By the Light of His Lantern

by Abe Moss

  “My son has not killed anyone. He’s not going to kill anyone.”

  “He nearly killed me!”

  The mother scoffed. “That’s a bit dramatic.”

  Her blood was on fire, and yet all her limbs were ice. In a flash she imagined herself sweeping across the room like a storm and viciously wrestling both the mother and her son to the ground in rage—how therapeutic it would be.

  “You’re arguing with the wrong person,” Catherine said.

  “You’re still denying it was you?”

  “No. What I mean is…” She paused. Her life wasn’t anyone else’s business. This woman and her son wouldn’t care. Yes, Catherine thought, perhaps her behavior with the woman’s son had been out of line. But it didn’t excuse them. And she wasn’t about to let them convince themselves otherwise. “What I mean, is there’s nothing you can say or accuse me of that’s going to change or distract from the fact that your son’s behavior is a danger to those around him, or the fact that you should focus more on talking to him than pointing fingers at me to deflect from your hurt ego. Your family—”

  “I’m not deflecting—”

  “Your family,” Catherine said again, more forcefully, “isn’t perfect, and you’re not a perfect mom. In fact you’re a lousy one. And your son isn’t going to grow up any better if you keep blaming everyone else.”

  “How dare you? Who are you to call me a lousy mom?”

  Catherine was silent. She looked the woman up and down, from the gold highlights in her dark hair, her meticulously smoothed, powdered face, eyelashes black and long and thick as paintbrush bristles, to her delicate ankles popping out from her denim capris, feet smashed in their undersized, lacy white sandals, toenails painted red.

  Who was Catherine to call her such a thing, indeed?

  She sighed. “Another lousy mom.”

  The woman wasn’t sure how to respond. Finally, she straightened, face turned up so that Catherine could see her nostrils from across the room.

  “You might be, yes. But I am not you.”

  “You’re right.” Catherine gathered her nearly empty food container from her desk, started cleaning up before the lunch break was over. “You’re lucky you’re not, believe me.”

  “Oh, I know.”

  “Yes, yes.” She paused and faced them both. “So are we done here?”

  “Far from it. I’d like to hear what the principal has to say about this.”

  “Good! I have to get my classroom ready for next period, so don’t wait around on me.”

  The woman sneered and, with her hand on her son’s shoulder, left Catherine’s classroom in a huff. Once they were out the door, Catherine stopped pretending to straighten things and collapsed into her chair.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  The mother had tried to arrange a meeting between all three of them, to better put Catherine in her place with the principal as her witness—Catherine couldn’t talk back with her sharp tongue in front of her boss, she’d probably assumed. But Mr. Dougherty knew better than that. He simply told her he’d handle things, that he’d talk with Mrs. Blake before the end of the day.

  He hastily swung by her classroom when school let out.

  “She wasn’t happy about it,” he said. “She wanted to be present for my disciplinary action, I could tell. You should be grateful I didn’t oblige her.”

  “I am, Craig. Trust me.”

  He sat on the edge of her desk where she sat—an aging man, though younger than herself. He might have been rail thin in his earlier years, nearly was still, only now his belly was beginning to round out above his belt.

  “She says you chased her son down in your car earlier this week and ‘verbally assaulted’ him in front of his friends. The ‘f’ word, she told me.” Mr. Dougherty recited all this very seriously, without a hint of sarcasm or playfulness. “Want to give me the less passionate story?”

  That sounds about right, she thought.

  “I was on my way home when her son nearly wiped me out in the middle of an intersection. Not a busy one, mind you, just a neighborhood near my own. I’ll admit, I was more upset than maybe I should have been…”

  “I understand you have more reason than the rest of us to be upset at that, Catherine. I understand that.”

  She took a deep breath, felt more relaxed.

  “It’s no excuse for how I handled things.” She paused. “I wasn’t feeling particularly professional to begin with.”

  He nodded. He thought.

