Surrogate Child

by Andrew Neiderman

  The fire seemed to rise up out of the floor as though it had been burning all the while and been hidden and silent beneath the floor rug. To Donald and Stanley, in the moment they had to think and react, it appeared they were sinking into the heart of the flames. Terror rushed into their hearts as fast as did the tremendous and overwhelming pain.

  Both boys screamed and lunged at the doors, their clothes aflame. The fire was cutting up their legs, across their backs, and across their stomachs. The moment they opened their doors, they fell to the pavement and began rolling around frantically. Remaining patrons at the Crossways rushed out the door. Someone had sense enough to grab a few tablecloths and began an attempt at smothering the burning clothing on Stanley. Another man did the same for Donald.

  They dragged their bodies away from the burning car as quickly as they could. By now the entire vehicle was on fire. No one even tried to quench it, but people who had parked nearby rushed to their vehicles to get them farther away.

  By the time the ambulance arrived, Donald had regained consciousness once, but the intensity of pain had driven him into a coma. Stanley never regained consciousness. He died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Donald, ninety percent of his body suffering third-degree burns, was rushed by helicopter to the Albany, New York, burn center less than an hour after he arrived at the local hospital. He remained in critical condition all night and died just before dawn the next morning.

  A little after two o’clock in the morning, Joe woke abruptly, sensing that Martha was not beside him. He sat up when he saw the light was still on in the upstairs hallway. He heard nothing, so he got out of bed and went to the bedroom door. There was no one in the hallway, but he thought he smelled gasoline. The bathroom door was closed. Why would Martha go to the hallway bathroom? he wondered. He sniffed again. The odor seemed to pass. Confused, but tired, he returned to bed. Before he closed his eyes, he saw the hallway light snap off. He saw the bedroom door open and Martha enter. She moved softly back to the bed and slipped under the cover.

  “Where were you?” he whispered.

  “Just checking to see that he was back all right,” she said.

  “He came home kind of late, didn’t he?”

  “He said none of the other kids had to be in any earlier.”

  “He had a good time?” he asked, unable to prevent the note of sarcasm from sounding.

  “It was all right,” she said. “Nothing special,” she added, and then she was quiet.

  “Nothing special until two in the morning?” She didn’t reply.

  He lay there on his back, his hands behind his head for a while, listening to the movements in the house and the way the strong evening breeze threaded itself in and out of crevices and over the roof tiles and windows.

  Something stirred in his chest. It wasn’t a pain; it wasn’t an ache. It was more like someone invisible poked him on the breastbone, and he was still feeling the pressure. He looked at Martha. She seemed to have fallen into a deep sleep again.

  And then the strange, imaginary nudging he had felt took shape in thought as he realized that Martha had gotten out of bed naked to check on Jonathan. He really never gave it much thought when she appeared naked before Solomon, even after he was into adolescence. They were, after all, mother and son.

  But this boy was only in the house a week, and he wasn’t their real son. Surely, she must have embarrassed him. Could she have forgotten she was naked? He felt like waking her up to ask, but then he remembered her accusation of jealousy earlier and that made him hesitate.

  He could hear her say “My God, Joe, you are jealous of him. Aren’t you ridiculous? He’s just a child, a lost, lonely child, and you want to deny him any sign of warmth and friendship.”

  Of course, he didn’t want to do that, but she shouldn’t be parading nude in front of a boy almost sixteen years old. That wasn’t right, was it? It bothered him so much, he couldn’t fall asleep until hours later, and after he did, he slept so soundly, he didn’t wake up as early as he had intended. In fact, he didn’t wake up until Jonathan knocked on the door.

  He opened his eyes and realized Martha had gotten up hours ago.

  “What?”

  Jonathan poked his head in.

  “Sorry, but Martha told me to wake you. She said you can’t sleep this late if you’re going to get in any work on the house today.”

  “Huh?” He looked at the clock. “Oh, shit.”

  Jonathan laughed.

