Forty-Six Years

    I looked down at my mother’s obituary in my hand. This will be my year, I told myself. It wasn’t like it was a surprise she had finally died. Months of her deteriorating, her grip loosening on my hand, her clarity waning. My visits turned from conversations about my childhood, spoken of like they were just yesterday, to sitting in a straight backed floral nursing home chair, watching her watch birds outside of her 2 foot by 2 foot portal into the world she had once inhabited. My mother couldn’t help the way she was, any more than she could help her incurable faith in people. There was not a person she didn’t think was redeemable, that didn’t have a speck of good in them, and that made me hold out for far too long. Forty-six years of waiting, planning, holding out even past the point when she would have any real notion of what I had done. It was a cruel twist of fate that the god she believed in so strongly, clasped around her neck in a tarnished piece of metal, was who she believed was responsible for her destiny. That a god could see a woman so pure, so driven by her belief, and give her this disease, this offspring, was clearly some sort of universal wrong. So I held out, for months and months, biding my time in my apartment, looking out of my 4 foot by 4 foot window at the same world my mother did, but my world looked so much different from hers. 

    Her world was a world of harmony, of balance. Mine was of a predator and prey.

    I had always known I would be the predator. From my first memories, standing over kids on the playground, laughing at their dirt smudged faces, the bruises whose origin would never be spoken. The fear. I was the predator, and for forty-six years, I waited. Past endless holidays, menial jobs, endless roach-infested apartments, I sat waiting. Somewhere along the way, my mother had instilled in me a sense of duty, of honor, and if that only applied to my great devotion to keeping her in the dark, so be it. I had other things in my life, sure. I made a mean coq au vin, and sometimes I watched hockey with people from work, or high school buddies that somehow had managed to stay in touch with me. There were a few women, dates which eventually gave way to discomfort, even flashes of panic as their basal instincts recognized mine. These women did not want to be prey, and some of them were so determined to not become prey that their eyes would flash and sparkle, their brows furrowing as they made hasty excuses for why they had to leave, even if their lobster had just made it to the table and I was wearing my best tie. The rage that lit up my ribcage for them was short-lived. If we were all animals, then it was understandable. No one wanted to be prey. We spend our entire lives trying not to be prey; eat or be eaten, stomp or be stomped. We are taught of survival of the fittest, and of not giving people power over us. We are taught to survive, and that is all these women want. That is all my mother wanted, up until the bitter end. 

    I wonder if she knew. A mother always knows, they say. The thought is upsetting to me, my mother staying alive as long as possible to delay the inevitable, so I fight it back, push it to the back of my brain. Did she know from the moment my father left her, five months pregnant, unemployed, there was something wrong with this one? A bad seed, a flawed meeting of sperm and egg. I thought I had hid it well, but it’s easy to not see your own flaws. Too much attention to detail in the boy scouts when they taught me how to tie a knot; the caress of my little boy fingers on the rope, the excitement as I looked at the grain of each one. The fishing wire I pressed against my skin until it bulged up on either side, distorting into something that was not mine, something that was not the color of flesh as I knew it. I hadn’t had time to perfect my craft yet, and surely if someone was trying to find a reason to incriminate me, they could find at least a reasonable suspicion. No man needed this much rope, this much length of cord, of fishing line, of twine, or metal cables. I didn’t know which was the correct one for me, which one would become my signature, something to be mused about by detectives for years to come. I had spent years thinking of it, and it took me years to settle on rope, so with luck and a few years of practice, I could narrow it down again, I knew it. It had started with just the clothesline in my mothers backyard. When I was young, it was a woven thread, smooth and tan and twisted together like the taffy my neighbor brought me, popping his head in our backyard to give me offerings, to stare at my mother in her calf-length dresses as she hung tea towels and threadbare clothing on the line. She moved like she was water; fluid, steady, constantly in motion, and she would turn her head periodically to look at me, sitting on the ground behind her with my homework and my hoard of candy, lifting her hair off her neck in the Baton Rouge sun, smiling at me before reaching into her bag of clothespins again. The rope became more and more frayed over the years, and then one day a tree branch landed on the already disintegrating cords and split them. The next morning we had gone outside, and she did not give the tope a thought, quickly moving in her house shoes to pick up the branches and toss them into the brush pile by the back door, while I stood, end of the rope in my hand, my fingertips worrying the rough edge. She came home a few days later with a new rope, tying it up and tugging it so hard I felt sure it would never come undone. Multifilament polypropylene. The man at the store had told her  it was strong, it wouldn’t rot like the last one had, and mildew wouldn’t get deep into the strands. I ran my hands along it as she hung the first loads up. Thick cord, tiny threads woven into an intricate pattern, but not into the twists I had associated with the summer sun, taffy sticks, fresh laundry. The threads didn’t catch on the pads of my fingers, and it was a bright color that didn’t make sense in the scene I had set. When it fell to the ground as well, I didn’t pretend to be upset by it, and she went to the store yet again. This time she came back with a plastic line, thin, white, almost rubbery when it got warm. I would lean against it, letting the tautness of the cord press into my skin, and it was the line I watched her hang the same towels on the day after my high school graduation. It would never be the same, I reasoned with myself, while I still felt a pit of sadness thinking of the old twisted cotton rope. Twisted rope held skin cells though, blood seeping into the deepest fibers. Plastic repelled all of that, could be wiped down. Plastic rope was the better choice. Less DNA. 

I would be lying if I said I didn’t put myself on a wall of fame in my head. I pictured bulletin boards, pieces of red twine connecting dots to a man they would never find. Crime scene photos of bodies, missing any fingerprints or DNA that could connect them to the only person who knew their last moments. I had been waiting forty-six years, and on the weekend after my mother’s funeral, in the first week of a brand new year, I had completed what I had sworn my entire life  I would do. It had never been a matter of if, only when. Because of that I had lots of time to think, to plan, and when it happened I had a singular focus. It wasn’t frenzied, or frantic, and I was proud of it. The last thing I needed, I reasoned with myself, was to become overzealous and make a mistake, leave behind one strand of hair or too many people who saw us in the same place at the same time. I was careful, like my mother had taught me to be when ironing shirts, careful not to burn them, leaving marks, telltale signs of an inexperienced ironer. No one could connect me to the woman I had killed, I made sure of it. My gloves were thick, my windows tinted, the rope bleached in the bathtub of my nondescript apartment, fan running frantically to get the smell out. By the time her body was found, there would be so much decomposition that evidence I didn’t even know existed would be long gone. She wouldn’t be the only one, but I wouldn’t raise suspicions. I would fly under the radar, as I always had. I had picked up a box of my mother’s possessions from the nursing home this morning, and it sat in the back of my car, undisturbed remnants of a full life that came down to just a few picture frames and sweaters. I was in the wind now, and there was nothing that tied me here, nothing preventing me from going out in the world, finding new people, new cities. Perfecting my craft, honing my skills. Perhaps, after forty-six years of waiting for this year, I would have another forty-six good years to go.