  “What you did was somewhat serious, I won’t lie to you. You engaged her son inappropriately. She’s going to call me tomorrow, and I imagine I’ll need to tell her something.” He considered. “She struck me as someone with a lot of pride, who might press matters far beyond what’s reasonable in order to maintain it.”

  “She was a complete bitch,” Catherine said, staring absently at the papers spread on her desk.

  “Well…”

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “I’m going to tell her you’re going through some hard times right now.”

  “Oh, please don’t. You don’t need to make things up, especially not—”

  “Am I making things up?”

  Catherine met his gaze, saw his sincerity.

  “It was almost this time last year, wasn’t it?” he asked.

  Suddenly she became very anxious. She began sorting through the papers on her desk without order, shuffling them randomly.

  “I’m surprised you remember.”

  “Of course I remember.”

  She got the papers evenly arranged and stacked them neatly.

  “I’m going to tell her you’re taking all of next week off.”

  “What?” Catherine stiffened. “Am I?”

  “I think it would be best.”

  “No. I would rather be here with the students. Help keep my mind off things. Stay busy.”

  “It’s two months until Summer break. It’s been a long school year. Have you even taken a single sick day?”

  Catherine’s silence answered enough.

  “You should take next week off. Do something you enjoy. The kids know where they’re at, having a substitute for a week won’t hurt them so badly.”

  “Are you asking me or telling me?” she asked, feeling helpless but oddly hopeful. Perhaps a week off would be nice, she thought…

  “I think I’m telling you,” he answered.

  She finally succumbed.

  When he was gone, she quickly got her things together. On the way to her car, she noticed all the blooms on the trees, pink and yellow. There was a breeze, warm and fragrant, not yet that of summer. Perhaps, she thought, a week off would be nice. A chance to relax. Do some of the things she hadn’t for a while. Spend an entire day sipping wine and composing her own music again. Maybe take her daughter out to lunch. Tend to the yard and…

  …to the man in the basement…

  On her windshield, in white window marker, was a single word:

  PSYCHO.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  The optimism she’d gained at the notion of having a week to herself quickly diminished by the time she pulled into her driveway.

  After setting her things down in the kitchen, she hurried upstairs to her bedroom’s adjoined bathroom. As she relieved herself she started to sob. When she was finished, she took her sobbing to her bed. When her pillow was thoroughly spotted with tears, she returned downstairs with plans of fixing something for dinner and at the bottom of the stairs the sobs returned with a vengeance and she crawled onto the sofa beneath the front window, where the day’s light was gradually waning to a soft violet. She cried there until her head was empty of it, until she forgot what she was crying about. Then she lay quietly with a throw pillow clutched to her. She could see the sky through the window from there, changing and growing more beautiful by the minute. She set her eyes on it, dead and wet, thinking very little. Normally a good cry made her sleepy, but she didn’t feel tired at all. She l
ooked around the darkening room, at the piano and the pictures on top, at the flowery paintings on the walls, at the useless coffee table books next to her. One of them provided ideas for activities for when you’re feeling lazy. She’d thought it sounded funny, something other people might think was funny if they saw it in her home. She’d never even opened it up to read it herself. Neither had anyone else.

  She looked beyond the coffee table, over the second sofa there, to the basement door on the other side of the room. Finally, she sat up.

  The young man was as she’d left him. She sat down beside him.

  “I wish you could talk,” she said. The words felt awkward leaving her mouth, just her voice in the otherwise deathly silent, concrete room. “I wish you could tell me what you’re experiencing wherever it is you are. I’d ask you if you thought you deserved it.”

  He was sort of handsome. In a vague way. Parts of his face were rather weak. Delicate. He would never have a man’s face. No matter how old he was now, he was just a boy in her eyes, and likely to anyone else who saw him. Anyone looking at him for the first time might assume he was innocent in that way. Not her, though. She knew what he really was.

