Surrogate Child

by Andrew Neiderman

  Right from the start, he knew how to worm his way into Martha’s heart. He knew the things she wanted to hear and the things she wanted to see. He sensed where she was vulnerable, and he struck at that vulnerability. She wanted Solomon alive, so he gave Solomon to her. But with what accuracy . . . what eerie accuracy.

  And he even got to me, Joe thought. He knew I was ambivalent about my son’s death, and he took advantage of that ambivalence. He played up to my own doubts about myself. When he had to stroke me, he stroked me . . . like when he made a big deal about wanting to accompany me on a service call. Or when he pretended interest in sports. He was always conniving, plotting, working at getting in with us until it was difficult to see him for what he is.

  A cold feeling came over Joe. He could see him for what he was, but how would he ever get Martha to do so? He had worked it so every time Joe criticized him, it looked like his only motive was jealousy. He would need solid, irrefutable evidence. But where would he look for that? All that boy did, he did subtly.

  Martha refused to permit any further discussion of the drug-related incident. When Jonathan and Martha had come downstairs for lunch, Joe commented about the fact that apparently only one student had ingested a hallucinogenic drug.

  “We’re putting that behind us, Joe,” she said in a tone of reprimand. “Placing doubts in our minds about Jonathan is just what he wants us to do.”

  “He?”

  “The police,” she said quickly. “Let’s not talk about it anymore. In fact, I forbid discussion about it,” she added.

  “You forbid?”

  “We won’t answer any questions or acknowledge any comments relating to the incident,” Martha said, sounding like a defense attorney again. Joe looked at Jonathan. He looked inscrutable, but Joe thought his eyes betrayed an inner satisfaction. To emphasize her point, Martha turned away from him and began to discuss some new designer shirts she had seen at the Orange Plaza Mall. “Colors by Julian,” she said. “There was this one design that would highlight your eyes, Jonathan . . .”

  Joe felt his face flush. He realized that when they had come down for lunch, she hadn’t even called him to come eat. She had made herself and Jonathan some sandwiches and actually had sat down at the table before he entered the kitchen. He made himself a sandwich and joined them. Now they were carrying on a conversation as though he weren’t even present.

  “I know what we should do,” Martha concluded, her face animated with excitement. “All the stores are open in the mall today. Why don’t we take a ride and you’ll try on one of the shirts.”

  “Sure,” Jonathan said. “Just give me a half hour to knock off some math homework.” He glanced at Joe, but Joe said nothing. Martha began to clean off the table. She looked at Joe as though she just realized he was there.

  “Are you coming along with us?” she asked. He could see she didn’t really care whether he did or not.

  “I thought I’d finish the trim work Jonathan and I started last weekend.”

  “Good,” she said. “You should finish that before the weather gets so miserable, you can’t do anything.”

  His decision apparently cheered her. She turned on the radio and began to sing to the music. Jonathan excused himself, and Joe went out to the garage to remix the paint and get out the ladder and paint rollers. He was well into the work when he heard the garage door open and saw Martha back out the car. He paused for a moment to watch them drive away.

  Jonathan was staring out the car window, and Martha was gabbing away, apparently being just as loquacious as she had been the other night with the Bakers. Just before Martha shifted into drive and headed down the road, Jonathan caught sight of Joe watching them.

  They stared at each other for only a split second really, but in that short moment, Joe definitely experienced a foreboding premonition. Jonathan had such a cold look of self-satisfaction and arrogance. Joe thought the boy already knew he had taken a significant grasp on their lives. Holding his head back, his face unsmiling, his eyes as still as fake-glass orbs, he brought the left corner of his mouth up into his cheek and turned to Martha as they drove off together.

  Joe watched the car disappear and then went back to his work. He moved more slowly, his mind occupied with other thoughts. He kept coming back to the accuracy with which the boy had taken on Solomon’s ways, an accuracy that enabled him to win Martha over so completely. It was almost as if Solomon had come back from the grave to whisper in his ear, but Joe knew that couldn’t be so. The dead don’t come back. They just don’t . . .

