by John Burley
Likewise, from a rational point of view, the idea of punishing her child for this atrocity seemed somewhat pointless. Perhaps punishment would at least teach him that every action has its consequences. But if he had no ability to appreciate that the action was wrong, reprimand was unlikely to keep it from happening again.
What other options did that leave? Sending her son somewhere to be locked away? Following him around every moment of every day to ensure that this sort of thing – or worse – never happened again? Impossible. She sat in the grass, legs crossed in front of her and arms wrapped protectively around her knees. She sat there for a long time, some ten yards from the dead wood rat in its plastic cell, and searched herself for an answer. It wasn’t a situation she’d ever imagined encountering, and now that it was here she had no idea what to do with it. She could still smell the stench of the thing: its furry body bloated and rotting in the sun, tiny feet torn apart and matted with blood from useless attempts to claw its way out. She felt another hitch in her stomach and turned to the side to retch once again. This time nothing came. She had emptied herself completely.
She wiped her mouth with the back of one dirt-grimed hand and stared at the container nailed to the board with its respective cloud of flies. The sight of it repulsed her, made her want to distance herself from it as much as possible. And yet, she realized now that it was also a part of her. She owned it as much as her son did, for wasn’t there an inseparable connection between mother and child? From the moment of conception, the two are linked by body and blood, and that visceral intimacy continues well beyond childbirth. It becomes a part of who you are, as indissoluble as the color of your skin or the tempo of your heart. She was vaguely aware that it was somehow different for fathers, who seemed to be able to disconnect themselves at times from the lives of their children, or at least to compartmentalize their thoughts and feelings in accordance with their various duties and responsibilities. She’d never been able to accomplish that degree of mental separation. She was a mother above all else, and for better or worse, she felt inherently tied to the lives of her children. She had difficulty describing it any more clearly than that, but understood it perfectly and without reservation. And what it meant was that the thing in the container was hers as much as it was Thomas’s. And now she was responsible for taking care of it.
She got up, crossed the yard, entered the house, and retrieved a pair of latex exam gloves from the modest supply of medical equipment she kept on the upper shelf of her bedroom closet. She wished for a mask to cover her mouth and nose, but lacking that, she grabbed a bottle of Vicks from the bathroom medicine cabinet and smeared a generous amount of the vaporizing gel on the skin between her upper lip and nose, then covered her lower face with a handkerchief that she knotted behind her head. She returned to the shed and grabbed two large, black heavy-duty garbage bags that Ben kept for the disposal of raked leaves and other yard debris. Then, quickly, before she could think about it further, she walked around to the rear of the shed, snatched the contraption off the ground – it was heavier than she’d anticipated, although she preferred not to think about why – and tossed it into the open bag. Angry flies zipped around her head, but she did not pause this time to swat them away. Instead, she wound the opening of the bag around itself several times, tied it with an overhand knot, dropped this bag into the next with her discarded gloves, and repeated the process.
She walked with her (What was it? Discovery? Prize? Package of shame?) to the Saab parked in the driveway out front, popped the trunk, lowered the thing in, and slammed the lid closed again against the smell that still seemed to permeate through the tightly bound, double-bagged plastic cocoon. She barely remembered the twenty-minute drive to the local dump, barely remembered tossing it into the gaping mouth of excavated earth, and barely remembered standing there for a moment, watching it from above. She did recall, all too well, that after a few watchful moments, the bag appeared to move, just slightly, as if she had been mistaken and the thing inside was not quite dead yet. That had been enough for her. She turned quickly, showing it her back, and drove home in a cold sweat that clung to her body for the remainder of the day, even after a hot shower and fresh clothes. Weeks later, despite all of her efforts to eradicate the smell, the car still seemed to stink of the thing, although Ben never took notice. Perhaps it was only an olfactory memory. If so, she owned that, too.
The next time she saw Thomas, she said nothing about the incident. In fact, she found herself avoiding him. She wondered whether he’d gone looking for the animal, found it missing, and had realized she must’ve discovered it. She also wondered if he cared, and she imagined that, most likely, he did not.
A week later, she encountered Thomas alone in his room, lying on his bed and listening to music on his headphones. The bedroom door had been closed. Susan was carrying a basket of laundry in her arms. She rested the basket on one thigh, knocked lightly on the door, and when there was no answer, opened the door and entered the bedroom, assuming it was vacant.
When she saw that he was there, she paused in the doorway, not wanting to go farther inside, not wanting to be alone with him, even for the few seconds it would take to leave the clothes on his dresser. More than the encounter itself, she was disturbed by the realization that she was so uncomfortable in his presence. No matter what he has done, she reasoned with herself, I am still his mother. That role hadn’t ended that day behind the tool shed, and although her discovery had forced her to see her son as something different from what she’d previously perceived him to be, the basic dynamic of their relationship hadn’t changed. Had it? No, she decided. He was still her child, after all, and she had an obligation to look after him. How to fulfill that duty under the current circumstances was something she had yet to figure out, but the responsibility was there, the same as if he’d been born with cerebral palsy or mental retardation.
