The Other Mrs.(82)

“Your father is on his way home,” I force out, though I don’t know why.

“No, he’s not,” he says, voice chillingly composed. “Dad’s at work.”

“He canceled his classes,” I say, shambling backward. “He’s coming home. He should be here soon.”

“Why?” Otto asks as, in my subtle retreat, I bump softly into the fireplace mantel.

I lie, telling Otto that Will also didn’t feel well. “He was turning around just as soon as his ferry reached the mainland.” I glance at the clock and say, “Any minute, he should be home.”

“No, he won’t,” Otto says again. It’s irrefutable the way that he says it.

I suck in a breath, release it slowly. “What do you mean?” I ask.

“Ferries are delayed ’cause of the storm,” he tells me, thrusting that hair of his back again with a hand.

“How’d you get home?” I ask.

“Mine was the last to leave.”

“Oh,” I say, thinking of Otto and me trapped together in this house until ferry traffic resumes. How long will that take? I wonder why Will hasn’t called to tell me about the ferries, though my phone is in the other room. I wouldn’t have heard it if he did.

A gust of wind rattles the house just then, making the whole thing shake. As it does, the lamp on the end table flickers. I hold my breath, waiting for the room to go dark. There’s a meager amount of light coming through the windows, but as they fill with snow it gets harder to see. The world outside turns a charcoal gray. The dogs bark.

“Do you want me to look at your throat?” I ask Otto. When he doesn’t reply, I retrieve my penlight from my bag in the foyer and go to him. Standing beside Otto, I see how he’s surpassed me in height nearly overnight. He looks down on me now. He isn’t heavily built. Rather, he’s lanky. He smells of teenage boy: all those hormones they secrete in their sweat during puberty. But he’s handsome, the spitting image of Will, just younger and thinner.

I reach up and press my fingers to his lymph nodes. They’re enlarged. He might be sick.

“Open up,” I tell him, and though he hesitates, he complies. Otto opens his mouth. It’s lazy at best, just barely enough for me to see inside.

I shine my penlight in, seeing a red, irritated throat. I press the back of my hand to his forehead, feeling for a fever. As I do, I feel a sudden rush of nostalgia, bringing me back to a four-or a five-year-old Otto, sick as a dog with the flu. Instead of a hand, it used to be my lips, a far more accurate measure of temperature to me. One quick kiss and I could tell if my boys were febrile or not. That and the way they’d lie limp and helpless in my arms, wanting to be coddled. Those days are gone.

All at once Otto’s strong hand latches down on my wrist and I jerk immediately back.

His grasp is strong. I can’t free myself from his hold.

The penlight drops from my hand, batteries skidding across the floor.

“What are you doing, Otto? Let go of me,” I cry out, trying desperately to wiggle free from his grasp. “You’re hurting me,” I tell him. His grip is tight.

I look up to find his eyes watching me. They’re more brown than blue today, more sad than mad. Otto speaks, his words nothing more than a whisper. “I’ll never forgive you,” he says, and I stop fighting.

“For what, Otto?” I breathe, still thinking about the washcloth and the necklace, as again the lights in the home flicker and I hold my breath, waiting for them to go out. My eyes move to a lamp, wishing I had something to protect myself with. The lamp has a beautiful glazed ceramic base, sturdy, solid enough to do damage but not so heavy that I can’t pick it up. But it’s six feet away now, out of reach, and I don’t know that I’d have it in me anyway, to clutch the lamp by the neck and bash the heavy end into my own son’s head. Even in self-defense. I don’t know that I could.

Otto’s Adam’s apple bobs in his throat. “You know,” he says, fighting back the urge to cry.

I shake my head and say, “I don’t know,” though I realize in the next moment that I do. He’ll never forgive me for not standing up for him that day in the principal’s office. For not complying with his lie.

“For lying,” he hollers, composure waning, “about the knife.”

“I never lied,” I tell him. What I want to say is that he’s the one who lied, but it doesn’t seem a smart time to lay blame. Instead, “If only you’d have come to me. I could have helped you, Otto. We could have talked it through. We could have come up with a solution.”

“I did,” he interjects, voice quivering. “I did come to you. You’re the only one I told,” and I try not to imagine Otto opening up to me about what was happening at school and me giving him the brush-off. I struggle to remember it, as I have every day and night since it happened. What was I doing when Otto told me about the bullying? What was I so busy doing that I couldn’t pay attention when he confessed to me that kids at school called him heinous names; that they shoved him into lockers, plunged his head into dirty toilet bowls?

“Otto,” I say under my breath, full of shame for not being there when Otto needed me most. “If I wasn’t listening. If I wasn’t paying attention. I’m so sorry,” I tell him, and I start to tell him how I was completely inundated with work in those days, tired and overwhelmed. But that’s little consolation to a fourteen-year-old boy who needed his mother. I don’t make excuses for my behavior. It wouldn’t feel right.