Scott Turow - Innocent

"Because?"

"Because for just a second, a few seconds, she was really happy. Gleeful. Victorious. She was happy I knew."

"Knew what?" he asks.

I stare at my son. Accepting the truth is often the hardest task human beings face.

"That she was trying to kill you?" he asks at last.

"Yes."

"Mom was trying to kill you?"

"She'd been to the bank. She'd been in my e-mail. She knew what she knew. And she was lethally angry."

"And she'd decided to kill you?"

"Yes."

"My mother was a murderer?"

"Call it what you want."

Now that he has heard it, he is finding it hard to speak. I can just about see his pulse twitching in his fingertips. It is a bad moment for both of us.

"Jesus," says my son. "You're telling me my mother was a killer." He snorts and says out loud, the cat-quick logician, "Well, one parent must be, right?"

I get it after a second. Either I'm lying because I murdered her or this is the truth.

"Right," I say.

He takes another instant to himself, staring at the refrigerator. The Christmas pictures from more than a year and a half ago have still not come down. The babies born, the happy families.

"She knew who it was. The girl?"

"As I said, she'd been in my e-mail."

"I'm not going to ask you to tell me-"

"Good. Because I'm not going to."

"But it must have really pissed her off."

"I'm sure she was enraged. And not only for her sake. She was trying to spare other people, too."

"So it was somebody's daughter. One of your friends? It had to be someone she was close to."

"No more, Nat. I can't sacrifice somebody else's privacy."

"Was it Denise? That's what I've always figured-that you got involved with Denise."

Denise is Nat's cousin, a couple years older than him, the daughter of Barbara's youngest uncle. A stunning young woman, she's had more than her share of trouble and is

currently struggling in her marriage to a state trooper for the sake of their two-year-old.

"There's no point, Nat. I behaved like an absolute jerk. That's all."

"I already knew that, Dad."

Touche. He sits at the table, looking away again, dealing once more with all his disappointment. I suspect what he is thinking: Mom was right. It all would have been easier without me. If one of us had to go, if I had created a situation where he could have only one parent, better it be Barbara. That was exactly what Barbara concluded, particularly because I had no right to imperil Nat's happiness with Anna.

In the meantime, Nat heaves a labored sigh and takes a second to finally remove his jacket.

"Okay. So you looked at Mom. And she's got this mad gleam in her eye."

"I wouldn't quite put it like that. But I looked at the pills and at her, back and forth, and it was one of those moments. 'Zero at the bone.' And I think I said something stupid and obvious like, 'Is this Advil?' and she said, 'Some generic.' And I stared at the pills again. Nat, I don't know what I was going to do then. Something didn't seem right, but I don't know if I was going to swallow them or say, 'Show me the bottle,' and I never found out, because she came over and snatched them from my hand and downed all four of them. One motion. 'Fine,' she said, and walked away in a typical huff. I thought it was your mother being your mother."

"She preferred to die rather than get caught?"

"I don't know. I'll never know. I think in the moment, she couldn't enjoy watching me kill myself as much as she thought she would. She had to be feeling a lot right then, including a good deal of shame."

"She saved you from her?"

I nod. I'm not sure that's right, but it will do for a son thinking about his mother.

"The phenelzine," he says. "That was just because it happened to look exactly like a pill you regularly took?"

"It does. Which she'd probably realized years ago. And that provided an opportunity. But I think the larger point was to make it appear like I died of natural causes. So no one would ever guess."

"Like Harnason tried to do."

"Just like Harnason. I'm sure she took some satisfaction in finding the primer in how to kill me in one of my own cases."

He smiles a little ruefully, which I take as an unvanquished appreciation for his mother.

"But there was a fail-safe," I say. "If the phenelzine overdose was detected somehow, she would say I'd committed suicide. That was why she'd made sure I picked up that prescription-and handled the bottle when I came in so I'd leave prints. That's why she'd sent me to the store to get the sausage and the cheese and the wine. One of the searches about phenelzine and its effects had already been done on my computer. She had a belt and suspenders."

He nods. He's followed all of that.

"Okay, but what was she going to say was your motive to kill yourself right before the election? You were about to hit the peak of your professional life, Dad."

"That's sometimes hard for people, Nat. And there was the divorce, my visits with Dana. I hadn't carried through the year before, so she could say I just couldn't face it."

"Wouldn't it look bad for her to come up with all of that after the fact?"

"She'd cry a little. Who wouldn't believe that a despairing widow would be eager to spare the reputation of her prominent husband, not to mention her sensitive son? She'd say the bottle of phenelzine had been out on my sink when she found me, and when they identified only my prints on the vial, it would corroborate her story. But no one would ask questions. Especially with Tommy Molto sitting in the PA's office saying good riddance to me. Besides, they could have torn the house apart. There was none of the stuff here they were looking for-mortar and pestle, dust from the phenelzine. They could have exhumed my body. They would never find anything that wasn't consistent with me voluntarily taking an overdose of phenelzine. Because of course that was exactly how I would have died."

He fingers his coffee cup while he considers it all. And then, as I would have expected a while ago, he begins to cry.

"Jesus Christ, Dad. You know. This lawyer thing in you. You can be like Mr. Spock. That's what I was saying before. You couldn't have sat around mourning. It's just not in you. Your way is to go completely cold. Like you're a million miles off. You talk about her as if she was a serial killer, or a hit man-you know, somebody who knew how to do this, to kill people. Instead of a super-angry, super-hurt person."

"Nat," I say, and say no more. That is how it has gone forever, my displeasure with him expressed in no more than his name. There is no point in reminding him that this is the truth he demanded. He goes to the sink for a paper towel to wipe his eyes and blow his nose.

"And how did you figure all of this out, Dad?"

"Slowly. That's what took a day."

"Ah." He sits again. Then runs his hand forward for me to go on.

"When I woke up, the sheets were wet with her perspiration. And your mom was dead. My first thought was that it was heart failure. I did CPR, and then when I went for the phone on her nightstand, I saw a stack of papers which she'd left under the water glass she'd brought for me to take the pills."

"What kind of papers?"

"The ones she'd gotten from the bank. The receipt from Dana's firm. Copies of the cashier's checks that paid my legal bills and the STD clinic. Monthly statements with the deposit amounts circled. She'd obviously put them there after I went to sleep."

"Because?"

"It was the equivalent of a note. She wanted me to know she knew."

"Ah," says my son.

"I was shocked, of course. And not especially happy with myself. But I realized how angry she must have been. And that this clearly wasn't an accident. It didn't take me long to think about the pills and to wonder what she'd taken that she'd intended to give me. So I went to her medicine cabinet. And the bottle of phenelzine was right inside in front. I picked it up and opened it, looked down to be certain those were the tablets. That's where the rest of my fingerprints came from.