Esmé, loitering at the cellar door, hung back. She heard her son, the love of her life, down there. She wished he of all people understood.
Opening the door to the cellar, the light off, she began to creep down, her hand finding its way down the rail.
Ray squirmed into the pitch-black. Kat had shoved a small flashlight into his hand. Its aura cast dim shadows on the walls.
At the door, at the top of the stairs, he heard something.
Mom, he thought.
Rather than worry about her, he shone his light around. He noted the cobwebs, the living spiders, the dank wetness of a space that needed, according to his architect-sensibility, a dry atmosphere.
“Mom?” he said, stepping into the space.
Her voice came from very close by, inches away from him, like a scent on the wind. He felt her touch his cheek.
“Right here.”
“Mom?” He heard her step in even closer. He heard his own throbbing heart and thought he heard hers, too.
“So you broke in.”
“You locked me out. Took my key. You weren’t going to open the front door. I need to talk to you, Mom.”
She said, “I hoped Leigh would never come back. I thought, if she doesn’t come back, we’re okay. We can go on as always.”
“I love her, Mom. I want her home.”
“I know you love Leigh. But I’m mad at her.”
“Her friend, Kat, got me going. She had her own reasons for looking for Leigh, nothing to do with you or me, but I’m glad she helped me find her.”
“Same outcome. Leigh’s out there on my doorstep. So’s her friend, Kat. They are up there waiting. Meantime, what should I do? That’s a big question.”
“You hurt Leigh, Mom, stabbed her with a chisel, for God’s sake. You almost-”
“I did my best.” Esmé’s laugh was dry, crackling. She had stepped back into the darkness. “I was hoping she died. But no such luck. I never had any.”
“You’ve been drinking. I can smell it.”
“I’m not that drunk. Not so drunk I don’t see you break into my house just like she did.”
“We have to figure out how to help you, Mom.” The dark made it hard to do anything. “Why won’t the light go on?”
“On your own you would never have gone after her. You would have let her go, because I taught you that, Ray, how to let go of things and people. How to move on, adapt to new circumstances. It took a lot of guts, living the way we did.”
“She’s my wife. It’s different. I never wanted to let her go.”
“Every single time we moved I reminded you that I was your rock. The two of us made a good family. We never needed anybody else.”
Ray’s flashlight landed on something. “The bricks are loose.”
He fingered it, and the crude mortar peeled up like an onion. “I told you, it’s crap. Not a professional job.”
“Don’t mess with the wall, Ray,” his mother said. “This is my house. My life.”
“This is a real problem here, the bricks. This has to be repaired right away,” he said. He knew it was an incongruous thing to say, but he couldn’t help it. He felt so comfortable in the role of a man who knew how to solve construction problems.
His mother laughed again. He shined the flashlight on her face and heard her laughter, saw her terrible smile. He saw a glint in her hand. “What’s that you’ve got?”
“Oh well,” she said. “The time has come, I suppose.”
“What am I missing?”
“You have all the keys you need,” Esmé said.
“Where’s the friggin’ light?” Ray shouted. “What is this?” He had been fiddling with the wall. A brick came loose, then another. “Some kind of opening.” He reached inside.
“You do not have the right to come here and invade my past.”
Ray moved the light down. He saw a big knife glinting. One of her sharp ones.
That night, Ray, twelve years old, had slept in the small room at the back of the house. Esmé had decorated it in blues and greens with an athletic theme because at that age he followed a number of national teams. He would watch games on Saturdays and Sundays, just like Henry had done years ago, genetically programmed to enjoy watching men bat balls, run around, and get knocked down.
Esmé had stayed up a little late watching her favorite sitcoms, savoring her time alone.
Curled up on the sofa, hot tea in hand, she had watched television, following the shenanigans of a group of unbelievable characters, reveling in the rewarding ending. She turned the tube off then, stretched, and carried her drink into the kitchen. She didn’t like facing litter in the morning. She liked it all put away.
Right when she was opening the dishwasher, she heard it, a car door closing, not slamming, but closing carefully.
Alerted, she crept toward the front door and peered through the window beside it.
Him.
She felt the familiar terrified rush of blood through her veins. Her hand flew to her heart and landed there, feeling the thudding below the skin. They had lived here in this house on Close Street for almost an entire year without being bothered by him. She liked Whittier, she thought, pressing against the wall. She didn’t want to move again. She didn’t want to leave this town. She was sick to death of his interference in their lives! Sick of it!
She felt rather than saw him approaching the house from the street.
Knocking.
He always knocked. Some vestige of civility remained, in spite of how much he must hate her by now.
She didn’t answer. Instead, she opened the drawer in the kitchen where she kept her knives.
A finger of feeling reached up and tried to grab her but she pushed it away. No. She had made her decision months ago. She would not succumb to sentimentality anymore.
No more running.
Ray deserved a normal life. He seemed happy this year and she wanted him to stay in this house, on this street where he was happy. He had friends at Ceves. She envisioned him at Hillview, then Cal High in a few years with the friends he had made.
She peeked through the window. Nobody at the door. Henry would be seeking a way in.
She kept all the windows of the house locked all the time, and had schooled Ray into doing the same long ago. He could not enter easily. Broken glass, she would hear.
She listened, hearing nothing.
But she would only hear it if something broke, something like the basement window.
The place got dank in winter, wet, moist. Maybe years ago, a window made some kind of sense in a basement. Maybe the owners had long-term plans to turn it into a poolroom or playhouse. Whatever they had planned had caused her problems. She stored jellies down there, and a few pickles she made when they stayed somewhere long enough for her to make them. Last time she had gone down there, she noticed the thickness of the air, and had cranked open the small window. The basement room reminded her, not pleasantly, of Bright Street.
