“You could be wrong, baby,” I say. “Not everything has to be a threat, or a conspiracy. We’re okay. We’ll be okay.”
He wants to tell me something else, I can see it in his body language. He’s also afraid that I’ll be angry at him. I hate that I’ve made him afraid to tell me things. “Connor? Sweetie? What’s bothering you?”
“I—” He bites his lip. “Nothing, Mom. Nothing.” My son’s worried. I’ve created a world for him where defaulting to a conspiracy theory makes sense to him. “Is it okay if I just . . . stay away from them, though? Kyle and his brother?”
“If you want to. Of course. But be polite, all right?”
He nods, and after a second I pick up my scotch again. He stares out at the lake. “I don’t need friends anyway.”
He’s too young to say that. Too young to even think it. I want to tell him that he should make all the friends he can, that the world is safe and no one will ever hurt him again, that his life can be full of joy and wonder.
And I can’t tell him that, because it isn’t true. It might be true for other people. Not for us.
Instead, I finish my scotch. We go inside. I set the alarm, and once Connor is in bed, I take all my guns to the kitchen table, lay out the cleaning kit, and make sure that I’m ready for anything. Like practicing my aim, cleaning my weapons feels soothing. Feels like putting things right again.
I need to be ready, just in case.
Lanny spends the rest of her suspension acing her homework and reading, headphones blasting, though she does go running with me twice. She even does it voluntarily, though by the end of the run she’s swearing she’ll never do it again.
On Saturday we call my mother. It’s a family ritual, the three of us gathered around my disposable phone. I have an app built in that generates an anonymous Voice over IP number, so that even if anyone is reviewing my mom’s call logs, the number won’t lead them anywhere close.
I dread Saturdays, but I know the ritual is important for the kids.
“Hello?” My mother’s calm, slightly fragile voice reminds me of her advancing years. I always picture her as she was when I was younger . . . Healthy, strong, tanned, lean from all her swimming and boating. She lives in Newport, Rhode Island, now, having left Maine behind. She had to move before my trial, and twice after it, but finally people are leaving her alone. It helps that Newport has that New England closed-in attitude.
“Hi, Mom,” I say, feeling the uncomfortable pressure in my chest. “How are you?”
“I’m fine, honey,” she says. She never says my name. At sixty-five years old, she’s had to learn to be so cautious about talking to her own child. “So glad to hear your voice, sweetheart. Everything okay there?” She doesn’t ask where we are, and she never knows.
“Yes, we’re fine,” I tell her. “I love you, Mom.”
“Love you too, sweetheart.”
I ask her about her life there, and she talks with false enthusiasm about restaurants and picturesque views and shopping. About taking up a scrapbooking hobby, though what she can scrapbook about me I have no idea. The reams of articles about my monstrous ex? My trial? My acquittal? It’s almost as bad if she doesn’t include any of that, and only has my pictures up to my wedding, pictures of the kids, without any context for our lives.
I wonder what kind of decorations Hobby Lobby sells to ornament the pages dedicated to serial killers in a scrapbook.
Lanny leans over to say, in a bright voice, “Hi, Grandma!” And when my mother responds, I hear the shift in that faraway voice . . . Real warmth. Real love. Real connection. It skips a generation, or at least, it skipped over me. Lanny loves her grandmother, and so does Connor. They remember those dark, awful days after The Event, when I was dragged off to jail and the only light left for them was my mom, who’d swept in like an angel. She’d rescued them into something like normalcy, at least for a while. She’d been a lioness in their defense, fending off reporters and the curious and vindictive with sharp words and slammed doors.
I owe her for that.
I almost miss it when she says, “So, kids, what are you studying in school right now?” It seems like a safe question, and it should be, but as Connor opens his mouth I realize that one of his classes is Tennessee history, and I quickly interrupt.
“Classes are going well.”
She sighs, and I can hear the exasperation in it. She hates this. Hates being so . . . vague. “And how about you, dear? Have you got any new hobbies?”
“Not really.”
That’s the extent of our conversation. We were never quite close, she and I, even when I was a child. She loves me, I know, and I love her, but it isn’t the kind of attachment that I see in other people. Other families. There’s a kind of polite distance between us, as if we’re strangers who happened to end up together. It’s odd.
But I owe her everything, even so. She’d never expected to have to keep my children for nearly a year while the prosecution tried to build a case for my guilt. They called me Melvin’s Little Helper, and my presumed involvement in Melvin’s crimes rested completely on the testimony of one gossipy, vindictive neighbor looking for attention. She claimed she’d seen me help Melvin carry one of his victims from the car into the garage one evening.
I never had. I never would. I hadn’t known a thing, ever, but it was horrifying and maddening to realize that no one, absolutely no one, believed that. Not even my own mother. Maybe part of the open wound between us stems from that moment when she’d asked me, with such revulsion and horror in her face, Honey, did you do this? Did he make you do this?
She’d never insisted it was a lie, never denied I was capable of atrocity. She’d only sought to find a reason for it, and that was incredibly hard to understand then, or now. Maybe it was the lack of attachment she’d had to me as a child, and I to her; maybe she could so easily believe the worst because she felt she’d never really known me at all.
I will never, ever do that to my children. I will defend them with complete devotion. None of this is their fault.
My own mother has always blamed me. Well, she told me at one point, you wanted to marry that man.
The reason the trolls are so viciously devoted to my pursuit is that they really believe that I’m guilty. I’m a vicious, predatory killer who managed to evade justice, and now they’re the ones who can administer the punishment.
On some level I understand it. Mel swept me off my feet with romantic gestures. He took me to beautiful dinners. Bought me roses. Always opened doors for me. Sent me love letters and cards. I really did love him, or at least I thought I did. The proposal was thrilling. The wedding was fairy-tale perfect. In a few months, we were pregnant with Lily, and I thought I was the luckiest woman in the world, someone whose husband earned enough to let her stay home and lavish her children with love and care.
And then, gradually, his hobby had crept in.
Mel’s workshop had started small: a workbench in the garage, then more tools, more space, until there wasn’t room for even one car, much less two, and he’d built the carport and taken the entire garage as his space. I hadn’t loved it, especially in the winter, but by then Mel had taken out the garage door, built a back wall, and added a door that he kept padlocked and dead bolted. Expensive tools.
I’d never noticed anything that had sounded odd, except once. It would have been around the death of his next-to-last victim—he’d told me that a raccoon had gotten into the workshop from the attic and died in the corner, and it would take a while for the smell to air out. He used lots of bleach and cleaners.
I believed every word of it. Why wouldn’t I?
But I still think I should have known, and in that, I understand the trolls’ anger.
My mother is saying something that, by the tone, is directed again to me. I open my eyes and say, “Sorry, what?”
“I said, are you making sure the kids are getting swimming lessons? I worry that you’re not, given the . . . the problems you have.” My mother adores the water—lakes, pools, the sea. She’s half mermaid. It was especially horrifying to her that Melvin disposed of his victims in water. It’s especially horrifying to me, too. My stomach clenches when I even think of dipping a toe in the lake that I admire so much from a distance. I can’t even take a boat out on that calm surface without thinking of my ex-husband’s victims, weighted down and chained to the bottom. A silent, rotting garden, swaying in the slow currents. Even drinking tap water makes me gag.