Perri O'Shaughnessy - Keeper of the Keys

“What’s this?” Ray had pulled something out of the hole behind the brick. The flashlight revealed tatters, dirt. “Cloth.” He had answered his own question.

“His shirt, I guess.”

Ray jumped back, knocking into the washing machine, and yelled, “What’s in there?”

“You mean who’s in there.”

“It’s-it’s a body!” he yelled.

“Henry Jackson. Your father, Ray.”

“Why? Why?”

His mother sighed deeply. “Oh, I wish you could just let go but you’re like me, stubborn and loyal. If only I hadn’t needed to stay near my mother for all those years when she was so sick we could have moved to Australia or somewhere. None of this would have happened.”

“You killed him! Oh, God, you did!”

“No, Ray, I stopped him. He broke in, just like you.”

“Wait. Wait.” They stood in the semidarkness, both breathing hard.

“He tried to hurt you, Mom? He attacked you?” Ray said at last, his voice breaking.

“He didn’t get the chance.”

“It was self-defense,” Ray mumbled. “He stalked you. We’ll deal with this.” He felt the tattered cloth again.

“It won’t look that way to a judge, Son.”

“But he broke in-”

“Ray. Ray, precious child, your father didn’t come here for me. He came for you.”

“He came to hurt me? Why?” A hundred possibilities flashed through his mind. “Did he think I wasn’t his?”

“Henry,” she spat out his name, “had full legal and physical custody of you.”

“But-”

“Yes, it is incredible, isn’t it? Ripping a child away from his mother.”

“But why would they do that?”

“He faked being perfect, and I wasn’t so good at that in those days. Look, I was a young woman when I had you, only twenty-two. I wanted some fun out of life! I deserved some fun!” She cast a desperate glance at him. “And one day, one miserable day, I did something really stupid. I drove drunk.”

He thought about that. “That was enough to cost you custody, getting caught driving under the influence? I mean, why not make sure you got some treatment and quit?”

“You were in the car with me. We cracked up. You spent two months in the hospital. My visits to see you had to be supervised after that. He took you away from me. He divorced me. He couldn’t forgive me for what I had done.”

Bright lights at night. A high bed. Nurses.

“You had a head trauma. Bleeding and pressure in your brain. You have a scar under your hair. No one could believe I would stop drinking, not Henry, not the caseworkers, not the judge. But I did.”

“Until now.”

“Who wouldn’t? Have you thought about my life at all? Thought about anything but your obsessions and your needs and Leigh? Ray, I need you to help me now. I’ll leave this house. I’ll go away like Leigh did, and I won’t come back. Will that satisfy you and Leigh?”

Silence lodged heavily between them.

“So you kept the tapes in case there was another custody fight,” Ray concluded. “You wanted to prove he was some kind of angry, crazy monster to the court. You needed something against him. Is that why they were so short?” He answered his own question. “You only kept the bad parts, and there weren’t many, were there? He got frustrated and angry sometimes.”

“Any judge would hear it in his voice. He was a dangerous man.”

“Dangerous because he wanted his son,” Ray said. “He had a court order to take me. He wasn’t a monster.”

“I did it out of-”

“And so you killed him. You were the monster.” He breathed heavily, and he stepped back farther from her. Each step felt like a year of the pain she had experienced, running with him, running, trying to take care of him and her mother, no life for herself, all for him-

“We had peace after that, didn’t we, Son?”

“We lived on top of his body!” Ray said, backing away from her toward the stairs. “You did that to me.”

“Where are you going? Are you leaving?”

“You almost murdered my wife!”

“She broke in, Son. She came down here when I was trying to fix the wall.”

“With a chisel?”

“That damn leak! I couldn’t fix it, and just like you said, the water was undermining the brick wall in the basement. I mean, you always said it was a hack job. It was a hack job because I did it! I put up that wall myself, and it was crummy and starting to get dangerous, so I was going to loosen the mortar and repair everything. And then she broke in at night and surprised me. I had to protect myself! I had to protect us! Wait-where are you going? What are you doing, Son?”

He shut the door and locked it. “I’m keeping you down here until the police come. The window is full of broken glass. Don’t try to get out that way. I’ll stand out there waiting.”

“Let me run. Please. Ray?”

He checked the lock. It was secure.

Seven months later, Ray drove up to Corona, California, the dry heartland of the state, practically at its center. He filled out a form in the entryway, showed his ID, went through the metal detector, braved the scrutiny of several guards, and finally got into the visiting area.

He put on headphones, as did Esmé, sitting across from him and through an acrylic barrier.

“They treating you all right?” She had aged, of course. Her jaw was set and he noticed how square and stubborn it still was.

“I’ve applied for kitchen duty,” Esmé said. “The food is too high-carb. I’ve decided to become a vegetarian. I don’t trust the meat.”

She didn’t ask about how Ray was doing, he thought with a twinge. Esmé was thinking about herself. Maybe she always thought of herself. It felt like a wind had swept through the big depressing room, blowing away his illusions. “I left some money for you for the canteen.”

“Did you bring my magazines?”

“You bet.”

“My roommate needs a kidney transplant. She’s back in the hospital. I sleep so much better now that she’s gone but I think they’re bringing in a new inmate next week.”

“That have you nervous?”

“They’re not as bad as you might think. Mostly abused women, druggies.”

She had never used that word before. Ray sat up straighter.

“It’s so unfair. I had that one lapse. That one time when you were in the car, and I drove drunk. So should I spend the rest of my life paying for that?”

And what about killing his father and attacking his wife? Esmé continued to have blind spots big as tunnels that would fit a big rig. “Mom, maybe you should listen to what they say. It’s not all stupid.”

“It’s so galling. Me, here. Do you blame me for things I had to do?”

“Yes,” Ray said.

“All I can say is, you’re not a parent yet. Someday you might understand better.”

Ray, now three months along on the road to becoming a parent, said nothing about Leigh’s pregnancy. “Do you blame me for the things I had to do to stop you?”

Esmé paused, wet her lips. “You were the center of my existence for most of my life, honey. Lately I don’t worry about you anymore, about how well you’re eating, if your work is going well. I suppose it’s one way to cut the apron strings.” She smiled. “But of course I blame you. You’re ungrateful. That’s how it is.”

“Try to understand what you did, Mom. After I found those tapes, I decided my father was some kind of stalker,” Ray said. “I thought he tracked you down and we moved because you needed to hide from him.”

“You should never have gone back to those places. Wasn’t it sad?”

“Yes.”

“You must understand why I had to hide you. I needed you close. You were just a baby, Ray.”