One of the mothers said that was called collective punishment.
“They might as well have blown up my home,” Barbara said. “I’ve never had one. I butterfly around and always have.”
She was living in a motel out on the highway that was next to a burned-out gas station and a knife outlet. The management of the motel was doing its part for the environment by changing the sheets and towels only after repeated requests, a notion picked up from the pieties of the better chains. Barbara was getting by with a debit card she’d found behind the bed. It was in the original paper sleeve with the PIN written on it. Some poor devil with shaky handwriting was out in the world not realizing his account was being discreetly drained.
The eldest mother made every effort to flex her arthritic hands and modestly succeeded. She couldn’t lift a finger to save herself even if that was all it took, which it never was. She felt the darkness closing in without exactly seeing it. This was not unusual. Life was like a mirror that didn’t know what it was reflecting. For the mirror, reflections didn’t even exist. Whenever she saw a mirror where she didn’t expect it, she thought: Poor old woman, how sad she looks.
“I had just said to the waitress that what I’d like was a nice cup of coffee,” one of the mothers was remembering, “when the police came in. I had to go with them and tell them what I knew. Of course I knew nothing. He had never presented his dark plan to me. I sometimes feel he committed that crime in another state of existence.”
“We don’t live in the same time as our children, if that’s what you mean,” Pam ventured graciously.
“But here we are,” Leslie said. “It doesn’t seem right, does it, and what are we supposed to do now? What shall we do?”
Bathed in tender moonlight, everything looked lethal, the weeds in their beds, the bottled water, the ladder on its side, the painted nails of the mothers’ feet in sandals.
“Have any of you performed community service,” Emily asked, and then blushed at their silence. Clearly what had been done by the offspring of those in the garden was beyond the salve of community service.
“When I first got here,” one of the mothers said, “I would take electric bills out of people’s mailboxes and pay them.”
“Did anyone ever make themselves available for comment,” Barbara asked. “I instinctively knew not to make myself available. And they respect that. Even the persistent ones give up after a while.”
“I retained a spokesperson but it was a big mistake,” Pam said. “Did anyone come up with an extenuating circumstance in the sentencing phase?”
The mothers shook their heads.
“Well,” Francine said, “Allen called 911 when his girlfriend cut off her fingers and toes, though admittedly anyone would have sought emergency assistance. But it certainly might have affected him, seeing his girlfriend of only a few months cut off her fingers and toes.”
“What did she think they were?” Emily wondered. “That she’d want to get rid of them.”
“Did you say minutes,” Barbara asked. “That’s like—”
“Months,” Francine told her. “A girlfriend of a few months.”
“I thought you said he was a sociopath.”
“He was a sociopath, a harmless sociopath at the time. He didn’t care for society or crowds. He didn’t like traffic, bars, sitting on planes. Then he found a girlfriend. I had great hopes for her but it turned out she was nuttier than he was.”
“In her fashion,” Emily said.
“One human family,” the eldest mother said. “That’s what we are. That’s what we’ve got to remember. This is Thyself. It should always be spoken of any creature to keep us in mind of the similarity of their inmost being with ours.”
“This is Thyself,” Pam repeated. She made fists of her hands and struck her breasts softly.
Emily thought of the several minutes she had spent yesterday looking out her window at the neighbor’s cat taking a dump. It didn’t cover up its deposit after it finished, just shook itself and walked away. It was a large white cat with a shining red sore on its head. The neighbor said she was allowing the matter of the sore to run its course. The cat still had a good appetite.
“I live beside a woman who lost a boy in the war, and she lords it over me something awful,” Leslie said. “She’s a police dispatcher, and when I smile at her in greeting she hisses at me, actually hisses. She planted a cherry tree, I guess for the boy, and it got the gall. It’s a few years old now and it’s got this enormous gall. I know it must be breaking her heart. I want to tell her that some galls can be beneficial. They return nitrogen to the soil, which is good. Or in other ways they can be beneficial to man.”
“You know a lot, Leslie,” Pam said, “but I don’t think this would give that woman any peace, coming from you.”
“It would be suicide to speak like that,” one of the mothers said.
“We must behave here as though we didn’t exist,” the eldest mother said.
“Didn’t exist?” said Barbara. “But we do.”
“What I like about our group is that it isn’t a support group,” Francine said. “I couldn’t handle a support group. I would consider it suspect in the extreme.”
They all agreed that any kind of support group for the mothers of celebrity killers would be in poor taste.
“Ours is a delicate situation,” the eldest mother said. She requested that someone, it didn’t matter who, light the candles.
Leslie said, “My first thought in the morning and my last thought at night is: We are going to be asked to leave.”
“I’ve still got the Popsicle-stick box he made as a kid,” Francine said. “I keep the kitchen sponge in it.”
“That can’t be sanitary,” Emily noted.
“I threw away the handprint. You know how they make plaster-of-paris casts of little kids’ hands for Mother’s Day in kindergarten and mount them on blocks of wood?”
“That would be worth something on eBay,” Barbara said. “People are such creeps.”
“What have we been discussing tonight, actually,” Leslie asked. “If I had to guess, I’d say we’ve been talking about God.”
“That’s a stretch,” Barbara said.
“I’d say that saying that is making a pretty safe bet,” Francine said. “It’s sort of vague. Not to hurt your feelings, Leslie.”
“OK,” Leslie said.
“It’s like each time we meet, you think we should have a subject or something. It’s not as though we’re going down a stairwell, one step at a time, putting what’s happened behind us, one step at a time.”
“OK, OK,” Leslie said.
The candles would not light as the cups they were in had filled with the rainwater of days past. “We should be going anyway,” one of the mothers said. Candles always discomfited this one. Vigils, sex, dinner, prayer…they had too many uses.
“I wish I had dropped him as an infant out of his snuggle sack on the rocks,” Barbara said loudly.
Emily had heard her voice this absolutely useless sentiment before. It was always a sure sign that the evening was winding down.
“We’ve settled nothing,” the eldest mother said. “We cannot make amends for the sins of our children. We gave birth to mayhem and therefore history. Oh, ladies, oh, my friends, we have resolved nothing and the earth is no more beautiful.”
She struggled to her feet and was helped inside. Her old knees creaked like doors. She always liked to end these evenings on an uncompromising note. Of course it was all just whistling in the dark, but sometimes she would conclude by saying that despite their clumsy grief and all the lost and puzzling years that still lay ahead of them, the earth was no less beautiful.