razor blades. In the blue room it was a gun. The instruments were location specific but his imagined last words were always the same.
“I’m sorry, Jackie,” he whispered. “I’m so goddamn sorry.”
– 74 -
The back door opened and closed, and Martha heard a pair of boots clunking to the kitchen floor, and she felt a teenaged body displacing air as it moved through the house, and when it climbed the stairs to its bedroom every sock-footed step seemed to be lying to her.
She learned this during her divorce: when a person you love is lying to you, everything they do or say is a lie until they confess it. Even a nominally true statement – “I want raisin bran for breakfast” – is still a lie because it takes the place of the truth. Small truths, told between lies, are just part of the cover-up.
These many years later, Martha remembered how normal her life with Terry had been during the months in which he’d carried on with his seventy-five-thousand-dollar-a-year glorified secretary. She suspected he was cheating, knew it in her gut, and yet those were happy days for her somehow. Sally Barwick had been lying to her then, too. So much of her life at the time had been a fiction, and yet she remembered it fondly, like a favorite novel. She could almost understand the appeal of a game like Shadow World.
Sadly, that brand of happiness eluded her now. She was wiser and more mature, and it was her son who was lying. Those were the differences, she supposed. Plus, she distrusted Davis Moore. Hated him even. That made the current situation unbearable. When her husband started having an affair with Denise Keene, Martha didn’t even know the little slut existed. Dr. Moore, on the other hand, was taunting her through notes in her son’s blue jeans.
When a two-thirty appointment canceled on her that afternoon, Martha thought she would call and see if Sara could sneak her in a few days early. She hated the way her hair was growing out, and had done as many blunt scissor repairs on her bangs as she was able. Midway through dialing, however, she changed her mind and decided to follow her son home from school.
A long bike path led from the umbrella-shaped bike-battery dock, past the athletic fields, and through a narrow gate in the chain-link surrounding the school grounds. Martha idled her cream Sable about fifty feet away and watched a hundred or more kids walk and ride out onto the sidewalk on Copes Street. The radio played an old rock song, from before her time even, and she hummed nervously along with it, even though the singer’s angst over love lost reminded her of the last days of her marriage.
Her son appeared at last, bundled in his jacket, his backpack as big as a Sherpa’s. A few weeks ago, when there was real snow on the ground, he’d have been walking or taking the bus. She resisted the temptation to shift out of park and followed him instead with her eyes. If he was going home he would take a left onto Delaware, she thought. When he didn’t, she wondered if he was headed for a friend’s house and why they weren’t walking with him.
The slow-speed chase that followed was ridiculous, she knew. Several times she pulled over to the curb and pretended to be lost or looking for something under the seat so an irate driver could pass. Three cars behind him in the turn lane at a light, she was afraid he had spotted her. He made a left, accelerating through a narrow opening between oncoming cars, and by the time she passed through the intersection, he was gone.
Driving through an area with no houses and thick old-growth trees close to the shoulder on either side, Martha wondered where he could have gone. There was little out this way but commercial real estate – office parks and fast-food joints. She was more and more certain Justin was on his way to a meeting with Davis Moore, but unless she happened to see his bike parked somewhere, she was sunk.
A quarter mile past the red-and-white sign marking the entrance, she figured it out: the forest preserve. He’d turned into the forest preserve.
Usually a strict disciple of driving etiquette, Martha made a blind three-point turn on the narrow road and reversed direction toward the blacktopped drive that wound through the preserve. There was hardly anyone here on a Thursday in winter, but high school students made use of the grounds all year round, for smoking or drinking or necking or, she hoped not to discover, holding secret meetings with a creepy doctor who’d been charged with stalking them when they were small children.
Martha stopped the car. What if Justin wasn’t here to meet Davis Moore? What if Justin really had come to the woods for smoking or drinking or necking? How embarrassed she’d be if he discovered her spying on his ordinary teen mischief. She sickened at the thought of Davis Moore and his experiments (or studies or whatever he had called them in his deposition) and lurched the car forward again. No one said being a parent wouldn’t be embarrassing.
The black SUV was parked halfway down a dead end. Martha might not have seen it except that the evenings were short and cold and Moore had no doubt left the engine running for the heat. Against the dimming horizon, she could see the curls of exhaust and the red glow of his taillights, and next to it, in the cold, matted grass, Justin’s silver bike. She could see broad streaks of white on the back of the older man’s head in the driver’s seat. Justin was turned toward him, his profile recognizable in silhouette.
With her car angled across the only exit, they were trapped up the road, but what would be the point of approaching? She still couldn’t confront them without unpredictable repercussions from Justin, and despite the satisfaction of seeing the ever more prominent Davis Moore, the darling of libertarians and television magazine programs, explaining himself in front of a judge and hiding his lying face from the news cameras, she knew she couldn’t just march up to the car and start screaming at them both. When her husband abandoned her, she had at least been a party to the action. She’d had a lawyer. Some input into the dissolution. She realized that unlike a spouse, a parent was helpless in this situation. A teenager can walk out on his mother without ever leaving the house.
She let up on the brake, coasted down the road, and drove home to wait for her son.
– 75 -
Locking and chaining his bedroom door and staring gravely into its white-painted paneling, Justin let a discontented noise expire softly in his throat. Adults. They worry so much. They have much to worry about, of course, but he worried enough for all of them. Didn’t they understand that’s why he was sent here? Why he was brought here? Sent here or brought here, he wasn’t sure which, but it didn’t much matter one way or the other. His responsibility was the same: to wonder, to worry, to act.
Dr. Moore was a mess. Poor guy almost had his life back together before Justin knocked on his door, but what did he expect? These things were decided long ago. Very long ago. Nothing is decided when it happens.
He felt bad for his mother. It would be hard on her when it all came out. She had done nothing to deserve the pain. She only wanted a son, presumably one without a destiny, but she had no choice in the one she got.
On his bed, his hand feeling around inside his backpack, Justin gripped a leathery pouch with a zipper. Retail stores used them to make cash bank deposits, and hip teens now used them for tools and school supplies and allergy medicines and computer discs and PDAs.
And stuff.
His mother had been at the park today. He’d seen her car in the rearview mirror. So now she knows he’s been seeing Moore. That was a problem. Not a fatal one, but it was another challenge. Whether the challenges were sent here or brought here, that again didn’t matter much.
Justin unzipped the pouch and dumped its contents on the bed. Cloudy crystals tumbled from a plastic Baggie. A lighter, a spoon.
He turned on the radio and after he had prepared the syringe he injected its contents into a kitchen sponge and placed the sponge in a plastic bag for anonymous disposal later. From a week of this ritual, the Baggie, the syringe, the spoon all looked well used, coated in black and white residue. He capped the needle, returned everything but the sponge to the leather pouch, and hid the pouch behind a row of books on his nightstand
