John Burley - The Absence of Mercy

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.

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.

On the day they’d disappeared, Ben had been detained for further questioning. For eight hours they’d interrogated him, asking the same questions over and over in a thousand different ways, trying to get him to contradict himself, not believing he hadn’t known. “You mean to tell me,” Special Agent Culver had asked, looming over him behind the chair in which Ben sat, “that you examined the bite marks on those victims, photographed them, discussed them with the investigating detectives, and never noticed that they matched the dental architecture of your own son? I mean , look at the pictures !” He’d thrown photographs of Thomas down on the table all around him, framed pictures that had been prominently displayed in Ben’s own home. “You don’t see that gap between the upper left canine and the first premolar—the one we’ve been focused on throughout the investigation? You don’t see that?! ”

The truth was, he hadn’t. Or more precisely, he’d seen it every day, and had never made the connection—had never allowed himself to make the connection. During medical school, one of Ben’s mentors—a surgeon with the last name of Zaret—had been fond of telling his students, “The eyes cannot see what the mind does not know.” If you don’t consider the possibility of a particular disease, in other words, you won’t recognize the signs and symptoms for what they truly are. “You have to think about it here,” the scrub-clad surgeon would say, pointing to his forehead, “before you can see it here,” he’d finish, the index finger descending to the level of his eyes.

Ben shook his head. He hadn’t seen it—hadn’t allowed himself to see it. But what if he had? Would he have been able to intervene somewhere along the way, before it became too late for all of them? And what about Susan? How much had she known, and when? Why had she not come to him with that knowledge? More important, why hadn’t she done anything to stop it? And the question he kept asking himself more than any other: Why had she chosen to run?

He wondered if perhaps she’d been trying to tell him all along, and that he simply hadn’t been listening. Bits of conversation stuck out in his mind like thistles, catching him when he wasn’t looking, wounding him with their missed significance.

… “I don’t think he should be dating that girl. One way or the other, he’ll end up hurting her . ”…

…“Why don’t you talk to him about it?” …

… “You have no idea about the measures that I am prepared to take— that I have already taken —to safeguard the lives of those children…. I would do anything— anything —for them . ” …

… “Mom says everyone deserves forgiveness . She says it’s not up to us to judge each other. It’s up to God . ” …

… “We have to take care of each other. Just as we always have . ” …

… “I just don’t want to lose him . ” …

Ben recalled how, after the first murder, he’d asked his wife—nearly pleaded with her—to take the boys away for a while. Their safety was the most important thing, he had argued.

“It won’t make any difference,” Susan had told him, and now he realized why.

The sliding glass doors of the hospital’s front entrance retracted dutifully. He crossed the lobby, turned right at the first intersection, and proceeded down the familiar hallway leading to the west stairwell. He passed several people in the corridor but said hello to no one. These days, that was best. He was a well-known presence in this town, but he walked the streets and buildings alone, like the ghost of a soul who has not yet realized that he is dead. People studied him with sideways glances, drew their children close in his company, and gave him wide berths as they passed. His son had decimated this town like a disease, an infection, a plague of one—and at the very least Ben was guilty by association, although there were many within Wintersville who claimed that his culpability ran far deeper than that. As a result, he was not only unwelcome here—he was suspect. And he would have left this place months ago if there were anywhere else for him to go.

But it was here, within this town, that he had lost them. For although Susan and the boys had been on the other side of the country when they disappeared, he had lost them long before that—in the lines of communication that had fallen short, in the clues that had gone unnoticed, in the innumerable opportunities he had had to stop this, if only he had listened carefully to the messages all around him. No, he couldn’t leave—couldn’t abandon the only tangible connection with his family that remained, couldn’t walk away from the things they had once touched, the rooms they had once occupied, the place they had once called home.

Distracted by these thoughts, he almost ran into her as she exited the gift shop.

“Monica,” he said, but she grimaced and stepped backward as if he were contagious, as if he might suddenly reach out and try to grab her.

Ben looked at her anyway, trying to see her as his son might have seen her. It was true that Thomas had pursued her through the woods, had torn apart her body, had left her lying there in the rain to die. She would never be the same because of it, would never be truly free of what his boy had done to her. But was it possible that Thomas had also come to care for her, to love her in some perverse way? Was he capable of that? Or had he only been toying with her all along—fascinated with Monica because of her survival, a living display of his handiwork. At the same time, Ben wondered what she might have once seen in him, if there was some shred of goodness and kindness she had discovered hidden within his son, a saving grace within his deep pit of damnation.