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, Esme,” 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, Esme.”
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.
EPILOGUE
Seven months later, Ray drove up to Corona, California, the dry heartland of the state, practically at its center. He filled out a form in the entryway, showed his ID, went through the metal detector, braved the scrutiny of several guards, and finally got into the visiting area.
He put on headphones, as did Esme, sitting across from him and through an acrylic barrier.
“They treating you all right?” She had aged, of course. Her jaw was set and he noticed how square and stubborn it still was.
“I’ve applied for kitchen duty,” Esme said. “The food is too high-carb. I’ve decided to become a vegetarian. I don’t trust the meat.”
She didn’t ask about how Ray was doing, he thought with a twinge. Esme was thinking about herself. Maybe she always thought of herself. It felt like a wind had swept through the big depressing
