Model Child_a psychological thriller

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Model Child_a psychological thriller Page 22

by R. C. Goodwin


  “No, Peter, I can’t. I need to know what happened here today. I need to see you face to face. I need to reassure myself that you’re okay.”

  Gottlieb tried the doorknob but the door barely budged. He didn’t understand—the bedrooms had no locks. Then he realized that his son had barricaded himself.

  “What did you put against the door?”

  “A chair. My desk.”

  “Peter, why are you doing this?” he asked, very quietly. His son made no reply.

  After a lengthy silence, Gottlieb sat on the floor, resting his large frame against the wall adjacent to the door. “Listen to me, Peter. I’m still here, and I’ll be staying here. I’ll be staying here

  all day. All night, if need be. I’m staying here until you let me in.”

  Again, no answer.

  “What time did you get home from Gordy’s? Things were okay before you left, at least they seemed to be. Did something happen there?”

  Still no answer, but Gottlieb thought he heard a muted sob, barely more than a whimper. “Whatever happened there this afternoon, whatever happened here, let’s talk about it like two reasonable human beings,” he went on. “Let’s talk about it, without a door between us.”

  His son maintained the same unyielding silence.

  Gottlieb fought against the swells of frustration that rose within him. He fought against the brief but powerful desire to break the door down, as in a TV cop show, which he could have done easily. Instead, he began to talk, to ramble.

  “All right, Peter. If you won’t talk to me, I’ll talk to you. You don’t have to answer, you don’t even have to listen, but I’ll keep on talking anyway. What to talk about, though? Let’s see . . . how about parenthood? Why not? As good a topic as any. All right, then, parenthood it is. What it’s like, what it’s meant to me. Let me try to sum it up for you, okay? I’ve had good and bad days in life, like everyone. A lot more good than bad ones, I’ve been luckier than most, but the two best days were the days that you and your sister were born. Nothing else compares with them. Not the day I graduated from medical school, not even the day I married your mother. Nothing else compares with them, and nothing ever will. You don’t know what that’s like, you can’t know, until you’re a parent yourself. All of a sudden there’s this astonishing new creature in your life, beautiful and innocent, and full of all the potential in the world. When you were born I felt fulfilled, in a way I’d never felt before. If I’d died on the spot, I would have considered my life a complete success. Your mother feels the same. We’ve talked about it.”

  He broke off as he heard the sounds of furniture being dragged across the floor. Peter opened the door slowly. His father, unprepared for what he saw, tried not to gasp. Peter’s eyes were red, and the sallow skin below them was swollen as if he’d been pummeled. His curly black hair was matted. Both forearms showed deep scratches, long parallel lines, which he’d made with his dirty fingernails. His only clothing: baggy, unkempt boxer shorts. It looked as though he’d worn them two or three days running.

  But Peter himself was in splendid shape compared to his room. Dirty clothes lay all over the floor, on top of the unmade bed and on top of the bookcase. The bookcase itself was now devoid of books. Peter had hurled them in all directions. The debris was punctuated by empty yogurt cartons, empty bags of potato chips, the core of an apple, the rind of an orange. The room had an indefinably rank smell to it. The smell of sweat and semen, of dirty clothes and rotting food, and, incongruously, the antiseptic aroma of a disinfectant spray.

  Gottlieb moved gingerly towards his son, but the boy retreated, waving him off with a brusque nod. He changed course, cleared a pile of underwear and pajama bottoms from the desk chair, and sat down. Peter, meanwhile, sat on the bed, his arms wrapped around his knees.

  “I’m glad you let me in.”

  Peter said nothing, but he uttered a small low grunt.

  “Feel like talking about what happened today?”

  Peter shook his head no, his eyes fixed to the floor.

  “Just tell me this. Did something happen at Gordy’s?”

  He didn’t answer, didn’t even shake his head this time, but his eyes welled up.

