Shatter My Rock

by Greta Nelsen

  This role-reversal has me tongue-tied; usually I’m the one giving the orders. “It’s a four-hour drive,” I offer.

  “Make it three,” he says. “And bring your husband.”

  * * *

  Tim refuses to get out of bed, even when I inform him of the detective’s call and no matter how stridently I beg. Every molecule of fight, it seems, has deserted him.

  I stand cross-armed at our bedside, assuming the countenance of a hardened nun. “We have to.”

  To the pillow, he mutters, “For what?”

  “Don’t you want him back? We have to claim the…”

  He burrows deeper into the mass of blankets, tells me with his body that he doesn’t care. Or that he cares too much. I crawl in beside him, let my lips on his neck say I’m sorry, that I still love him, that I need him more now than ever before. His fingers on my spine reciprocate, tell me he will be the rock of this family to the bitter end.

  “Should I call your mother?” I ask softly.

  “I’ll do it.”

  Despite my promises, I have yet to notify anyone of Owen’s fate. “Okay.”

  I slip off to the bathroom so he can have his privacy, a quiet space to collect his thoughts. But there I find my own demons. I open the faucet, splash some cool water on my face and neck, let my skin drip dry. In the rushing stream I hear, You did it, and now you must pay.

  * * *

  The drive to Maine takes longer than it should, and not because Tim spares any pressure on the gas pedal. Instead, it stretches out from heavy quiet, the kind of nothingness that devours a man whole. As we exit the interstate, I ask, “Do you know where we’re going?”

  “The state police barracks?”

  “I think so,” I say.

  “Call Jenna.”

  I take Tim’s advice, let Jenna know we have returned. “Hi, it’s me,” I say, confident she will know my voice until the day she dies. “Can we stop over?”

  She hesitates. “To the house, you mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t think so,” she tells me. “It’s taped off, and there are cameras everywhere. We’re at a hotel.”

  “Cameras?”

  “The, uh…accident made the national news.”

  I cannot figure how the drowning of an infant could garner such attention. “The national news?”

  Tim tenses beside me, shakes his head and sighs.

  Jenna says nothing.

  “We’re meeting with Detective Hanscom,” I say. “Do you know where the state police barracks are?”

  “Listen, Claire,” she says, “you need to be prepared for…”

  The idea that I may be a suspect in Owen’s death surprises me not at all. “I know,” I say. The police have every right to turn their focus my way.

  “I can talk to them for you, tell them whatever you think might help.”

  In the face of everything I’ve done, drawing Jenna into this quagmire seems innocuous. Yet I don’t have the stomach for it. “Just point us in the direction of the barracks,” I tell her. “We’ll take it from there.”

  Chapter 13

  A trooper so young he looks as if he’s playing dress-up in his daddy’s formal, French-blue uniform leads Tim and me through a maze of corridors to the cusp of an interview room. From the hallway, I note the room’s spare furnishings and institutional décor: prison-gray walls; commercial-grade carpeting with the texture of Astroturf; a table and three armless, steel-framed chairs.

  Tim reaches for my hand and squeezes, and for a moment I forget that he doesn’t know everything, that he still believes Owen was his and the tragedy was nothing more than a simple accident. “Let’s get this over with,” he tells me with a note of sympathy I don’t deserve, “so we can get back to Ally.”

  “Have a seat,” the trooper says, a wave of his hand indicating where he wants me to go. “Detective Hanscom is on the way.”

  As I cross the threshold, I sense the course of my future shifting, settling into a new pattern. Gone is the pulled-together version of Claire Fowler, the professional who kicks ass and takes names, always gets the job done. In her place survives an arrested facsimile of me, an emotionally stunted half-breed who wishes only to escape with her freedom and her sanity. Everything else can wither on the vine, seed the earth anew.

  Tim tries to follow me, but the trooper sidesteps into his path. “I’ll need you to come with me.”

  The way he says this makes me nervous, first puts the idea in my mind that Tim is a suspect too. “Why?” I ask.