  “I’ll be outside, mixing the paint,” he said. “I can start on the lower-level window frames, if that’s okay.”

  Joe scrubbed his head vigorously and sat up.

  “Yeah, sure. Damn, I haven’t slept this late since . . .”

  “Since Solomon died,” Jonathan finished for him, and smiled. “I know. Martha told me,” he added, and closed the door softly.

  For a long moment, Joe simply stared at the closed door. Then he got himself up and into the shower to try to wash away the strange mixture of erotic dreams and nightmares that clung stubbornly to the insides of his eyelids.

  SEVEN

  Martha had been hearing and seeing Solomon more and more all week. There was little terror and amazement in her reaction; she half expected it, although at first she was surprised these visions and sounds had not appeared and occurred during the period of time between Solomon’s death and Jonathan’s arrival. It seemed to her that that’s when it should have happened. Her longing for her dead child was so intense during those months, it wouldn’t have shocked her to see him standing in his room or hear his voice in what had become the terribly empty house.

  But none of it happened until after Jonathan came, and this made her more angry than terrified. In fact, she thought it was characteristic of Solomon and his selfishness for him to have kept himself hidden and silent behind the dark walls of death even though he had the capability to appear and to speak to her when she most needed him. She believed that what finally brought him out was not his love for her so much as his jealousy, the same jealousy that she now had to admit kept him from liking and appreciating his father. Joe always knew; Joe always understood. She had been wrong to pretend she disagreed, but she did it to protect Solomon.

  His appearances became more frequent as the week wore on and she did more and more for Jonathan. After she had found Solomon standing by the window in his room that first day, he surprised her with his appearance in the laundry room while she was folding Jonathan’s underwear and socks. She realized he must have been there for quite a while watching her. Ordinarily she would have sensed his presence, just the way he was always able to sense hers, but she was concentrating on thoughts about Jonathan.

  “Why don’t you let him do it himself?” she heard, and turned around to see Solomon standing there with that horrible ropeburn still vivid on his neck. It seemed even wider and brighter, the raw flesh glimmering. He could make it look that way, she thought. He wanted to torture her with the sight. “I did all that for myself, didn’t I?” he said, and smirked.

  At first she was going to ignore the visions; she was going to chase them back into the recesses of her mind and bury them under new memories and new feelings, all having to do with Jonathan. But she couldn’t pass up the opportunity to express her own anger, and she had to defend Jonathan.

  “You didn’t do it for yourself until you were almost thirteen,” he said.

  “He’s almost sixteen.”

  “You have no right to be critical of him. He’s alive. He didn’t punish his parents with his own death,” she said. It was a cruel, hard thing to say. She knew that, but it worked. Seconds later, Solomon’s image was gone, and she didn’t hear his voice until late the next afternoon, about an hour after Jonathan had returned from school. She was working in the kitchen, and when she turned around, there was Solomon seated at the table. He had his elbows on the table and his hands clutching his neck, covering most of the vivid scar. She imagined he was ashamed of it now. She noted that although he was d
ressed in the clothing he had worn the day he died, he did not have his watch, the watch she had given to Jonathan.

  “Working like a little beaver to make him his favorite meal,” Solomon said. “You used to worry more about what pleased Joe.”

  “That’s not true. I was always making you your favorite things. There were even some things that Joe didn’t like, but he ate them just to please you. That’s all we ever tried to do—please you. And what did we get for it? Your corpse hanging from a tree.”

  “That wasn’t my fault,” he said. “You know it wasn’t my fault.”

  “Why don’t you leave us alone? You chose to leave us before. Why are you coming back again and again?”

  “I don’t like him using my things. Get him his own things. You gave him my watch!”

  “You should have thought of that before you rushed out to hang yourself,” she said, surprised herself at how hard and tough she could be now. But now she had Jonathan to worry about, and Jonathan was alive. She could touch Jonathan; she could hold him to her.

