HEX (28 page)

“The creek's been back to normal for two days now,” Steve said. “And there's no indication that things are any different than they were before, or that the horses are in any kind of danger.”

“Unless a certain person forgets to shut the stable door,” Matt remarked. He seemed shocked by his own comment, but it was too late: Jocelyn's expression changed into a mask of offended distress.

Steve was taken aback. “What kind of goddamn presumptuousness is that!” he exclaimed.

“Well, it's true, isn't it? Gramma can't use her hands, and Fletcher didn't unbolt his kennel by himself, you know!”

“We don't know how Fletcher got out. But if your mom says she bolted the kennel, you have no right to doubt her. I want you to apologize.”

“I'm not going to apologize for something that—”

“Apologize!”

Matt slammed his book on the floor and jumped up from the table. “I'm sorry, all right? Sorry you guys can't take it if somebody speaks the truth for once!”

“Matt!”

But he had already run upstairs and slammed his bedroom door. Steve was aghast. He looked at Jocelyn in the pale four o'clock light, but she lowered her eyes. “Well done,” she sighed.

“You should have said something yourself, then,” Steve snapped, nastier than he had intended. He understood that Matt's irrational outburst was just his way of dealing with his grief, but it made Steve angry nonetheless. He didn't know how to deal with Matt's mood swings, especially when he got downright mean. Jocelyn was better at it. One of the things that had always held their marriage together in the Black Spring whirlwind was the natural division of roles they had settled into within the family, from which they rarely deviated. It created context and order in an environment where turmoil was all too common. And when it came to matters of the heart, reason was a virtue. One of the aspects of that role division was that Jocelyn took care of Matt while Steve was responsible for Tyler. It wasn't entirely black-and-white, of course, but that's what both of them—all four of them—knew to be true.

“I don't mean just Matt,” Jocelyn said. “It's affecting both of them. Tyler hasn't come out of his room for days. This is going to leave scars, Steve.” She gestured angrily at the waning daylight. “There's something out there that killed our dog, and there's nothing we can do about it.”

“To be honest, Matt's reaction seems like a perfectly natural expression of grief to me. Crude and unreasonable, but normal. His grief is seeking an outlet, and he's not fighting it. He wants to blame people. He'll come back and apologize, I'm sure.”

“That's not the point. You're trivializing the situation. Fletcher gets buried. Fine. We buy a new table, we get everything nicely painted, we make like none of it ever happened. But it did, and you see the traces right there in front of you.”

She pointed at the dark tiles that had the dents of Paladin's hooves hammered into them. Steve stared at her and sighed calmly in an effort to salvage the situation. “What surprises
me
is that Matt got so worked up about the fact that we didn't offer anything up at the festival. Remember how he went on about it on Saturday? We didn't offer anything, so it's our fault that Fletcher is dead. I hoped we had given Tyler and Matt a bit more reason than that. He almost sounded like the people from town.”

“What do you expect?” Jocelyn exclaimed. “What the hell does he know? Maybe that
did
cause it, maybe it
is
our fault. Are you trying to say that isn't a natural reaction?”

“Jocelyn,” he said, “you're talking nonsense.”

“Not at all. I'm not saying that's how it happened; I'm just saying that we don't know how Fletcher ended up in that tree. And we'll never know.
That's
why Matt is scared, Steve. And Tyler … have you even sat down and talked to Tyler in the past few days? Aren't you worried about how he's
distancing
himself from everything?”

“I did ask him about it.”

“That's not the same as talking.”

“Sweetheart, he prefers to solve his problems himself, now. That, too, is perfectly normal for his age.”

“Nothing's normal here. This town is bewitched, Steve. And it's not just Katherine. It's everything, it's the sounds we hear at night and it's that creek behind our house that was full of blood for three days—
blood,
do you realize that? And it's the people. Do you really believe this won't have a lasting influence on the children? Or on us?”

