Free Lying with the Dead by Michael Mewshaw Page B

tomorrow morning some smart person—a policeman, a lawyer, a priest—would show up and declare that he couldn’t be held accountable.
    But Mom soon busted that pipe dream. “What we have to pray for,” she said, “is they give him life, not the death penalty.”
    “He’s just thirteen.”
    “They booked him as an adult. It’s a capital crime. If they prove premeditation—”
    “Maury never premeditated anything.”
    “That’s the point. Anybody asks, you tell them he wasn’t capable of planning ahead. That’s our best hope.”
    But nobody asked me that or anything else. Nobody spoke to me at all except Dad’s relatives, who carped out loud, never caring who was in earshot. Heavy drinkers and hell-raisers, railroad men from Pennsylvania and oil roustabouts from Louisiana, they made it a point to take me aside and tell me that Dad had married a hardhearted woman. It went unsaid that she had produced damaged kids, one sick in the head, the other crippled in body. But it was clear they believed he had had less luck in life than at cards. Now we simply had to hope that he had gone to a better place.
    Mom never asked me anything either. Not how I felt nor whether there was something she could do for me. She expected me to do for her. I became her dogsbody—honestly, that’s the term she used. I prayed Dad’s death would bring peace at home. But the battle between husband and wife turned into a mother-daughter donnybrook, and it took her no time to beat me down.
    The worst of it was I had to go through this without Maury, who loved me like no one else in the family. With him in jail and me on my own, a hunger took hold that was as raw and stinging as a skinned knee. Nothing eased that ache until Quinn was born, and I had an infant to fawn over. I dressed and undressed him, bathed him and pushed him in his stroller. He was a doll, my living doll, and all I had to love until Lawrence happened into my life.
    Still, I can’t complain that Mom had it easier than me. She wore herself to a nub working for Maury’s release. And when the public defender convinced her that that wouldn’t happen and that he should plead guilty to second-degree murder in exchange for a life sentence, she didn’t despair. Roaming the halls of the County Service Building, she cornered lawyers and begged them to do his appeal for free. She wrote petitions to shrinks and social workers pleading for help. Driven by a love hard to separate from lunacy, she paid out of her Safeway salary for tests that were supposed to prove his diminished responsibility. Finally she managed to have him transferred to the Patuxent Institute for Defective Delinquents, where he got psychological treatment and a chance for parole once he was no longer a threat to society and himself.
    After that, I expected Mom to move on with her life and move out of the house where the murder was committed. But she fixed her course and wouldn’t swerve from it till her son was free. I don’t know where she drew the strength.
    People insisted I was strong too because I stuck by Mom. But I knew better. I knew I stayed with her out of weakness.
    “Candy!” she calls from upstairs. “Candy, where the hell are you? I’ve been hollering for five minutes.”
    Afraid that she’s fallen and hurt herself, I scramble from the rocking chair and risk my neck on the stairs, climbing them two at a time. Dust rollers nestle in every corner of the second floor. I’d lay money she hasn’t vacuumed or changed her sheets since last summer. She’s living in her own house like a bag lady in the streets.
    The door to her bedroom is shut. She shouts again, summoning me to the bedroom that used to be mine. Nothing’s left of me here, and Mom calls it “the library.” It has a shelf full of paperbacks, some of them from when Quinn was in college. Eventually, Mom read them herself, dead set on keeping pace with her son. But I have to say that where they fed his mind, all those books seemed to