by Lisa Unger
“What happened?” I asked her. “What did he do?”
She released a sigh, took another swallow of wine. “He tripped me,” she said easily. “I fell down the stairs.”
I looked at her. “What? When? Mom, are you hurt?”
I had noticed her limping and asked her about it on Tuesday. She’d said her sciatica was acting up, which I knew meant she was getting overtired. And I felt guilty for going back to work part-time. My son was resentful about it; my mother was getting too old to care for children every day. But I selfishly didn’t ask her if it was all too much for her. I liked having a job, getting out of the house, talking to people. I felt like a real person for the first time in years. I was giddy with it.
“On Monday,” she said. “He claimed it was an accident. But it wasn’t.”
“How do you know it wasn’t?” I asked before I could stop myself. I so wanted her to be wrong about this.
She shook her head and offered me a sad, tight smile. She was still a pretty woman, petite and always put together, with her makeup done.
“I saw him, too late, stick his foot out,” she said.
She was patient, not angry that I didn’t want to believe her. There was a little quaver to her voice and the sound of it shattered me inside. “But really it was the look on his face that told the tale. He didn’t run down after me. He just stood there. Honey, he smiled.”
I grabbed her hand. “Oh, Mom, no. Please no.”
“You must know what he is,” she whispered. “You must.”
I could hear my sister shrieking, You knew what he was, Mom! You must have known. He slept in your bed.
“The medication,” I started, but didn’t finish. His most recent diagnosis was bipolar disorder, which no one believed. But the medication seemed to be helping somewhat. He was calmer, sleeping through the night.
“There’s no medication for that child,” she said. “He is what he is, just like his grandfather. It’s bad wiring, dear. I didn’t know it when I saw it the first time, in my own husband. But I can’t pretend not to see it now—the blankness, that black hole inside him.”
“No,” I said. It wasn’t true. There was some goodness in him, some of me, some of his father. I didn’t believe he was irredeemable. A mother knows these things. And I told her as much.
“Then send him someplace where they can help him, where they can teach him to live right, if nothing else. You can’t do it here. You’re enabling him. I’m sorry, sweetie. But it’s true. You just move him from school to school, hoping his reputation doesn’t follow, that he doesn’t hurt anyone else. But he always does.”
I cried and cried. She stroked my hair and told me that she loved me, but that she couldn’t be alone with him every afternoon anymore. I’d have to quit my job, or work only when he was in school. And anyway, it was about her time to return to Florida.
We stayed up talking for I don’t know how long. In the end I agreed to look at the school, to consider it. I would call my husband in the morning and ask him to come home. Our situation, I would tell him, had reached a crisis and decisions had to be made. He would help me; I knew he would. In spite of everything, I knew he still loved me.
When I went upstairs to check on my son, his door was open. I knew that I had closed it because I always did. The light in his bathroom was on. Had he heard us? Had he been listening in, as we had often caught him trying to do? But he was sound asleep. Curled in his comforter, still very small for his age, and underdeveloped in every way but intellectually, he looked like the angel child I’d never had. I tried to imagine him pushing children from jungle gyms, biting classmates, hurting the class guinea pig, tripping his grandmother. All the things he’d done to others, which I knew were true but had never witnessed. And he looked so small, his cheeks flushed with sleep. How could he be what he was?
The next day, the call came from the school to pick up my son early. The principal was waiting for me the hallway near the main entrance. He was a young man, blond, pasty, wearing chic, slim black trousers and a crisp white button-down. I had liked him on sight when we first met; but all his warmth and joviality had disappeared.
My son was sitting on a couch in the office waiting, looking proper and innocent in his navy-blue-and-white uniform, with its little red crest embroidered on the chest of his polo shirt.
I sat beside him while the principal took a seat behind the desk.
“Would you like to tell your mother why we’re here?” he asked. “Or shall I?”
My son shrugged, looked casually at his fingernails. “It was an accident,” he said lightly.
“He gave a classmate a peanut butter sandwich today,” said the principal. “This student has a severe nut allergy. And he was rushed to the hospital.”
Mr. Cruz, that was his name. They are all running together, these school officials with their stern faces and devastating words. I had packed the lunch this morning—macaroni and cheese, baby carrots, an apple, some steamed broccoli in a thermos. There was a strict no-nuts policy at this and most schools. Every mother with a school-age child knows that.
“I didn’t pack him a peanut butter sandwich,” I said.
“But he had one nonetheless,” said Mr. Cruz. “He told the student that it was hypoallergenic.”
“Why would he do that?” I said. I looked at my son, who was still looking at his nails. “Why would you do that?”
No answer.
“There was a kerfuffle on the playground a couple of days ago,” said the principal. “The other student pushed your son. A teacher intervened.”
“Why wasn’t I made aware of this?”
“You were sent an e-mail,” said the principal, straightening up his shoulders. “It was a fairly minor incident. But whenever there’s a physical conflict, we inform the parents.”
I never received an e-mail. But it suddenly occurred to me that I hadn’t been home in the afternoons. He could have easily gone to my computer and deleted any message from the school. He was staring at me now.
