The Other Mrs.(83)

Before I can say more, Otto is speaking, and for the first time there are details I’ve never heard before. How we were outside when he told me about the bullying. How it was late at night. How Otto couldn’t sleep. He came looking for me. He tells me he found me outside on our building’s fire escape, just outside the kitchen window, dressed in all black, smoking a cigarette.

The details, they’re ludicrous.

“I don’t smoke, Otto,” I tell him. “You know that. And heights.” I shake my head, shuddering. I don’t need to say more; he knows what I mean. I’m acrophobic. I’ve always been.

We lived on the sixth floor of our condo in Chicago, the top floor of a Printers Row midrise. I never took the elevator, only the stairs. I never stepped foot on the balcony where Will spent his mornings sipping coffee and enjoying the sweeping city views. Come with me, Will used to say, smiling mischievously while tugging on my hand. I’ll keep you safe. Don’t I always keep you safe? he asked. But I never went with him.

“But you were,” Otto claims, and I ask, “How did you know I was there if it was the middle of the night? How did you see me?”

“The flame. From the cigarette lighter.”

But I don’t own a cigarette lighter. Because I don’t smoke. But I go quiet anyway. I let him go on.

Otto says that he climbed out the window and sat beside me. It’d taken him weeks to work up the courage to come and tell me. Otto says I went ballistic when he told me what the kids were doing to him at school. That I was totally worked up.

“We plotted revenge. We made a list of the best ways.”

“The best ways for what?” I ask.

He says it unambiguously, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “The best way to kill them,” he says.

“Who?”

“The kids at school,” he tells me. Because even the kids that didn’t mock him still laughed. And so, he and I decided that night that they all needed to go. I blanch. I humor him only because I think that this is cathartic somehow for Otto.

“And how were we going to do that?” I ask, not certain I want to know the ways he and I supposedly came up with to kill his classmates. Because they’re Otto’s ideas, every last one of them. And I want to believe that somewhere inside of him is still my son.

He shrugs his shoulders and says, “I dunno. A whole bunch of ways. We talked about starting the school on fire. Using lighter fluid or gasoline. You said I could poison the cafeteria food. We talked about that for a while. For a while that seemed like the way to go. Take out a whole bunch of them at once.”

“How did we plan to do that?” I ask as he grows lax and his hand loses its grip on my wrist. I try to pull free, but just like that, he reengages, clinging tighter to me.

His answer is so sure. “Botox,” he says with another shrug. “You said you could get it.”

Botox. Botulinum toxin. Which we stocked at the hospital because it treats migraines, symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, and a host of other conditions. But it can be fatal, too. It’s one of the deadliest substances in the world.

“Or stabbing them all,” he says, telling me how we’d decided that was the best way because he didn’t have to wait for poison, and a knife was easier to hide in his backpack than bottles of lighter fluid. He could do it right away. The very next day.

“We went inside,” Otto reminds me. “Remember, Mom? We climbed back in the window and went to look over all the knives, to see which would be best. You decided,” he tells me, explaining how I chose the chef knife because of its size.

According to Otto, I then took out Will’s whetstone and sharpened the knife. I said something canny about how a sharp knife is safer than a dull one, before smiling at him. Then I slipped it in his backpack in the soft laptop sleeve, behind all of his other belongings. As I zipped the backpack closed, I winked at him.

You don’t have to worry about getting an organ, Otto says that I said. Any old artery will do.

My stomach roils at the thought of it. My free hand rises to my mouth as bile inches up my esophagus. I want to scream, No! That he’s wrong. That I never said such a thing. That he’s making this all up.

But before I can reply, Otto is telling me that before he went to bed that night I said to him, Don’t let anyone laugh at you. You shut them up if they do.

That night Otto slept better than he had in a long time.

But the next morning, he had second thoughts about it. He was suddenly scared.

But I wasn’t there to talk it through. I’d gone in to work for the day. He called me. That I remember, a voice mail on my phone that I didn’t discover until later that night. Mom, he’d said. It’s me. I really need to talk to you.

But by the time I heard the voice mail, it was done. Otto had taken that knife to school. By the grace of God, no one was hurt.

Listening to Otto speak, I realize one gut-wrenching truth. He doesn’t think that he’s made this story up. He believes it. In his mind, I am the one who packed the knife in his backpack; I am the one who lied.

I can’t help myself. I reach up with my one free hand and trace his jawline. His body stiffens but he doesn’t retreat. He lets me touch him. There is hair there, only a small patch of it that will one day grow to a beard. How did the little boy who once lacerated his thumb on the blade of Will’s razor grow old enough to shave? His hair hangs in his eyes. I brush it back, seeing that his eyes lack all the hostility they usually have, but are instead drowning in pain.