  Gottlieb tried to convey a casualness he didn’t feel at all. “Well, maybe you’ll feel like talking about it later.” He shut his eyes, trying to think clearly and dispassionately, trying to rid his mind of the room’s bad aura. Trying to find a way to break through the wall his son had built around himself. Then he recalled his conversation with Dr. Pasternak.

  “Yesterday I saw an old friend, a man I haven’t seen for many years. We talked about . . . oh, about a number of things. One of the things we talked about was you. I told him how much I was worried about you. Not only worried but stymied. I told him I had no idea how to reach you now, and no idea of what you wanted. My friend asked an interesting question. He asked me what I wanted when I had been your age.”

  Peter’s eyes rose from the floor. For the first time, he looked at his father directly. “What did you tell him?”

  “Above all else, I wanted not to feel so different.” He recounted as much of the conversation as he could.

  Peter listened closely, once in a while leaning slightly towards him. “You felt that way too?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “But at least you knew what you wanted to do. I remember, you told me once that you wanted to be a doctor from almost as far back as you could remember.”

  “Yes, I did, but so what?” He crossed his legs as he sat in the narrow desk chair. “You can know what you want to do but still feel as though you don’t fit in. Worse than that, you can

  feel you never will.”

  Out of nowhere: “I hate him! God, I hate his goddamn guts! I wish he’d get hit by a car or get brain cancer!”

  “Gordy?”

  Peter nodded.

  Gottlieb drew in his breath. “Tell me about what happened.”

  Peter squeezed his eyes shut tight, as if the faintest ray of light would make it impossible for him to tell the story. He looked as though he had to steel himself before launching into it, as though it took his every bit of will. “His parents went out,” he began slowly. “They went to see his grandparents. His sister was out too. So we had the house to ourselves. At first it was okay. We listened to some new CDs he got, we sat around talking. And then . . . do you remember what I told you about the mall last week? Remember what I told you about those girls?”

  “Yes. Go on.”

  “He called one of them. Deirdre. Asked her to come over. She’s older than we are. She got her license this summer. She’s got a car, so she can come and go as she pleases. So, good old Deirdre came over. The three of us talked. It was obvious they didn’t care about me, like at the mall, but they tried to be polite. For a while, at least. And then—” Peter buried his face in his hands, his voice so muffled that his father could barely understand him. “I don’t wanna talk about this anymore.”

  Gottlieb pushed ahead, with quiet relentlessness. “They tried to be polite,” he recounted. “And then?”

  Peter shut his eyes again. “And then they started to fool around. They were on the sofa in the family room, wrapped around each other. They were kissing, and then he began to feel her up, and then she had her hand inside his pants. They didn’t care that I was there. I didn’t want to watch, but I couldn’t help it. Maybe they liked my watching, in fact I think they did. It was like they were putting on a show. So finally . . . so finally Gordy said they’ll be gone for a while, they were going to the bedroom. They both had these big shit-eating grins on their faces. Gordy’s bedroom is right next to the family room. I heard the whole thing, heard her giggle, heard them groan and moan, heard the bed shake and the springs creak. Once she said, ‘Shh, Peter’s right outside.’ He said, ‘That’s okay, he’ll enjoy it, he’ll get his rocks off.’ And that’s what I did, that’s exactly what I did. I got my rocks off, standing outside the bedroom door with my dick in my hand. Hatin
g them, but hating myself even more, feeling like this fat ugly fly on the wall, getting my rocks off while they fucked. Oh, God, Dad—”

  He began to cry, to sob. Gottlieb went over to him, and this time Peter didn’t pull away. He buried his head against his father’s shoulder. Gottlieb said nothing, did nothing, except for patting the back of Peter’s neck with his large hands as his son’s tears soaked his shirt and undershirt. The torrent of tears gave way to a torrent of words.

