Chapter Twenty-two

Five minutes after twelve o’clock, two guards came to Edward’s cell and put handcuffs on his wrists to escort him to a transfer car. Fay had given him the impression that a nametag was going to give away their identities, but instead, it was the fact that the handcuffs were on loosely enough that Edward could wriggle out of them with just a bit of pain. The two guards had melancholy, baggy faces that instantly gave away that they were going to kill themselves a few minutes after.

It was winter, and the street was sheeted in a layer of ice. The sun reflecting off of it made looking out the window unbearable. The entire time, he had been counting the seconds, trying to calculate how he could make it back in time to save his mother. He would have enough time if he drove two times faster than the guards had been and taken the short route through instead of going around downtown like they did. There was the sense that they were prolonging the drive or taking a scenic route. It was their last drive. He wouldn’t be able to change anything.

The transfer car drove for thirty-six minutes until Edward was at the river half a mile outside the city. The giant thing wasn’t frozen, but radiated cold and swirled like a death trap. The two drivers parked so close to the river’s edge that for a second, Edward thought they were going to drive straight into it. Finally, the door on Edward’s side of the car unlocked and he could get out, but not in time to stop the two from murmuring some type of prayer that the Spartans would take care of their families and then shooting themselves through the head. Perhaps he could have even gotten them on his side if he was quick enough. Now, he was inevitably going to be found guilty of shooting them. That was three murders on his record. Even Fay didn’t have anything that bad yet. After that, he grabbed one of their guns to use against Aries if it came to that and stepped into the driver’s seat to start making his way to his mother’s house.

He ended up arriving an hour and ten minutes after twelve o’clock. It was possible that Fay had given him an impossible deadline. Perhaps the deadline really was possible, but she had instructed the guards to take a slow route around town as torture for him. Maybe they decided themselves that they wanted a dramatic last run around the city.

Edward’s mother had told him that she was renting a room in someone’s house. She never mentioned specifically which one, but out of boredom in his jail cell, Edward had taken what she said about a hole in the yard and tied it to a sinkhole that opened a few years before that happened near the house of a man who had put up signs advertising his spare room. Edward had noticed the signs on his drives to work. He didn’t see any cars in the driveway, but his mother didn’t drive anyway.

He ran to the front door and saw that it was open with two hairpins still in the lock. With his gun loaded and ready, he checked each room in the house. In the time that it would take to think logically about where his mother would be, Aries could have pulled a trigger. The downstairs bedroom was the second-to-last room that Edward checked, but it was the one with a ‘FOR RENT’ sign hanging on the half-open door. Light came from inside.

Edward shoved the door open with his gun ready at eye-level, hunting for the b*****d’s face in his view. Instead, he saw nothing. The room was completely quiet. He would have left to check the last if he didn’t suddenly notice his mother’s body lying in the corner with a blanket over her legs and an empty pill bottle still in her hand.

“Mother?” he said, inching closer. Her eyes were closed. He waited for any movement at all to assure him that she was still alive�"a twitch, any rising and falling of her chest. He was desperate to know, but he was too scared to come any closer. Her body was so pale and limp that it looked like whatever was lying on the bed was manufactured from plastic. He asked again, “Mother,” waving his hand in the air as if it would elicit some type of response.

There was a note lying on the cabinet beside the bed. He didn’t notice it until he had walked past it, and then only a few seconds after did he notice that something was there that shouldn’t have been. He stepped backwards, the tiniest bit grateful for the excuse to stall the discovery.

Any glimmer of hope that he felt had been whisked away like tumbleweed in wind. He picked up the note between his thumb and first finger, magnifying the trembling of his hand and making the small print illegible. The note wasn’t addressed to him�"it wasn’t addressed to anyone�"but it was signed with his mother’s name at the bottom. The content of the note was rendered nearly unreadable from the black marker over it, but Edward could make out a few phrases and words from underneath. It was a suicide note scribbled with blue pen, apparently absolving anyone of guilt if the body was found by the police. Written diagonally over the note in neat, cursive print was, “Looks like she beat us to it” signed with Fay’s name.

She had discovered his own mother’s suicide note before him and decided to mock him for it. She had left her name on the note and the hairpins in the door to make absolutely certain that he knew that she wasn’t afraid of the police and that the force that he once fought for was finally and completely against him. She had once stood exactly in the same position that Edward was, right beside the cabinet putting the note down with a wide grin on her face at the thought of destroying everything that he had been living for, and that made him want to vaporize the damn house from existence.

Edward staggered backwards, picturing what Fay had done. She didn’t deserve to be in the same room as his mother. She didn’t deserve to be the first to discover the body. She didn’t deserve to touch the same floor as his mother. She deserved to be strapped to a bed in a mental asylum, screaming and crying for help that would never come.

She had walked through the doorway to the bedroom. Edward felt himself inching backwards out of it like ice rising up in blistering hot water. She had been down the stairs. He ran up as quickly as he could as to not demean himself by living in the same space that she had. She had been through the front door. He slammed the door shut, making the hairpins in the lock fly out onto the cement in front of the house. She had used those pins to unlock the door. He grabbed them both and threw them as hard as he could out into the street as if they would somehow find her and pierce her throat.

Edward’s mother had been helping the Spartans. She had killed herself to make it easier for him to take them down.