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“How so?” he asks.
“He was a colicky baby, always crying. I mean, nothing could soothe him.Nothing. I was home alone a lot, with Ben at work, and I remember there were times, during those first nights—”
I stop myself, deciding that it may not be in my best interest to betoohonest. Not yet, at least. To describe the unusual way Mason came into this world or the panic of those early morning hours in too much detail. The desperation that started to creep into my chest when I found us alone in the dark, his writhing little body in my arms, limbs like twigs that could so easily snap. I can still remember those muddy, sleep-deprived musings; the kind that didn’t even feel real. The kind that no mother would ever admit to herself, let alone utter out loud. Mason would shriek in the night and they would flare up so suddenly, soviolently: dark little fantasies of all the things I could do to finally make him stop. And I would let them in, if only for a second. I would let myself entertain them for a beat too long—but then, in the mornings, I would simply ignore them again, pretend they were never even there to begin with. I would feel my cheeks burn hot with shame as I lifted him out of his crib and smothered him in kisses, casting them back into the recesses of my mind where the other banished feelings lived: naughty and nocturnal, curled up in that dank cave of my subconscious, skulking around until the sun dipped below the horizon again and it was safe for them to crawl back out.
“It’s just hard,” I continue. “Being a mother. It’s not what you expect it to be.”
Nobody ever warns you about the spite that comes in the night when you’re operating on two hours of sleep. Nobody ever tells you about how resentful you begin to feel toward a person you created. A person who relies on you for everything.
A person who never asked for any of this.
Waylon shifts in his chair, uncomfortable, before taking a deep sip of wine and returning his attention to his plate. I’m sure he was imagining something different: one of those rosy memories mothers relay with stars in their eyes, making everyone else feel botched. I don’t really know what drove me to say it—the intimacy of this dinner, maybe, of sharing a meal with someone in my own home for the first time in months. Or maybe it’s because Waylon has been the first person in so long to really listen to me, tobelieveme, and we’ve been tiptoeing toward this type of raw honesty ever since that day on the plane when he placed his card on my knee.
Whatever it is, it feels good, the admission, even though I know it’s not what people want to hear. It feels honest.
Finally, something honest.
The fact is, I’ve never been able to be honest. Not to Ben, my parents, the other mothers at day care—especiallythe other mothers. Even before Mason was taken, before I met Ben, I always had secrets, swallowing them down every time the urge to repent came gargling up my throat like bile. I learned fairly quickly that when people asked how I was doing, how I washolding up,they didn’t actually want an answer—not a real one, anyway—so I simply ignored that little needle prick that stuck in my jaw, the threat of impending tears, and plastered on a smile, giving them the answer I knew they expected: that everything was good, everything was fine.
In fact, no. Everything wasperfect.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Waylon and I are still in the dining room hours later, the table pushed to one side so we can sit on the floor and stare at the wall. Mason’s case file is between us, along with the two bottles of wine—both of them empty. We’ve since moved on to liquor: a whiskey on the rocks for him, and for me, a vodka soda, a single slice of lime bobbing on top.
“Did you ever leave a spare key outside?” he asks. It’s late, almost one in the morning, and there’s a little slur in his speech, barely there, like his tongue is numb. His eyelids are heavy, and although I’m sure the alcohol isn’t helping, mostly, I think he’s tired. He’s ready for sleep. “One that someone else might have known about?”
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “Ben was always opposed to that. Ever since I found ours missing from under the Welcome mat.”
Waylon raises his eyebrows, but I shake my head.
“That was years ago,” I say. “Mason was, like, six months old.”
Waylon looks back down, nodding, and I can still remember its grimy outline making my stomach squeeze. Ben had assured me that we had probably just misplaced it—maybe it fell out of my pocket on one of my walks with Roscoe or slipped through the wooden slatsof our porch—but still. It spooked us: the thought of somebody else being able to lift up that flimsy piece of fabric and let themselves into our lives so easily, almost as if we had invited them in ourselves. It made me realize that we were too trusting; that, too often, we just assume nobody is out to hurt us. That nobody is watching when we walk around our houses at night, blinds open, the lights from inside illuminating our every move. That when we step outside and lock our doors, stash the key beneath a flower pot or wedged behind a rock, they’re not going to walk up behind us and dig it back out.
That the violence isn’t always looking for a way in—always poking and prodding at our lives, searching for a soft spot to sink in its teeth.
“What about the baby monitor?” he asks next, and I shoot him a look.
“The batteries were dead. Remember, I told you—”
“Sorry, yeah,” he says, rubbing his eyes. “What I mean is, did the monitor keep any earlier recordings? Like, did they save? Like a security system?”
“Yeah, they did,” I say. “It was connected to WiFi, so the video synced to our cell phones and laptop. You control it all from an app.”
“Do you still have that old footage?”
“I should,” I say, speaking slowly. The police had asked for footage of that night, the night he was taken, but since the batteries were dead, I couldn’t help them. They never asked forearlierfootage, though, and I never really thought to look. It didn’t seem important, looking inside the house. I had spent all my time looking outside of it. “Why?”
“Just in case there’s something on there to see,” he says. “In the days leading up to his kidnapping. You never know.”
I nod, push myself up from the floor, and walk over to the table, grabbing my laptop. I bring it back over to Waylon, who’s taking another sip of his whiskey, his eyes inspecting something at the bottom of his glass. I open the laptop, type in my password, and findthe folder housing the old recordings, buried deep in my hard drive. There are hundreds of files in there, organized by date, each one storing a night of Mason’s life.
“I guess I’ll start about a week earlier?” I ask, looking at him. He shrugs, nods, so I double-click on the file labeled “Thurs_Feb_24_2022” and hold my breath as a video loads.
It starts in the morning, six a.m., with Mason sleeping. My breath catches in my throat as I watch from the corner of his nursery, where the camera is mounted, his little body lying still on the mattress.
“He’s cute,” Waylon says, and I look over my shoulder at him watching the screen. He smiles at me. “Big head of hair.”