  Unless . . . he looked up at the house . . . unless they’ve left their words to be heard. That’s it, he thought. That’s it. Excited by his realization, he walked into the house quickly and rushed up the stairs to Jonathan’s room.

  He entered, but stopped in the doorway. The computer monitor stared at him as though it anticipated what he was about to do, what he had to do. He rushed to the keyboard and searched all around it. Nothing. He looked behind the machine and even looked under the computer table to see if something had been stuck there. Nothing. He stood up and stared down. Where could he be?

  Gingerly he lifted the keyboard. There was the slip of paper. He picked it up slowly and read the symbols, feeling a certain electricity when he realized what they meant. This was the password into Solomon’s secret files.

  Without delay, he turned on the computer and called up the menu listing the files. It seemed to him that there were a number of new ones, but he brought the cursor to the ones that had been inaccessible to him, and when he typed in the symbols from the paper, he found that he had indeed entered into his dead son’s secret files.

  He sat down at the computer and began to scroll the pages. As he read the lines rolling before him, he understood why Jonathan would think he had brought Solomon back from the dead. Suddenly the computer had become The Lazarus Machine. He could hear Solomon speaking as clearly as if he were standing beside him.

  “My father’s life seems so vacant and empty, filled with endless hours of watching basketball games, fixing the house, occasionally reading a computer magazine. He’s devoted to the family, but when I think about him, I wonder if he doesn’t at times feel the emptiness, the uselessness, of his activities.”

  He scrolled down further, and read on. “Watching him makes me think about my future. Despite my good school grades, what makes me think I’ll be any different? There seem traps in the adult world, a pattern of ceaseless, pointless activity that never really satisfies . . .

  “Sex is a brutal antidote they use to forget their vain, empty lives . . . and here I am, an experimenter of sex, but not an enjoyer. Not the enjoyer my own mother is.”

  Pressing the button again, he got more text, a chill rising up his spine. “I’ve been thinking a lot about life and . . . death lately. I don’t want to believe that this is all there is. Death seems too final and yet . . . I went to the library to do some research on the subject and read The Undead by Dr. R. R. White and Black Numerology. I like the idea that life after death is eternal and contains only the most beautiful aspects of life . . . things that are pleasing linger with us forever. At times—maybe I’m going crazy—it seems peaceful, the peace I seek.

  “There’s an interesting idea in the numerology book: If you die on the day of your birth, you’ll obtain blissful afterlife. Didn’t Thomas Jefferson, or was it John Adams, die on his birthday? How did he know? How can you guarantee that you’ll die on your birthday? Maybe I’m getting jaded, but these questions have lingered with me since childhood . . . the puzzle of it all.”

  Pain traveled up Joe’s spine. He felt stunned and struck by the maturity of his son’s secret voice. Was this inside the boy all that time? Shaking his head, he scrolled back through the file, feeling the dreaded chills again as he read his son’s thoughts, and saw the path to his final solution.

  He scrolled more deeply into the file, stopping here, stopping there. His son had maintained a virtual computer diary, recording his every t
hought and feeling. The diary was divided into days, and recorded in a way that he could call up any section at will.

  One entry made him pause long. It read: “Audra was talking to Donald Pedersen again today. I could feel my anger growing, recalling all the stories I’d heard about the way he treats women. He uses then discards them, and I didn’t like the way he was peering into Audra’s eyes. I’ve also observed him bullying and taunting some of the more helpless students, like the science whiz Henry Wilson . . . when old man Corde’s barn burned down to the ground two months ago, destroying several horses and goats caught inside, everyone knew Pedersen was behind it. Fortunately Audra had put on her ‘pleasant,’ polite facade, and when I arrived, he backed off. But I will say this, if I were to go, I would enjoy taking him with me . . .”

