by Bill Floyd
Randy made me quit my job at Shaw Associates when we found out I was expecting; I’d put up something of a fuss, having recently been touted for another promotion, this time from analyst to the lead job in the marketing division, a position I’d been eyeing for some time. But he reminded me that we’d discussed the matter before the wedding, so I had to cede the point. Randy had always told me he aspired to the “traditional family” model, where he would be the breadwinner and I would look after the kids. It all sounded fine in a quaint sort of way, back when we were engaged, but then I’d discovered a fierce capacity for my job, and a rewarding sense of accomplishment every time I saved the company some money by improving their billing practices or finding a cheaper vendor. I’d stewed and pouted, but Randy held fast, and convinced me that a Rockwell-perfect home would be best for the child. He quoted developmental-psychiatry articles from magazines and journals that I suspected to be bogus, but in the end it seemed easier to let him have his way. He promised me I could relaunch my career as soon as the child started school.
With so many empty hours to fill, the fear crowded in. For a while I was able to tell myself that I simply had too much time on my hands. Our house was clean and spotless, no dust mote too diminutive that it could be allowed to settle on the furniture without my prompt attention. Six months in and I was going crazy. Randy noticed and told me I needed to ask the doctor what could be done about it, because I was getting all over his nerves with the constant dusting and polishing and vacuuming. “I feel like you’re following around behind me, my every little move,” he groused. “It’s making me really edgy. You understand?”
I said I did. I blamed hormonal shifts. Meekness came more naturally to me by then than it ever had before in my life. Don’t attract attention. I promised him that I’d speak to the doctor about it, then I retreated upstairs and closed the door to what had been Randy’s office/storage room but was now being remodeled into a nursery. Our computer was still in there, next to the new crib. I logged on to the Internet and read the latest on the as yet unsolved killing of the Hughes family, Keith and Leslie. They’d lived in Bakersfield, only a couple of hours away. It happened over six months ago but for some reason I kept reading about it. The initial reports said the bodies had been mutilated, but never anything more specific. I’d considered an anonymous phone call to the Bakersfield police. “Was it their eyes?” I would ask. “Was something done to their eyes?”
I never called. Delicate tremors coursed through my nerves day and night. I craved sedatives, alcohol, sleep aids; I couldn’t take anything, for fear it would harm the baby. Cleaning helped; circular motions, repetition serving as a calmative blanket; actually thinking about what might happen once the baby was born had the opposite effect.
I watched Randy pose in front of the bathroom mirror. In our second house, the master bath opened right off our bedroom, and when I’d been quiet and he didn’t notice me watching, or when he didn’t care enough anymore to worry about what I might think if I did see, he would flex and posture. He kept his black hair cut close to the scalp, a more conservative look than he’d favored when we’d first met. I figured he must have been hitting the free weights in his shed out back, because his muscles grew more defined as the years passed instead of less so, like he was aging in reverse. More likely he was self-conscious as middle age walked him down, and working hard to stave off any outward signs. A healthy vanity was one thing, but he was damn near narcissistic, especially with the scrapes and bruises. There was a full-length mirror across from the shower, and he assessed his wounds as if marking a tally. He fingered their contours with his eyes twinkling. I can remember the shape of each contusion, the tiny scars that the deeper ones had left. I’d quit even asking about their origins after a while. I simply noted them and catalogued them mentally and drowned out whatever they suggested.
A trio of shallow scratches over his left eye. That thin white thread leading from his neck back across his shoulder; you couldn’t even see it when he was wearing a collared shirt. Another grouping of furrows marked his stomach and chest. Mostly the wounds weren’t very deep and quickly disappeared, but a few turned out to be permanent.
The victims who resisted did so courageously. Keith Hughes was stabbed over fifty times before he finally succumbed. DNA taken from his fingernails would also prove damning to my husband in court. Jamie Hefner, Buddy Beckman, Daphne Snyder, they all got their licks in before Randy struck the fatal blows. I sometimes imagine him, against my will, standing over them while their lives ebbed away, him sucking it up like some vampire, panting and exhausted and elated with his accomplishments while human lights were extinguished so close at hand. Extinguished by his very hand and the tools he honed and wielded.
After they lay dead, he really went to work.
He came to bed and I loved him dutifully, distractedly, thinking of grouting the linoleum. What he thought of, I cannot say. He would place his hand over my eyes as he neared climax, pressing down hard enough that I saw stars exploding, comet trails and lava lamps bleeding across my eyelids. At first it freaked me out, and then, for a short while before I got pregnant, it kind of turned me on. Once I tried it on him and he firmly moved my hand away, held it down by my side as he slammed into me harder, those flat, packing sounds, stinging my thighs. Over time I grew to welcome the dark, fondly and then greedily, allowing it to take over, to block everything out and—admit it, admit the worst, do tell—hoping that one day the light wouldn’t return at all. Too many things were exposed there in the light, too many things that were all around me now, so if I looked away from one there was another staring me right in the face.
