I don’t welcome that.
I flash back to the blood from that night. I think about the blood a lot. I dream about it too. I don’t know how often. In the beginning, it was every night. Now I would say it’s more a once-a-week thing, but I don’t keep track. Time doesn’t pass normally in prison. It stops and starts and sputters and zigzags. I remember blinking myself awake in the bed I shared with my wife Cheryl that night. I didn’t check a clock, but for those keeping score at home, it was four in the morning. The house was silent, still, and yet somehow I sensed something was wrong. Or maybe that is what I believe—incorrectly—now. Memory is often our most imaginative storyteller. So maybe, probably, I didn’t “sense” anything at all. I don’t know anymore. It’s not like I bolted upright in my bed and leapt to my feet. It took time for me to get up. I stayed in my bed for several minutes, my brain stuck in that weird cusp between sleep and awake, floating ever upward toward consciousness.
At some point, I did finally sit up. I started down the corridor to Matthew’s room.
And that was when I noticed the blood.
It was redder than I imagined—fresh, bright Crayola-crayon red, garish and mocking as a clown’s lipstick against the white sheet.
Panic gripped me then. I called out Matthew’s name. I clumsily ran to his room, bumping hard into the doorframe. I called out his name again. No answer. I ran into his bedroom and found…something unrecognizable.
I’m told I started screaming.
That was how the police found me. Still screaming. The screams became shards of glass careening through every part of me. I stopped screaming at some point, I guess. I don’t remember that either. Maybe my vocal cords snapped, I don’t know. But the echo of those screams has never left me. Those shards still rip and shred and maul.
“Hurry up, Burroughs,” Curly says. “She’s waiting for you.”
She.
He’d said “she.” For a moment I imagine that it is Cheryl, and my heart picks up a beat. But no, she won’t come, and I wouldn’t want her to. We were married for eight years. Happily, I thought, for most of them. It hadn’t been so good at the end. New stresses had formed cracks, and the cracks were turning into fissures. Would Cheryl and I have made it? I don’t know. I sometimes think Matthew would have made us work harder, that he would have kept us together, but that sounds a lot like wishful thinking.
Not long after my conviction, I signed some paperwork granting her a divorce. We never spoke again. That was more my choice than hers. So that’s all I know of her life. I have no idea where Cheryl is now, if she’s still wounded and in mourning or if she’s managed to make a new life for herself. I think it’s best that I don’t know.
Why didn’t I pay more attention to Matthew that night?
I’m not saying I was a bad father. I don’t think I was. But that night, I simply wasn’t in the mood. Three-year-olds can be tough. And boring. We all know this. Parents try to pretend that every moment with their child is bliss. It’s not. Or at least that’s what I thought that night. I didn’t read a bedtime story to Matthew because I just couldn’t be bothered. Awful, right? I just sent my child to bed because I was distracted by my own meaningless issues and insecurities. Stupid. So stupid. We are all so luxuriously stupid when things are good in our life.
Cheryl, who had just finished her residency in general surgery, had a night shift in the transplant ward at Boston General. I was alone with Matthew. I started drinking. I’m not a big drinker and don’t handle spirits well, but in the past few months, with the strain on Cheryl and my marriage, I had found some, if not comfort, numb there. So I partook and I guess the drinks hit me hard and fast. In short, I drank too much and passed out, so instead of watching my child, instead of protecting my son, instead of making sure the doors were locked （they weren’t） or listening for an intruder or heck, instead of hearing a child scream in terror and/or agony, I was in a state the prosecutor at the trial mockingly called “snooze from booze.”
I don’t remember anything else until, of course, that smell.
I know what you’re thinking: Maybe he （meaning “I”） did do it. After all, the evidence against me was pretty overwhelming. I get that. It’s fair. I sometimes wonder about that too. You’d have to be truly blind or delusional not to consider that possibility, so let me tell you a quick story that I think relates to this: I once kicked Cheryl hard while we slept. I’d been having a nightmare that a giant raccoon was attacking our little dog, Laszlo, so in a sleep panic, I kicked the raccoon as hard as I could and ended up kicking Cheryl in the shin. It was oddly funny in hindsight, watching Cheryl try to keep a straight face as I defended my actions （“Would you have wanted me to let Laszlo get eaten by a raccoon?”）， but my wonderful surgeon wife, a woman who loved Laszlo and all dogs, still seethed.
“Maybe,” Cheryl said to me, “subconsciously, you wanted to hurt me.”
She said that with a smile, so I didn’t think she meant it. But maybe she did. We forgot about it immediately and had a great day together. But I think about that a lot now. I was asleep and dreaming that night too. One kick isn’t a murder, but who knows, right? The murder weapon was a baseball bat. Mrs. Winslow, who had lived in the house behind our woods for forty years, saw me bury it. That was the kicker, though I wondered about that, about me being stupid enough to bury it so close to the scene, what with my fingerprints all over it. I wonder about a lot of things like that. For example, I had fallen asleep after a drink or two too many once or twice before—who hasn’t?—but never like this. Perhaps I’d been drugged, but by the time I was a viable suspect, it was too late to test for that. The local police, many of whom revered my father, were supportive at first. They looked into some bad people he’d put away, but that never felt right, not even to me. Dad had made enemies, sure, but that was a long time ago. Why would any of them kill a three-year-old boy for that kind of revenge? It didn’t add up. There were no signs of sexual assault or any other motive either, so really, when you add it all up, there was only one true viable suspect.
Me.
So maybe something like my raccoon-kick dream happened here. It’s not impossible. My attorney, Tom Florio, wanted to make an argument like that. My family, some of them anyway, believed that I should take that route too. Diminished capacity or some such defense. I had a history of sleepwalking and some of what could have been described as mental health issues, if you pushed the definition. I could use that, they reminded me.
But nah, I wouldn’t confess because, despite these rationales, I didn’t do it. I didn’t kill my son. I know I didn’t. I know. And yes, I know every perp says that.
Curly and I make the final turn. Briggs Penitentiary is done up in Early American Asphalt. Everything was a washed-out gray, a faded road after a rainstorm. I had gone from a three-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath Colonial, splashed in sunshine yellow with green shutters, decorated in earth tones and pine antiques, nicely situated on a three-quarter-acre lot in a cul-de-sac, to this. Doesn’t matter. Surroundings are irrelevant. Exteriors, you learn, are temporal and illusionary and thus meaningless.