The Boy Who Drew Monsters: A Novel (20 page)

Tim sat on the bottom step of the staircase, and Holly posted herself on a kitchen stool. They pretended not to notice him, for often he responded more quickly if he thought he was being ignored. She stole glances with her husband, trying to convey with the stoniness of her features her dissatisfaction with his direct and clumsy approach. The chirping stopped abruptly, and Jack unlocked the pretzel of his arms. Expression returned slowly to his eyes like tinder catching flame, and as suddenly as he had departed behind the veil, Jack returned. He blinked and then smiled at his mother. When he asked if he could run upstairs and work on his drawings, she let him go with a sigh.

The rest of their Christmas was quiet and uneventful. A turkey dinner with the trimmings. A video chat over the Web with her faraway sister. A long complicated board game for three before Jack was sent to bed for the night. He was asleep within ten minutes, as guiltless as a newborn, snug in his blankets. Tim turned in an hour later and was lightly snoring beside his lit reading lamp. Holly slipped in beside him as the clock struck eleven, but she could not let go of the day so easily.

When she could no longer bear the insomnia, she left Tim in the bed and wandered down the hall. The door to her son’s room was closed as she had left it, but she could not resist turning the knob carefully and opening the door, with a whisper from the hinges. His room was chilly, and through the window even the moon and stars looked cold. In the pale light, she saw the scattered papers and pencils on his desk, a sign that he had been busy working on some new project. She resisted the temptation to steal a look and resolved instead to ask about his drawings in the morning.

She floated downstairs, moving from room to room with no real purpose other than to defeat her restlessness. The Internet beckoned. She had a theory about the bones and the wreck of the
Porthleven
, but the thought of investigating more leads online just depressed her. She touched the glass tablet, which was smooth as ice.

Bones, she thought, who collects the bones? A ghoulish task. Who came to retrieve the drowned, how did they recover those shipwrecked corpses washed ashore? Near her head, the window rattled long and hard as though something was trying to force its way inside the house, and in the rooms above, someone had awoken and was moving the furniture.

*   *   *

He could not sleep. In the dead of night, Tim opened his eyes and realized he was alone in the bed. His wife was gone, sleepless too, no doubt. Lately Holly had been uneasy and agitated, seeing and hearing things, strange things that were not there, but then who was he to judge? Not with that pale wild man running naked over hill and dale, or was it just a chimera, a conflation of a white dog and his own frazzled nerves? Turning over in the bed, he flipped his pillow to the cool side, trying to go back to sleep. Useless.

Huffing, he threw off the covers and swung his legs over the edge to sit up in the bed. The room was gloomier without her in it. As a boy he could not bear to stay alone in a darkened space. Where had she gone, what was she chasing now? He walked across the creaky floorboards and threw on his robe. Just past midnight, the alarm clock said. Another Christmas come and gone. That Weller boy would be over in the morning, just hours away, their houseguest for the next week. He envied Fred and Nell, ditching the kid and heading for warmer climes, a week at sea away from the wintery murk of Maine. He imagined them promenading on the deck, Fred in a tuxedo and Nell in an evening dress, and then at once he laughed at the absurdity of his vision, the notion that people today traveled like they were Astaire and Rogers in some black-and-white 1930s film, when in reality it was probably polo shirts and khaki shorts, or maybe a charming little sundress, her peach one that gives the impression that she is wearing nothing at all. He banished her from his thoughts.

As soon as he stepped into the hall, Tim could tell where Holly had been. The door to their son’s room was ajar, so he traced her steps and pushed it open with his toes just enough so that he, too, could spy on Jip asleep. A crack of light zigzagged across the boy’s face, giving it a gentle and peaceful aspect, a marked contrast to the sullen child hours ago who could not be contained. Why did he push his son so hard? Why did Jip have to go so far away sometimes? Love from a distance was so much more difficult when it is your own child. And Tim loved Jip with a depth that amazed him in such quiet moments. Still, he cursed the doctors and the therapists, wishing for a thousandth time to have a different boy.

Perhaps Holly was right, perhaps their son wasn’t ever going to be normal. Surely they had more difficulty recently in forcing him to comply with their wishes. Jip had deliberately torn apart that drawing long after he had been told to stop, and he persisted despite their warnings. They would have to work harder with Jip, Tim thought, at listening and obeying. Go easy, Holly had said, but that was just the problem. They had been too easy on the boy, coddling him, when he’s smart enough to understand the moral consequences of his actions, right from wrong. He’d talk with Dr. Wilson next time. He’d find a way to get Jip to obey more readily once it becomes clear that he has no choice. They would work harder on achieving some equilibrium.