  “Are you sorry at all?” She waited, scrutinized him with increasing contempt. “I bet you’d say anything to come back. You’d tell me anything I wanted to hear.”

  She stayed with him nearly half an hour longer. When she was ready to go back upstairs, she turned him onto his other side and pulled the blanket snug around his still body.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  The television flashed its stories over her, BREAKING NEWS, though she barely absorbed anything she saw. Her mind drifted endlessly from one thing to the next, hardly settling long enough to form full thoughts. Sleep snaked its way closer, prowled in the bristly darkness at the sides of her bed. Her eyelids bobbed like a baby doll’s.

  Who are you to call me a lousy mom?

  When her mind, in a passing moment of clarity, realized how close to the brink she was, she reached across her lap for the remote. She brought it to her scrunched up face, searched the buttons she’d used a thousand times.

  Then the phone started ringing.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  She dressed in a drowsy flurry—felt cloth and denim to her pawing hands, threw each article blindly over her body until she was no longer naked. Then she slipped into her slippers, grabbed her purse and keys from the kitchen counter, pulled her car out into the quiet night, and dowsed the roads in a shower of headlights.

  She checked the clock repeatedly as she drove, couldn’t wrap her head around the time. It was nearly two in the morning. Had she really stayed up so late? She noticed her tank was almost empty as well. It would be best to fill up on the way home, she thought. Not have to worry about it the next day…

  “Damn it,” she said, as she realized she was driving the wrong way. To work. She stopped at a four-way, thought heavily. She flipped the car around and started off in the other direction.

  “What am I doing…” she mumbled. “I’m just tired, that’s all…”

  Fifteen minutes later she parked at the curb. She leaned across the seat, peered through the passenger window at the tiny white house with its tiny, weedy lawn, at the tiny red car parked in the driveway. The lights were on in one of the windows. Out of the porch shadows a figure emerged, huddled into themselves, head bent, quick little steps down the walkway toward the car. Catherine opened the passenger door and they climbed inside. The door shut and the car was silent.

  “Was there nothing you wanted to bring?”

  Lara shook her head. “I couldn’t. I’ve been waiting out here the whole time.”

  Catherine nodded understandingly.

  “I want to stop for gas before we go home. Is that okay?”

  “It’s fine.”

  She pulled the car around and they were off.

  “Did you need to stop for anything?” Catherine asked.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  Lara didn’t say anything at first. “Maybe tomorrow. I’m tired, and… kind of drunk.”

  She gave a short, self-deprecating laugh. Catherine wanted to touch her, to put a hand on her shoulder. She wanted to pull the car over and wrap her arms around her. But that wouldn’t be for Lara, she knew. She wanted that for herself.

  “Whatever you’re comfortable with.”

  They stopped for gas. Before getting out, Catherine asked her daughter if she was sure she didn’t want anything, to which Lara didn’t respond because she’d fallen asleep. Catherine filled up her tank, got back in the car, and drove quietly until they were finally home.

  The garage door shut behind them and she pulled the key from the ignition. In the car’s dome light which then came on, Catherine watched her daughter sleeping beside her. Her mouth hung open. Hair veiled her eyes.

  “Lara,” she whispered. “We’re home.”

  She nudged her daughter’s shoulder until she roused. Without another word, Catherine led her daughter from the car into the house, and then up the stairs to the guest bedroom down the hall from her own.

  “The sheets and everything are clean. There’s an unopened box of toothbrushes and a newish tube of toothpaste in the bathroom.” She paused, watched her daughter sit on the bed, hanging her head in a sleepless stupor. “You know where everything is.”

  Catherine shut her door. Let her be. She continued into her bedroom and got undressed and climbed back into bed. She pulled the pillow tight against her face, eyes open in the dark.

  In her chest, her heart was a stampede.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  There was noise downstairs the next morning, and when Catherine finally got out of bed to investigate, she passed the guest bedroom and saw the bed was still made just as it’d been the previous night. She went downstairs and into the kitchen.

