“We came to Maine because of Tim. When we were first married, I would have followed him anywhere. It was his dream to come north, find a nice place on the ocean, settle down, and raise a family. His soul, he says, finds its natural rhythm in the tides. He was out of the service and thought he could go back to college here. Study the sea. And I had a postcard view of life, the boats in the harbor, lobster in the summertime, and the light in late September. We were happy here at first, and it seemed that the next part of the dream would come along right away. We’d start making babies, little water nymphs, and set them outside in the sunshine and clean air and salt water and watch them grow big and strong and healthy.”
Miss Tiramaku shifted in her chair, and Holly wondered if her story was hitting a sore spot with her.
“We couldn’t get pregnant for a long time, and I hope you don’t mind, Father, but we tried everything in every conceivable way.…” She blushed at her accidental word. “I don’t mind saying that I even prayed for a child. Hope had all but run dry, and then a small miracle. Pregnant at last, and those first few months I was expecting, I was deliriously happy. And then I found out what happened between Nell and Tim right before I got pregnant.”
“And who is this Nell?” Father Bolden asked.
“She was my best friend. Is. She and Fred invited us over at the end of the summer, and it was nothing really, an indiscretion. We had been drinking, all of us, and they ended up in bed together.”
The priest shoved the strudel in his mouth. “Did your husband confess?”
“He never said a word, but she told me, eventually. Months later. Look, if we hadn’t both been pregnant … I’m over it,” Holly said. “Moved on, and our babies coming together made it easier to forgive and forget. Or forget, at least. Though I’m not so sure about Nell. Maybe she brings Nicholas over so much because she still feels guilty.”
“Nell is Nicholas’s mother?” Miss Tiramaku asked.
Holly nodded and continued her story. “Look, I had a baby growing inside of me, I was so sure it was a girl, and I dreamed of seeing her, holding her, dressing her the way I used to with my baby dolls when I was little.
“Just as my belly was getting big enough to make it seem real, my anxieties took over. Something wrong with the baby. I dreamt it was a fish thrashing around inside, pulled by the tides. So many premonitions and omens. Just hormones and unbridled intuition. But who could I tell those to? Not Tim, surely, because he was just elated, and this baby was the missing piece that would make us happy.”
To calm her nerves, Holly took a sip of coffee. “There was Nell, but she had her own pregnancy to think about, so our problems simmered just below the surface. I just spent the last weeks afraid that the baby would not be what I thought it should be. When Jack was born, he was such a beautiful boy, it went out of mind. Until, of course, I saw the infants together over time. Nell’s son, Nicholas, was so different. Where Jack was quiet, almost eerily calm, Nicholas was fussy but animated and curious. And even though they say it’s best not to compare, what mother can resist to some degree? Especially when it begins to sink in that there’s something missing, something odd about your child.”
She stopped herself. Her eyes began to water, and she knew she would cry if she went on talking, and she did not want to cry, told herself that she should not. The room went quiet except for the murmur of snow falling against the windows. Father Bolden leaned back in his chair, looking older than his years. “God often gives us burdens as a reminder of the call to sacrifice.”
“Please,” Holly said. “I would trade that sacrifice to have a normal life for my son. There’s no sanctity in the suffering of a child.”
“I only meant—”
Miss Tiramaku interrupted him. “He did not mean to diminish what you’ve been through.”
“My apologies,” she said. “It’s just that people sometimes want to ennoble his condition and struggles, and I would give anything, trade anything, do anything for him to be … ordinary.”
“I meant no harm,” the priest said.
“Tell us how he developed his phobia of the outdoors,” Miss Tiramaku said. “What happened that day on the beach?”
“When he was seven, Jack nearly drowned. It was the end of summer, a last day on the beach. Jack and Nick were sitting in the wet sand, just on the edge. The incoming waves were lapping along the shore and wetting their legs and swimming trunks. What could go wrong? It was a bright blue August, a few clouds in the sky. I was reading a novel, an old favorite du Maurier, and looked up from the book and saw that they weren’t there anymore. And then I saw Tim racing, kicking up sand, and behind him Nell. Fred was just standing there, dazed in the sunshine, and I knew at once that the boys were under the water. We weren’t keeping watch like we should, and I thought the boys were gone. I was paralyzed and couldn’t move to save them.”