  She turned her back on the image, and when she looked again, he was gone. But he returned every day, sometimes twice, once three times, each time complaining about something she was doing for Jonathan. And each time she drove him away by reminding him that it was he who had ruined things, not her. He didn’t want to accept that, but it was characteristic of Solomon to shift blame onto other people. She saw that now; in fact, she saw more of his weaknesses and liabilities now that he was dead and she could compare him to Jonathan. And that became another way to rid herself of the image and the illusion: Force Solomon to see what his inadequacies were by comparing him to Jonathan.

  “He thanks us for what we do for him,” she told Solomon’s spirit when it appeared behind her in her bathroom. She was brushing her hair, and suddenly there he was, standing behind her as he often did, watching her dress and prepare herself for the day. “He’s very grateful he has two warm and caring adults looking after him now.”

  “He’s playing you both for suckers,” Solomon said.

  “Jealous words. Deliberate lies born out of envy. Don’t waste your breath,” she said, and then she laughed. She saw how that got him, so she laughed again. “How can you waste any more of your breath? You wasted it all at the end of a rope,” she added, and the spirit evaporated.

  She thought she had firm control of it and it would do them no harm, but then Jonathan came to her on Thursday afternoon to tell her about this feeling he had. He spoke like someone under hypnosis, and it did frighten her.

  “I get the feeling that I’m not alone when I’m in his room. I can’t explain it, but sometimes…I’ll look up from what I am reading or writing because it was like someone just walked by behind me. Of course, there’s no one there, but still … it’s eerie. Once I looked in the mirror, and I thought I caught sight of someone reflected in the window.”

  For a long moment, she said nothing. Then she smiled to reassure him.

  “It’s understandable. You’re in a new place, and the history of the boy in whose room you now live is a tragic and horrible history. Maybe that’s playing on your mind. Try to forget about it.”

  “I’ll try,” he said.

  Poor thing, she thought. Damn you, Solomon, she thought, and she looked forward to the next opportunity she would have to chastise and threaten him. She wouldn’t tolerate him trying to ruin things for Jonathan. That was when Joe walked in on her.

  For a moment she wondered whether or not Joe would see Solomon’s image, too. He seemed to have heard his voice. But he didn’t see him, or he would have reacted for sure. It didn’t surprise her that Solomon made himself totally invisible to Joe. He was practically invisible to him when he was alive, and he wasn’t jealous of Joe’s relationship with Jonathan, anyway. He was jealous only of hers.

  She thought about telling him, but then she thought he might not understand or believe her, and instead he might somehow blame it on their taking in Jonathan. The next thing she’d know he’d want to get rid of the boy, claiming it was too much of a strain on her, so she kept all the sightings and conversations to herself. She was confident she could handle it, anyway. Just as with all the other occasions during the week, she had Solomon on the run. She told him he was forbidden from appearing in what was his room anymore.

  “It’s no longer yours, and these are no longer your things,” she told him. “You gave them up that Thursday afternoon after school when you calmly went out there and ruined all our lives. As usual, you thought about no one but yourself. Well, it’s too late now. I want you to leave him alone,” she said, and Joe came in.

  As long as she had Jonathan to look forward to, she didn’t feel any pain or regret in driving Solomon’s image away. She shuddered to think of what it would have been like had Solomon appeared before Jonathan’s arrival. She wouldn’t have eventually searched for a foster child. Solomon would have stolen her out of reality and taken her completely away from Joe. She realized all that now, and she was even more grateful for Jonathan’s appearance. He was truly a godsend, and that was why she didn’t think it was any sort of coincidence that she had finally confronted him; a boy who resembled Solomon in so many ways, a boy whom she could take into her home and feel comfortable caring for and loving. Joe didn’t see the wonder in all of this, but Joe didn’t know all of it, did he?

  He didn’t know all that had happened before, although sometimes she wondered if he did. He didn’t know the secrets buried in her heart. Sometimes she wanted to share these things with him, especially months after Solomon’s death when they used to sit so quietly in the living room or at the dinner table. She felt a great urge to confess and reveal, but something held her back.