  Lara stood at the open refrigerator observing its contents.

  “Your fridge is so empty,” she said, only hearing Catherine’s footsteps behind her. “All you eat is a single grapefruit every day?”

  “Oh, no. It’s time for me to go to the store. That’s all.”

  Lara shut the fridge door. She looked at her mother plainly.

  “Also… is there anything I should know about, health wise? I wasn’t snooping, I just noticed them when I came downstairs. But…” She left the kitchen briefly, then returned with a large, colorful plastic bag in her arms. “I saw these on the floor by the basement door. I know you’re not old enough to need these. Right?”

  What she held was an economy-size package of adult diapers, and though Catherine knew they weren’t for herself she couldn’t help blushing at the suggestion. She scrambled for an explanation.

  “Those aren’t for me,” she said. “Well, I mean… they are for me, but… I’m not using them for their intended purpose.”

  “Oh. What are you using them for?”

  She hesitated. “Nothing important. A do-it-yourself thing I wanted to try, but never got around to it. They’ve been sitting around for a while now.”

  “What, soaking them in a skincare cocktail and putting them on your face or something? Another one of your anti-aging experiments?”

  Catherine tried to laugh. “Something like that, yes.”

  Lara shrugged and tossed the package on the kitchen counter.

  Wanting to escape the subject entirely, Catherine quickly spoke up before Lara could ask anything else.

  “How about we go get breakfast somewhere? My treat.”

  Lara sighed a sigh of relief. “Please, I’m starving.”

  She looked at her mother, with what Catherine saw was her strongest effort to smile.

  “And a little hungover.”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  “What happened to your arm?”

  Catherine looked down at the same long cut Beth had pointed out before, now a scab.

  “Oh. I cut myself cooking.”

  Lara only grimaced. “Okay. Weird…”
/>
  “It’s fine.”

  Lara nodded, eyebrows raised. Skeptical.

  “So anyway,” Catherine started, “Tell me about what’s going on. Something about your roommate and your boyfriend, you said, over the phone last night?”

  “I came home and found them together. That’s all.”

  Catherine put her hand across the table, trying to be there for Lara, who seemed reluctant to even make eye contact.

  “I’m so sorry, honey.”

  “It’s fine.”

  Catherine shook her head. “No, it’s not. I’m sure you’re—”

  “Really.” Lara brought her food to her mouth on the end of her fork and stopped, considered. “We shouldn’t’ have been together anyway…”

  “You never truly know a person. I’m sure… what’s his name again?”

  “Rob.”

  “I’m sure Rob seemed like a great guy until… all of this.”

  “Yeah.” Lara nodded. “You really don’t ever truly know a person…”

  “And there’s nothing you could have done. They’re adults, they make their own decisions. Nothing you could have done.”

  Lara took another bite of her food. “Are you really not going to eat anything? Just coffee?”

  Catherine cupped her mug between her hands. The hot glass felt good.

  Grinning, she said “I have an entire grapefruit at home, remember?”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  They sat in the car together for a minute, eyeing the house.

  “Are you sure it’ll be okay?” Catherine asked.

  “It’ll be fine. She should be at work.” Lara unbuckled her seatbelt. “I’ll just grab a few things and then I’ll meet you back at home… now that I’m good to drive.”

  Catherine observed the little red car in the driveway and felt a pang of longing. It occurred to her she’d get to see a great deal more of her daughter now, however. At least for the time being.

  “You don’t need help packing or anything?”

  Lara shook her head. “No. It won’t be much.”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Catherine stopped at the store on her way home and rather hastily grabbed a trunkful of groceries to fill her fridge. Her daughter had a surprising appetite. When she returned home and put everything away, she tidied up wherever she could although there was hardly anything out of place. She checked on the man downstairs, took care of him as quickly as she could, and double checked the basement door to make sure it was locked when she was finished.