  “I’m fat and ugly, I’m such a goddamn geek . . . no woman’s ever gonna look twice at me, I’ll still be jerking off when I’m forty. I’ll never get a girl like Deirdre with her blonde curls and freckles and her perfect tits, and I wouldn’t know what to do with her anyway, I’d just fuck it up, the way I fuck up everything. I am the biggest waste of time who ever lived . . . so they finished, FINALLY, and they came back out to the family room, and the three of us went on talking, like nothing happened, except every so often they’d smile at each other, pat each other’s leg and things like that. GOD, I hate them, I don’t know which of them I hate more . . . I didn’t know it was possible to hate someone so much! If I had a gun, I really think I might have shot them . . . and then Deirdre gave me a ride home, and the whole time she had this smug little smile across her face, and she’d hum to herself, but of course she didn’t talk to me because she thinks I’m not worth talking to, which is probably the case . . . and then Mom said something totally innocent, like did I have a good time there. That did it . . . I went off on her, I ran up to my room, and I wouldn’t let her come in, and I wouldn’t come out, and I wouldn’t tell her why, because I couldn’t. It wasn’t her fault, I knew that. I’m not completely stupid, but it didn’t matter. She was the only one I could take it out on. Wrecking the room made me feel better, I don’t know why . . . it just did, and I felt better when I scratched myself. It hurt, and the pain took my mind off the other thing . . .”

  When he finished, he pulled himself away from his father’s embrace. With a dull thud, he set himself down in the middle of the floor, clearing a spot for himself with a wave of his hand, amidst the books and dank clothes and remains of food. He sat with his hands around his knees, staring blankly straight ahead.

  “This has been the most awful, most miserable day of my life,” he brought the story to a close. “I wish I could crawl into a hole and die.”

  Gottlieb sat on a corner of the bed, on top of a heap of crumpled sheets and blankets. “I have only three things to tell you, Peter. First, I think I understand how bad you feel now, more than you imagine. There were points when I felt as terrible as you do now. I didn’t think I’d survive them. I didn’t care if I survived them. In fact I didn’t want to, but I did. Second, in time what happened today will become a very dim and distant memory. It will become no more painful or important than a bad dream you once had, or a toothache you vaguely remember. I know you don’t believe me, but it’s true. Third, I still love you very much. So does your mother.”

  “She hates me!” broke in Peter. “I don’t blame her. I said some pretty awful things to her.”

  “She’s smart enough to know you didn’t mean them.” Gottlieb said this with more conviction than he felt.

  “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered noncommittally. “She was driving off just as Sarah and I were coming home.”

  “Listen, Dad, I know it’s a lot to ask of you, but could you please not tell her about Gordy and Deirdre and me? About

  what happened there?”

  His father considered. “All right. I guess she doesn’t have to know everything we talk about, any more than I have to know everything that you and she talk about.”

  Peter didn’t say thanks out loud, but his lips formed the word, unmistakably.

  “I have a proposal for you,” Gottlieb said. “I’ll help you clean up here if you’ll let me.”

  “It’s not your mess. Why should you?”

  “Because no one should have to live this way. Because it’s a two-man job.”

  Peter glanced around the room. “It’s so bad, I don’t know where to start.”

  “We’ll start by getting laundry baskets from the basement and some trash bags from the kitchen. I’ll do that while you bring up the vacuum cleaner. It was in the downstairs hall closet the last time I saw it.”

  They spent the next two hours putting books back on shelves, filling plastic trash bags, vacuuming, and doing laundry; they even used furniture polish on the desk and bureau and cleaned the windows. Gottlieb went down to check on Sarah once. She’d fallen asleep in front of the television. Later, he and Peter ate leftover pizza. Those were their only interruptions. By the time Sharon came home, they were nearly finished.

  She stood in the doorway. Her jaw dropped when she beheld the clean neat room with its freshly made bed, its books back on the shelves, its spotless floor visible for the first time in months. Her jaw dropped further when Peter came over to her and kissed her on the cheek.

  “I’m sorry, Mom. I didn’t mean those things I said.”

  CHAPTER XXI.