  “We need detailed statements from both of you.”

  “Can’t he…?” I say.

  The trooper predicts where I’m going and quickly shuts me down. “It’s more accurate if we take them separately,” he says, “so your recollections don’t affect his, and vice versa.”

  This explanation is as logical as could be, and yet it leaves me unsatisfied. If Tim were set to lie, such a tactic might be effective, but my husband is as oblivious as the police.

  “You okay?” Tim asks me.

  It’s probably better that he doesn’t witness me perpetrating these fabrications. “Go ahead,” I say with a flick of my wrist.

  He shoots me a hopeful look that I read as sad and desperate, the embodiment of his desire to save me from myself. As much as I wish to release him from this obligation, it is neither the time nor the place. Instead, I dig deep, draw a peppy smile from somewhere in our charmed past and tell him one more time, “I love you.”

  * * *

  The interview room has no windows, no clock, not even the static buzz of an old-school radio. It is me and my thoughts alone, a setup devised to test a suspect’s strength of mind. And it’s working.

  For what seems an hour or more, I am left to ponder the patent wrong of what I have done, the culturally condemned evil of it. If it weren’t for Tim and Ally, I would confess now, let the police arrest me, persecute me, string me up as a warning for those so deficient as to consider following in my footsteps. But in a convoluted way, I have done this for my husband and daughter, to spare them the kind of destruction that stole everything I ever loved before them.

  The door bursts open, and in saunters Det. Hanscom, a stack of coffee-splattered papers clutched in his grip and a determined look fixed on his flushed face. The young trooper slips in behind him, more a shadow of the detective than an autonomous being.

  Det. Hanscom says nothing, drags a chair from the table and settles in across from me. The papers he deposits between us, facing more my way than his. I glance at the top sheet and notice, among other things that cause my breath to catch, the words: Post-Mortem. Fowler, Owen Richard.

  Before we get anywhere, the detective draws a small handheld recorder from his pocket and breezily places it near the edge of the table, where he clicks it on. Then he delivers the Miranda warning, which I have heard an untold number of times on television and in the movies but now assumes a whole new gravity. “Do you understand these rights?” he asks with mild condescension. He studies my reaction, awaits my response. But when I fail to speak, he sighs. “I think you know why we’re here.”

  I shrug lightly, tell him without words that I don’t intend to make this easy for him.

  “Your baby didn’t drown,” he says outright, and again he waits.

  I consider his eyes, wonder if he has a wife or daughter at home, someone whose existence may buy me his sympathy. Or perhaps his pity. I feign surprise. “Huh?”

  Briefly, I notice the trooper scratching notes on a small pad, but soon he becomes so superfluous it’s as if he has dissolved into the wall.

  “Your baby was asphyxiated,” the detective continues, the hint of a knowing grin crawling across his lips. “But you already knew that.”

  I shake my head, remind myself to breathe. “No.”

  He rolls his eyes. “His lungs were dry. You know what that means, don’t you?”

  I figure he is being rhetorical.

  “He was dead before he hit th
e water.”

  The gruffness with which he handles me seems uncalled for, even if I am a killer. I have still lost a child, a boy I cherished despite the complications he was born into. “You’re wrong.”

  This time the detective chuckles. “I don’t think so.”

  “The deck was wet.”

  “Most are.”

  “I slipped,” I claim.

  “People slip all the time, but they don’t launch their babies overboard. And if they do, their babies drown; they don’t asphyxiate.”

  I shove the autopsy report aside. “It’s wrong. They made a mistake.” I gulp. “Owen drowned.”

  “So that’s how you’re gonna play it?” he huffs, his nostrils flaring. “Lie and deny?”

  As much as I try to halt them, the tears come anyway. But at least they do so quietly, in a soft trickle that barely wets my cheeks. “Whatever.”

  This word prickles him, jolts him from his chair. “Whatever?”

  I stay silent.

  From nowhere, the detective switches direction. “Are you thirsty?”