Scars. He loved his own, nurtured them even. He only granted me mine, the interior scars that came with each of his little evasions and patronizing rebukes, chipping away at my pride and peace of mind like a prince carelessly throwing a kiss to some unremarkable commoner in a crowd of thousands, gone from his mind the next instant but haunting the recipient for all the longest nights of her life to come.
CHAPTER FIVE
1.
Hayden had often asked about his father, from the time he was old enough to understand that most of the other kids had one. When he was very small, I avoided the subject by telling him that I’d fill him in when he was old enough to understand. But you know kids; they get old enough long before you want to admit it. At that early stage, I might’ve actually intended to tell him the truth.
Right after Randy was convicted and sent to prison, he made several attempts to track us down. Letters would arrive at my mother’s house, never addressed to me, but always to Hayden. I told Mom to throw them away without opening them, but of course she opened and read them. She said they gave her the shivers; Randy wanted to establish a relationship with his progeny. He claimed to have a legal right. And he may have been correct.
So I changed my name and moved across the country. Hayden didn’t even know he was once a Mosley. By the time he was three, it had become obvious to me that the truth was exactly what I could never allow him to know, or at least not until he could handle it. I mean, how could you make those words come out of your mouth: Your father was a killer who defiled and murdered a dozen human beings? I had to tell him something, though. He was constantly falling into step behind adult men whenever we went out in public, reaching out to grasp the hems of their coats at the grocery store. I could see his eyes narrow when he saw fathers toting their kids on their shoulders while we were out at the park; he even seemed transfixed by men scolding their kids publicly in restaurants.
Eventually, my evasions sent him into tantrums. So, God forgive me, I improvised. I told him that he did have a father, but that his father had done some very bad things that made it impossible for Mommy and Daddy to live together anymore. I said his father stole money from people; I explained why stealing was wrong. I said his father was a dangerous man who would never be a part of our lives. I could see the deep wound in my son’s eyes. I knew it was better than the reality.
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br /> Then came that story I saw on CNN, about how another convict had attempted to kill Randy and instead been killed.
The next time Hayden mentioned his father, I sat him down and told him that there had been an incident in the prison where his father was being held. I told him his father was dead.
I’d meant to do better. I thought it would end the conversation for good. But even as I told The Lie I could hear the searing bitterness in my own voice. I hoped it would deflect any further questions, and it did, but I could hear him crying in his bed that night. And I couldn’t bring myself to comfort him. Always I had wondered: Do those shots fired in our front yard in El Ray echo in his prememory? He wasn’t even a year old when it happened, but somewhere he must have retained it, down there wherever dreams come from. He’d always been a light sleeper, and he often talked in his sleep, too, child gibberish I could not understand but which nevertheless gave me chills up the back of my spine as I lay alone and awake and restless in my own room next to his.
Of course I knew that he would find out the truth at some point in the future. Of course I’d always acknowledged, to myself, that there would come a day, perhaps when he was in his late teens or even early twenties, when he would say to me, “Mom, I know that story you told me about Dad was a load of crap. I want you to tell me the truth.” And by then he’d have developed into a stable, wellbalanced person, able to cope with the shock of the reality without it forever skewing him or tainting him beyond repair.
But Charles Pritchett and the local media had decided, without my input, that today would be that day, and never mind that I was not prepared, not ready by even the most tortured definition of the concept of readiness. Never mind that my son wasn’t ready, either.
2.
The school bus stop was a block from our house. Usually Hayden was under strict orders to go straight home and lock the door until I arrived from work. Lately, he’d been hanging out at the McPhersons more often than not, but today I parked my car at the curb and waited for the bus to drop him off. After overhearing the discussion in the ladies room at work, I went ahead and took the rest of the day. Jim had told me in no uncertain terms that he didn’t want to see me back in the office for at least a week. He had told me to call him anytime I needed a sympathetic ear. He’d tendered both his home and cell phone numbers and I dutifully keyed them into my cell.
The bright yellow paint on the bus did little to disguise its prior history as conveyance for the NC State Bureau of Corrections; the school system bought a fleet of them from the state last year at bargain prices, and the vehicle had one of those blunt, ugly noses that looked nothing like the buses we rode when I was a kid growing up in Oregon. They hadn’t even bothered to remove the mesh cages from over the windows, perhaps thinking it would keep the children safer in case of an accident. The effect was unsettling, though: sterile functionality crossed with overt restraint.
The doors opened with that pneumatic hiss. Seven or eight kids clambered off, hefting backpacks too large for them, a couple of girls cutting a streak down the sidewalk past my car, talking in excited tones about what Kevin did in third period. Another lone kid disembarked, talking into a cell phone. He couldn’t have been more than eight. Still no sign of Hayden, and my throat closed up a little. But here he came, last off, listing side to side down the three steps, so obviously dejected that it was like he was having a hard time keeping himself upright. My heart clenched, seeing that gait, knowing what it portended even before he lifted his head and I saw the snot streaks down his puffy cheeks.
The bus driver watched him a moment, then looked up and spotted my car at the curb, me opening the passengerside door and calling for Hayden to come on. The driver kept staring at me even as he pushed a button and the bus doors closed.