She had not closed the window. Bad mistake.
Walking silently toward the basement stairway, which was at the far side of her kitchen, she tried to remember exactly how big he was. Could he squeeze himself through the window?
Mice, she had heard, needed only one-half inch to squeeze into the pantry and eat everything in sight.
Rats, maybe an inch.
An angry man? How much space? How fit was he these days? Henry worked out. She remembered that, how he stayed fit.
Without turning on the light, she stepped down the thirteen stairs into the basement. Down here, she did laundry.
She let her eyes adjust.
Saw one foot, then the other foot push through.
Yes, he was fit enough to squeeze himself through.
She waited like an assassin, gearing herself up, so eager, dying to have it all over. For so many years Henry had ruled her life. She couldn’t take another minute. She could not.
His entire body shimmied through the window. He landed on a long, rustic table that someone had built beside the washer-dryer and turned to face her.
“Oh, Esmé,” he said.
“Yes.” She realized the light from the hallway was leaking down the stairs behind her. She must look like a silhouette to him.
A certain, small piece of her heart yearned for him, but the feeling concreted into confidence that she had made the correct decision when he said, “Where is he?”
“Sleeping upstairs.”
“I’m taking him. Get out of my way, Esmé.”
That’s when she stabbed him with the sharp, sharp kitchen knife. Then she stabbed him again.
“What’s this?” Ray had pulled something out of the hole behind the brick. The flashlight revealed tatters, dirt. “Cloth.” He had answered his own question.
“His shirt, I guess.”
Ray jumped back, knocking into the washing machine, and yelled, “What’s in there?”
“You mean who’s in there.”
“It’s-it’s a body!” he yelled.
“Henry Jackson. Your father, Ray.”
“Why? Why?”
His mother sighed deeply. “Oh, I wish you could just let go but you’re like me, stubborn and loyal. If only I hadn’t needed to stay near my mother for all those years when she was so sick we could have moved to Australia or somewhere. None of this would have happened.”
“You killed him! Oh, God, you did!”
“No, Ray, I stopped him. He broke in, just like you.”
“Wait. Wait.” They stood in the semidarkness, both breathing hard.
“He tried to hurt you, Mom? He attacked you?” Ray said at last, his voice breaking.
“He didn’t get the chance.”
“It was self-defense,” Ray mumbled. “He stalked you. We’ll deal with this.” He felt the tattered cloth again.
“It won’t look that way to a judge, Son.”
“But he broke in-”
“Ray. Ray, precious child, your father didn’t come here for me. He came for you.”
“He came to hurt me? Why?” A hundred possibilities flashed through his mind. “Did he think I wasn’t his?”
“Henry,” she spat out his name, “had full legal and physical custody of you.”
“But-”
“Yes, it is incredible, isn’t it? Ripping a child away from his mother.”
“But why would they do that?”
“He faked being perfect, and I wasn’t so good at that in those days. Look, I was a young woman when I had you, only twenty-two. I wanted some fun out of life! I deserved some fun!” She cast a desperate glance at him. “And one day, one miserable day, I did something really stupid. I drove drunk.”
He thought about that. “That was enough to cost you custody, getting caught driving under the influence? I mean, why not make sure you got some treatment and quit?”
“You were in the car with me. We cracked up. You spent two months in the hospital. My visits to see you had to be supervised after that. He took you away from me. He divorced me. He couldn’t forgive me for what I had done.”
Bright lights at night. A high bed. Nurses.
“You had a head trauma. Bleeding and pressure in your brain. You have a scar under your hair. No one could believe I would stop drinking, not Henry, not the caseworkers, not the judge. But I did.”
“Until now.”
“Who wouldn’t? Have you thought about my life at all? Thought about anything but your obsessions and your needs and Leigh? Ray, I need you to help me now. I’ll leave this house. I’ll go away like Leigh did, and I won’t come back. Will that satisfy you and Leigh?”
Silence lodged heavily between them.
“So you kept the tapes in case there was another custody fight,” Ray concluded. “You wanted to prove he was some kind of angry, crazy monster to the court. You needed something against him. Is that why they were so short?” He answered his own question. “You only kept the bad parts, and there weren’t many, were there? He got frustrated and angry sometimes.”
“Any judge would hear it in his voice. He was a dangerous man.”
“Dangerous because he wanted his son,” Ray said. “He had a court order to take me. He wasn’t a monster.”
“I did it out of-”
“And so you killed him. You were the monster.” He breathed heavily, and he stepped back farther from her. Each step felt like a year of the pain she had experienced, running with him, running, trying to take care of him and her mother, no life for herself, all for him-
“We had peace after that, didn’t we, Son?”
“We lived on top of his body!” Ray said, backing away from her toward the stairs. “You did that to me.”
“Where are you going? Are you leaving?”
“You almost murdered my wife!”
“She broke in, Son. She came down here when I was trying to fix the wall.”
“With a chisel?”
“That damn leak! I couldn’t fix it, and just like you said, the water was undermining the brick wall in the basement. I mean, you always said it was a hack job. It was a hack job because I did it! I put up that wall myself, and it was crummy and starting to get dangerous, so I was going to loosen the mortar and repair everything. And then she broke in at night and surprised me. I had to protect myself! I had to protect us! Wait-where are you going? What are you doing, Son?”
He shut the door and locked it. “I’m keeping you down here until the police come. The window is full of broken glass. Don’t try to get out that way. I’ll stand out there waiting.”
“Let me run. Please. Ray?”
He checked the lock. It was secure.