  I am and he must know it, this closet of a room so claustrophobic it makes me dizzy. “No.”

  He stands. “You sure? ‘Cause I’m gonna hit the vending machine.”

  I hold my ground, even on this trivial point.

  He doesn’t ask a third time; instead, he clicks the recorder off, exits and leaves my brain to eat itself alive. The trooper trails him out the door.

  Only now do I allow myself to ponder how long one might spend in prison on a murder conviction and whether Maine is a death penalty state, something I should already know with certainty. Rhode Island abolished such a merciful option somewhere in the mid-1980s, a change that doomed any murderer with a conscience to hell.

  Another half-hour passes, maybe an hour. When the door next swings my way, what I first see are the shapely legs of a woman. Det. Hanscom slinks in behind her, his vintage suit jacket gone, his tie loosened.

  The woman smiles, and when she does, I feel something that surprises me: empathy. Contrary to popular wisdom, not all women posses this quality, a quality I crave with such ferocity it rivals my need to breathe. “Hello, Mrs. Fowler,” the woman says, her dark eyes peering through me with ease. She motions at the detective. “I’m helping Jack with your case, trying to get to the bottom of what happened to your son.”

  My case? It sounds as if they have already banged the gavel and clunked the prison door shut behind me. Weakly, I say, “Oh.” If I must tell someone the truth, it will be her.

  The woman takes a seat and shakes my hand in a warm, soft way. “Charlotte Tupper, Assistant Attorney General.”

  My mother’s name was Charlotte. A sign.

  Det. Hanscom drops a tattered notepad on the table and hovers over Ms. Tupper’s shoulder as she peruses it. If I were smart, I would study it too, try to glean what they know. Then again, I doubt the authorities can prove a case for murder or anything else, since I am the sole witness to Owen’s demise.

  “Can you remind me what happened on the evening of May 27th and the morning of May 28th, from the beginning?” Ms. Tupper asks, a polished chrome pen poised over her legal pad, where she has headed the page with the date and time of our interview.

  I have shared some of this story before, the sanitized version. But never from start to finish. I nod, knowing I will give her more than she expects but not everything. “We had a hard time finding the place,” I begin. “Those roads by the beach are a maze.”

  The detective rolls his eyes, annoyed I have started the telling here. Ms. Tupper shifts in her seat, settles in for the duration.

  “It was raining,” I go on, “and we had to stop for directions.” Truthfully, I move through our arrival at the cottage, the clambake dinner, our ridiculous level of alcohol consumption, and even a glossed-over version of my sexual encounter with Tim.

  Now and then, Ms. Tupper halts me, requests I repeat myself, underlines items in her notes, which now overtake Det. Hanscom’s. “So you were the last one to go to sleep, at approximately three a.m.?” she backs up to confirm.

  I nod. “Yes.”

  “And your husband, Tim? When did he go to bed?”

  I pause, think before I speak. “Right before I did. He’s a heavy sleeper. As soon as his head hit the pillow…”

  “Did he pass out?”

  “No.”

  She cocks an eyebrow. “Did you?”

  “No.”

  “And your daughter was where?”

  “The salon.”

  She flips a number of pages in the detective’s notepad until she finds what she seeks. “The baby was already asleep in the stateroom when you went to bed, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about the Dearborns? When would you say they retired?”

  I shrug. “Maybe an hour before me and Tim. Two o’clock?”

  “So, to your knowledge, everyone on the boat was asleep by three a.m., including you and Owen.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then what happened?”

  Det. Hanscom leans in, prepares to catch the confession I may lob his way. “I heard him crying,” I mumble.

  Ms. Tupper allows me a moment to settle my nerves. “Go on.”

  I would rather stop here, let my mind accomplish what it aches to do naturally: lock those early morning hours somewhere so inaccessible that even I don’t know how my child died. “I picked him up,” I say with a little sniffle, “so he’d stop fussing. I didn’t want to wake Tim.”

  The detective gulps down the last of his ginger ale and deposits the empty bottle in my line of sight; if I am to look at Ms. Tupper, I must confront the bottle too. A bold-faced taunt.