He looked at her, nonplussed. “Jocelyn, I'm not pretending it never happened. I'm just trying to preserve the peace. That's the only reasonable way to deal with this. Just like we've always done.”

She was standing directly across from him now, and she was hopping mad. “But everything's changed now, don't you get that? We've lived here in relative peace for eighteen years and we could stand it because we weren't in any immediate danger. But now Fletcher's dead, so don't you say we're not in danger, Steve! Don't you dare say that!”

“It seems like everything's back to normal, and—”

“Nothing's back to normal, and I don't want you to pretend it is! It's your fault that we…”

She didn't finish her sentence, but she didn't have to.
So there we have it,
he thought. The sly dig, the final argument to chasten Steve when all others had failed, because no matter how much time had passed, this was still what could strike him at the core. He knew what Jocelyn had wanted to say:
It's your fault that we live here, so
you
do something about it.
Steve felt shaken, as if he had bumped into an invisible pane of glass. Was this still the issue? How was it possible to live together in perfect harmony for years and years, only for something like this to come barreling out of the blue and put them in a zone of full-fledged alienation? Boulders or no boulders, it was for Steve's career that they had moved to Black Spring, while Jocelyn had given up her own. The old wound had lain buried for more than fifteen years—
In a hole in the backyard, just like Fletcher,
he thought absentmindedly. But sometimes what lay buried came back … because buried wasn't always
buried.

She read the indignation in his face and touched his arm, but he pulled away and grabbed her wrist. “Just remember,” he said, “that
I
was the one who argued against having a second baby. If you aren't pleased with the way they've grown up, think about the fact that you could have avoided half of it.”

Of course that wasn't fair; of course he shouldn't have said it. Jocelyn's lips quivered, then she tore away from him and went to the kitchen without saying a word. Steve was left behind in the dining room, which felt more abandoned than ever.

Christ, how could I have thought that everything was all right?
he said to himself.
Katherine, what on earth have you done to our family?

From the kitchen came a stifled cry, then the rattling of the baking sheet in the oven. Soon the smell of burned pastry filled the room. Steve closed his eyes as Jocelyn noisily shook the failed quiche into the trash can and let the pie plate clatter into the sink. Her face stained with tears, she pushed by him and went upstairs. Steve entered the kitchen and looked into the trash can. There was little left of the edges, but the center of the quiche still looked pretty good. He slid it cautiously onto a plate, cut the burned pieces away, covered it with aluminum foil, and left it on the counter. Then he went outside. He caught himself about to take Fletcher's leash from the hook out of habit, then remembered he had stored it in the shed along with his basket yesterday.

He walked briskly, hands in his pockets, straight into a howling wind that numbed his cheekbones. He crossed the golf course and continued a few miles past the tall fence enclosing West Point, away from Black Spring. Fuck, maybe Jocelyn was right—maybe he had been too quick to shrug it all off. He sincerely tried to recall what had gotten into them two nights before when they thought they'd heard Fletcher barking—even if only for a minute or two. Bullshit, of course; he refused to believe it. It seemed far away now, blurry, like the chill that had overtaken him in the woods when he found Fletcher dead, or when he'd damaged the fairy ring. These were irrational moments that weren't at all like him. It felt foolish, embarrassing.
Buried is buried,
he thought.
And that's the end of it.

But maybe it wasn't foolish for the rest of the family. And despite the fact that it hurt Steve more than he was willing to admit, didn't that make him responsible?

Later I stopped believing in witches, so I did it as a balancing exercise.

Steve decided to talk to Tyler as soon as the opportunity arose.

*   *   *

THE LOW-PRESSURE SYSTEM
in the house lasted all evening long, but at least Jocelyn and Matt ate some of the quiche. Tyler didn't even come downstairs; he muttered something about having to study for an exam and wanting to be left alone. That night Jocelyn and Steve each lay facing the wall on their own side of the big bed, unspoken words trembling in the empty space between them. He lay awake for a long time but finally fell asleep from exhaustion.

