“What’s a pecker?”
“You know, your thing between your legs. If this dude is naked, you’d see his pecker.”
Jack Peter giggled and tilted his head at the image. “You mean his penis.”
“Whatever you want to call it. His is missing.”
Across the room, a window flew open, snapping as though spring-loaded, and the curtains unfurled like two flags. A gust of cold wind blew and scattered the loose pages onto the floor.
“What the heck was that?” Nick rose to close the window.
Jack Peter stopped him. “Wait, get those papers first. I’m not finished yet.” He was already busy drawing again.
Mr. Keenan strode into the room, his face red with anger. Hollering at the boys, he raced to shut the window, and he turned on Jack Peter, demanding to know why he was opening all the windows in the house and didn’t he realize the heat was on. But Jack Peter simply withdrew, tapping the pencil against the table. Nick had seen that gesture many times and knew that his friend was retreating deep into himself and would not be reached. Mr. Keenan kept hollering at them to tell the truth. When Jack Peter finally confessed that there was someone on the beach, his father did not believe him at first. He had to go to the window to see for himself, to press his hands and face against the glass, searching the shoreline for what had spooked his son. “What the hell is that?”
In a blur, he dressed in boots and an old winter coat and was out the door searching for what they thought they had seen. The boys watched as he stumbled across the sand and rocks, looking back once as if to ask them for directions or whether to go on, but it was too late, he was too far gone, and he disappeared into the midday nothing, and they were all alone in the empty house.
iv.
Trying to stem the pain, Holly pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead. Behind her a line of customers shifted impatiently in place, and the teenaged clerk at the counter waited for a credit card with indifference. Perhaps it was the fluorescent light or the incessant piped-in music or the hustle and bustle of the determined shoppers, each on their merry mission, unaware of the other people in the world, thank you, at least one of whom had a thwacking headache. She hated the mall, and at the moment she was not too fond of Christmas either.
The Rose Art Gift Set, with its sixty-four-piece assortment of premium-quality drawing components, included twenty-four colored pencils, eight watercolor pencils, oils, pastels, duo-tip markers, sharpener, eraser, and illustrated instructions, along with the sixty-sheet Deluxe Sketchbook, may have been overkill, for her son’s interests were often fleeting. There were scads of toys abandoned in his room, gathering dust on the shelves, archived in his old toy box. He’ll like it, she reassured herself, although she never knew with Jack from day to day what he liked, much less what he loved. If he loved.
Shopping bag in hand, she exited the store and threaded her way through the groups of gawkers wandering the faux boulevards. Knots of bored teenagers aimlessly passing another afternoon. Boys in football jackets, girls with wires twisting from their ears, everyone tapping messages to one another on their smart phones. Young husbands, helpless and clueless, searching for that perfect gift for their wives. Young mothers pushing strollers, their babies ordinary as could be. Children queuing for photographs with an ersatz Santa Claus. Holly lingered awhile before a shop window displaying ridiculously expensive women’s boots and wished she were twenty years old again. What different decisions she would make. Better shoes, not the least of them.
In the plate glass window, the reflection of her son appeared. Dressed in a winter coat and a watch cap, Jack was walking directly behind her, hand in hand with a tall blond woman in a long black coat and black boots with silver clasps. By the time Holly realized who she had seen and turned to find them, they had vanished. Sure that she had seen Jack, if only fleetingly, she looked up and down the long broad corridors. They had simply disappeared, though she was certain that the blonde would stand out in the crowd. Convinced that they must have gone into the bookshop directly opposite, she walked briskly to the entrance, whispering his name to herself.
The front of the bookstore was stuffed with tchotchkes, T-shirts printed with portraits of Shakespeare and Austen and Dickens, bookmarks and book lights, playing cards and lap desks, kitschy souvenirs of Maine. She hurried past the fiction and poetry, searching for the pair of them, her son and his kidnapper, and at last Holly spotted the blond woman in the black coat. Transfixed in the cookbook section, she held in her hand a fat book about cupcakes. Jack was missing from her side.