She motioned for him to remove his headphones so she could talk with him, and he did so with the normal reluctance of an eight-year-old boy. She stepped inside the room, set the basket of folded clothes on the floor, and closed the door behind her.
‘I found the dead rat behind the shed,’ she told him matter-of-factly, ‘the one you nailed inside the plastic container.’
She didn’t know what she’d been expecting his response to be. Denial, perhaps. Or anger. Lying. She was even prepared for tears. What she got instead was: nothing. He lay on his back in bed, his head propped up on one hand, and regarded her blankly, waiting for her to continue – waiting for her to say something of some significance.
When he made no reply, she continued. ‘You tortured and killed that poor, helpless creature. I want to know why.’
He continued to regard her, his face devoid of emotion.
‘Are you sick, Thomas? Do I need to put you in a hospital? Is that what needs to happen here?’
Nothing. His green eyes remained disinterested. It was unsettling, the way he looked at her with that empty, dispassionate gaze. His response scared her, probably because it confirmed what she’d already feared. Suddenly she wanted to slap him. She wanted to cross the room, grab him by the shoulders, and shake him violently back and forth until some emotion – any emotion – registered on that face. She wanted to scream, ‘Fuck you for what this means! Fuck you for putting me in this position!’ Instead, she picked up the basket of clothes and dumped them on the floor. It was a meaningless, pathetic act.
‘You listen to me carefully,’ she told him. ‘I won’t tolerate anything like this again. Ever. If you have a problem, you need to deal with it. If you need help dealing with it, I will get you help. But you need to ask for it. You need to show me that you want to get better. Because if you continue down this path, it will not end well, Thomas. I guarantee you that.’
The boy said nothing in response, showed nothing discernible in his expression. She turned and left the room, moving down the hallway and descending the stairs to the family room, nearly tripping over her own feet as she went. He
r vision blurred slightly as tears of frustration threatened to spill over her lower lids, and she made a beeline for the front door, needing to take a walk and get away from the house for a while. As she passed by in the hallway, Ben glanced up from the kitchen table, where he was sorting through bills.
‘What’s the matter?’ he called to her.
‘Nothing,’ she said. It was the first time she lied to him regarding their son, but it would not be the last. ‘I’m going for a walk.’
‘You want company?’ he asked.
Sweet, sweet Ben, she thought to herself angrily. So well-meaning, and yet so completely oblivious. She tried to remind herself that it wasn’t fair to cast him in that light. How was he supposed to know? She considered taking him up on his offer, considered asking him to join her. But she knew that if she did she would end up telling him the whole story of the wood rat and their oldest boy’s newfound hobby. That would start a chain of events beyond her ability to control, and she wasn’t ready for that yet. She wasn’t ready to involve him. She needed time to think, and to observe what happened next. Yes, she would keep her horrible knowledge to herself for the moment. It seemed like the course of action with the least number of variables, and right now that strategy made sense to her. Perhaps it was the only thing that did. She had no way of knowing then how that decision would change the course of the years to come, or how the simplest decisions are sometimes the most important ones.
‘No thanks,’ she’d called back to her husband as she grasped the knob on the front door. ‘I need to be by myself for a while.’
All of that seemed like such a long time ago. Life moved on, as it always did, and she watched her boy grow older and more mature with the passing years. For nearly two years after the incident with the wood rat, she’d discovered no further evidence of similar behavior from Thomas, and she dared to imagine that her confrontation had paid off – that he had somehow gotten better. It wasn’t until shortly after his tenth birthday that she noticed the home-made signs stapled to several telephone poles in their neighborhood. Lost cat, they read, identifying the wayward feline as Mr Tibbs, who was orange with a broad white stripe along his underbelly. Reward if found!! the sign promised, and gave a phone number and address to contact. The address belonged to Susan’s neighbor three houses down.
The first thing she’d done after reading the sign was to return home and look behind the tool shed. She didn’t think there would be … well, she didn’t know what she thought, exactly. But of course there was nothing there. That night she’d casually mentioned during dinner that she’d seen the signs alerting people to the missing cat, and she’d watched Thomas closely out of the corner of her eye for a response. He barely seemed to have heard her, which offered her little relief. What if he hasn’t gotten better at all? she wondered. What if he has only gotten better at hiding his true nature?
Several days passed. That weekend, while Ben and the boys were off at one of Thomas’s baseball games, she decided to pay their neighbor a visit. There was a cake-decorating class Susan was thinking about attending that summer, and she wanted to know if the mother, Annie, would be interested in joining her. They talked for a while, and as she was getting ready to leave, Susan mentioned that she’d noticed the signs regarding Mr Tibbs, and she inquired as to whether he’d been found.
‘Not a sign of him.’ Her friend shook her head. ‘He was always an outdoor cat. Liked to wander through the woods out back, I suppose. Liked to stalk birds, too, although I don’t know what he’d do with one if he ever caught it. Sometimes he stayed out all night. I never paid it much mind.’ She offered Susan a thin smile. ‘He always showed up at the back door for breakfast and dinner, though. That guy could eat. Most afternoons he slept inside on the windowsill.’ She pointed toward the vacant sill, which looked sad and deserted in the cat’s absence. ‘Sally’s been pretty upset about it. She sure loved that cat.’
