The Locket

My name is Maren. I am forty-seven years old, and for the past nineteen years the only person who has made that fact feel meaningful is my son, Leo. He is the entire architecture of my ordinary life, the reason I keep the refrigerator stocked with the cereals he likes even now that he lives at a university forty minutes away, the reason I still leave the porch light on when he visits, the reason I have never once in all these years gone to sleep on a night he was supposed to call without waiting up first. People talk about unconditional love as if it requires some great sacrifice to sustain it, but with Leo it has always felt like the easiest thing I have ever done. He is funny and kind and slightly too serious for his age, and even now that he shaves and drives and argues about politics at the dinner table, he still kisses my cheek before he leaves and says I love you, Mom the way he has said it since he was four years old, with complete and uncomplicated sincerity.

Which is why the night everything changed started the way it did, with me half asleep in bed and my phone lighting up on the nightstand at ten past one in the morning, his name on the screen.

I answered before the second ring. “What’s wrong?” I asked, because that is always my first question, always, the reflex of a mother who raised a child alone and learned early that the phone ringing at strange hours rarely meant good news.