Holly hesitated, caught by the realization of just how illogical her request would seem. She cleared her throat, and the woman in black faced her with an inquisitive stare. Young, too young, to have a ten-year-old boy. Too innocent to have abducted him.
“So sorry to bother you,” Holly said, “but I saw you passing by in the window across the hall, and I thought…”
The blonde smiled at her, signaling to continue.
“I’m looking for my son,” Holly said. “He’s ten years old. A blue coat and watch cap?”
“Sorry, I haven’t seen any little boys. Is he lost?”
“Yes, no.” She clutched her bag and shouted at her, “Didn’t I just see you walk in here with a little boy?”
The blonde took two steps away and pretended to study the pages, casting a backward glance over the crazy woman behind her. Holly brushed past her and searched the rest of the store, scouring the children’s section, asking a bewildered clerk if he had seen a ten-year-old boy in the past few minutes. Wandering the maze of aisles, Holly saw not a single child, and when she passed the blonde with the cupcake book in line at the cashiers, she convinced herself that she had been mistaken. She had conjured a mirage. How could it be Jack? He never leaves the house.
The instant she walked out of the bookstore, Holly began hearing a tapping sound, thinking at first it was just the clack of her shoes on the linoleum, but it was a far steadier sound hidden in a melody piped over the sound system. The noise seemed natural at first, part of the song, but even when the tune changed, the rhythm persisted, so softly that she thought it must be a mistake, but then the drumming intensified into the following song. She looked around at the other shoppers to see if they could hear it, too, but they were anesthetized by the general bustle. In front of the soft-pretzel stand, she saw an older man in a trim white beard who reminded her of the actor who played Kris Kringle in that old black-and-white movie Miracle on 34th Street. “I believe, I believe, it’s silly but I believe,” she whispered to herself, “and if you can’t trust St. Nick, you can’t trust a soul.” She grabbed his arm and asked, “Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
She pointed to the ceiling in the direction of the speakers. “That knocking sound. It doesn’t go with the music.”
He tilted his head and cocked an ear to the ceiling and listened for a couple of measures. Laying a finger against his pursed lips, he contemplated his response with detached bemusement. “I’m sorry, but I don’t hear it.”
“No, no, listen. There, just beneath the piano, like someone’s rapping on a table.” She beat out the time on the glass counter of the pretzel stand. “A code. Don’t you hear it?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t hear any secret code.”
“You’re kidding me. Like a séance. Listen: tap-tap, tap-tap-tap.…”
The man shot out his free hand and grabbed her wrist until she let go of his arm. “Look, lady, there is no tapping, just the regular old Christmas songs. Do you want me to get you something? Water? Would you like to go somewhere and sit down?”
Holly backed away. The knocking followed her as she looked for the correct exit, the one nearest to where she had parked the car. Along the way, nobody else had noticed that the sound system had run amok, that a mad drummer boy played a steady and diabolical tattoo. She fought her way outside where the music stopped, and the drumbeat faded into the wind blowing across the parking lot. While sh
e could no longer hear it, Holly felt the throbbing pulse in her forehead. A green bench beckoned, and she sat on the cold metal and held her head in her hands, wanting nothing more than to get home and lie down in a darkened room till the pain went away. She closed her eyes and willed the ache to end.
She sensed the presence of another, a shadow hovering over her. “There you are,” a disembodied voice said. “I was hoping to catch you.”
Holly shielded her eyes with one hand and squinted at the man with the short white beard. She was alarmed to see him and thought at first that he had followed her to confess that he, too, had heard the strange tapping over the sound system, but he was holding up a bag that read Sharon’s Arts & Crafts. “You left this at the pretzel counter. I’m glad I was able to find you before you got away.” He set the bag beside her on the bench. “Are you okay?”
“Gifts for my son. He loves to draw. I don’t know how I could have forgotten him.”
He eased onto the empty spot on the bench and jumped a bit when his rump came in contact with the cold surface.
“He’s just so hard to shop for. My son. He’s ten, and you would think that a boy of ten might be the easiest child in the world, but he’s special needs, for one thing.” Her voice faltered and she choked back the urge to cry.
“And he never leaves the house.”
