The Family Game by Catherine Steadman (36)

I wonder if Robert mentions any of this on his tape. If his story is a memoir or a thriller, or if that was just a joke. I didn’t have a chance to listen to it as I had hoped when I got home earlier, but I could listen now with Edward sleeping beside me. I feel a jolt of that illicit thrill at the idea of hearing Robert’s voice, but I’m not sure I could stand the shame if Edward found out what I was doing next to him. No, best to wait until he’s out tomorrow. Edward stirs in the sheets as if my thoughts had seeped into his dreams and I can’t help wondering if I am a bad person.

But I know the answer to that: I am a bad person. Good people don’t do the things I have done. There are no mitigating circumstances. What I did was not in self-defense, or in the heat of the moment, or by accident. I did what I did in cold blood. My pulse was steady and I was thinking straight, and that is how I know I am a bad person.

Edward loves me, but he wouldn’t if he knew what I was capable of, what I did on the side of a road on a cold morning twenty years ago. We all have something inside us that we fear would repel the world if it ever came out. But for most people that thing is something that the light of day would only render harmless. My secret would put me in jail for the rest of my natural life.

I shake off the thought and tell myself I am not that person anymore. We change, we grow; I will never be her again. Though I know that’s not true. I feel her inside me down dark alleys; late at night when things get scary I know she is there in the shadows with me. I know she has my back; our back.

I try to imagine what Robert Holbeck would think if he really knew who his son was marrying. If he knew he’d chased away so many perfect partners and ended up letting me slip through the net.

Unless of course he does know.

That thought hits me hard. I look at the digital clock on the bedside table beside me. It’s three A.M. This is insomnia, this is anxiety, this is PTSD. Robert Holbeck does not know. He might have a sense for people, he might have a feeling about me, but he cannot read minds. No one was there that day. You could call it a perfect crime except it wasn’t perfect; it was horrific.

I turn in my fresh Egyptian cotton sheets and try to clear my mind. The past is gone, my family is gone, and right now, I need to think of the future.



* * *



—

The next morning after Edward leaves for work I slide my suitcase out from underneath the bed and spin its combination lock until the numbers align and retrieve the microcassette player.

It’s finally time to listen to Robert’s story. I want to hear it—him, his voice, his words.

I make sure the front door is locked as I pass by it and set myself up in the sitting room, the chunky Olympus player nestled in my lap. I slip the red foam headphones over my ears, carefully adjust the volume, and press PLAY.





18


The Tape





PART 1




Things I remember from that morning. The warmth of sun on skin, dust hanging in light, her hair in the street breeze.

There would be a tent, eventually, to cover him. His college sweatshirt, with all but the A of COLUMBIA obscured. I often recall her face looking up at me as she explained what happened, her expression serious, her words lost in the traffic and the wind. It did not need explaining, what happened. Although it would be explained. Thoroughly.

His head hit the sidewalk at thirty miles an hour. He did not brace himself; he did not break his fall from six floors up, which initially mystified at autopsy. My boy, my good, kind boy, lying broken on the sidewalk like leaking left-out garbage.

Her face again as she spoke words I could not hear, her eyes filling with tears as the wind played with that soft blond hair. The weather vane glinting high above us.

I would hear the story again. Many times. And then later the police would, in turn, ask me. Lawyers. I would search for you in each detail she told me. Knowing the truth was hiding somewhere in there. Knowing she knew why you did it but was unable to articulate it, and I could not hook it out of her.

Things had gone wrong between me and you, my son, that much everyone knew. He was good, a good boy, better than me, and there is a particular pain to knowing that the one you want the world for does not want your world. That your way is the wrong way. You wanted change, and though I feared it, deep down, I wanted you to prove me wrong. To show me this great change. To prove me wrong about the way the world works, and show me that good triumphs and kindness wins the day. But you did not show me that, unfortunately. You showed me this. And the world kept turning.

The blood was so dark it looked black on the sidewalk.

He jumped, so the story goes, but why?

After lunch, he went back to his room to study, she would tell me. He was tired. He had bitten off more than his still-adolescent mind could chew, more responsibility than he could shoulder unaided. And the poison inside him. But she did not know this then. It would be weeks until we knew what he had taken. The medication, a slow daily drip of meds on top of meds, the results unnoticed at first. And what could be more like him than choosing a drug that pushed him to be more, to do more. So clever, so undetectable to everyone who knew him, it’s no wonder it passed for so long.

If I think on it long enough the blame always lands on me.

I pushed you too far.

What you did. What I did after.

A hasty word to you, a lack of malleability in myself, my poor show of example. But it was done, and it cannot be undone: my work, your work. The solution to it all writ large.