My Son Branded Me a Murderer

On the day of the SAT English exam, my son spent two and a half hours writing nothing but a single essay.

The title was My Mother Is a Murderer.

It described, in careful detail, the whole process of how I killed my husband and sealed his body inside a wall.

A few days later, the grader who read it called the police at once.

Officers swarmed our house and broke open the very wall my son had written about.

When I saw what was inside that wall, I smiled.

My son, on the other hand, went mad.

……

When the police surrounded the house, I was out in the yard watering the flowers.

Every flower in that yard, my son had planted himself, one by one, when he was small. He treasured them. If even one wilted a little, it pained him so much he couldn't eat.

Then the gate was kicked open, and a wave of officers filed in, trampling straight across the flowers and plants in the yard.

Watching my son's beloved flowers get crushed underfoot like that, I ached. I was about to say something when he suddenly rushed out of the house, his whole face lit up at the sight of the men:

"You finally came!"

I had no idea what was happening. The man at the front walked up to me, holding out his badge.

"I'm Captain Gray of the homicide division. You're a suspect in a murder case. Please cooperate with our investigation."

As he said it, he handed me the essay my son had written at the testing center.

It was only in that moment that I learned I had become the most notorious murderer mother in the country.

My son's essay had set off an enormous stir across the city.

Because in every major practice exam before this, he had always sat far and away at the top, untouchable.

For these SATs, everyone had been certain he would be the top scorer in the entire state.

And yet, during the English exam, he simply threw away a perfect-score test and spent two and a half hours writing this essay instead.

The essay said it plainly: "One night ten years ago, my mother, Sara Henson, killed my father, Oscar James. She bricked up a wall that same night and sealed my father's body inside the wall of their master bedroom."

After the grader called the police, the whole thing spread everywhere.

And it spread together with the essay my son had written.

Everyone was talking about the presumptive top scorer who threw away his SATs and used his own future to expose, in an essay, that his mother was a murderer.

And I was the last to know.

I stared at that essay for a long time, and the longer I looked, the harder my hands shook.

I knew my son's handwriting.

But what it said, I couldn't accept.

I looked at my son and asked, my voice trembling:

"You wrote this?"

He looked back at me without any expression.

"Yes. I've waited too long for this moment."

A sharp pain shot through my chest, as if something had stabbed into me.

"So these ten years, all that hard work, was just to get back at me like this?"

His eyes were cold on mine.

"That's right. Only this way would my essay be taken seriously. Only this way would everyone find out you're a murderer."

Looking at this child I had raised for eighteen years, I suddenly felt I didn't know him at all.

Ten years ago, my son was in third grade, and his grades had always trailed at the very bottom of his class.

He wasn't slow.

He just couldn't sit still. All he ever thought about were the flowers and plants out in the yard.

I tried tutors, I tried after-school classes, and none of it worked.

Then, after the thing with his father, he suddenly changed.

He grew quiet and withdrawn, a book in his hands whether he was eating or going to sleep.

At first I thought it was just a passing phase.

But the stack of tests on his desk kept growing taller, the practice sets kept piling up, and he worked through them all, from third grade straight up to his senior year.