in the mud.”
“Where?”
“Outdoors. Sometimes he takes these walks in the woods.”
Cara looks over at her; in the light of the lamp beside her, her hair looks horribly artificial, no better than a doll’s. Does she realize what she’s saying? She thinks of Matt’s words—You collect two hundred cigarette butts, five of them with lipstick, what does that tell you? Someone wearing lipstick has been there, smoking. Cara comes back around the sofa and stands in front of the woman. “Were you with him, Mrs. Barrows? Did you help Kevin get out to the woods?”
“He wanted to see the boy. He tried to go by himself, and finally I said, ‘Kevin, let me help you.’ You’ll soon figure this out—there’s not much a mother can do after a while, but I can help him get where he needs to be.”
Cara thinks of more things Matt has said: The guy must have prepped somehow, planned what he was doing, really quite meticulously. This cardboard could explain why there were so few footprints. “So you were there when it happened?”
“Kevin has done nothing wrong. Nothing. He’s had a very hard life and he’s asked very little of other people.” She stares at Cara so there can be no mistake. “He’s asked very little of you, and you’ve taken a lot. He’s angry with me, but I only
did what I had to. What any mother would do.”
Why wouldn’t Kevin have included this part? As long as he was admitting as much as he did, why wouldn’t he also have said, My mother was there. I needed her help? She thinks of Suzette’s words: He wants you to think of him as nondisabled, mostly independent. How sad that he would admit to so many things, but not that he still needs his mother.
“I’ve tried to protect him. All his life I’ve said, ‘Choose your friends carefully.’ You care about the wrong people, you’ll only get hurt.” She shakes her head and stands up. “You might have thought a little bit more about the impact of your actions on other people once in a while. I understand that I’m not supposed to blame you, but I’m sorry, I do.”
Cara feels the air go out of her body. Mrs. Barrows’s wig is so askew now it’s hard to notice anything else, and Cara thinks of Adam, the one word he’s found to describe his time in the woods—hair—and slowly, it dawns on her: What if Kevin’s mother wasn’t just a witness? What if she isn’t just a sad figure, broken and crazed by a lifetime of tending to a boy who’s never really recovered? What if she’s the one who killed Amelia?
Cara starts to back out of the room. “I’ve done a lot of things wrong,” Cara says.
“You certainly have.”
“I took Kevin for granted. I was too focused on my child.”
“That’s right.”
“I tried to build a circle around us. I wanted our life to be private. Just ours.”
Mrs. Barrows shakes her head. “It doesn’t work that way.”
Cara’s heart speeds up. Her palms turn cold and clammy. She needs to get herself out of here. “I need to go home,” Cara says, working to keep her voice steady, to betray as little emotion as possible. She moves sideways, away from the window, afraid to turn her back to the woman which perhaps is a mistake. It confirms what they both know. Now there’s no need for the shred of pretense. “I’ll kill you if you leave,” she says.
How? She wonders. Is the knife in her bathrobe? Is this tiny woman going to come lunging at her? For a second, this ludicrous image energizes Cara. She’s not a little girl taken by surprise; she can fight this woman off and save herself, if only she can find a way out of this house.
“You can’t go now. I have a knife.”
Cara doesn’t move. “If you kill me, Mrs. Barrows, how will that help Kevin?”
“I should have done it a long time ago.”
“No,” Cara says. The woman does indeed have a knife she’s pulled out of her pocket. It is narrow, as thin as a steak knife, but much longer, and serrated. Cara remembers hearing one of the main things gleaned from Amelia’s wound: the knife was serrated. “I know what you’re thinking, and it’s not the answer.”
“You don’t know what I’m thinking.”
“I do. For the last five days, I’ve been lying awake every night, thinking about this girl who came into my son’s life.” Cara keeps her voice level, her words steady. “I was horrified that she’d been murdered, of course, but in some way I was glad she was gone, because it meant she couldn’t make some choice down the line that would devastate Adam. Couldn’t befriend him for a year and then decide, next year, to make fun of him on the playground.” Cara can see that this is working. The woman’s eyes are turned away, but Cara can see in her posture, her hands, that she is listening. “But now I’m starting to think maybe I was wrong. Maybe this girl wasn’t a distraction, maybe she was a measure of success I couldn’t see. Maybe Adam’s friendship helped her in some way, and he understood that.” She slows down now, to choose her words carefully. “I know that Kevin’s friendship helped me. Even if we couldn’t sustain it. Even if he made that choice—” She pauses to ensure the words are clear: He made the choice. “I know that he loved me. I know his heart is good, that his intentions are loving. And he knows that mine are the same. And I think it’s possible to feel sustained by certain kinds of love even when you don’t see that person. Knowing that Kevin is here, with us, watching over us, thinking about us, has sustained me. Don’t ruin what’s left of Kevin’s future. He still has a chance. Don’t ruin it, Mrs. Barrows.”
Behind her, Cara hears a car pull into the driveway.