“I’m so sorry—”
She pressed her hand against his arm, trapping him. “Not unless we force him, of course, and there are times when we have to take him to the doctor’s or whatnot, but it’s like moving a prisoner.” She rocked back and forth on the bench, subconsciously imitating her son.
He flexed his bicep, hoping she would take the hint, but she tightened her grip. The man shifted in his seat, as though he could not decide how to gracefully flee.
“No, he was fine until a few years ago, as fine as a boy with his condition can be. On top of it he has this phobia, and it’s getting worse. Do you understand?”
Head on a spring, the man nodded.
“My big fear is that he’s never going to be normal … enough to mainstream. I mean, you know, what would happen to him when we aren’t around anymore?”
“It must be difficult.”
“Difficult? He’s missing this, the snow, the mad rush of the holidays, the whole wide world.” A tear escaped the corner of her eye, and her nose was about to run, when suddenly a sensation came over her, one she had not experienced since she was a child, and all at once a gush of blood sputtered from her nose. She raised her hand to cover and catch it, but the blood ran over her fingers. The man was reaching for his handkerchief, and she coughed, and another clot burst and ran down her chin. Before she realized it, her blood had spread across the white cloth in her hand, and the man with the beard had reached over and tilted her head back and was holding her still, his hand cupped along the base of her skull, and telling her that it will be all right, it will be all right.
“I’m so embarrassed.” Her voice was muffled by the fabric. “I used to get these all the time growing up, but it’s been ages.”
They sat together, quiet and still, and waited for the bleeding to stop. There were fine flecks of her blood in his beard.
“Funny, but here I am confessing all my sins, and I was just talking to a priest this morning.”
“People say I have a trusting face, but I think it’s just the beard.” He stood and leaned close to get a better look. “Maybe it’s stopping. Do you want to try to sit up?”
As she nodded, she felt the reassuring cradle of his hand lift her. He kept his fingers on the base of her neck while she steadied herself and daubed the wet mess beneath her nose and mouth. A red spray had speckled the sleeve of his jacket, and the handkerchief looked like a crimson flag. She touched her face with her fingertips to determine how far the stain had spread.
“Let’s get you to the ladies’ washroom where you can clean up proper.”
In the bathroom mirror, she was shocked by the red map on her face. One of Jack’s pictures gone awry, her eyes half-crazed with horror and the blood running nearly ear to ear and curling beneath her chin to the throat. She washed her face gingerly till all traces had disappeared, and as she was inspecting her reflection, she saw the word over her shoulder, scratched into the paint of one of the stalls. It was backwards and foreign and she could not make out what it spelled. Turning round, she read it clearly: “wicked.” Wicked, indeed, the wicked witch of the mall.
The first thing she saw when she left the bathroom was the gallant man holding up the shopping bag as a sign of his fidelity. A bright smile emerged from the forest of his beard. “Feeling better?”
“I’m so embarrassed, and you’ve been so kind.”
“No more nosebleed? No more spirits tapping under the table?”
“All better,” she said and held out her hand in gratitude. He hooked the handle of the bag over her wrist.
“Merry Christmas,” he said. “I hope your son enjoys his gifts.”
* * *
Low clouds bruised the late afternoon, and the sun kept disappearing, then reappearing as a faint halo on the misty sky. On the drive home, she delighted in the houses strung with bright lights, little beacons of cheer in the gloom. Along Mercy Point, she glimpsed a cargo ship far out at sea, its blinking lights sending off some melancholy signal, and she wondered if the captain and crew would make it home for the holidays, or if their turkey dinner would be a lonesome affair on the vast and wasteful ocean. Her thoughts drifted to the Porthleven and its doomed passengers. What terror it must have been for those poor souls taking on frigid water within sight of land.
The front rooms of the house were dark when Holly pulled into the driveway. Strange for Tim not to have lit the way for her, and by this late hour, he surely would have supper on the stove, but the place looked empty. She grabbed the bags from the passenger seat and hoped to sneak them past any prying eyes. Beneath the map light, she checked in the rearview mirror for any trace of blood on her face, and satisfied that she had removed all evidence, she stepped into the gloaming.
