“For what, Otto?” I breathe, still thinking about the washcloth and the necklace, as again the lights in the home flicker and I hold my breath, waiting for them to go out. My eyes move to a lamp, wishing I had something to protect myself with. The lamp has a beautiful glazed ceramic base, sturdy, solid enough to do damage but not so heavy that I can’t pick it up. But it’s six feet away now, out of reach, and I don’t know that I’d have it in me anyway, to clutch the lamp by the neck and bash the heavy end into my own son’s head. Even in self-defense. I don’t know that I could.
Otto’s Adam’s apple bobs in his throat. “You know,” he says, fighting back the urge to cry.
I shake my head and say, “I don’t know,” though I realize in the next moment that I do. He’ll never forgive me for not standing up for him that day in the principal’s office. For not complying with his lie.
“For lying,” he hollers, composure waning, “about the knife.”
“I never lied,” I tell him. What I want to say is that he’s the one who lied, but it doesn’t seem a smart time to lay blame. Instead, “If only you’d have come to me. I could have helped you, Otto. We could have talked it through. We could have come up with a solution.”
“I did,” he interjects, voice quivering. “I did come to you. You’re the only one I told,” and I try not to imagine Otto opening up to me about what was happening at school and me giving him the brush-off. I struggle to remember it, as I have every day and night since it happened. What was I doing when Otto told me about the bullying? What was I so busy doing that I couldn’t pay attention when he confessed to me that kids at school called him heinous names; that they shoved him into lockers, plunged his head into dirty toilet bowls?
“Otto,” I say under my breath, full of shame for not being there when Otto needed me most. “If I wasn’t listening. If I wasn’t paying attention. I’m so sorry,” I tell him, and I start to tell him how I was completely inundated with work in those days, tired and overwhelmed. But that’s little consolation to a fourteen-year-old boy who needed his mother. I don’t make excuses for my behavior. It wouldn’t feel right.
Before I can say more, Otto is speaking, and for the first time there are details I’ve never heard before. How we were outside when he told me about the bullying. How it was late at night. How Otto couldn’t sleep. He came looking for me. He tells me he found me outside on our building’s fire escape, just outside the kitchen window, dressed in all black, smoking a cigarette.
The details, they’re ludicrous.
“I don’t smoke, Otto,” I tell him. “You know that. And heights.” I shake my head, shuddering. I don’t need to say more; he knows what I mean. I’m acrophobic. I’ve always been.
We lived on the sixth floor of our condo in Chicago, the top floor of a Printers Row midrise. I never took the elevator, only the stairs. I never stepped foot on the balcony where Will spent his mornings sipping coffee and enjoying the sweeping city views.Come with me,Will used to say, smiling mischievously while tugging on my hand.I’ll keep you safe. Don’t I always keep you safe?he asked. But I never went with him.
“But you were,” Otto claims, and I ask, “How did you know I was there if it was the middle of the night? How did you see me?”
“The flame. From the cigarette lighter.”
But I don’t own a cigarette lighter. Because I don’t smoke. But I go quiet anyway. I let him go on.
Otto says that he climbed out the window and sat beside me. It’d taken him weeks to work up the courage to come and tell me. Otto says I went ballistic when he told me what the kids were doing to him at school. That I was totally worked up.
“We plotted revenge. We made a list of the best ways.”
“The best ways for what?” I ask.
He says it unambiguously, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “The best way to kill them,” he says.
“Who?”
“The kids at school,” he tells me. Because even the kids that didn’t mock him still laughed. And so, he and I decided that night that they all needed to go. I blanch. I humor him only because I think that this is cathartic somehow for Otto.
“And how were we going to do that?” I ask, not certain I want to know the ways he and I supposedly came up with to kill his classmates. Because they’re Otto’s ideas, every last one of them. And I want to believe that somewhere inside of him is still my son.
He shrugs his shoulders and says, “I dunno. A whole bunch of ways. We talked about starting the school on fire. Using lighter fluid or gasoline. You said I could poison the cafeteria food. We talked about that for a while. For a while that seemed like the way to go. Take out a whole bunch of them at once.”
“How did we plan to do that?” I ask as he grows lax and his hand loses its grip on my wrist. I try to pull free, but just like that, he reengages, clinging tighter to me.
His answer is so sure. “Botox,” he says with another shrug. “You said you could get it.”
Botox. Botulinum toxin. Which we stocked at the hospital because it treats migraines, symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, and a host of other conditions. But it can be fatal, too. It’s one of the deadliest substances in the world.
“Or stabbing them all,” he says, telling me how we’d decided that was the best way because he didn’t have to wait for poison, and a knife was easier to hide in his backpack than bottles of lighter fluid. He could do it right away. The very next day.
“We went inside,” Otto reminds me. “Remember, Mom? We climbed back in the window and went to look over all the knives, to see which would be best. You decided,” he tells me, explaining how I chose the chef knife because of its size.
According to Otto, I then took out Will’s whetstone and sharpened the knife. I said something canny about how a sharp knife is safer than a dull one, before smiling at him. Then I slipped it in his backpack in the soft laptop sleeve, behind all of his other belongings. As I zipped the backpack closed, I winked at him.
You don’t have to worry about getting an organ, Otto says that I said.Any old artery will do.
My stomach roils at the thought of it. My free hand rises to my mouth as bile inches up my esophagus. I want to scream,No!That he’s wrong. That I never said such a thing. That he’s making this all up.