  Joe sat back, his apprehension growing. “Take him with me” echoed again and again in his mind, along with other memories.

  He recalled the night of the Pedersen accident. Was it an accident, after all? He recalled he thought he had smelled gasoline after Jonathan returned that night.

  He looked at the computer screen again, locked into the passage he had just scanned. Now the glow of the machine was more than mesmerizing; now the glow was evil.

  Chilled to the bone, Joe realized that the pieces fit all together. In a horrible, twisted way, Solomon was possessing Jonathan. Through the computer. Solomon had indeed reached back from the grave and fed his thoughts into a mind most eager to receive them.

  Who was really to blame for Donald Pedersen’s death? Jonathan or Solomon? Actually, now it no longer mattered. Joe had to do something. The boy was dangerous. What if there were other references to violence in here? he wondered.

  He sent the computer’s memory to the final chapter and scanned Solomon’s thoughts on suicide again. It was bone-chilling to read the entry. His fingers could barely work the keys to move the pages forward.

  When he had read enough for now, he paused. He had to read all of it, but he didn’t want to do it in here. He took a disc from the rack and copied the file. He would read the rest of it at his office.

  He wasn’t aware of how much time he had spent at the computer until he looked outside and saw how far the sun had descended. He went outside to clean up his painting material. By the time he returned, the house had grown depressingly dark, too. He went about turning on lights. The mall to which Martha had gone was only a half hour away. He knew how long she could be when she went off with one of her girlfriends to shop in the bigger malls in New Jersey, but he couldn’t imagine her spending so much time with a teenage boy in the local mall, a mall that had a quarter of the stores.

  He was also getting very hungry. From what he could see, Martha hadn’t prepared anything for dinner yet. He opened the refrigerator and picked on some leftover chicken, but he grew increasingly annoyed by her absence as the minutes ticked on. When the phone rang, he expected it to be her, but it was Kevin Baker.

  “We heard about the disaster at the school party last night,” he said. “The boys were just talking to their friends about it. Lucky it didn’t happen to Jonathan, too.”

  “Yeah. I hope it was only luck.”

  “What do you mean? You think he might be involved with drugs?” Kevin asked, taking on the tone of an investigator for the prosecution. “Have you found anything on him or in the house?”

  “No.”

  “Well, does he seem stoned at any time?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “Is he hanging around with kids who might be into that sort of thing?”

  “No. Like I told you, all his friends so far are Solomon’s old friends, and from what I could see and from what I still see, they’re pretty straight kids.”

  “So what are you talking about?” Kevin asked. Joe debated about telling Kevin about the computer files, but he didn’t think he’d understand. Who would unless he had lived here and seen the subtle things Jonathan had done?

  “I don’t know. I get these bad vibes.”

  “Not very scientific, and for you to unscientific . . .”

  “I know, Counselor. I know.”

  “How’s Martha today? Mindy was going to call, but she went shopping in Jersey with her sister, and she’s not back yet.”

  “Martha’s not back yet, either. She went shopping with Jonathan. I’m afraid she’s getting too involved with this boy,” Joe said.

  There was a long pause.

  “I asked my boys about him. They say he’s cool.”

  “He’s cool all right.”

  “Look, Joe. If you’re feeling uncomfortable with him, then maybe you should have a good conversation with Martha.”

  “Don’t know if I can. Don’t know if she’ll listen, and the last thing I want to do to her now is get her emotionally upset a day after Solomon’s birthday.”

  “I understand. Well, if there’s anything we can do . . .”

  “There’s something,” Joe said, the idea coming to him quickly. “When we were at the police station, along with other parents and students this morning, Paul Dawson mentioned something about Jonathan’s previous records. Do you think you could find out if he had any run-ins with the law?”

  “He’s a juvenile, Joe. There aren’t going to be any records like there would be on an adult offender. If he had problems in previous schools, the principal here might tell you about them.”

  “I’m looking for more serious things.”