“Is he all right?” I asked. “The child.”
“He will be,” said Mr. Cruz. “There have been other incidents, as you know.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Do we have the right e-mail address for you?” he asked, looking at his computer screen.
“What other incidents?”
Mr. Cruz regaled me with my son’s activities over his first three weeks of school. He pulled the fire alarm on the first day. He was caught doing so by the security camera. He relentlessly taunted a little girl for being adopted, causing her to have an epileptic seizure brought on by stress (according to the girl’s mother). He wrote profanity on the chalkboard during math class when he’d been asked to solve a problem on the board. Now this.
“Do you deny any of this?” I asked my son.
“No,” he said. “But I did think I smelled smoke. That girl called me a shrimp, because I was the smallest kid in class. I was just giving her a taste of her own medicine. And the problem the teacher gave me was too easy. I had some extra time.”
Here I saw what my mother had been talking about: the smile—the slight, cruel little turn at the corners of his mouth. I hadn’t seen it before. My heart filled with dread at the sight of it. The principal asked him to wait outside, which he did, exiting in the most sullen way possible with a dark backward glance and a slam of the door. It was theater, though. He didn’t care. He wanted to be thrown out; he wanted to be home with me.
“The sandwich was a clear retaliation for the events of the day before,” said Mr. Cruz. “The other student is quite large, somewhat of a bully, and suffers from learning challenges. He did overpower your son, who has been taking some guff for his small size.”
I felt myself nodding. The room was growing hot, and the principal’s voice distant.
“So I see why he was angry. But the premeditation is what disturbs me, as it should you. He sought revenge in both cases and exacted it
. That’s not normal. The other things—the fire alarm, the profanity on the board, okay. We deal with that here. But this—it’s disturbing. The other boy could have been killed. And he knew it.”
“Yes,” I said. “I agree that it’s very upsetting. What do we do? We brought him here because you specialize in difficult children.”
“We are not equipped to handle a behavior problem like your son. You’ll need to find a facility more suited to his needs.”
I couldn’t believe how many different ways there were to express this sentiment, which I had heard a total of five times now. I don’t remember the rest of the visit, or the car ride from the school to our house. I quit my job that afternoon, and I called my husband and asked him to come home. But it was too late.
Knowing what I knew, I shouldn’t have left them to go to the store. I should have known that he heard my mother and me talking that night, that he knew I had already called the school upstate.
I should have had Mr. Cruz’s words ringing in my ears: But the premeditation is what disturbs me, as it should you. He sought revenge in both cases and exacted it.
What happened is unclear. My mother’s memory of the events is fuzzy. And my son claims—passionately and tearfully—that he had no idea what precipitated my mother’s fall in the bathroom, where her head knocked against the marble tub and she lay unconscious until I returned home from the store. My son was upstairs playing video games, and it was another fifteen minutes of my putting groceries away with no sound from behind the bathroom door in my master bathroom (which she never used) before I got concerned. I finally pushed my way inside the unlocked door and found her lying there, still and pale.
She regained consciousness in the hospital, but has a severe concussion and her doctor wanted her to stay overnight for observation.
“What happened, Mom?” I asked her when we were alone. She’d told the doctor that a rug slipped out from beneath her and she’d crashed backward.
“A very common fall,” he’d said. “You’re very fortunate it wasn’t worse, and that you weren’t alone.”
She swore to me that she didn’t know. She thought the rug might have slipped, and in fact it did look as though it had been bunched up on the floor.
“But why did you use that bathroom, and not the guest bathroom?” I asked.
“The door to the other bathroom was locked,” she said. “I thought he was inside, using the toilet, too embarrassed to answer when his grandma knocked on the door.”
It could have been an accident. There is no evidence to suggest that my son had anything to do with it. I inspected the rug, and there was nothing except a little extra water on the floor. The shower often sprayed out onto the tile if it wasn’t turned in the right direction. And perhaps I missed it this morning, didn’t wipe down the floor well enough. Maybe it was my fault.
In my heart, I don’t believe he would have willfully hurt his grandmother. I know he has problems, serious ones. But I know he loves her. In a lot of ways, he’s like a scientist. He does things just to see what the outcome will be. It’s not malice but a lack of empathy, an inability to envision consequences to others. You probably think that I am deeply in denial, diary. Maybe you’re right. But I have to cling to it, my faith that my son does have a heart. It might be slower than other hearts, but it does beat.
My mother is sleeping now, and my husband is home with our son. He seemed relieved to be called home, to be needed. And he knows that we need to talk, to make some decisions about our life and about our boy. We have to help him, if we can. And we have to help ourselves, as well as everyone else who may cross his path.
19
Dr. Cooper was waiting for me in her doorway, looking motherly and concerned. She had a mass of copper curls and a pretty, freckled face that always seemed to hold precisely the right expression. In her aura, I felt myself relax.
“How are you doing?” she asked as soon as I was inside.
I shrugged. “Not too great.”
“Okay,” she said. “Come in.”
