“How did it go here today?” I couldn’t help asking.
“Well, okay,” said Petra. “It’s clear that he’s getting along much better since he’s had a bit more attention from you.”
I pasted a smile on my face. If she thought I’d let her provoke me again, she had another thing coming. “Well, then, see you tomorrow.”
I helped Aaron into his jacket and walked him to the car. It was cold out. We’d had a few weeks of warm weather, but there’d been a cold snap and everybody was waiting for summer to show itself again.
“I’m hungry, Mommy.”
“We’re going to eat in the restaurant, sweetie.” I hadn’t had time to do the shopping for a change. I often made a foray to the supermarket at lunchtime but hadn’t had the time.
“Don’t wanna.”
“Pizza. You like pizza, don’t you? We’ll have a yummy slice of pizza, and that nice man always gives you a lollipop at the end, remember?”
I buckled him into his car seat and tried to make him look me in the eye. He was gazing vaguely in my direction, but that was it.
I drove to the pizzeria around the corner from my mother’s house. The food wasn’t great, but they had a liberal children’s policy, meaning that all kids under the age of fifteen were lavished with lollipops.
We went into the pizzeria. Our coats were taken from us and we were shown to a table in the back, by the window.
“I wanna go home,” Aaron whined.
I sighed, annoyed. “I’m sorry, but we’re here now. Tomorrow I’ll cook at home. But I didn’t have time for shopping. And anyway, you love pizza, don’t you?”
The waiter came to our table. I ordered a glass of white wine and a lemonade.
“I wanna go home,” he persisted.
“Tell you what. I’ll ask if we can have it wrapped up for takeout. But first we have to have a little patience.” That seemed to do the trick; as long as I could keep him occupied for the next ten minutes, disaster averted.
“Tell me. What did you do today in nursery school? Did you draw me another beautiful picture?”
Aaron slipped off his chair.
“What are you doing?”
“Going home.” Aaron started plodding toward the door.
I got up and set him back on his chair. “Sit down. We’ll go home soon. As soon as we have our food.”
He started wailing. Of course.
“Shhh,” I said, not very quietly. It was early, fortunately; the restaurant still pretty empty. But the few patrons who were there started shooting me annoyed looks.
The waiter came back with our drinks.
“There’s your lemonade,” he said. “Drink up, ragazzo.”
“I don’t want,” Aaron screamed. “Go way!”
“I’m sorry,” I said to the waiter. “He’s not having a very good day.”
“Would he like a lollipop?”
“He doesn’t deserve one. Just give me the check, then we can leave before this gets out of hand.”
“I wanna lollipop! I wanna go home!”
“Sit down,” I hissed. To no effect. Aaron, flailing his arms around, spilled the glass of lemonade in front of him.
“Not to worry,” said the waiter, hurrying off to get a towel.
“Look what you did!” I grabbed Aaron by the arm. “And now you’re going to behave yourself.”
I caught an elderly couple sitting a couple of tables away, staring at me. “In our day we handled things differently,” the woman said, loud enough for me to hear.
“Bitch,” I muttered.
Aaron wouldn’t stop howling, not even when the waiter pushed a lollipop into his hand, not even after the table was wiped clean and a fresh glass of lemonade was set in front of him.
“We really have to go,” I said to the waiter. “Do you have the check for me?”
“On the house,” he said. “It’s not your fault.”
I felt myself on the verge of tears.
He put his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry. We’ve seen everything in here.”
I then had to carry a thrashing, kicking, and screaming child out of the restaurant. I tried to hold my head high, to preserve some small shred of dignity. But it was thoroughly humiliating. Another public disgrace, starring me as Incompetent Mother.
Wrestling Aaron into his car seat was another struggle. “What’s your damn problem?” I had lost all self-control. I was yelling hysterically. “Why can’t you just be normal?”
I was this close to slapping him in the face. Or just tossing him out of the car and gunning it. Instead, I slammed my fist into the backrest just inches from Aaron’s head.
He immediately piped down, staring at me wide-eyed. I took a deep breath and clicked his seat belt into place.
“But I don’t know how, Mommy,” he said when I had climbed into the driver’s seat and started the car.
I turned around. Seeing the drawn little face with those grave, big eyes, I almost burst into tears. Because I realized he was right.
That night Aaron and I watched the aquarium, completed the shark puzzle, and read the fish encyclopedia. Once Aaron was in bed, I thought back on our vacation in Tenerife, a year ago. We had played all day in the surf. We’d hunted for shells and built sand castles. We’d let ourselves get dragged into the sea by the tide. And then at the end of the day when Aaron had started screeching because he didn’t want to go back to our hotel room, I’d tickle him and say, “Hey, silly boy, I’m glad you had such a good time today that you’re mad we have to go. But know what? Tomorrow we’ll do it all over again.”
I had been truly happy then. I’d felt I was a good mother, even. I’d resolved we’d take another vacation soon.
I started to wonder what had been my mother’s state of mind when she drove Ray to the home for boys? Even though motherhood wasn’t particularly easy for me, I could never bear to send Aaron away. Because I loved him, of course I did, but if I were honest, the main reason was I could never live with the guilt. Wasn’t maternal love just another name for Stockholm syndrome?
Maybe I was jealous of the layer of Teflon coating my mother’s soul.
I went over the clippings about Ray again. There was very little background information on him, except that he was reclusive and withdrawn according to those who knew him. And he used to work in a bakery.
“Most of the time he’d walk right by you,” a neighbor had told the Telegraph in an interview. “Even if you said hello.”
Rosita was the only person he seemed to have had any contact with. I examined a photo of her. A Mediterranean-looking woman with a wide mouth and unruly curls. She wasn’t beautiful in the classical sense, but she was definitely sexy. And then there was her daughter. Where the mother was dark, the little girl was fair. Where Rosita laughed provocatively into the lens, Anna seemed rather introverted.
I reread the account of the murders. Ray had slaughtered his next-door neighbor and her daughter with some sharp implement and had then, it seemed, sat down and smoked a cigarette. Cigarette ash had been found on the bodies, and the burn mark of a butt stubbed out on the little girl’s arm. What did it all mean? The savage explosion of violence, followed by the cool enjoyment of a cigarette. I conjured up Ray’s face and tried to imagine him doing such a thing. The Ray who kept such a meticulous logbook and who closed his eyes when you mentioned his fish. Ray couldn’t have done it. It simply didn’t fit the picture.
I started fantasizing about unmasking the real culprit, and freeing Ray from the mental institution. Maybe one day we’d all be living happily ever after.