The sheets on Justin’s bed hadn’t been changed in a week and a half, and Martha felt terrible about that. She had been showing four houses a day, many of them for the same client, a young woman (just married to an older doctor) who had convinced her husband they needed a suburban house with a yard and a playroom and a big kitchen more than they needed a downtown apartment with a view of the lake. “If he thinks I’m going to raise kids in the city just so he can be close to his Gold Coast mistresses, he’s nuts,” she told Martha. The woman confessed she knew about her husband’s Gold Coast mistresses because until recently she had been one of them.
For a boy’s room, Justin’s was unusually tidy. He spent a few minutes at the end of every day organizing, arranging his books at alphabetical attention, blowing the dust from his computer keyboard, coordinating his clothes for the following morning. Although he never showed signs of fatigue, she couldn’t imagine how he had time for sleep, between school, his own independent study, his fastidiousness, and the hours he spent playing that blasted computer game. She had read an article about how thousands of kids (and adults, too) spent so much time playing Shadow World they had become indifferent to, if not outright neglectful of, their own, real lives. Extracurricular and athletic team enrollment were both down dramatically in high schools across the country, and many educators claimed, credibly, that Shadow World was to blame. It made sense: just in Northwood, Martha personally knew of three – three! – marriages that had broken up because one spouse had left the other for someone they’d met in Shadow World. At least Terry left Martha for his personal assistant. There was something almost old-fashioned about that.
Not everyone agreed the game was entirely bad for kids, though. Some psychologists claimed teens who experimented with adult scenarios in Shadow World were better prepared for college and the pressures of leaving home. They were said to be confident, less risk averse, and more likely to be content once they entered the working world. Never having played the game herself, Martha was skeptical about such claims, but it was easier to believe them than to try taking the game away from her son (or her son away from the game), so she chose to have faith.
Martha pulled the dirty sheets from the mattress and aired out the clean ones, measuring the sides of the fitted sheet and folding the corners of the top sheet. Then she reassembled blanket and comforter and pillowcases, trying to be as neat about it as her son would be. He never complained but Martha had caught him more than once remaking the bed after she had done it, to his mind, in a substandard way.
She had sorted the laundry and carried her own clothes into the master bedroom (compared to where she slept, Justin spent his nights in a biological clean room). Two weeks’ worth of his shirts, jeans, and underwear, washed and dried in a morning-long marathon, filled three round laundry baskets, and she set about putting them away in their proper places. Blue jeans needed to be folded and stacked on the second shelf from the bottom in his closet. Shirts hung on plastic hangers, never metal. Blue socks had a different drawer than black socks. Underwear should be rolled instead of folded. Again, he never complained to her or threw a tantrum over it, but she knew he’d redo it if she didn’t get it exactly right.
At the bottom of the laundry basket she found three bleached-and-dried one-dollar bills. She must not have checked all the pockets before she threw his pants in the washer. Worried she might have ruined something important – a homework assignment or a pretty girl’s phone number – and not above using that concern as an excuse to snoop, Martha began feeling inside Justin’s pockets. She found two more ones and a five in the first four pairs and set the money on his dresser. In the fifth, her hand felt something curious: paper, wrinkled and warped in the agitated soapy water and spin cycle, the size of a business card. She pulled it out. The name printed on it didn’t even register with her at first without the “M.D.” behind it.
Anger wasn’t the word for what pulsed through her. Outrage was closer. Or just rage. She wondered where Moore had approached him. For how long had they been meeting? What does that sonofabitch want with my son, and why won’t he leave us alone? She wanted to call her lawyer, but knew he’d start the clock at $350 an hour. She wanted to call the police, but knew the first thing they’d ask was whether she had ascertained all the facts. Have you talked to your son, ma’am? It’s not a violation of the restraining order for your son to be carrying around a piece of paper with Davis Moore’s name and number. The truth was she couldn’t ask Justin. She was too scared. He hadn’t said a cross word to her in over four years, but he still frightened her. A mother knows her son, even if he received none of her DNA. A mother knows what her son is capable of. Every time he quietly redid the bedding or refolded his jeans, Martha imagined the pressure building inside his head and inside his heart, pressing against his skull and his ribs, whistling in his ears. Sooner or later it would need to be released.
But as long as she could keep Justin close, as long as her boy studied and played under her roof and under her eyes, as long as she remained interested and up to date with his friends and his hobbies, she could guide and control and protect him.
And hope for the best.
Martha grabbed a piece of paper from Justin’s printer and wrote down Davis Moore’s private phone number and e-mail address, and she returned the card to Justin’s pocket.