“He’s not entirely innocent, you know.”
There are footsteps on the gravel walk, coming up to the house. She hears a female voice, not Kevin as she expected. Cara looks up. “What do you mean?”
Cara takes a step into the entryway. In the corner of her eye, she can see the kitchen, a red painted door on the far wall. There’s a clear path to the door, no chairs or table blocking the way. The question is whether it’s locked, and how hard it will be to find her way from the dark, fenced-in backyard to her car. She will need to make a run for it, trusting that this woman’s reflexes are slow, her experience with a knife marginal.
“Ask him yourself. Ask him why it’s taken him nine years to get in touch with you. Ask him if he knows anything about your poor parents.”
Cara flies then, jerking around so fast her shoulder hits the doorway with a smack that momentarily sends her reeling off course, then surging toward the back door. Behind her, there’s movement, a scrambling, objects falling to the floor.
Miraculously, when she gets to it, Cara finds the door open and a second later, she’s outside, enveloped by darkness and cold night air. She jumps off the porch and crouches into the cover of bushes beside the house to wait.
Behind her she hears someone ring the front door bell, open the door, and then call out, in a familiar voice: “Evelyn, it’s me.”
From her spot in the bushes, Cara creeps closer to the window. She doesn’t understand, doesn’t know how it’s possible. She stands up to see what she can through the window: the back of Kevin’s mother, standing in the doorway and, behind her, Suzette walking in, opening her arms, and saying, “I’m so sorry, sweetheart. Just tell me what happened.”
June doesn’t know if this is right or not, but Suzette has insisted that she drop her off. “I’ll be fine. I promise you,” she said, though she didn’t look fine anymore. Her eyes darted from house to house, window to window; her hand shook slightly as she reached for the door. “I have to do this by myself. I’m asking you, please. Come back in an hour.” In her voice, June heard a core of steel, a determination to do whatever she had to without assistance. She thought, Maybe this will be a breakthrough, like she never had taking her two-block walks with Teddy.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll be back.” Maybe this is a mistake or maybe it’s what Suzette needs most: to be trusted, given a chance.
With an hour to kill, the only place June can think to go is the parking lot behind the school that overlooks the woods. She won’t go hunting, won’t do anything dangerous, but maybe she’ll see if there’s any sign of Chris. When she gets there, it’s amazing: there are no other cars, no sign of life, but there in the woods, a light is flashing. It’s a dim orange glow, a weak flashlight on the last of its batteries.
Before getting out of the car, June makes one last call to Teddy’s cell phone and, miraculously, he answers. She’s so relieved to hear his voice again, so happy he’s alive and apparently fine, that she almost tells him she loves him right on the spot.
But of course that would be silly. What’s important now is finding Chris, tracking down this light in the woods. She tells him where she is, what she’s seen. “He’s been out there before apparently, during school hours.”
“All right. I’m coming over. Stay right where you are. Don’t go in by yourself, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Promise me.”
In the distance, the light turns off, as if whoever’s holding it has seen her car, or somehow heard this phone call. She gets out of the car and moves soundlessly across the field where she knows the older children sometimes play a complicated game of tag that, until Amelia’s murder, supervising adults had allowed in a tacit agreement to choose some battles over others. No one, that she’s heard, has ever mentioned this
fact to the police, but she wonders if it isn’t an important facet of what happened: that children had been allowed to extend their own boundaries.
At the edge of the wood, she steps in the direction she believes the light was coming from.
She hears a sound that no animal could make—a stick hitting dirt, with labored breathing behind it. As she moves into the grove of trees, a branch catches her shirt and she cries out in startled terror. Beneath a moonless sky, it’s impossible to see anything but the branches directly in front of her face, so she moves by feel, inching forward, her hands in front of her, trying to make as little sound as possible. If the killer is out here, he won’t have an easy time finding her, she tells herself, and creeps forward in the direction the sound was coming from. But what will she do if she does find danger? She has no protection, nothing on her that resembles a weapon. If someone lunged at her right now, she hardly knows what she would do except execute the vaguest plan of self-defense—a knee to the crotch, fingers to the eyeballs.
Except for the leaves beneath her feet, the only sound in the woods now seems to be coming from her own body—her heart pounding, blood rushing in her ears. Then she sees it again, a flash of yellow light. Out of the silence, she hears something high-pitched and, after a moment, realizes what it must be: a child crying.
She moves faster, ignoring the branches that snag at her clothes. Something tears her sleeve and she yanks it free, and only feels, a few seconds later, that it’s scratched her, too. She touches her arm and feels a trickle of blood.
She finds him, finally, by nearly falling on top of him. In the fading glow of his dying flashlight, she can see the outline of the boy—the hunch of his shoulders, his shoes, the edge of his glasses—curled at the bottom of an oval-shaped hole, five feet long and several feet wide. He is so bent on his work digging this hole, he doesn’t look up and see her standing over him. She levels her voice to a whisper and tries to calm her thundering heart: “Are you okay?”
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