  Maybe it was Solomon, she thought. Maybe he was here all that time, but he just didn’t let himself be seen the way he did now.

  Yes, that made sense, she thought. That was why there was so much darkness in the house, why the shadows looked deeper and longer, why the sunlight stopped at the windows. He brought the gloom and the heaviness. He wanted them to suffer.

  And that was why he was so angry about Jonathan’s arrival, she concluded; because Jonathan was driving him away, driving him back to the grave. Solomon’s revenge was ending. His clothes no longer hung like skeletons in his closet, his bike no longer tormented them unused on its rack, and his room, which had become a tomb, was now a boy’s room again.

  It’s over, Solomon, she thought. Give up; don’t bother. To prove it to herself and to him, she went out back and stared up at the tree. Sure enough, it looked like nothing more than a tree. Why, the sight of it didn’t even conjure up the terrible memory any longer. There was no cold feeling, no terror, no revulsion. It was a warm, sunny fall day, and the tree was filled with beautifully colored leaves. She took a deep breath, inhaling the rich scents of nature, and returned triumphantly to the house to prepare for Jonathan’s homecoming.

  How wonderful every day could now be. She had things to do again, things that would fill her life with hope and with meaning. Perhaps she was a little overenthusiastic when it came to the boy. Perhaps she doted on him the way she had doted on Solomon. Maybe Joe’s feelings were understandable, but he would have to understand something more . . . Jonathan was their salvation. She was confident that in time, he would come to that conclusion, and once again, perhaps for the first time really, they would be something of a family. She was prepared to make any sacrifice necessary to cause that to happen.

  Joe didn’t know whether he saw it because he wanted to see it or because it was actually there, but there was something disturbingly different about Martha’s demeanor this particular Sunday morning. She spoke to him pleasantly enough; she looked happy and energetic, but she seemed so aloof. He felt like a boarder in his own home—tolerated, decently treated, but distinctly apart from the family who ran the place. He felt like someone who had died long ago and was forgotten. Martha was moving around and above him, looking through him.

  From time to tim
e, she stopped what she was doing and looked intensely at an empty chair at the table, the chair that used to be taken by Solomon and was now taken by Jonathan. Her behavior made him nervous. He ate his breakfast as quickly as he could, listening to the news on the radio and watching her move oddly about the kitchen. When he got up from the table, Martha said she would be out to watch him and Jonathan paint the house trim.

  “I can’t believe the boy got up so early and got things started already,” he said.

  “Why not? He’s a wonderful boy, Joe. I see so many good things in him, things I didn’t see in Solomon,” she said. He was surprised. It was the first time he had ever heard her say anything in any way critical of Solomon. He was convinced she could never be objective about him; she was a typical mother, and when a mother like Martha lost her child, her only child, there was a tendency to deify him, to raise his image up on a cross and pay homage to it with compliments that sounded more like homilies.

  But Joe could now see that the new boy was helping to crack the hard shell of biased thoughts. That’s good, he thought. That’s very good. Bringing him into the house may have a great deal more value than he originally anticipated. He looked forward to joining him and working side by side on the house.

  By the time he got out there, Jonathan had mixed all the paint and painted two window frames. He was up on the ladder doing the boards that ran just under the lip of the roof.

  “You’re fast,” Joe said. He stood with his hands on his hips and studied the completed work. “And good.”

  “Thanks. The rollers make this part easy.”

  “It’s never easy when you’re working on your own house,” Joe muttered. “Especially when your wife is your chief critic.” He started on the remaining window frames on this side of the building.

  They worked quietly at first, building a rhythm between them that was almost poetic in its coordination. By the time Joe finished a frame, Jonathan had painted the wood above him to that point and moved the ladder accordingly. He talked a little bit about the work he had done on the Porter house when he lived with that family, but Joe could hear a note of disdain in his descriptions. Whatever hard feelings had developed between him and his former foster parents had been mutual.