Lucy did not heave the blade into Will’s father again. Instead she lowered it to her side, let the handle clatter away, all the while staring at the man she had killed so quickly and efficiently.
They dragged the maroon-stained carpet toward the hole. Will guided the damp, bloody end as his mother lifted. The remnants of Jacob Pallasso slid into the grave beside his legs.
The body faced the wall. All the better, Will thought, but it was too high above the floor. Parts of him were still sticking out of the grave. When he saw his mother eyeing the axe again, Will scurried to the hole, forcing the petrified skin and muscles down, bending the body sideways. Even though rigor mortis had set in, he struggled, hearing cracks and crunches as he got the body to bend and twist and without further mutilation from the axe. Not that his father would have minded, not that he could feel anything at that point even if she’d chopped him into a hundred pieces.
He wasn’t there anymore. He was in Hell, for his terrible sins.
His mother spoke but Will couldn’t hear. He pulled a load of freshly dug dirt with both hands into the hole, worked it around and into the cracks and fissures made by the bent and twisted body. He must have been doing it right because Mom never stopped him. Sometimes he would get confused, perceptions skewed, seeing legs where they did not belong. He convinced himself that they weren’t legs any longer, just parts. It was funny and he almost laughed. But, before it came, the crying found freedom first. He pulled the dirt, stuffed it under the silky costume adorning his father’s arms and crotch, trying not to touch anything. Everything blurred through tears, snot dripping into his mouth. He licked it away and continued to pack the dirt, pressing his father’s corpse down into the ground under his house.
At some point Will had found himself sitting on the landing at the bottom of the steps, head back against the wall and staring up toward the kitchen, daylight so bright and elusive above him. He didn’t know how he got here. His mother’s voice, from somewhere close by, said over and over, Come back, wake up, oh, William, come back, I need you.
He whispered her name, and she laughed and cried simultaneously in a short, gasping burst of emotion.
He sat for a long time, hungry, his need to urinate slowly taking prominence but he dared not move, dared not leave his mother alone. It was stupid, but he thought that if he went upstairs, when he came back down they would both be gone, lost in the basement forever. The thought was so vivid that he simply let the piss come, soaking through his pajama pants, running down his thigh—in right about the same spot where his father’s leg was cut away, he thought, in that lonely moment of relief. It scurried in yellow rivulets down the last step to the concrete floor.
His mother would later fuss and muss over the whole deal, but the scolding was more reflexive. By then she was beyond exhausted, having covered the body with the bloodied rug, then the rest of the dirt that would fit. She pulled one of the bags of concrete out, hidden in the far end of the room where one of Jacob Pallasso’s ilk would never bother to question its existence—how long she’d had the bags downstairs, and whether she’d intended them for this eventual use would strike Will later in life, but they were questions he chose never to ask—mixing batches and slowly, carefully, patching up the square. At one point she stopped and ran upstairs, not yet noticing Will had wet himself, and called the school to tell them her son was sick and had to stay home. As she returned to the basement in heavy, jagged steps, she’d muttered that he could stay home from school.
That was one memory, crystal clear in all the years that followed. The sheer absurdity, the normalcy, of her words. He could stay home from school. It was monstrous in its displacement from everything happening that morning, in its implications that he would, in fact, be going to school tomorrow. That things could actually go back to normal.
The funny thing was, they did. The next day, Will Pallasso only shrugged to his friends when they asked how he was feeling, gave everyone the line his mother made him rehearse again and again until they both passed out with exhaustion on the living room couch at four o’clock in the afternoon.
“How come you stayed home, Will?”
A shrug, eyes downcast to conceal the lie. “My Dad ran away.”
“No way! For how long?”
“Forever, I think. Packed his stuff while I was sleeping and Mom was at the hospital. No note. Nothin’…”
Repeated, with slight variations as he warmed to the story (so much more palatable than the truth) throughout the day. Gratefully spoken to only one teacher who had apparently spread the tale to the rest of the adults, an occasional hand alighted on his shoulder as he bustled down the hall, always looking down at the cracked tile floor. Sad-faced, poor little Will. William to his mother. Billy to his father.
Poor little Will. Helped to kill his father.
He laughed in Mrs. Dejasu’s class when he thought this, not from humor but the sheer surprise of having thought it in the first place. Mrs. Dejasu, always ready for a scolding and writing your name in her “book, which I will gladly share with the principle,” though most of them suspected she never did, let it slide. This, more than anything else that day, gave him hope that things might be okay.
He got home to find his mother had not returned to work as she’d promised. Instead, she had finished her work in the basement, filling the cracks and missed spots her tired eyes had missed the day before. She’d bagged all of his father’s clothes and driven them an hour and a half away, into Boston, and left them in a Goodwill box behind a restaurant. The energy she’d had to get all these things done to cover up their crime, amazed him. Her exhaustion was painfully obvious when he saw her.
Even so, Will’s hope that their life might be fine, maybe better than it had been, grew a little more each day, like the bean plants in science class.
It wilted, then died, the afternoon she showed him the altar.