“You were afraid,” Father Bolden said.
“No. I wanted to help, that was my first reaction, my instinct, but almost immediately I was, I don’t know, relieved that they were gone. Like an act of God was taking them. It was a horrible sensation. It lasted just an instant, but I blame myself for having wished him away.”
She stopped suddenly and caught her breath. “I’ve never confessed before, but I’m sorry, so sorry. I raced across the beach, guilty, guilty, and they had reached them and were pulling them up from the bottom. Jack was alive, sputtering and coughing, but we couldn’t find Nick until my husband pulled him from the sea. We all thought Nick was dead, pale and blue and had swallowed the ocean. Jack stared at him, intently, blankly, like he sometimes does, lost in his mind. And then when Tim pressed on Nick’s chest, out shot a stream of water. He gasped and came back to us. But they were never the same.”
For a second time, she stopped herself on the verge of tears, and she pushed away from the table, turning from the gaze of the priest and the housekeeper. Through the window, she could see the snow shaken from the sky in steady waves. “Look at it coming down. I should have taken the Jeep. I should go before I get stuck.”
“I could run you home,” the priest said.
“Oh, no, Father. My husband can pick me up, if you don’t mind me leaving my car in your parking lot. He can bring me back to retrieve it when the roads are clear.” She began rummaging in her purse for her phone.
“Of course not,” he said. “But it would be no bother.”
“No, no. Just point me to the phone. I seem to have lost my cell again.”
On the tenth ring, someone answered the call, and she knew at once that it must be Jack by the resounding silence on the other end. She kept explaining where she was, and he kept dropping the phone to the floor. Each time, she turned to her companions with a look of bemused exasperation. She couldn’t imagine why Tim had left him all alone in the house.
“He’s done it again,” she said. “Everything is so literal with that boy, gone to fetch a pencil I suppose. Jack, Jack, are you there?”
They finished their conversation, and when she was reasonably sure he had taken down the message, she hung up.
“He said the most curious thing. He said I was a good mother.”
Miss Tiramaku put her hand on Holly’s shoulder and led her back to the table. “He’s right, you know. You are a good mother.”
“Sometimes I wonder,” said Holly.
With a brief smile, Miss Tiramaku forgave the self-deprecation. “Your husband is on the way?”
“He will be as soon as he comes back inside.” Holly returned her smile. “According to Jack, he’s out chasing monsters again.”
iv.
The wipers beat furiously against the glass, and through the nearly impenetrable wall of white, Tim inched along, feeling his way through the storm. He worried about getting to the church a few miles away, and he worried that he would not be able to make it back home to the boys. As usual, Jip balked about going outside, and Tim was in no mood for protracted negotiations, not after he learned how long Holly had been w
aiting and how his son had completely forgotten to give him the message. Out on Shore Road, he was glad he had decided to leave the boys behind. Even if it meant they would be alone, at least they would be safe.
“Don’t leave the house,” he had told them. He did not want Nick outdoors tracking the invisible man. “Not for anything, Nick. If there’s some problem, call the Quigleys across the road, and they’ll help you, and I wrote down the numbers for the police and for Star of the Sea right by the telephone. In this storm, it’ll take a while to get there and back, but I don’t want you to worry. I’ve driven through worse.”
“Take me with you,” Nick pleaded. “Don’t leave me alone with him.”
Jip locked his fingers around Nick’s wrist.
“Listen boys, you’ll be all right as long as you stick together.” The boy looked heart stricken, and Tim reassured him with a quick hug. “Don’t worry, you’re safe inside.”
“I want to go,” Nick said.
“All right, son, that’s enough. If for some reason we’re not home before dark, make yourselves supper. I’ll call in any case before we head on home, just to check in.”
