IGMS Issue 50 (14 page)

"I am so sorry," Veronica said. Not to Angela--to Tara. "We won't bother you again."

"Wait--" Tara said, her anger pushing her forward toward the door. "Angela, what--?"

Mrs. Heggins closed the door. Tara heard the lock fall in place. For a moment, she stood in the silence of their street, confused. She knocked on the door but there was no answer. Knocked again: only silence inside the Heggins household. A deeper silence than had ever been in hers, she thought. Tara backed away from the door, letting the silence push her off the porch, back across her lawn, to her own door, her own quiet-but-not-silent home.

She dreamed of a girl crying. She woke, listening, stretching ears for the sound. But the sounds in her home covered the noise. Mike murmured something--half asleep himself--and put his warm hands on her arms. She fell asleep again, hunting that crying girl in her dreams.

Tara found the last scrap of paper in Tommy's jeans as she sorted through his laundry, checking for change and loose dollar bills. She found it in the little pocket on the right, just above the main pocket. The pocket no one ever used because it was too small to hold anything. A meaningless little pocket of
nothing.

It was big enough to hold a slip of paper folded over and over again. Tara's hands trembled as she opened it. Four inches long, three fingers wide. Covered in Jack's symbols.

Tara collapsed against the laundry-room wall. The ink was rust-colored, smudged and smeared along the paper, and oh, Jack! It didn't look like ink at all. She knew what it was, and it made her heart seize, made her hands lift to her mouth to hold back the wail of despair and fear. Because if she cried, Zandy would hear it, and then she would cry too, and the last thing she needed right at this moment was a four-year-old wailing in her ears as she tried to solve this puzzle, this boy, this
Jack
!

Tara forced herself to put the paper on the linoleum floor of the laundry room and smooth her hands over it. And stare at it, like she could decipher it; decipher her son and all his oddness, just by looking. Just like the first scrap of paper she'd found, the symbols seemed to draw her eyesight closer to them. The closer she looked, the more they seemed to convey. Fractal writing in her little boy's blood.

No. No. Tara slapped her palm over the symbols. Smacked them again and again, until her palm burned and the paper ripped. When she dared to look again, the symbols were still. Blood writing, but no code, no mystical cypher. Tara folded the paper, stuffed it into her back pocket.

A thought occurred to her. She picked up one of Zandy's overalls, and hunted through it.

Another paper, folded into the loop of the tag. Just a few symbols on this one.

And then she went through all the dirty clothes, all the miscellaneous pockets on Zandy's dresses and playsuits, and in Tommy's boxer shorts and dress shirts. A scrap of paper in each one, hidden away in the unused, secret spots. There was nothing in her or Mike's laundry. None in Jack's own pile.

When Tara finished with the dirty laundry, she went upstairs and tore through their drawers, their closets, under their beds. She had five handfuls of paper when she was done. An armful of rustling scraps, painted in rusty symbols. Jack's blood. His sickness.

Some of the writing looked fresh.

Tara put Jack's papers in a plastic grocery bag and cinched the handles together viciously, as if the scraps might fold their way out. Scatter around the house again. Infect everyone's eyeballs with blood fractals. She gathered a shuddering breath. In the den, Zandy was singing and clattering her toys together. Tara pushed her attention into that sweet nonsense noise until she could catch herself, until she could recover a little.

She called Mike. He came home early and together they called Dr. Loeb, who, after explanations were made, sounded just as despondent and disappointed as they felt.

"I am so sorry," Dr. Loeb said. "I thought things were going so well. The past couple months . . ."

End of the school year, Tara thought. Fourth-graders lining up to play Little League baseball, Pee Wee soccer, signing up for summer camps. Vacation about to burst onto the world, and where would Jack be? In a psychiatric hospital. Learning . . . what? How broken, how destructive the world was, screwdrivers and belts and abuse; stories that weren't his stories, but what if he thought they were?

"Say something flippant," she whispered to Mike. Something to cure the heaviness pressing on her guts.

He just stared at his hands, listening to Dr. Loeb. He said, "We'll go get him now."

"I'm sorry," Dr. Loeb said again. "We are going to get through this." She hung up.

Tara nudged the bag full of Jack's scraps toward Mike. "Lousy penmanship," she said. Her voice hitched. She was no good at flippancy. That was Mike's job, but he wasn't going to do it.

He looked at her, lost. But he swallowed, and managed, "Bloody terrible."

Mike left to pick up Tommy from school as Tara sat at the table in the kitchen, listening to Zandy play, listening to the house breathe. Watching the scraps of paper in the bag, making sure none escaped. Mike wasn't gone long, and both he and Tommy looked sober and cautious. Tommy dropped a scrap of paper into Tara's hand.

"Found it in my jeans," he said.

She nodded, and jammed it into the bag with the rest of the paper.

"That's not ink," Tommy said.

"No," Mike said. "Tommy, we need you to watch Zandy. We have to . . . we have to take Jack . . ."

He broke off, swallowing and looking away. Tommy reached out to Mike, wrapped his arms around him, kissed him on his cheek. Mike sobbed once, coughed, and hugged him back. How long since their hugs had turned to handshakes, pats on the back? They stood like that, father and son, leaning into each other's embrace, faces buried into each other's shoulders.

Of the two boys, Jack was the more emotionally expressive one. How long before he could hold them like this? When all this was through, would he even want to?

"You ready for this?" Mike asked as they headed out the door.

