Chapter 4: In the Other Cabinet

Eventually, the police have made it through all the questions they have for me. “Can you get somewhere to stay tonight?” is the last one they ask. “Your apartment is going to be a crime scene for a while now.”

“Sure. I would want to grab a few things, though. I might need to grab a few things, though, to make it to morning.”

“We can let you go up there after a minute,” Barnes says.

“Good.”

While I’m waiting, the paramedics come back down. The pair of them are carrying a stretcher, on which waits an unseen body with a shroud over it. Seeing it, I know what happened. I know my mom’s status. I shouldn’t approach them. I certainly shouldn’t do anything so pathetic as ask if she might be alive. I have to, though. I can’t just not ask. I approach them. “Any hope?” I ask.

“She’s dead, sir,” the paramedic says.

“Thank you.” It’s a strange thing to say, but I am thankful to them. It was so polite of them to entertain my denial, to waste their time walking up and down the stairs to retrieve what would obviously be nothing more than a body.

As they walk away, I cry.

My mom is dead. She’s going to be dead for the rest of my life. Unless this turns out to be a nightmare. It’s still not too late for that. Maybe it’ll never be. I shouldn’t let myself entertain that, though. It’s pathetic. Adults like me should be above clinging to false hope like that.

Then again, grown boys also aren’t supposed to want their mothers like I do right now. I want her more than anything else in the world. I want to talk to her, to see her, to hug her, even if it’d have to be for the last time, I want just one chance to say goodbye.

It was a normal Friday night. I was just down getting candy for her. Everyone loses their parents eventually, but it’s supposed to happen when they’re old. It’s supposed to be a medical thing that you see coming months away. It’s not supposed to just happen one day, two minutes after you let them out of your sight.

That’s for normal people, though. Me and her weren’t normal, not really. We were hunted. Haunted by our connection to Springwater. The town I came from, the town she escaped. For a while. She escaped it for a while, until it came for her.

“Can I see her?” I ask the paramedic, just before they’re able to put the body in the ambulance. They stop. They set the stretcher down.

“It might be better for you to wait.”

“No,” I say. “I need to see.” I don’t know why I need to see. If someone else were in this situation, I think I’d tell them they were a moron for wanting to see. I need to, though. I approach the stretcher. They try to warn me one more time, but when I insist, they pull the tarp back.

I’d already seen her face upstairs, but somehow, I’d expected it to be cleaner now that someone had retrieved it. It’s not cleaner. It looks exactly the same, except there are little red lines where the blood dripped down her face while I was running away like a coward.

I rest my hand on her chest, where it’s still covered by the tarp. As I do it, I worry the paramedics will stop me, but they don’t. I try to say goodbye. I try to choke the word out. I need to say it. I’ll have to say it eventually. She’s gone. I’m never going to see her again. Never hug her again. Never go out drinking with her again. We’ll never watch another show together. I’ll never hear her voice again, and she’ll never hear mine. There’s a word you say when you’re never going to see somebody again. Goodbye.

I don’t say it. I want to. I truly want to, but it just won’t come. I pull my hand back. She doesn’t even look peaceful. Her eyes are closed, but her mouth is half-open, as if in the shocked distress she must have felt before she died.

When I’m done, the paramedics pull the tarp back over her.

We’ve hugged each other every night since I was little. Long after most kids would have grown out of something like that, we kept it up. The ritual meant something to us. It reminded us that whatever else we didn’t have, and we didn’t have a great deal, we had each other. That last hug, the one I owed her tonight, I’m never going to give it to her.

I step away from the ambulance. I only make it to the stairs in front of the building before I have to sit down. I curl up, and, in full view of the police and the crowd of my neighbors, I let myself cry.

I finish crying, eventually. When I’m ready, they let me back into my apartment to retrieve a few things. The TV is still on when I get there. The forensic people have arrived, and one of them is extracting the bullet from the wall. There’s something about the bloodstain that’s not quite real now that there’s no body paired with it.

There are cops all around the place. One of them has been specifically tasked with watching me, but even if they hadn’t, there’d be no way I could do anything without them seeing. That’s okay. There’s nothing bad I want to do.

I go into the bedroom. Mom’s bed is made for tonight. That’s not what I’m here for. I have to ignore it. I get together a bag with everything I’ll need to stay the night somewhere else. Toothbrush, toothpaste, and some clothes. I already had my wallet with me. Once I have everything I need, I walk back out to the main room.

As I do, something dawns on me. Something horrible. Something so horrible that it can’t possibly be true. I have to check, though. I go over to the kitchenette and ask if I could grab a snack out of one of the cabinets. The nearest officer says it’s okay. I open the cabinet and move aside the blender.

The new bag of candy is there. Plump and bright and sweet and satisfying. Fully capable of satisfying my mom’s sweet tooth without a trip downstairs.

I said I was going to get a snack, and I don’t want to make these cops suspect me of anything, so I put the candy in my bag. It barely fits, but I stuff it in. Now that I have everything, I leave for the nearest hotel that I’ll be able to check into at this time of night.

***

“What do you mean it’s not accepting my card?” I ask the woman at the front desk. Honestly, it’s a stupid question. She means it’s not accepting my card. What else would that mean?

“I’m sorry, sir. It says it’s expired.”

“No it’s not!” I say, confidently, swiping my card back to look at its expiration date. “I bought drinks with this card earlier tonight. I used it on a vending machine less than an hour ago. It wasn’t expired then.”

I’m correct. It wasn’t expired, then, because that was around eleven on the thirty-first.

It’s now twelve-thirty on the first, and yes, my card is, in fact, expired.

F*ck. This is my debit card, which is the only means I have of accessing my checking account. My mom was the only one who had a checkbook. She managed most of our finances. I carried my weight in earning money, but she usually handled spending it.

I call the police again. Not 911 this time. Just the number Sergeant Barnes gave me in case I needed to get into touch with him. I ask him when I’ll be able to come back to my apartment.

“It’ll probably be a few days,” he replies.

“A few days?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is there any way to speed that up?”

“No. We’re looking over the whole place very carefully. We have to study every speck, every stray hair, anything that could lead us to this third person you told us about.” I can tell by the tone of his voice that he still doesn’t quite believe me about that. “It’ll probably be a few days before we can let you back in. You said you would be able to get a hotel room.”

“It turns out I’m having trouble with that.”

“Well, good luck with that,” Barnes says. I half expect him to hang up right after saying it, but he does at least have the decency not to do that. “I don’t know what else to tell you. Processing a crime scene takes a while.”

“Fine. I don’t suppose you could let me into my mom’s purse?” She had a check book I could use.

“I don’t think so,” he says. “It seems to have been opened. We’re going to be scanning and testing it for a while. You’ll probably have the apartment itself back sooner than you’ll be able to get anything in her purse.”

“Of course. I guess there’s no point in asking you to stretch or massage any rule?”

“Doing things by the book gives us the best chance of finding your mother’s killer.”

“I’m sure it does.” I hang up.