  “It was cold outside,” I rush to say, “and wet. I started to slip, and when I grabbed for the railing, Owen fell.”

  “Hold on,” Det. Hanscom says with a shake of his head. “When did you go above board?”

  “As soon as I took him out of the basket. I told you…”

  “And what were you planning to do up there?” he asks.

  I glance at Ms. Tupper for guidance, forgetting she is on the detective’s side. “I don’t know. Rock him back to sleep? Sing him a song? Feed him?”

  “But you didn’t do any of those things?” Ms. Tupper asks.

  “No.”

  A few moments of silence ensue, during which the State’s attorney tips her legal pad out of my view and furiously scribbles something that convinces me I have been caught. Then she glances at her watch. “I need to use the restroom. Excuse me.”

  She exits and the detective follows, but not before shooting a smug glare my way as he pinches the ginger ale bottle between his fingers and spirits it off. When he returns, he is outside the company of the assistant attorney general. And the trooper has returned.

  The detective spins an empty chair around and straddles it. “Let’s get serious here.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know what you’re…”

  “You smothered Owen, didn’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Then Tim did.”

  “He did not,” I say, louder than anything I have yet uttered.

  He reaches for the stack of documents, atop which the autopsy report still rests. But instead of the report, he retrieves a plain manila folder. “Well, somebody did,” he says matter-of-factly. He draws a handful of photographs from the folder and strews them across the table.

  I do not turn away soon enough to avoid the grisly sight of my dead baby.

  “Go ahead,” he says. “Take a good look. Somebody suffocated this baby, and there’s bruises to prove it.”

  There is no way I can respond to this line of questioning, my throat seized.

  The detective doesn’t seem to notice my difficulty. “Was it an accident?”

  I draw a couple of deep breaths on the chance I am headed for hyperventilation. Then I meet his gaze. “Yes, it was.” His eyes spark briefly before I add, “He drowned.”

  This t
ime when he bolts from his chair, he upends it. And that’s how it remains while he paces the space between the table and the wall, turns his back on me for an inordinate amount of time. When he swivels my way again, it’s as if a kindly grandma has taken possession of his soul. “Come on, Claire,” he coos. “Tell me what happened.” He rights the chair and sits. “You’ll feel better once you get it out.”

  It seems likely he has studied the psychology of human behavior, because I do yearn to rid myself of this secret, its dark weight a burden I have barely the strength to carry. “I want a lawyer.”

  Obviously, this is the last thing he expects to hear. He stiffens. “Guilty people need lawyers; innocent people tell the truth.”

  “I want a lawyer.”

  “I see.”

  Again, I say, “A lawyer.”

  “There’s a video camera,” he tells me, “at the marina. We’re waiting on the enhancement.”

  My blood runs cold; I think of nothing but the possibility of Tim being forced to watch me take Owen in open court.

  In case I am not spooked enough already, he adds, “And the deck pillows are at the crime lab.”

  “I want a lawyer,” I say one last time. “And my son.”

  Chapter 14

  I next see Tim in the parking lot of the state police barracks, where he leans against the tailgate of the van sucking down a cigarette, the urgency of his smoking a thin cover for the tremble it masks. I stifle the urge to chastise him, remind him it’s been twenty years since he’s indulged such a filthy habit. But now seems as good a time as any to revert to a past crutch.

  I sink into his arms, the cigarette burning on behind my shoulder. “Shh,” he breathes, because without realizing it, I have begun sobbing. “It’s okay. It’ll be all right.”

  I want nothing more than to believe him, but he speaks from ignorance. “Owen...” I manage to sputter. “We have to…”

  “I took care of it.”

  “You did?”

  He nods gently before pressing his lips to my head. “He’ll be home tomorrow.”

  I flatten my face to his chest, inhale the goodness that seeps from his pores. Then I close my eyes. “Thank you,” I say. At least now it’s conceivable that we could bury the baby before I am under arrest.