  A T NINE FIFTEEN ON MONDAY MORNING, as James Shannon sat opposite him, Gottlieb was struck by how much his patient had aged since he’d come to GCFI. His hair was grayer; the lines etched around his eyes had deepened. His mustache, trim and shiny when they’d met, appeared unkempt and dull. He’d lost weight, especially in the face, and his depleted jowls gave him a hangdog look. You’d think that he’d been here for years instead of months, thought Gottlieb. By Christmas he’ll look like an old man.

  “The last time we met, I was short with you,” Shannon opened. “Our parents tried to drum it into us that there was never cause for rudeness,” he went on. “Especially our mother. She was close to eighty when she died and I don’t recall her being rude to anyone, not once.”

  “Confinement doesn’t help our manners.”

  “I suppose not.” He paused distractedly. “We did our best to teach Christina manners. Our one success with her. Unfailingly polite she was, I’ll give her that.”

  Gottlieb sought to keep the focus on her. “Your one success with her. There weren’t others?”

  “None.” Shannon spoke with the certainty of an Old Testament prophet.

  “I wonder if other people would agree with that. People who knew her, who knew the family.”

  Shannon shrugged. “That’s not important, is it? Even if she fooled the entire world with her model child act, so what?”

  “How do you think others regarded her?”

  He rubbed his temples, as if trying to recall the very distant past. “I suppose they were impressed with her. At least at first. Understandably—she was smart enough, and pretty and polite. Who wouldn’t be impressed by that? The good impression never lasted, though.” He broke off the narrative, as if he were too exhausted to continue.

  “Go on.”

  “Of course people never told us they disliked her, not directly. We were her parents after all, so they pulled their punches. But they managed to get the point across. When we went to her school for parent-teacher conferences, the teachers always had those fake stiff smiles. Awkward, kind of pained. You could tell they’d rather not be talking to us.”

  “What kinds of things did they say about her?”

  Shannon put his hands together in his customary prayerful fashion. “They said she was a diligent worker, they agreed on that, but they all said she needed to work on her social skills. A nice way of telling us that she didn’t get along with other children. It’s interesting. She didn’t not get along with them. It’s not that she got into fights and such. It’s more that she was unmindful of them. One teacher used just those words. Unmindful of them.”

  He went on to give a more detailed account of how she did in school. Of teachers who praised her clear, precise handwriting, and her invariably neat homework, invariably turned in on time (she’d never asked for an extension). Of her methodical if superficial book reports. Of her quiet demeanor in the
classroom and her perfect attendance. The faint praise was offset by comments about her aloof nature, her coldness, her intolerance of criticism. And every teacher brought up her dislike and indifference towards any group activity or effort. She’s just not a team player, one of them had summed it up. “The biggest understatement I ever heard,” said her father in a rare display of hyperbole.

  “By the way,” said Gottlieb casually as he could, “since we’re talking about how others reacted to her, I should tell you that I had a conversation with one of the women who knew her

  at Green Lake Camp.” Shannon said nothing but he arched his eyebrows, almost imperceptibly. “A woman named Anita Pierce,” Gottlieb went on. “The camp director. You never met her, but I believe you spoke with her on the phone.”

  Shannon looked annoyed. “Now why did you have to go bothering her?”

  “Because I needed to learn more about your daughter, in order to learn more about you.”

  The annoyance passed. “Well, I hope you had better luck than we did. When Margaret and I spoke with them, right after they decided to send her home, they weren’t one bit helpful.”

  “What did they tell you?”

  Shannon sighed. “I thought we went through all this before. They said she couldn’t adjust to life at camp, but they were vague on the particulars. That she kept herself apart from other girls. That she was homesick. I might have told that already, I can’t remember. In any case, we knew that was a load of hogwash. Not the homesick type, Christina.”

  “There was more to it than what they told you.”

  “Like what?” Shannon’s tone remained the same, but Gottlieb sensed that he was listening raptly.

  “They suspected Christina’s involvement in a number of strange occurrences. Instances of petty theft. Doing damage to a garden plot, hurting animals in a petting zoo.” He gave a summary of what he’d learned from the former camp director.

  “I should add that this is all conjecture,” concluded Gottlieb. “No one ever proved she did those things.”

 

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