Everything came tumbling out of me—everything to do with the police, with Luke, the scavenger hunt, Langdon. I told her about the Fakebook page and all the accusations there. She listened nodding, not reacting.
“Maybe your friend Ainsley has the right idea,” said the doctor. “Have you thought about going home?”
“I don’t have a home,” I said with more venom than I would have intended. I would have liked nothing better than to go home, someplace where I was safe and loved and accepted. But that place didn’t exist.
She pulled her mouth into a sympathetic line, bowed her head a little.
“To your aunt’s house,” she said. “You know your aunt would welcome you. She wants to be there for you.”
“And, while I’m down there, drop in on my father? On death row?”
“You’re angry,” she said. “I get it.”
“It doesn’t really seem fair, does it?” I asked. “I mean, is it me? Doesn’t this seem like quite the shit pileup?”
“It does,” she agreed. “But we’ve talked about fairness before here. Life is not fair. Horrible things happen to people, sometimes in disproportionate amounts. And I’m sorry that all of this is converging on you.”
You get what you get, and you don’t get upset; that was one of my mom’s favorite lines. But I always got upset. I’m sure I was as big a pain in the ass as Luke when I was a kid. Though I hope I wasn’t as mean to my mother as he was to Rachel. I don’t think I was.
“Someone who’s ill equipped to deal with it, who has dealt with too much already,” I said. I hated to be whiny, but I was really feeling sorry for myself.
“You are equipped to handle this,” she said. “And I’ll help you, no matter the outcome.”
I hugged one of her big soft pillows to my center and curled myself up deep in the corner of her couch.
“Maybe we can table the discussion of your father for now,” she said. “He has reached out to you. It’s up to you whether you want to communicate with him or not. Maybe now is not the time to make the decision.”
“What does he want?” I asked. “Did he tell you what he wants?”
She released a breath. “You want to address this tonight, with everything else going on?”
I nodded.
“He wants to know how you are. He wants to know if you are healthy and living well. He wants to know if you have managed to put the ugliness of your past behind you, what your plans are after graduation. And he wants to have a conversation with you. He said that there are things he needs to tell you that he doesn’t want to share with me.”
I stared at a painting she had on her wall. It was a soothing oil painting, swirls of gold and pink and white. I was always searching it for shapes. That night I saw a chrysalis with a butterfly folded deep inside.
“It’s to his credit that he sought to reach you through me, rather than finding a way to reach you directly,” she said. “It shows a true and honest concern for you, whatever his crimes.”
“What else?” I could feel it, that other thing hovering in her consciousness.
“His private investigator, Paul Rodriguez, claims to have new evidence,” she said. “Your father wonders if Mr. Rodriquez has reached out to you.”
I didn’t answer, just kept looking at the painting—now an angel, her wings curled protectively around her.
“I’ll remind you that you don’t have to talk to him or to the investigator.”
“He’s not innocent,” I said.
Now I saw a tornado, twisting and turning, decimating the village beneath it, spitting up debris.
“I watched him bury her body,” I said. This was not news to Dr. Cooper. “I sat there as he dug the hole in the ground and rolled her body, which was wrapped in our Oriental dining room rug, into the grave he’d dug. I lied for him, because I was afraid that he’d bury me right beside her.”
She watched me carefully. “I understand,” she said. “We’ve talked ab
out this. You didn’t actually see him kill her.”
“No,” I answered. “But who else? Who else?”
Who else?
My mother had a lover allegedly, according to the defense. Not a fling, or a one-night stand, not a brief encounter that never should have happened and that she lived to regret. She, allegedly, had a long, enduring love affair and friendship with a man other than my father. If it was true, I never knew about it, of course. That’s not a thing one shares with her child, I imagine—not that I know anything about affairs or about parenting.
This affair was the reason, the police concluded, for my father’s homicidal rage. The rage that caused him to murder her, dispose of her body, and then declare her missing. When I think about it, that she loved someone and he loved her, it gives me an odd sense of relief. I’m glad to know that somewhere in her life she was happy. Because she wasn’t happy with us.
When I think back upon that afternoon, what I walked in on when I came home from school that day, my whole body freezes. Sometimes it’s like a puzzle, shiny bright pieces scattered on the floor of my memory. Odd things, like a strange pair of shoes by the door, the tinkling of music coming from my mother’s room. My palms slick and red with blood. The siren of my own screaming. My father standing in the kitchen weeping. I wasn’t supposed to be home; art club had been canceled because our teacher was sick. I often wonder, though I try not to, how things would have been different if I had not come in when I did.
There were dates in her old calendar, including that afternoon, assignations marked only with the initial S. That’s what led them to conclude that my mother was having an affair. But this man, this lover, this suspect for a time, he was never found. They’d been careful, very careful—almost as if they knew something horrible would happen. Or maybe he—the other man—was the only one who knew it. And he was able to disappear without a trace.
It was this man who my father claimed had killed his wife. My father had found her murdered, he finally admitted. Then he hid her body, because he knew that he would be accused. Because he, too, was having an affair.