“Hey, champ,” I said as Hayden climbed in beside me. He used both hands to pull his door shut. I told him to buckle his seat belt and he did so, moving like a robot. All my tears had dried up in my throat. Be strong now if you’re ever going to be, he needs you worse than you need anything, you’re all he’s got and if you go to pieces there’s no one else around to pick them up, there’s no telling what the long-term damage might be … “How’s it going?”
He faced me across the seat and his eyes were as cold as I’d ever seen them. Bottomless black glass. I swallowed and forced a smile and drove slowly back to our house. As the garage door was closing behind us, I turned to reach for his hand but he was already on the move. He had his own house key at the ready. He was through the door and up the stairs and gone before I could even retrieve my laptop bag from the backseat.
I found him in his bedroom, lying facedown on the comforter, crying helplessly. The curtains were closed and the only light came from the screen saver on his Junior PC, a soft blue geometric pattern that pulsed and twisted in place. I sat and stroked his hair. I began, “Baby—”
“It’s true, isn’t it?” he said into his pillow. It was very nearly a scream. “He’s alive, and he’s not just a robber. What everyone at school was saying about my dad, it’s all t-t-true?”
No defense left. “Yes.”
He turned over and his expression was very grown-up, which is always a disorienting thing for a parent to see on their child’s face, but in this case it was worse, it was awful, because it was the very countenance of betrayal. I supposed that if he were an adult, this exact same expression would render him childlike in its nakedness. I couldn’t help it, I felt the hot tears constricting the back of my throat and I swallowed thickly. His glare was pitiless. “You told me Daddy was gone. How could you lie about that?” he managed. “Yuh-y-you told me not to ever lie.”
“Honey, I’m so sorry.” I pulled him close and he allowed it but his arms remained limp at his sides. How many times could my heart break? How much longer could Randy—imprisoned and sterilized behind the meanest steel—keep doing this to us? “I didn’t know how to tell you.”
“Daddy killed people? For no reason?” He pushed away from me and repeated the second question.
I said quickly, “There’s never a reason. Listen, Hayden, because this is important. Your father is a very sick man. You remember how sick you were when you got the chicken pox, back when you were in play school?”
He nodded solemnly.
“Your father wasn’t sick like that. He was sick in his mind. I didn’t realize it when I met him, because he pretended not to be sick, and it’s easier for people who are sick in their minds to hide it than it is for people who are sick in their bodies. There are no sores or anything that would tip you off. He pretended to be just like everybody else, but really he wasn’t. I didn’t find out until years later, and by then I’d had you and I couldn’t do anything to take back what your father had already done. I stopped him from doing it to anybody else, though, because I called the police as soon as I realized.”
I heard echoes of my defense to Charles Pritchett, sounding just as lame. Not my responsibility, not me, how could anyone expect the person who lived day by day with the madman to know anything about who he really was, his true nature? I mean, you can’t hold me to such a standard, it’s simply unrealistic, it’s too much …
But this was my son, and in this horrible moment of clarity I understood that what I had owed him all along was nothing less than the sad truth. “I was afraid of him, sweetie. I was afraid that if I let myself understand how sick your father was, and what he’d done to other people, then I’d have to give you up, along with everything else we’d … I’d worked so hard for. And later on, when you would ask me about him, I knew that I was afraid of what he might do to you if he ever got the chance, because he was so sick, and I thought it would be better for everyone if you thought he was gone.”
He was holding himself at arm’s length, watching me carefully with that betrayed face. But he’d stopped sobbing, and was attentive, trying to evaluate these concepts of insanity and personal responsibility. Usually, you wouldn’t have to worry about getting these abstract kinds of
ideas across to a seven-year-old. I realized suddenly that this was the first time he’d ever caught me in a lie. He would never ever look at me again in quite the same way as he had this morning. I could still remember the first time I caught my parents lying. My lip trembled. I swallowed and took a deep breath. I focused.
“Honey,” I said, “you remember how when that mean boy stole your baseball in first grade last year, and your teacher asked who did it, and the boy wouldn’t admit it but she found it hidden in his backpack anyway?”
“Brian Carter.” My little man was all serious absorption now. Waiting to see if what I had to say would be in any way independently verifiable.
“Brian, right. Well, you remember how I told you that stealing was bad but lying about it was worse? And how if he would have just admitted it then the teacher might not have punished him?”
Hayden nodded.
“Well … I told myself that if I didn’t tell you the truth about your dad, it might not hurt your feelings so much. No one wants to know something like that about their parents, and I hate your dad for doing it to us, I will hate him until the day he dies, and that’s the truth.” Hayden’s mouth had fallen open; he knew “hate” was a bad word. I refocused. “I only meant to keep you from getting hurt. But you see how the truth came out anyway, just like it did when Brian stole your baseball? It’s always like that, which is why it’s always better to tell the truth in the first place, even if it’s something bad. I know I didn’t do that, and I know I let you down. I’m sorry. I was wrong to do it. From now on, I promise you I’ll do better.”