The next morning at breakfast Jocelyn said, “Maybe I will bring the horses back after we're finished riding this afternoon. I think you're right. It probably won't hurt them.”

Steve nodded and felt something relax inside. “You want me to come along with the trailer?”

She shook her head. “Matt and I can manage.”

Nothing else was articulated, but at least it was a start, and he didn't want to force anything. Times of tension between them never lasted long, but this had been different, more delicate, and it required careful treatment. He thought about it during the day at the university, and as he was raking the leaves in the backyard that afternoon he came to the conclusion that they weren't so bad off after all. Jocelyn and Matt were hooking up the trailer to the car in the driveway. Steve inhaled the cold autumn air deep into his lungs—it was one of those November days that held the first subtle traces of winter—and comforted himself with the thought that there must be people in town who had done much worse than they had.

He was still working in the backyard when Jocelyn came outside in her riding gear and screamed, “Steve!” She sounded anxious. “Steve, right away!”

He dropped the rake into the pile of leaves and ran to the kitchen door. “Something's wrong with Tyler,” she said. “He's not responding … I can't get through to him.”

She took him to the living room. Tyler was sitting on the couch in the twilight with his legs drawn up close to his body. It took Steve less than three seconds to come to a diagnosis: The boy seemed about to drop into a psychotic episode, or was already having one. The toes of his bare feet were curled up and cramped, his hair was tousled, his knuckles were white. He was staring into the far distance with big, unseeing eyes. Steve recognized that expression from psychiatric patients who were willfully struggling to disengage themselves from reality. It was the expression of someone moving from the light into the darkness, and Steve suppressed a sudden burst of staggering fear.

He lowered himself to his knees in front of Tyler and put his hands on his shoulders. “Hey, Tyler, look at me…” He shook him gently to awaken him from his stupor. Tyler yielded to his movements immediately, which alarmed Steve even more. He had expected his body to be as constricted as his fingers and toes. Resistance would have been a sign of consciousness. But Tyler's body was behaving like a doll filled with straw. Steve put his hand on the back of his neck and squeezed his vertebrae tightly with his thumb and forefinger.

“What's wrong with him?” Jocelyn asked, aghast. She knelt beside him as well. Matt had popped up in the open French doors and was peering at them in terror.

“Shock,” Steve said. “Get me some water, Jocelyn.”

Jocelyn did as he asked and Steve sat down on the couch next to his son. He took him in his arms and rocked him gently back and forth. Tyler's body felt cold and clammy. “Hey, son, it's going to be all right; everything's going to be all right,” he murmured, and he kept on repeating the words like a mantra. But inside he cursed himself: He had known that it
wasn't
all right from the moment Robert Grim had questioned Tyler, right before the horses had gone crazy. He had seen it in his eyes. Why hadn't he tried harder to fish it out of him?
Idiot.
“What are you doing, son? Scaring the daylights out of us.” He held his son even tighter. “I'm here with you, Tyler. No matter what happens, I'm always with you. It's going to be all right.”

Finally, his attempts bore fruit and Tyler began shuddering in his arms. The blind, boneless expression on his face began to thaw. His lips quivered and released a soft, stifled moan. His eyes opened wider and became moist. His hands moved upward, trembling, and fell helplessly back down.

Jocelyn came back with a glass of water and a towel and put them on a stool in front of them. Steve hardly noticed, because at that very moment Tyler looked up at him with such a fragile expression of misery and despair that Steve's heart abruptly filled with almost drunken love and a sickening feeling of regret.

“Listen, Jocelyn. Why don't you go riding with Matt?”

“But I can't leave him like this.… Is he going to be all right?”

“He'll be fine. I think the two of us need a little time together, here.”

He gave her a meaningful look and Jocelyn understood. “Come on, Matt, let's go,” she said, directing him out of the living room. She closed the French doors behind them, smothering Matt's fierce protests. Then they left through the kitchen door and everything got quiet.