The last he saw of them, Jip was lost in yet another drawing. Nick escorted Tim to the front door. “Be a good boy, son. And take care of things. Watch after Jip. I’ll be back in a jiff.”
Some jiffy, he thought to himself. The snow poured from the heavens. He wouldn’t be surprised if a foot had fallen already. There were no other cars on the road, and though the county had plowed once earlier that afternoon, he still found himself searching for tire treads to follow. Round the bend at Mercy Point, he saw it again.
The figure crossed right in front of him. Had he been driving at normal speed, Tim would have run over the man. He could barely make out that there was a man at all, only the outline of his limbs, and the dark mane and beard discernible through the scrim. As Tim drew near, he could see that the man was deliberately standing in the road, a mad look of terror on his face as they locked eyes, provoking a confrontation. Stamping on the brakes, Tim felt the Jeep skid sharply to the right, and forgetting all he had been taught, he tried to steer against the slide but wound up fishtailing and lodging the back wheels between the road and an embankment.
“Shit,” he said when the car lurched to a stop. Clutching the steering wheel, he sat in the car for a moment, hoping his heart would quit that awful pounding. He looked through the windshield, but the creature was gone.
Shaken, he stepped out into the storm and hollered at the place the man had been, but there was no reply, and he really hadn’t expected one. In the cold and wet, he walked around to the rear and saw that the bumper on the passenger’s side had plowed deep, and he could not tell if it was jammed against the earth or simply wedged into a snowbank. If he tried to power his way out of the drift, he ran the risk of sinking deeper without any traction. The Jeep was usually a hog in the dirt and mud, but he’d been stuck before when he’d gone off-roading and couldn’t figure the escape angle. Caked in snow, he studied the situation and then got back in, convinced he could rock backward and wiggle his way free. Otherwise he’d have to hope to raise a cell signal in the storm and wait on a plow or the police for help.
“What the hell is that thing?” He sat behind the wheel considering possibilities, some crazed loon escaped from the nuthouse now wandering out to sea. Or worse, a ghost from Holly’s ship. Whatever it was, that thing was as big as a man, that much he knew for sure. “White dog, my ass,” he muttered and popped the car into reverse as he stepped on the gas. For a brief moment, the Jeep responded as he had hoped, swaying backward, and he could sense the treads dig and catch hold, but he shifted too slowly into drive, and the wheels simply fell back in place and spun a deeper rut. He was stuck. He beat on the steering wheel and mashed the horn, but it only made him feel foolish.
* * *
The blare of the car horn sliced through the quiet landscape, and even inside the house, the boys could hear it bleat like a lost sheep. The second sound was just as forlorn, the wailing of a man, and Nick wondered how the car sounded so far away, yet the man sounded so near. He imagined Mr. Keenan crashed on the road, his head striking the steering wheel, and he speculated, if that was so, when help might arrive and how long he would be trapped alone in the house with Jack Peter. The monster boy, the boy monster. He had gone mad these past few days, possessed by some spirit that had him drawing, drawing, drawing all the time. Even now, when they had the run of the place, Jack Peter scribbled at the table, oblivious to everything but his work.
Restless, and anxious about the tracks in the snow, Nick pestered Jack Peter for attention. “Let’s do something. Instead of sitting around all day. This is worse than school.”
“Let me finish. Leave me alone.” He looked up from his work, malice in his eyes. “Do you want them to send me away?”
Nick hated him. He felt nothing but anger and resentment for him. Stupid, why did he have to be so stupid? Why couldn’t he be normal, same as everyone else, and just get off his butt and play or fight or talk or throw a ball or break something or go outside? Stuck in the house in a glorious snowstorm with a lunatic. He wanted to smash his face. He wanted to sit on his chest and make him cry. Instead Nick just left him at the kitchen table and went wandering through the house.