The front door swung open when she turned the knob, and she called out for her family and flipped on the lights. Nobody appeared. Tim should have heard her arrive, seen the car in the driveway, and Jack usually greeted her after she had been away all day. The room was cold and quiet. She left her coat and hat on the edge of the sofa and turned up the thermostat, the furnace blowers thumping, as though the house itself had been holding its breath for her. On the kitchen table were the remnants of a male bacchanal, dirty plates with pizza crusts, an open bin of pretzels, the peel of an orange curling upon itself. But no boy, no father. Where the hell were they?
Something pattered across the floor overhead, and she stuck her head into the stairwell to call for her son. Nick Weller appeared on the landing, followed by Jack, a wild grin on his face. Bounding down the steps in their hooded sweatshirts, they looked like trolls descending from the hills, and Jack nearly bowled her over. She circled her arms around his head and shoulders to return the embrace, but he pulled away at her touch. Beyond him, Nick stood on the stairs, watching.
“Nick, what a surprise.”
When he bowed his head, his hood concealed his eyes. “My mother dropped me off so they could go to my dad’s Christmas party. I guess they forgot me.”
Holly suddenly remembered the last-minute phone call the night before from Nell with an urgent request that they watch Nick. Not the first time they had left him late, but the boy before her was so penitent, abject really, that she sensed trouble far greater than his parents’ absentmindedness. “But where’s Mr. Keenan?”
“Gone,” Nick said.
“What do you mean gone? How long has he been gone?”
“I went out to look for him, but I couldn’t find him anywhere.”
Clamoring for attention, Jack stuck his face next to hers. “He chased it. He went outside and chased it.”
“Chased who? What are you talking about?”
; “He’s out there.” He pulled at her arm. “Daddy tried to catch it.”
“Jack, please—”
“The monster.”
She wriggled free from his grasp. “Nick, tell me what really happened. Where’s Mr. Keenan?”
“It’s true, Mrs. Keenan. He saw something out there on the rocks, by the ocean. And he wanted to get a closer look.”
“Mom, do you want to see my drawing of it?”
“Jack, honey, I have to listen to Nick, now—can you please be quiet, please?”
He did not like it when anyone raised their voice or reproached him, so Jack turned his back to her and faced the wall, but at this particular moment, she did not have any desire to consider his feelings. Nick was acting queer as well, shrinking into that ridiculous hood like a turtle retreating into its carapace. But she had no room for his feelings either, and she pressed the question by stepping closer so that she was nearly touching Nick. The boy’s face shone with perspiration and a dark red stripe of skin above his upper lip had been rubbed raw.
“When Mr. Keenan didn’t come back, I got worried. Not at first. We watched him go over the rocks, but then he vanished, and I didn’t know what to do.” He wiped his nose with the sleeve of his jacket.
“And what was he after?”
Nick moved to put himself between Jack and his mother. “I can’t tell what it was. Me and Jack watched him and then he never came back and then it just was later and later and Jack said he was hungry. I didn’t know if I was supposed to stay inside with him or if I should try helping Mr. Keenan, so I made him some lunch, but we got hungry and ate it. After, when he still didn’t come home, I thought maybe something bad happened out there, and I told Jack to stay here, and I went out—as far as the ocean and up to the highest rocks I could—but I never saw him, I’m sorry.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Maybe three or four hours.”
“Jesus,” she said and then covered her mouth with her fingers. A kind of paralysis came over her, and she could not decide whether it was wiser to search for her husband, flashlight in hand, or wait for him at home with the boys. Or perhaps she should call the police or the fire department, and what would she say, my husband ran out of the house and hasn’t come back for four hours? Darkness swallowed the last of the twilight, and she stared through the bay window as the land and sea lost shape. “Tim, Tim, Tim,” she whispered under her breath until his name became mere rhythm, the drum on her heart, and still he did not come. The sudden closing of a car door in the cold air gave her a moment of hope—he’s home—but it was only Fred and Nell come to fetch their son. They rolled into the house, slightly drunk and worn from the party. One look at her snapped them into sobriety.
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