‘He’ll show up,’ Susan assured her, trying to sound more optimistic than she felt.
‘I hope so,’ Annie said. ‘I hope he didn’t get hit by a car or anything. If Sally came across him in the roadway, I’d have a pretty traumatized little girl on my hands.’
‘Don’t think that way,’ Susan responded, reaching over and squeezing her friend’s hand. ‘Cats are very resourceful animals. They know how to stay out of harm’s way.’ She tried on a smile and found that it almost seemed to fit.
When she arrived home, she went to the tool shed, wanting a second look around. She found the door to the shed locked, just as it should be. She retrieved the key from the kitchen, removed the padlock, slid the door open and stood inside. The interior was stagnant, and smelled vaguely of the combined scent of oil and earth. Being there reminded her immediately of the day she had discovered the wood rat. Recently cut grass clung to the wheels of the lawn mower. The bags of topsoil she’d purchased two years ago for her gardening were long gone. In their place was a spade-tip shovel, leaning against the far wall. Its tip was caked with dirt. She ran her fingers thoughtfully along the wooden texture of its long handle. The tool seemed to be the only thing out of place in the neatly arranged shack. Acting more on instinct than anything else, she picked up the shovel, exited the shed and proceeded into the woods behind their house. It took her twenty minutes to find the recently dug grave, and only two minutes to exhume the body. Her right hand automatically went to the back hip pocket of her jeans, pulling out the heavy-duty black plastic bags she’d absently brought with her. She had no recollection of grabbing the bags from the shed, but she’d obviously done so. She must’ve known all along what she was bound to find.
She double-bagged the animal as before, barely taking notice this time of what had been done to it. She made the trip to the dump and disposed of it in a manner that, if discovered, would not lead to her son. She returned home, showered and took a nap. Ben woke her from a dreamless slumber when he arrived home an hour and a half later.
‘You okay, honey?’ he asked, brushing the hair back from her eyes and feeling her forehead with the back of his hand. ‘You were sweating in your sleep. Are you sick?’
‘No,’ she responded, looking up at him, her thoughts still muddled with sleep. But your son is, she almost added, but again chose not to, leaving him out of this for the second time. God only knew why. ‘Just tired,’ she muttered, and rolled away from him, trying to find her way back down into the merciful nothingness from which she’d been disturbed.
PART SIX
Terms of Survival
Chapter 51
Early May. Dr Ben Stevenson pulled the dark blue Honda into the parking lot and killed the motor. The lingering caress of winter had grudgingly slipped away two weeks ago, giving way to warm sunshine, a multicolored tapestry of blooming things and the frenzied flurry of insects eager to begin the new season. Normally, the nicer weather would have lightened Ben’s spirits, which tended to be darkest during Ohio’s cold, grim, intractable winters. This year the change of season only heightened his sense of loss. It reminded him that life went on, and subtly suggested that wounds, however deep, might someday heal, and that loss, however poignant, was but a temporary condition that would fade ever so slightly with each successive year.
He climbed out of the car and closed the door, glancing behind him as he crossed the parking lot. No one watched from the driver’s seat of an unmarked police car. They’d stopped following him two months ago, and even that had saddened him. Have they given up that quickly, he wondered, or have they just decided I have nothing further to contribute? If their assumptions coincided with the latter, they were right. He was in the dark as much as they were – perhaps more. There must be leads they are pursuing, he told himself. There have to be. A mother and two children cannot simply disappear from the face of the earth without a trace. Could they? No. Surely, there must be something.
On the day they’d disappeared, Ben had been detained for further questioning. For eight hours they’d interrogated him, asking the same questions over
and over in a thousand different ways, trying to get him to contradict himself, not believing he hadn’t known. ‘You mean to tell me,’ Special Agent Culver had asked, looming over him behind the chair in which Ben sat, ‘that you examined the bite marks on those victims, photographed them, discussed them with the investigating detectives, and never noticed that they matched the dental architecture of your own son? I mean, look at the pictures!’ He’d thrown photographs of Thomas down on the table all around him, framed pictures that had been prominently displayed in Ben’s own home. ‘You don’t see that gap between the upper left canine and the first premolar – the one we’ve been focused on throughout the investigation? You don’t see that?!’
The truth was, he hadn’t. Or more precisely, he’d seen it every day, and had never made the connection – had never allowed himself to make the connection. During medical school, one of Ben’s mentors – a surgeon with the last name of Zaret – had been fond of telling his students, ‘The eyes cannot see what the mind does not know.’ If you don’t consider the possibility of a particular disease, in other words, you won’t recognize the signs and symptoms for what they truly are. ‘You have to think about it here,’ the scrub-clad surgeon would say, pointing to his forehead, ‘before you can see it here,’ he’d finish, the index finger descending to the level of his eyes.