Five(63)

The turnoff after the university campus on the right side of the road is approaching. It is the turn they always took to get to Anne and Ollie’s house, only five minutes from here.

“What does it look like now?” Gideon asks, with a deeper voice than he had the last time they were in a car together.

“It’s gone, it’s just an empty space,” she says, knowing what he is asking.

“Can we go there?” Gideon asks.

“Maybe after you’ve been home for a while,” she says.

“I want to see it,” Gideon says.

“There’s nothing there,” she says.

“I need to see it, Emma,” Gideon says.

“All right,” she says, and makes the turn.

A few minutes later, they get out of the car and stand on what was once the gravel driveway of Anne and Ollie’s house, now overgrown, weedy, abandoned. A chain-link fence stands along the perimeter of where the house used to be before Gideon burned it down, with Anne, Ollie, Louise, and the dog sleeping inside. They had the charred remnants of the house cleared and a fence put around the footprint to discourage squatters and vagrants and feral cats. To make it seem less like an empty lot and more like a work in progress until a decision is made about selling or rebuilding, a decision Anne and Ollie still can’t bring themselves to think about. Morning glories creep up the links of the fence, bursting with blooms, impervious to the crime that took place here and to the young man who committed it, standing before their bright heads, bobbing in the breeze.

“Where are they?” he asks, hands pushed deep into the front pocket of the new hoodie she bought him, his right foot unconsciously sweeping across the gravel. The hoodie is far too big because she didn’t know his size. It has been so long since she bought him any clothing, since she has been familiar with the contours of his physical presence. He notices that the sign that says Private Property, Keep Out is rusting in the corners where it attaches to the fence.

“They left,” Emma says. “They don’t want us to contact them. They didn’t say where they were going. Remember, I told you?”

These are lies. She knows that Anne, Ollie, and Louise moved to Cardiff, to be near Ollie’s family, to start over, to forget. They all survived the fire, except for the dog. Anne miscarried from the shock and the smoke inhalation. Ollie sustained significant burns to his torso from shielding Louise with his body as he ran through the blaze to save her. Louise was unharmed, physically, but psychic scars will appear later in her life from a childhood of dealing with her mother’s years of depression and her father’s suffocating, anxious love and the sense that she can never do enough to ease her parents’ mourning for their children who did not live and their children who were only dreams.

“Do they hate me?” Gideon asks.

“No. They’re sad for you. And afraid of you,” she says, lying and telling the truth in the same breath.

“Are you afraid of me?” he asks, not looking at her, but looking in the distance through the fence to the back garden beyond, remembering how Ollie used to let him put the dog in a kiddie pool to give her a bath in the sunshine. Ollie was nice to him. He knows he was.

“No,” she says, as quickly as possible, because it is the right thing to say, even though it isn’t true.

Wordlessly, they slowly walk around the plot. She waits for him to say something. She does not expect remorse or regret from him. She does not chastise or rehash the past or lecture him about how he will have to behave in future. She does not lay ground rules. She does not say that this is a fresh start. She does not mention a blank slate. She does not say she hopes he learned his lesson. She knows that he does not understand the rules that govern the lives of other people. Even other people who have done bad things. His conscience is weak and mute, if it is there at all. Right and wrong will have to be explained to him as facts, because they are missing as his instincts.

They stand for a long while in front of the fenced-in overgrown weeds. The sun comes out from behind a cloud. Gideon closes his eyes and turns his face to it. It is the most tender thing she has ever seen him do.

Eyes still closed, he says, “I wasn’t trying to kill them. I wasn’t thinking about them, not really.”

“I know,” she says.

“I don’t feel things,” he says.

“No,” she says.

“I know,” she says.

“I don’t want to be bad,” he says.

“No?” she says, a slight question, a slight hope in her voice.

“Because I don’t want to go back there,” he finishes the thought, “ever again.”

A different mother would say something here about the goodness inside of him, that it has always been there, that she believes in him, even if he doesn’t believe in himself. That she will do the believing for him. She’s read that true psychopaths aren’t deterred by punishment. That he doesn’t want to go back to prison gives her a small shred of hope, the smallest. She hangs on to it.

She says, “Well, that’s enough of a reason.”

“Other people feel things,” he says.

“Yes, but we’re not like other people, I don’t feel what other people do,” she says.

“What happened on that day with the train? Was it because you couldn’t feel? Were you trying to feel?” he asks. He has asked her about this episode in their lives many times, and each time the question is different.