Five(62)

Three.

“Get off him!” Emma—the Rich Bitch, the lunatic, the mother—roars at Liam, her palm against her son’s chest.

Two.

“Oh fuck,” Liam says, letting go of the child.

One.

Fear has a sound. It is hard to recognize because we only hear it once or twice in our lives. We may have a feeling that we think is fear more often than that, when we travel to foreign countries and need medical attention, or have a near miss in a car, or get into a fight in a bar with a big stranger, or come home to a house that’s been burgled. But it isn’t until we hear the fear of life ending, the fear of seeing it end in front of us, that we know the difference. The guttural cry or wailing scream, the shrill call of succumbing to disaster, the whispered prayer of a last breath—the sounds of fear are worse, sometimes, than the sights.

“Gideon!”

Emma’s cry for her son is the last word uttered before the train finally stops. And the sound that none of them will ever forget.





Time





Destination





Expected




                       1st 7:06

                        London Victoria

                        Cancelled



                       2nd 7:13

                        Bedford

                        Cancelled



                       3rd 7:20

                        London Victoria

                        Cancelled





Gideon


Emma and Gideon are driving home in silence. He sits in the passenger seat, leaning on his elbow staring out the window. She picked him up from the facility for youth offenders about an hour ago.

When she first saw him in the visitors’ room there, he was a young thirteen, just on the cusp of puberty. He looked tiny and fragile next to the hulking man-boys at the adjacent tables, all of them taller and bigger than their haggard, exhausted, tear-stained mothers. Emma hated the room’s banana-yellow and pea-green walls, the sticky chairs, hated being searched every time by the guards, hated standing in the queue of terrible mothers waiting to see their wayward sons.

All of the visitors were women. She was envious of the ones who weren’t mothers, who were aunts or grandmothers or older sisters who had taken the place of mothers, because no one deemed them directly responsible for the crimes of their boys. But the mothers, even if they were good mothers, even if they had sacrificed for and loved their boys, even if they had given them good homes, were still and always would be the bad mothers of terrible sons. Even if the sons were led to their mistakes by their fathers, even if the fathers showed them how to make those mistakes. It was still the fault of the mothers, for choosing such poor fathers for their children.

Emma knew, however, that this prejudice was not a silent injustice in her case. She was not a victim of sexism, or Freudian views of motherhood, or society’s casual dismissal of mothering as work until it failed and children grew into criminals. And then police, and social workers, and lawyers, and the public needed someone to blame.

Emma knew that everything about Gideon was entirely her fault. She had brought him into the world through spite, to prove her superiority, to harm the women—her mother, her sister, her cousin, all the women like them—who should have loved her but didn’t. Who should have protected her, helped her, brought her in instead of keeping her out. But Gideon has done much more harm than she ever did and the blame for his crimes, of course, is hers.

Now, at fifteen, almost sixteen, Gideon is taller than her, broader, handsome features emerging beneath the angry acne and greasy black hair. The gap between his teeth has closed somewhat, like the dentist said it would, but not entirely. She wonders when he will learn to use it to his advantage. It crosses her mind that despite how thin he is, he is physically much stronger than her now, and she suppresses the thought of what this might mean. They have said almost nothing to each other since she picked him up this morning. Neither knows where to begin. They don’t have much to say. They have too much to say.

“Are you hungry?” she asks, both hands on the wheel, staring straight ahead at the road.

“Not really,” he says. Loss of appetite, she knows, is a side effect of his new medication.

She does not push beyond this, she does not say, “Oh nonsense, you must be,” or “My goodness, you must want some real food after whatever they gave you in there,” or any of the things another mother in her position might say. She does not press. She will give it time. Although she is worried about how unhealthy he looks, the gauntness of his shoulders, the sharpness of his cheekbones, she will let him acclimate at his own pace.