Page 91 of Not a Word

“What?”

“What your mom put you through. You’ve had to carry her guilt.”

She’d struck on something that had occurred to him many times over the years. “Go on,” he said.

“She gets away with murder, she’s in the clear, gets to go on and live her life, not a care in the world. But you, you’re the one holding that big secret, letting it eat away at you. Year after year. Like a cancer. And it just keeps growing and growing inside of you. It’s metastasizing.”

That seemed like enough for their first meeting. Plant the seed. Over their next coffee, she’d ramp it up a bit.

“How could any mother do that to a kid?” Alicia said, as though thinking out loud, shaking her head. “Tell them they wouldn’t love them anymore.”

“I don’t know,” Holden said.

“I’ll bet you Jeffrey Dahmer’s mother still loved him. The guy that ate people?”

“Was his mother still alive when he did that?”

“Okay, I don’t know,” Alicia said. “It’s a for instance. Like the BTK killer, or Lee Harvey Oswald, or even Hannibal Lecter. If their mothers were alive, I’ll bet they still loved them, even though they did bad things.”

“Lecter’s not a real person.”

Alicia rolled her eyes. “You’re missing my point.”

“But they were the ones that did the bad things. They killed and ate people but at least they weren’t ratting out their mothers. She said if I ever told, the family would get torn apart. She’d go to jail, my dad would go to jail, they’d split me and Reece up and put us in different foster homes or something like that.”

Alicia shrugged. “And she put all that on you. Like you were the one responsible for keeping the family together when the real person at fault was her for killing somebody. You don’t see that? How she manipulated you? Dumped her guilt onto you? Jesus.”

She sprung for another round of coffees, figuring they’d get kicked out if they didn’t keep buying something. But she got herself a decaf. Didn’t want to be up half the night.

“You need to be free,” she said. “Liberated.”

“How would I do that?”

She shrugged. Thought, save that one for next time they got together.

That turned out to be a movie. Some big noisy thing where massive robots were fighting monstrous sea creatures. Totally dumb, but fun. When they came out, Holden said, “I liked the part where the robot punched the monster,” and Alicia couldn’t stop laughing because there’d only been two straight hours of that.

She said, “Take me to your place and fuck my brains out.”

Holden nodded. “I can do that.”

The closer she drew him to her, she figured, the better chance she had of getting him to do what she wanted. And again, she did kind of like him. But if he hadn’t had the potential to be her instrument, would she have stayed with him?

Not a chance, Charlie.

When she saw his place, her resolve hardened. She wanted Holden to kill his mother not just for her. He needed to do it for himself. How could his family let him live here? Okay, sure, they’d dropped a bundle on his treatment, but couldn’t they spend a few extra bucks and maybe send in a cleaning lady once a week?

Fuck it, she’d do it herself. Manipulating Holden—God, was she no better than his mother?—meant putting in the time here, and she couldn’t live in this mess. When she wasn’t on the stuff, she was something of a neat freak. Holden, on the other hand, was oblivious to the mess around him, straight or high.

She put in an afternoon once, when he was doing his drywalling gig, tackling the mess in the kitchen. Took care of the dirty dishes in the sink, scrubbed the countertops, then went into the fridge, a black hole of expiration dates. She still had some energy left, so she started on his bedroom, hanging up clothes that didn’t need to be laundered, vacuuming, rearranging the top shelf of his closet so stuff wouldn’t fall out on somebody’s head.

Moved a shoebox that felt too heavy to just have shoes in it. Brought the box down, put it on the bed, took off the lid.

“What the,” she said.

A gun.

Worried that it might be loaded, that she might discharge it by accident, she made no attempt to pick it up. But she wasn’t going to put it back either. When Holden returned, she brought him into the bedroom and pointed.