Notes on an Execution(7)

“Fine,” Lavender said. “But you promise, after, you’ll find him?”

She climbed on top. Tears fled salty into her mouth as she shimmied out of her linen pants. As she pressed Johnny inside, she pictured her baby, toppling scared into a stream. She pictured water, filling his tiny lungs. A vulture, hovering. A steep ravine. Lavender pumped up and down, numb—by the time Johnny wilted inside her, the sneer on his face had transformed him entirely.

I don’t think you can ever see the whole of another person, Julie used to say. As Johnny shoved her off, limp and heaving furious, Lavender studied the disdain. The moon of his face, revealing its cratered underside.

*

Afternoon bled into evening as Lavender paced the yard, hysteria blooming. Johnny had stormed out—to search, she hoped—and she hugged her knees to her chest on the bottom step of the porch, rocking anxious. By the time Lavender heard the rustling from the forest, night had fallen, and her worry had hardened, crystallizing into an urgent, profound dread.

“Mama?”

It was Ansel, crouched in the twilight at the edge of the forest. His feet were filthy, a ring of dirt caked around his mouth. Lavender rushed him, her eyes adjusting: he was covered in crimson, and he smelled like rust. Blood. She patted him frantically down, felt each of his child bones for a break.

The blood, it appeared, was coming from his hand. In his fist, Ansel clutched a chipmunk with no head. It looked, in shadow, like a mutilated stuffed animal, a decapitated doll. It didn’t seem to bother him—just another forgotten toy.

A scream built in Lavender’s throat, but she was too exhausted to let it out. She scooped Ansel onto her hip and hiked back up to the house, shuffling him into the outdoor shower. Bugs flew in clouds around the single bulb, while Lavender ran the mottled sponge over Ansel’s toes; she kissed each one in apology as the freezing water pounded.

“Come on,” she whispered, as she toweled him off. “Let’s get you something to eat.”

When she turned on the kitchen light, Lavender’s body felt like a funnel, her relief draining slowly away.

The house was quiet. Johnny had gone. But while Lavender had been pacing the perimeter of the property, he had taken a trip to the shed. His grandfather’s dusty old locks had been pulled from storage and fitted to the pantry door. Johnny had locked all the canned food away, locked the refrigerator, drilled a hole in the cabinet above the sink just to fit a lock over the dry pasta and the peanut butter.

Lavender could hear his words, an echo parroting constantly in her ear: You and that boy need to learn to earn your keep. Never mind the long afternoons she spent in the garden, trying to bring the tomato plants to fruit. Never mind the mornings she passed with Ansel, teaching him words from the leather-bound dictionary. Never mind the evenings she spent scraping grime from Johnny’s old hunting boots. Johnny had made himself clear: his job was to provide. Lavender could not parse exactly what her job had become, but clearly, she was failing to do it.

Okay, Lavender thought, as she surveyed the locked food. Her head, a scramble. Okay. They would eat in the morning.

She did not dare sleep in her own bed that night. She could not face him—she did not know what she might find. Instead, she curled up with Ansel on the hard floor in the extra bedroom, on top of the old blanket from the barn. Hungry, Ansel babbled into the night, as Johnny’s footsteps finally thunked up the stairs. When Ansel began to shiver from the hunger, Lavender took off the bathrobe she’d been wearing since the shower and wrapped it around him. Naked on the floor, breasts bared to the window, Lavender caught the glint of her mother’s locket, shining in reflection—the only thing she owned for herself. Gently, she unclasped it. She threaded it around Ansel’s neck.

“This is yours now,” Lavender said. “It will always keep you safe.”

Her voice quavered, but the words themselves seemed to lull the boy to sleep.

Lavender waited until the house was completely still before she crept downstairs and pulled one of Johnny’s jackets from the front closet. Until that point, her worry had been negligible. Johnny had never done something like this—had only gripped her wrists a little too hard, shoved her aside on his way up the stairs. The locked food was a promise and a threat, spurred by her inability to do the most basic thing: the mothering.

The pickup truck loomed near the edge of the field. Lavender waded barefoot through the tall damp grass. The night was so dark. No moon. She felt faint, withered. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast. The key fit easily into the lock on the door; it opened with a whining creak.

Lavender settled in the driver’s seat.

It was irresistible: the almost. She almost put the keys in the ignition. She almost drove through the night, until she found the ocean. But the sight of the stick shift pushed the truth over Lavender, even more devastating now that she’d made it this far. She didn’t know how to drive. She didn’t know if the car had gas, and she wouldn’t know how to fill it either way. She wasn’t even wearing a shirt, and she couldn’t get a shirt without going into the room where Johnny slept. It was so desperate, too much. She could never.

Lavender bent over the steering wheel and let the sob overtake her. She cried for Ansel, for the chipmunk, for her own grumbling stomach. She cried for the things she had wanted, which she couldn’t even picture anymore. It was like she’d held her own desire too long in the palm of her hand and it was now just an object, devoid of meaning, useless and taking up space.