Tara didn't know how to answer him. You're never ready for a child.

She wasn't ready for her cellphone to ring either. Or the voice on the other end of the line telling her that Jack had been picked up by the police.

Jack was sitting on a chair thumbing through what looked like an old science fiction magazine as the police station bustled around him. Tara saw him all the way across the room. He didn't see her, or Mike, or the detective that escorted them through the station, so Tara got a chance to just watch him. There was something different about Jack. It was subtle--in the curve of his cheek, somehow, or the way he held his shoulders. Or in the rhythm of his sneakers as he swung his feet back and forth in his chair, skipping the sole of his shoe against the carpet.

She pushed through the crowd to get to her boy. Mike paced her. Jack looked up at the last moment before they reached him. His face brightened and then they were on top of him, wrapping arms around him.

His shirt and jeans were soaking wet. He smelled foul. Like he'd been crawling in a drainage ditch, or something. Tara put her hands all over him, alternating between squeezing him and just . . . touching him. Pressing fingers against his cheeks, stroking the back of his skull, rubbing his shoulders, feeling his spine. If she held him long enough, she'd figure out what it was that had changed.

And this whole thing--the symbols, the strange nights, the terrifying everything--would make sense.

She wondered if she would love or despise the world when it made sense again.

"We should talk," the detective said.

He led them to a room marked "Interrogation Rm C." Another man joined them, carrying a couple cardboard boxes. He smiled at them--Tara noticed the dark circles under his eyes. An officer in uniform followed them in and closed the door behind them all. Interrogation Rm. C was small and dingy, with windowless cinderblock walls and a fussy halogen ceiling light. A blocky table was bolted to the floor. Six chairs surrounded it.

The detective motioned for them to sit. Tara and Mike took seats on either side of Jack; the men sat facing them across the table. The fellow with the boxes rummaged through them as the detective spoke.

"I am Detective Cartwright. This is Officer Meadows. That is Andrew Dowser." Detective Cartwright waved at the man going through the boxes.

Not "detective." Not "officer." What was he, then?

"Pleased to meet you," Andrew Dowser said without looking up. He extracted a grimy-looking spiral-bound notebook from the box, and put it in the center of the table.

Detective Cartwright slipped a couple mug shots onto the table. One was of Angela Heggins; the other was a middle-aged man. "Do you recognize these two?" he asked.

"I know the girl," Tara said. "Angela Heggins. I've never seen the man."

She was sitting close to Jack, their arms brushing together, and felt a tremble shudder through his whole body.

"When was the last time you saw Angela?" Detective Cartwright asked.

She told them about picking her up from the police station after her accident. "I haven't seen her since then."

"Did Angela mention anything about Greg Olson?" Andrew Dowser asked. He nodded toward the man's mugshot.

"No."

"What is this about?" Mike asked. "I'm guessing it's more serious than a DWI."

Detective Cartwright said, "Greg Olson is wanted in a string of home invasions as far south as Oklahoma. We think he was targeting your neighborhood."

"Not the neighborhood," Jack said. His voice was soft but insistent. "I told you already, he wants the kids." He gestured toward the grimy notebook. "I showed you his journal."

Andrew Dowser smiled briefly at Jack. Officer Meadows and Detective Cartwright frowned. But all Tara could think was that her son, her boy, her
Jack
knew something about this man. And a thousand thousand terrible thoughts ran through her mind. A criminal and her son, a grown man and her little boy, a man who
wanted children
. O God, O God, she was going to break under the heat and flash of her own thoughts, O God save me, save
him,
save us.

"Jonathan Lorenzo Howard," Mike said quietly. Naming names. "Tell us what is going on, son."

"I found a tower in the woods," Jack said. His hand rested on Tara's knee. She could feel his warmth through her jeans. "I was just . . . wandering around, I guess."

"How long ago?" Tara asked. Remembering the scent of smoke. Remembering a fluttering page. She couldn't keep the anxiousness out of her voice.

Jack said, "January."

January. Ages ago. Forever ago.

Jack continued. "The tower was a bunch of patio furniture stacked up high against a broken tree. It was . . . weird. I can't . . . I don't know. It's like how you can sometimes tell you're going to get sick without feeling sick. Like, your whole body gets hot and prickly, but this was in my brain, and I knew I should get away, but I was already on my knees looking inside. Everything inside the tower was marked up, especially the tree. All these symbols."

He glanced at Tara, at Mike. Neither of them spoke.

"It made my head swirl," he said, "and my eyeballs itch. There were drawings . . ." Here he stopped. Swallowed. Jack looked down at his lap. "He had drawings of the faces of kids I knew, all in symbols, climbing all over the patio furniture, up and up along the tree. I didn't know until later, I . . . I thought it was cool. I didn't tell anyone, I just thought it was someone's art project. I came back a couple times, and I never saw anyone, ever at all, but someone was adding faces to the symbols. Then a couple months ago, I saw a man there."

His hand fluttered toward the photo of Greg Olson. "And he was with Angie. They were . . . uh . . . naked, and he was on top of her, and he just kept telling her, 'Say the names, say all their names,' and she did, and I couldn't look away, Mom, I just couldn't, even though I . . . just like the tower, I couldn't. He made her say Zandy and Tommy's names, and I couldn't look away, even though I knew what he was thinking, and what he wanted to do to them. I could see it in the shadows of the tower, like in the shadows cast by the symbols he'd carved into the tree. I just wanted to run away, but I couldn't even look away from them."