Alone at home, Martha opened a bottle of expensive Cabernet she’d grown tired of saving. She poured wine into a deep glass up to the widest part of the bowl and let it sit on the kitchen table until the surface became still, staring into and through it as if it were a ruby crystal ball. Finding no answers there, she grabbed the glass by the stem, painted the back of her tongue with the Cab, and closed her eyes.
Justin was out. For the third time this week. Some nights he didn’t come home. There were things she knew, things she suspected, things she feared, and almost nothing she could talk about with him.
It was after nine o’clock and he could be anywhere. He didn’t have a car and his bike was still here, but his friends – what friends he had – were older and most had their own cars, fast cars with poor safety ratings. Plus, there were enough places to find trouble within a few minutes’ walk. The least of which was not the home of Dr. Davis Moore, just six suburban blocks away.
Her things had been disappearing. Jewelry and cash from her bedroom. Never-used silver from the dining room. Gasoline from the car. Decaying boxes from the attic packed with cut-glass bowls and not-very-valuable art. She could never tell when he had taken stuff, or prove it, or even be confident enough in his guilt to confront him. Or maybe she was confident but too frightened. Frightened of what he might do. Might do to her if she accused him.
When at school or out at night God knows where, he always locked his bedroom door. When she and Terry had moved in, before Justin was even born, the previous owner had handed them a set of keys. Every doorknob in the house had a cheap lock in the knob, installed there by the paranoid old man who had built the place, she explained. They never used the keys, but kept them in a kitchen drawer just in case someone locked themselves out of a room by accident (which was easy to do if you pushed and twisted the knob just right when closing the door behind you). Justin had taken the key to his room about four months ago and now used it every day.
Every night after he left she wandered down the hall past his room on the way to hers and checked to see if it might be open. She told herself even if she ever found it unlocked she would never go inside, but she never got a chance to test that kind of discipline. Every time Martha set her hand on the knob it felt welded in place.
Martha frequently asked him to let her in to clean, but every time she asked, Justin added another task to his routine. He changed his own sheets every week now, or almost. He washed his windows inside and out every two weeks. He dusted. Once he even unhooked the drapes and piled them in the hall to be dry cleaned. All to prove there was no need for her to be in there. Ever.
This night the doorknob turned. Martha didn’t consider the promise she’d made to herself. She didn’t hesitate.
The bed was unmade. Drawers hung open from bureaus. Dirty laundry spilled from the closet. The air was sour and a remaindered odor stung her nose, becoming more intense when she neared the bed. A rounded pile of garbage topped the trash can like a snow cone and then multiplied into freestanding piles around the room. Martha stepped through it slowly and reluctantly, like she was wading through a basement flooded with sewage to reach the fuse box.
This was all recent. He had given her a glimpse of his room from the hall about a month ago, an eyeball inspection he had allowed in order to get her off his back. It had appeared spotless. How he could have made a mess this big in such a short time, Martha had no idea.
She wanted to open a window, but thought better of leaving evidence she had been here. Just look for it and get out, she told herself. She wasn’t sure what it was, except that it was anything she didn’t want to find.
If Martha Finn had been an overly suspicious woman, and Lord knows by this stage in her life she had reason to be, something would have struck her as staged about the whole thing. The unlocked door. The filthy room. The ease with which she was able to find it, sitting on top of his nightstand, the Baggie even open. Translucent yellow rocks spilling onto the dark grain of the tabletop like hard candy. A curious collection of homemade devices. She could only imagine the manner in which they had been used, in combination with a lighter and spoon. But used they were. She didn’t touch them.
She shut the door as she left, leaving it unlocked, the way she’d found it, walked to her room, and cried.