He toured the downstairs rooms, picking up knickknacks on the tables and reading the titles of the books in the living room library. Toying with the idea of watching TV, he remembered that only soap operas and cooking shows and programs for little kids were on at this time on a weekday afternoon. He pawed through the mail in the basket by the front door. He thought of his parents out on the ocean in the warm sunshine. Stupid parents. They should come get him from this madhouse. Circling round Jack Peter, still concentrating on the details of his stupid drawing, he made his way up the stairs and headed for Mr. and Mrs. Keenan’s room.
The inner sanctum. He had never been in their room without an adult present, and his solitude made him feel like a spy. Behind the door, their robes hung side by side, and he remembered Mrs. Keenan in the nightgown, the spill of her breasts. The bed was neatly made, so he was careful when he got in it, wondering which side was whose, and then he inhaled deeply on the pillows trying to catch their scent. Nothing, so he eased his way off and straightened the covers. In the dresser drawers, all the clothes were folded and sharply stacked, but he hesitated to open the closets, suddenly afraid of what might be lurking behind the door. The shadowy dimness of the space gave him the creeps, and he was about to leave when he noticed a white corner of a piece of paper peeking out from beneath the rug.
Squatting on his haunches, he peeled back the edge and found one of Jack Peter’s pictures lying on the floor, but he could not make out the details, so he took the page to the window and held it at an angle to catch the available light. Two boys, half-dressed and floating beneath a wavy line, were locked together, wrestling, surrounded by fish and a ragged-clawed lobster on the sand. One boy pushed down on the other’s head while the other boy had his arm round his attacker’s shoulder to drag him to the bottom of the sea. The boys were mirrors to each other, a self-portrait fighting with itself.
He did not know what to make of the picture or why Jack Peter had hidden it there, a clue to a crime committed over three years ago. While Jack Peter clearly remembered the drowning, he had never said a word about it in all this time. Nick set the drawing on the bed and rolled back the rug until it butted against the bedframe. On the floor lay four more sheets of paper, stashed like treasure maps. Four variations on a theme, the underwater wrestlers in different poses, but in each case, twin battled twin. He laid them out upon the bed like pages in a murdered and dismembered book, trying to make sense of the story.
He searched for more. In the linen closet in the hallway, beneath a stack of bedsheets, he discovered two pictures: the naked wild man crouched on a rock overlooking the ocean, and the white dog sprinting after someone who was indicated by part of one leg and a fo
ot, the rest of the person escaping the edge of the page. He left them on the hallway floor by the closet door and then investigated Jack Peter’s room.
Drawings had been hidden everywhere.
Another half dozen under his rug, a sheaf of papers tucked beneath the mattress, a batch in the dark cavern under the bed, and still more tucked in the leaves of books. Nick pried open the desk drawer crammed with page after page. It was madness. Hundreds of drawings, page after page after page. All the monsters on sheets torn from the sketch pad, crowding into notebooks, dashed off on scrap paper. Many showed the creature that prowled outside in the woods, by the sea, a wretched haunting thing. He gathered the drawings in a giant pile and spread them out, covering the entire bedspread, thick as snowfall. The pages spilled to the floor. Babies and bodies and bones from the sea. The sight of the pictures quickened his pulse and strained his breathing. His temples throbbed. Glimpsing himself in the mirror, he was shocked by how pale his skin had become and the dark circles under his eyes. Just like an inside boy. Feeling ill, Nick knelt on the floor by the bed and bowed his head to rest in a mountain of drawings. Jack Peter must be stopped.
The wind shifted outside and gathered speed, throwing the snow fine as grit against the windows. The storm made a constant roar, like the ocean in a seashell, but underneath that sound was a human cry, bitter and constant, as if some poor soul was keening. Nick rose from the floor and surveyed the hurricane of papers in the room. Leave it, he thought. When Mr. and Mrs. Keenan come back they will see the mess and realize how far their child has spun out of control. He wanted them to know and in knowing, do something about the problem. At the very least, they could rescue Nick, put him somewhere safe until his parents returned to claim him and take him away from such raw mayhem. He missed his mother and father and wanted to go home. Nearby, the voice outside roared again, pleading and insistent.
The Boy Who Drew Monsters Page 24