“What’s the matter?” he called to her.
“Nothing,” she said. It was the first time she lied to him regarding their son, but it would not be the last. “I’m going for a walk.”
“You want company?” he asked.
Sweet, sweet Ben, she thought to herself angrily. So well-meaning, and yet so completely oblivious. She tried to remind herself that it wasn’t fair to cast him in that light. How was he supposed to know? She considered taking him up on his offer, considered asking him to join her. But she knew that if she did she would end up telling him the whole story of the wood rat and their oldest boy’s newfound hobby. That would start a chain of events beyond her ability to control, and she wasn’t ready for that yet. She wasn’t ready to involve him. She needed time to think, and to observe what happened next. Yes, she would keep her horrible knowledge to herself for the moment. It seemed like the course of action with the least number of variables, and right now that strategy made sense to her. Perhaps it was the only thing that did. She had no way of knowing then how that decision would change the course of the years to come, or how the simplest decisions are sometimes the most important ones.
“No thanks,” she’d called back to her husband as she grasped the knob on the front door. “I need to be by myself for a while.”
All of that seemed like such a long time ago. Life moved on, as it always did, and she watched her boy grow older and more mature with the passing years. For nearly two years after the incident with the wood rat, she’d discovered no further evidence of similar behavior from Thomas, and she dared to imagine that her confrontation had paid off—that he had somehow gotten better. It wasn’t until shortly after his tenth birthday that she noticed the home-made signs stapled to several telephone poles in their neighborhood. Lost cat, they read, identifying the wayward feline as Mr. Tibbs, who was orange with a broad white stripe along his underbelly. Reward if found!! the sign promised, and gave a phone number and address to contact. The address belonged to Susan’s neighbor three houses down.
The first thing she’d done after reading the sign was to return home and look behind the tool shed. She didn’t think there would be… well, she didn’t know what she thought, exactly. But of course there was nothing there. That night she’d casually mentioned during dinner that she’d seen the signs alerting people to the missing cat, and she’d watched Thomas closely out of the corner of her eye for a response. He barely seemed to have heard her, which offered her little relief. What if he hasn’t gotten better at all? she wondered. What if he has only gotten better at hiding his true nature?
Several days passed. That weekend, while Ben and the boys were off at one of Thomas’s baseball games, she decided to pay their neighbor a visit. There was a cake-decorating class Susan was thinking about attending that summer, and she wanted to know if the mother, Annie, would be interested in joining her. They talked for a while, and as she was getting ready to leave, Susan mentioned that she’d noticed the signs regarding Mr. Tibbs, and she inquired as to whether he’d been found.
“Not a sign of him.” Her friend shook her head. “He was always an outdoor cat. Liked to wander through the woods out back, I suppose. Liked to stalk birds, too, although I don’t know what he’d do with one if he ever caught it. Sometimes he stayed out all night. I never paid it much mind.” She offered Susan a thin smile. “He always showed up at the back door for breakfast and dinner, though. That guy could eat. Most afternoons he slept inside on the windowsill.” She pointed toward the vacant sill, which looked sad and deserted in the cat’s absence. “Sally’s been pretty upset about it. She sure loved that cat.”
“He’ll show up,” Susan assured her, trying to sound more optimistic than she felt.
“I hope so,” Annie said. “I hope he didn’t get hit by a car or anything. If Sally came across him in the roadway, I’d have a pretty traumatized little girl on my hands.”
”Don’t think that way,” Susan responded, reaching over and squeezing her friend’s hand. “Cats are very resourceful animals. They know how to stay out of harm’s way.” She tried on a smile and found that it almost seemed to fit.
When she arrived home, she went to the tool shed, wanting a second look around. She found the door to the shed locked, just as it should be. She retrieved the key from the kitchen, removed the padlock, slid the door open, and stood inside. The interior was stagnant, and smelled vaguely of the combined scent of oil and earth. Being there reminded her immediately of the day she had discovered the wood rat. Recently cut grass clung to the wheels of the lawn mower. The bags of topsoil she’d purchased two years ago for her gardening were long gone. In their place was a spade-tip shovel, leaning against the far wall. Its tip was caked with dirt. She ran her fingers thoughtfully along the wooden texture of its long handle. The tool seemed to be the only thing out of place in the neatly arranged shack. Acting more on instinct than anything else, she picked up the shovel, exited the shed, and proceeded into the woods behind their house. It took her twenty minutes to find the recently dug grave, and only two minutes to exhume the body. Her right hand automatically went to the back hip pocket of her jeans, pulling out the heavy-duty black plastic bags she’d absently brought with her. She had no recollection of grabbing the bags from the shed, but she’d obviously done so. She must’ve known all along what she was bound to find.
She double-bagged the animal as before, barely taking notice this time of what had been done to it. She made the trip to the dump and disposed of it in a manner that, if discovered, would not lead to her son. She returned home, showered, and took a nap. Ben woke her from a dreamless slumber when he arrived home an hour and a half later.
“You okay, honey?” he asked, brushing the hair back from her eyes and feeling her forehead with the back of his hand. “You were sweating in your sleep. Are you sick?”
“No,” she responded, looking up at him, her thoughts still muddled with sleep. But your son is, she almost added, but again chose not to, leaving him out of this for the second time. God only knew why. “Just tired,” she muttered, and rolled away from him, trying to find her way back down into the merciful nothingness from which she’d been disturbed.
Part 6
Terms of Survival
51
Early May. Dr. Ben Stevenson pulled the dark blue Honda into the parking lot and killed the motor. The lingering caress of winter had grudgingly slipped away two weeks ago, giving way to warm sunshine, a multicolored tapestry of blooming things, and the frenzied flurry of insects eager to begin the new season. Normally, the nicer weather would have lightened Ben’s spirits, which tended to be darkest during Ohio’s cold, grim, intractable winters. This year the change of season only heightened his sense of loss. It reminded him that life went on, and subtly suggested that wounds, however deep, might someday heal, and that loss, however poignant, was but a temporary condition that would fade ever so slightly with each successive year.
He climbed out of the car and closed the door, glancing behind him as he crossed the parking lot. No one watched from the driver’s seat of an unmarked police car. They’d stopped following him two months ago, and even that had saddened him. Have they given up that quickly, he wondered, or have they just decided I have nothing further to contribute? If their assumptions coincided with the latter, they were right. He was in the dark as much as they were—perhaps more. There must be leads they are pursuing, he told himself. There have to be. A mother and two children cannot simply disappear from the face of the earth without a trace. Could they? No. Surely, there must be something.