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“Where are we going?” Simon asked sharply.
“I think you know.”
“Turn the car around. I don’t want to go to Stowe, Mom. Jesus.”
I kept driving.
“Mom, I’m not kidding.” He raised his voice. He was angry, but around the edges of the anger I could hear panic. When I didn’t answer or slow or turn the car, he took out his phone. “I’ll call Dad. Okay? If you don’t turn around.”
I kept driving. He called Rory’s number, but the call went straight to voice mail.
“Fuuuck.” Simon kicked out hard in the footwell of the passenger seat. Then he turned his body away from me and acted like he didn’t care one way or the other. He stared out the window. We drove up to the house. I parked.
“Come on,” I said. I got out of the car, and I stood and waited for him. After a minute he joined me. There was yellow police tape fluttering at the door. We couldn’t go in, but maybe we didn’t need to. It was cold and I pushed my hands deep into my pockets. The forecast was for snow, and you could feel it on the wind. I took a deep breath and tried to put a lid on all my emotions. If I was going to get through to him, I would have to be very calm and steady. Even when he was a little boy, Simon had never liked being pushed into anything.
“You have to tell me what really happened that night with Nina. You can’t carry this around with you for the rest of your life. It will be like a poison inside you. You need to tell someone, and I’m that person. Whatever you tell me today will stay here. We will never, ever speak about it again. But at least, after today, you’ll know that I know, and that I love you, and that will make things just a little bit easier.”
He turned his back and walked away from me. He went to the water, right to the edge of the jetty. I followed him.
“Simon?”
He didn’t react. Didn’t respond to me at all, and I knew. It was like a doom settling over me, stripping away everything that made me who I was. I was nothing at all, except the mother of a boy who had killed a girl. I turned the idea over in my mind. What did it mean? Had I made him the way he was? Had I formed him with not enough love, or too much? An image of Nina’s face, laughing, inserted itself into my mind against my will. I shook my head to try to clear it. I pressed my hands to the sides of my face. Simon turned to me. I didn’t see him coming and then he was there, right in front of me.
“It was an accident,” Simon said, so quietly that I could barely hear him. So quietly that if I wanted to, I could pretend I hadn’t. He put his arms around me and pulled me closer. He hugged me so gently. I rested my head on his shoulder and I cried. We stayed that way for a long time, until snow started to fall silently around us and he started to shiver. We could have gone home, but I don’t think either of us was ready to get in the car.
“You don’t have to tell me any more if you don’t want to,” I said. “But if you do, I’m willing to listen.”
Whatever had happened, it had been an accident. Of course it had been an accident. Nothing else made sense. He had loved her so much, and he was not a murderer. I wasn’t blind to Simon’s faults. I knew he could be selfish. That he could be entitled. Maybe that was my fault. We’d raised him with so much, Rory and I, and Simon had watched me build my life around Rory’s needs and wants. Maybe Simon had never seen the real me inside the pretend me. So maybe we’d sent him the wrong messages about what a relationship should be, but we had not made a killer. I’d watched my child grow up. I’d seen him gently carry a stray moth or a spider outside, before Rory or I could swat it with the back of a magazine. He’d been given a character award in the sixth grade, for God’s sake, for defending some kid against a bully.
Simon was hesitating.
“If you’re worried that I’ll tell your father, I have no intention of telling him anything.” Though from the look on Rory’s face in the lawyer’s office, he already suspected the truth.
“He knows,” Simon said.
I didn’t think I’d heard Simon properly. The words didn’t make sense. Except that they did. I’d seen it in Rory’s eyes, in the lawyer’s office.
“Your dad already knows. You’ve talked about it?”
Simon nodded. His eyes were on my face, worried. I tried to shake off my feelings of betrayal.
“Okay.” I took a breath. “I know everything’s scary right now, but your dad will take care of things. Everything’s going to be okay.”
Simon’s face tightened. “I don’t think so.” He took his phone out of his pocket and gestured with it. “The police want my search history. Arnie says they’ll get it eventually, whether I agree to hand over my phone or not.”
“What’s wrong with your search history?”
“I was really stupid. I guess... I guess I was in shock. When Nina died, I looked some stuff up. About how to clean up blood.” He looked at me anxiously. “She hit her head, Mom, on the fireplace. It was an accident. Nina fell, but I freaked out.”
“Okay.”
“And I looked up how to clean up blood so that police couldn’t find it. I used an incognito search, you know? Because I thought that would be safe, which is so fucking stupid. Arnie says police can easily get around that. All incognito does is block cookies. I thought it made your searches anonymous.” He looked miserable. “I’m so scared, Mom. About what’s going to happen to me.”
We both stared down at the phone in his hand. Such a little thing, to condemn him. I reached out and took it from him, and then I turned and threw it, as hard and far as I could, into the lake.
Simon looked at me with his mouth open. I tried to smile.
“They can swim for it, if they want.”
