ACCORDING TO HER TESTIMONY, PATRA GREW UP IN A SUBDIVISION OUTSIDE MILWAUKEE. She was the youngest of five children by almost a decade, raised in a household of adults. Her father was an engineer, and her mother, who’d stayed home with all her siblings, had gone back to school by the time Patra was born and was getting a PhD in urban sociology. She had taken little Patra to all the classes she TA’ed and to her field research in a juvenile center in Waukesha. By the time Patra was in high school, her mother was a tenured faculty member, her father had died of colon cancer, and her siblings had teenage children of their own. Patra finished high school a year early and left for the University of Chicago, where she met Dr. Leonard Gardner her junior year. The week she graduated they were married. He bought a turn-of-the-century colonial for them in Oak Park, with a vegetable garden and cats. A swing set, a gazebo.
After Paul was born, Patra took him to infant music classes, then gymnastics for toddlers. She started him in preschool when he was three, one of the best in town. She’d driven him to Montessori classes every day—Patra confirmed this on the stand—even though she didn’t like to drive, and even though she’d have preferred to keep him home with her a little longer. Patra also confirmed, when the DA pressed her, that when Paul’s teacher had expressed concern one day in February about his health, she’d taken him secretly to see her mother’s friend, who was a pediatric endocrinologist. The DA showed paperwork disclosing the doctor ordered tests that Patra never scheduled. Patra tried to explain that this was because Paul had seemed better after that, so she blamed her worry—and her decision to see the doctor—on overconcern with the natural fluctuations of a growing child. She was getting herself worked up, she said, losing a sense of perspective. It was around this point that she agreed to Leo’s plan to spend some time at their newly built summer house in March. “To give us some mental space,” she said. “To have a change of scenery.”
I also learned during the trial that while I’d been in Loose River that day getting Tylenol, while I was on my way to and from town, Leo had decided it would be best to get “a change of scenery” again. He’d worked an unconscious Paul into a pair of pants, wedged his feet in shoes, filled his backpack with puzzles and trains, Handi Wipes and animal crackers, a coloring book of birds he’d bought in Duluth. He’d combed down Paul’s hair, and when I returned with the bottle of pills in the afternoon, there they were on their way out the door through the kitchen. Patra came first and walked right past me—her face white and taut—then Leo. Then Paul in Leo’s arms, Leo sidestepping the kitchen island like he was carrying a big bundle of wood, or a miniature bride. Leo’s red eyes took me in, then moved on to other obstacles in his path. The table, the front door. “Thanks, Linda,” he said, when I moved a chair out of the way for him. Paul’s one white arm dangled behind him like a length of rope.
*
Did they tell you where they were going? I was asked.
They didn’t say anything.
Did they tell you they would drive two and a half hours, and make two stops at private residences, in both Brainerd and St. Cloud—
They didn’t say—
—neither of them medical professionals, before the victim expired from complications of cerebral edema at approximately seven thirty that night?
Leo just asked me to lock up behind them.
The last I saw of Patra, she was standing in the driveway, bent over double, the heel of her hand in her mouth like a hunk of bread. She had on unbuttoned jeans and slouchy moccasins, and when she straightened up, her whole face was slick. Her eyes were unfocused, her mouth open wider than it needed to be for breathing. She closed the car door without a word.
I stood in the doorway for a long time after they left. I still had the bottle of pills in my hand, and after a while I went back inside and set it down on the table. I didn’t take my shoes off at the door. I could see tiny half-moons of dirt in a track I’d made across the floor. Back on the mat, I untied my tennis shoes and found a broom for the dirt, sweeping in my socks through the kitchen and down the hall.
Outside Paul’s bedroom there was a fishy-sweet scent. I stood for a moment holding my breath. Then I went in and lifted Paul’s full plate of pancakes from the dresser, gripped his full glass of milk—which looked viscous in my hand—and carried both back to the kitchen. I walked out to the deck and poached some pinecones and strips of bark from Europa’s walls, carried them back in my arms. Arranged them just as they’d been outside right there on Paul’s rug, in a half-circle around the dresser. The room smelled better then, like sap. I heaved open the window for good measure. Someone had already stripped the bed. I folded the Candy Land board, returned it to its box. I turned on Paul’s caboose night-light, though it wasn’t dark, though the late afternoon sun had hit an angle that allowed it to filter through the trees and shove a trapezoid of light across the floor. I sat on his little-kid bed, lay back. Willed my skin not to crawl when I felt the dampness of his bare mattress. I focused on the trapezoid of light as it bent in half, made a stage, then seeped up the wall. My feet in their socks dangled off the far edge of the bed.
You thought they’d come back?