“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 Esmé, 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,” Esmé 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. Esmé was thinking about herself. Maybe she always thought of herself. It felt like a wind had swept through the big depressing room, blowing away his illusions. “I left some money for you for the canteen.”
“Did you bring my magazines?”
“You bet.”
“My roommate needs a kidney transplant. She’s back in the hospital. I sleep so much better now that she’s gone but I think they’re bringing in a new inmate next week.”
“That have you nervous?”
“They’re not as bad as you might think. Mostly abused women, druggies.”
She had never used that word before. Ray sat up straighter.
“It’s so unfair. I had that one lapse. That one time when you were in the car, and I drove drunk. So should I spend the rest of my life paying for that?”
And what about killing his father and attacking his wife? Esmé continued to have blind spots big as tunnels that would fit a big rig. “Mom, maybe you should listen to what they say. It’s not all stupid.”
“It’s so galling. Me, here. Do you blame me for things I had to do?”
“Yes,” Ray said.
“All I can say is, you’re not a parent yet. Someday you might understand better.”
Ray, now three months along on the road to becoming a parent, said nothing about Leigh’s pregnancy. “Do you blame me for the things I had to do to stop you?”
Esmé paused, wet her lips. “You were the center of my existence for most of my life, honey. Lately I don’t worry about you anymore, about how well you’re eating, if your work is going well. I suppose it’s one way to cut the apron strings.” She smiled. “But of course I blame you. You’re ungrateful. That’s how it is.”
“Try to understand what you did, Mom. After I found those tapes, I decided my father was some kind of stalker,” Ray said. “I thought he tracked you down and we moved because you needed to hide from him.”
“You should never have gone back to those places. Wasn’t it sad?”
“Yes.”
“You must understand why I had to hide you. I needed you close. You were just a baby, Ray.”
“Henry had custody, Mom.”
“So? Did I raise you badly? Did I ever take a drink while you were growing up?”
“You stole me from him. You stole him from me.”
She considered this. Then she sighed. “Here we go again. After all I did for you, you blame me.”
“You robbed me of the truth.” Henry Jackson would have been sixty-two this year, not old. His remains had now been officially interred at Memory Gardens in Brea.
“Would you rather he had robbed you of your mother? I doubt that.” Esmé changed the subject and talked about all the wonderful things she planned to do when she finished serving her time, eight to ten years. She would renovate her house at last, she said, not asking but assuming Ray would keep it for her. She didn’t know yet that the house had already been sold to pay her legal fees. Where she would go when she got out was something Ray didn’t want to think about. She told him she would quit her job at the market and do volunteer work in the schools.
Quit her job! She had been terminated long before her guilty plea to second-degree murder.
Esmé rambled on. She loved kids. She needed kids in her life. But Leigh and Ray had decided their baby wouldn’t be visiting Esmé at the prison. Ray didn’t want to hurt his mother, so he might never tell her until the day she walked through the locked gates to whatever was left of her existence.
He let her meander on, worrying about her. Mainly, as always, he felt amazed that this woman had loved him so fiercely that she had killed his father.
He listened, took her in, and felt so sad.
Beau smiled, waving his arms. He kicked his round legs all day long. After Raoul finished changing his diaper, he quieted, lying peacefully down against the bold blue bolsters edging his crib. Kat came in to finish cleaning up the changing table. Raoul leaned over the crib, playing with Beau’s little fingers.
He and Kat had found Jacki some help, and Jacki was back to working part-time.
Kat was seeing a lot of Zak.
After several weeks of silence between them, Zak had finally called. “Hiya.”
“Hiya.” Kat had been attempting a chicken curry, chopping onions in her kitchen, holding the phone to her ear against her scrunched-up shoulder. She had a special new knife they sold on television, a big book of recipes, and a hobby, being a homebody who liked her own company better than almost anyone else’s.
Although tonight Leigh and Ray were coming over. They saw a lot of each other these days. Ray was going to tell her that they were pregnant, and she was going to look surprised, as if Leigh hadn’t told her that a month ago during one of their long lunches.
Zak said, “So-”
Kat picked up the board full of chopped onions and dumped them into the wok. “So-”
“I’ve tried to work out why things haven’t worked between us, and I want to clear the air.”
“Okay.”
“I hadn’t had a date in two years when I met you. I have a brother who’s a little like Jacki, concerned about me becoming a creepy bachelor. Sometimes that makes me nervous and it made me really nervous because-I like you, and you don’t seem very responsive. So I’m going to lay it on thick, and tell you everything and that way I’ll know I’m being rejected for myself, and not for the image. You know what? I hate Rollerblading. You just sounded like such a fun-loving person, it seemed like the right thing to do. I’m a reader, mostly nonfiction, but I can get into a thriller. I’ll go to any movie ever made, and eat a large popcorn clogged with butter. I like to take walks in my neighborhood. And I basically like my life the way it is. It’s-contented. Wonderfully boring.”
“Oh, Zak!” How bizarre. He had a dating game, too. “We did start out awkward, didn’t we?”
“You surprised me, though, talking about yourself. And I felt you deserved the same from me. A little bit of the truth. I see other people bogged down in mortgages and babies and-that’s not for me right now, Kat. So now you know.”
She smelled the curry, then reached to pull the cloves down from the shelf. Nobody else liked cloves the way she liked cloves. “You like cloves in curry? I mean lots? Don’t lie to me now, Zak.”