  “Sometimes it’s better not to look,” Kevin said. “Anyway, from what the boys tell me, he’s doing very well here.”

  “He is.”

  “Maybe you’re just getting uptight for no reason, Joe. With Martha under tension, with you under tension . . . Harry Lowe called me a little while ago. He wants to sue the school, so maybe I’ll be talking to Jonathan myself.”

  “Good,” Joe said. He wanted someone with Kevin’s insight and intelligence to talk to the boy. “Maybe I can arrange for it this week.”

  “I’ll see. This might be one of those cases that I settle with a phone call.”

  “What did he say about Audra? How is she?”

  “Apparently she’s still having reactions. Hallucinating, talking about creatures on the school lawn, and . . .”

  “What? I can take it,” Joe said in anticipation.

  “Solomon. He’s in the hallucinations.” There was another long pause, and then Kevin added. “This is the main reason I called you, Joe. You’re liable to hear it one way or another. Stephani Lowe blames it on her going out with Jonathan, going back to your house, being with a boy about his age. She was babbling about all kinds of resemblances that Audra sees between Jonathan and Solomon, but from what Martha said last night . . .”

  “There are some similarities,” Joe said, and almost laughed after what he considered to be an understatement.

  “Stephani was wild on the phone. Harry couldn’t keep her off. I never heard anything so stupid. She was threatening to call you. You might want to say something to Martha and prepare her just in case she does make such a call. She’ll certainly tell her thoughts to other people. Stephani Lowe’s beside herself. Understandably, I suppose.”

  “Yes, it is understandable. Thanks for the warning, Kev.”

  “Unfortunate situation, all around. I’ll try to resolve the legal end of it as quickly as I can and get things back to normal. I’ll be in touch,” he said, and hung up.

  Joe went back to the living room and stared out the front window. Darkness was falling quickly now. The shadows were coming out of the forest to reclaim the road and the lawn. He could see the first stars appearing. When he looked at his watch, he saw that it was six-thirty. He was annoyed with Martha for not calling, but then he thought maybe they had gone to another shopping center and picked up a pizza. They would be home any moment, and the delay would be explained.

  He tried watching some news to keep his mind off the two of them, but when they didn’t appear by a quarter after seven, he gave up on the pizza theory. Altho
ugh he was aggravated, he was also hungry, so he went into the kitchen and made himself some eggs. He had just sat down to eat when Martha and Jonathan drove up the driveway. He heard the garage door open and close, and a moment later, he heard their excited voices and laughter.

  They were still laughing when they came in from the garage. Both of them were carrying bags, and both stopped immediately when they saw him. He sat back and lifted his hands in exasperation, palms upward.

  “What?” Martha said.

  “What? Where the hell have you been? That’s what.”

  “You knew where we went.”

  “Yeah, I knew you went to the mall, but you didn’t say anything about not coming home for supper.”

  “Jonathan and I decided to eat in that German restaurant.”

  “I waited and waited and finally made myself some eggs.”

  “I knew you could take care of yourself.”

  Jonathan started to laugh, but stopped and kept it at a wide smile. Joe blanched.

  “That’s not the point, Martha,” he said calmly. “You wouldn’t want me to do such a thing to you.” He looked pointedly at Jonathan and added, “And it’s not the kind of thing you’ve done in the past.”

  “Oh, my God. To carry on over something as insignificant . . .” She put her hand on Jonathan’s shoulder. “Go on up with the clothing and forget about showing it to him.”

  “Fine. I’m the one who’s wrong here,” Joe retorted. He looked down at his eggs, his appetite quickly dissipating. Jonathan moved quickly through the kitchen and to the stairs. Martha waited and then came to the table.

  “I had succeeded in getting him to forget the depressing time he had last night and this morning, and now you ruined it.”

  “I ruined it? And what do you mean, depressing time he had last night?” Martha stared at him for a moment.

  “He finally told me about Audra Lowe. There’s no question she gave herself the drugs.”