I hated you for trying to be normal. For leaving me there with her, alone, within the walls of Sam’s home.

* * *

? ? ?

Violet never came up. I never went down.

When I woke up the next day and saw that you had taken the painting from his nursery and leaned it against the wall near the end of our bed, I became weightless for a moment. The pain stopped thumping in my bones. I had stared at that mother holding her child for nearly a year, while I rocked and fed and burped and whispered lullabies in his tiny ear. I realized when I saw the painting that I would live, and I don’t know why. I knew I would crawl out of this place that crushed every ounce of me. And I hated you for it. I didn’t ever want to feel normal again.

I walked to Violet’s room in my underwear, my legs as heavy as they’d ever been. I opened her door and there she was, stirring under her sheets. Her eyes fluttered and then squinted at the light from the hallway.

“Get up.”

I poured her cereal and looked around the kitchen. Someone had taken away his high chair, his bottles, his blue silicone spoon, the crackers he liked to suck on. Violet’s feet scampered on the floor above into our bathroom, where you were shaving.

* * *

? ? ?

I don’t know why you put the painting there. We never spoke of it. It’s in our bedroom now, here with me, in this empty house. I barely notice its details anymore, like the finish on the faucets or the backward way the laundry door opens. But every once in a while, that woman, that mother, looks at me. The sun hits her in the morning and brightens the colors on her dress for hours.

46

Some days when I couldn’t be at home any longer, I would ride the subway from one end of the line to the other. I liked the darkness outside the subway car windows, and I liked that nobody spoke to one another. The motion of the train was soothing.

I saw a poster stapled to a board on the platform and took a picture of it with my phone.

Two days later, the address took me to the basement of a church. The room was cold and I didn’t take my jacket off, although everyone else’s coats were stuffed on wire hangers on the rolling rack in the corner. I needed an extra layer between me and the damp chill that came through the white cement walls. An extra layer between me and them. The mothers. There were eleven of them. There were gingersnap cookies and a pot of coffee, and creamers placed in a basket that was lined with a Christmas napkin even though it was April. There were orange plastic chairs, the kind they used to set up for assemblies in my high school auditorium. Something profane was carved into the seat where I sat. Here we were, assembled, me and the mothers.

The group leader, an impossibly skinny woman with gold bangles up her arms, asked us to introduce ourselves. Gina was fifty and a single mother of three, and her oldest son had murdered someone in a nightclub two months ago. With a gun. He was awaiting trial, but he would plead guilty. She cried as she spoke and her skin was so dry that the tears made dark, defined rivers on her face. Lisa, who sat beside her, had patted the woman’s hand even though they did not know each other. Lisa was a veteran of the group. Her daughter was serving a fifteen-year prison sentence for the attempted murder of her girlfriend and was barely two years into her time. Lisa had been a stay-at-home mother from the time her daughter was born. Her voice was soft, and she paused before the last word in each of her sentences. She had plum-colored hammocks under her eyes.

I was next. The fluorescent lights flickered just before I spoke and I wondered if I might be saved by a power outage. I told them my name was Maureen and that I had a daughter who was in jail for theft. Theft was the least-bad thing I could think of. Theft seemed like just one bad mistake, like everyone had done it but not everyone had been caught. Like I could still be the mother of a person who was good, and lovable.

I don’t remember all the details now of what everyone else said, but I remember there was a rape, and a few possession charges, and someone’s son had killed his wife with a snow shovel. She said it was the Sterling Hock murder, like we all should have read about it in the newspaper, but I had never heard about it before. The group leader reminded us that we shouldn’t use last names or details. We were to be anonymous.

I searched each of their faces for something familiar to me.

“I feel like I’m the one who committed the crime,” one of the mothers said. “The guards treat me that way at the facility. The lawyers treat me that way. Everyone looks at me like I’m the one who did something wrong. But I didn’t.” She paused. “We didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Didn’t we?” One mother spoke up after thinking for a moment. Some people shrugged and some people nodded and some sat perfectly still. The group leader looked as though she were silently counting to ten, a tactic she might have learned in her social work program, and then she reminded us there were cookies for the break.

“You gonna come back next week?” Lisa with the eye hammocks passed me a napkin for the coffee that dripped on my hand while I filled the small Styrofoam cup.

“I don’t know yet.” My forehead was beaded with sweat. I couldn’t be in the room anymore with these women. I’d wanted to see other mothers like me, mothers whose children had done something as evil as mine had, but the basement walls were beginning to feel like they were closing in on me. I felt in my purse for the prescription I still hadn’t filled. Instead I felt the softness of his diaper. I had always carried one in my purse.