How much easier it had been in the beginning, before they knew the facts about Jip. He came into the dream house as an answer to their long-held prayers for a child. After years of trial and failure, the miracle pregnancy, and nine months later the baby was born, pure and simple, a baby who did baby things. Who would know, without any experience in raising a child, what to expect at each stage of development? They took his affect as normal, his long naps were a blessing.
Aren’t you lucky
, Fred Weller had said,
to have one that sleeps through the night?
The baby’s sudden disinterest in play or food was chalked up to boredom. Only when periods of withdrawal grew more frequent and alarming did they begin to suspect. They made countless trips to the doctor, but they resisted nearly every diagnosis.
On the spectrum
, one had said.
Asperger’s
, said the next one. But he refused to believe it for the longest time, and even now, he pressed against the cold hard language every chance he could. Words, words, but no real explanation, no cure. An
abnormality
—one quack had actually used that word. As if that was a reasonable way to talk about a human being or to discuss the future of a child with his parents. Tim looked at his son, sleeping like a baby, and wished he could buy back those days and hold him in his arms again, unaware of the darkness ahead. Bring me back my baby, my little boy.

When he closed the door, the knob clicked softly. He listened to whether he had awakened his son by accident, but heard instead his wife moving through the rooms downstairs, furtive as a mouse. Sneaking around lately, holding secrets, off to church for the first time in years, a signal of her deeper unrest.

“I just miss it,” she said, when the prospect of midnight Mass had been broached. “Not so much for the religion but for the ceremony, the ritual, the order, and certainty of it.”

“Go then,” he had said. “I’ll stay here with Jip. But I hope this doesn’t mean you’ve gone soft in the head and are interested in all that superstition—”

She kissed him, now that he thought about it, to shut him up.

And then after the service itself, she had come home more upset than ever, with stories about voices filtering out of the sea in the middle of the night. She’d gone off her nut with the stress.

A gust of wind hit the house and rattled the windows. The whole wall seemed to shake. From Jip’s room came a scraping sound as if the bed had been pushed across the floor. Downstairs Holly whooped at the noise, an involuntary yell of apprehension. He raced to her quickly and had reached the first floor when the rattling happened again, this time much more violently at the kitchen windows, the wind zeroing in on the spot. Then two thumps, one right after the other, striking against the glass. Holly found him in the dim light, and she latched onto the sleeves of his robe.

“Did you hear that?” she asked. “There’s someone trying to get in.”

“No, it’s the wind.”

As if on cue, the glass rattled till it hummed.

“No, Tim, that’s someone outside the house trying all the windows. Listen.”

The rattling moved, in fact, to the mudroom, the windows shaking one by one, as if the thing outside was testing each as it moved from the back of the house toward the front. The outer door shook briefly, and the doorknob trembled. Tim loosed himself from her grip and went to the front closet and pulled out the brand-new baseball bat he’d bought himself for Christmas for just such emergencies.

“Don’t, Tim.”

“Be quiet. I just want to be protected if there is someone out there, but I tell you it’s the wind.”

They crouched together in the dark. A minute passed in silence, and another, and then they breathed more easily. Another five minutes crawled by, and nothing.

“We could turn on a light,” Tim said.

“Are you kidding? And have whatever’s out there see us in here?”

“There’s nothing out there. Gales. A front moving through.”

“How could it be the wind? Does the wind turn doorknobs? Does the wind knock on the kitchen windows? Something’s trying to get inside, Tim. Inside the house, inside our lives. I hear it all the time.”

“Those back windows are twelve feet off the ground. Just listen, you can still hear the wind in the distance. It’s just moving off. A squall.”

“It’s not the first time,” she said. “It has been going on for weeks. Weird noises around the house, things that go bump in the night.”

He held out his arms and she nestled into him, feeling a light clunk from the baseball bat as he embraced her. “You’re overwrought. It’s about Jip, isn’t it? I know he’s been a handful lately, but I’ve got a plan. A New Year’s resolution to work harder with him.”

She sighed and buried herself deeper in his arms. They stood together in the middle of the room anticipating another sound, but the only noises were the wind whistling and blowing in the distance and the creaks and ticks of the old house.

“You’re tired,” he said. “Been doing too much for the rest of us.”

“I am tired, but my mind won’t shut off.”

He laid the baseball bat on the sofa. “We’ll get you a sleeping pill.”

“Perchance to dream.”

He put his arm around her hips and led her to the bottom of the stairs. Shrouded in darkness at the top of the stairwell, Jip stood looking down upon them.

“Jesus,” she said. “You gave me a fright. How long have you been up there?”

“J.P., what are you doing out of bed?” Tim turned on the light, and the three of them blinked and shielded their eyes from the sudden illumination.

“I had a dream,” he said, rubbing his eye. “There was a monster under my bed.”

They walked up to him, pausing a few steps below, so that they could see him face-to-face.

“Too much turkey and apple pie,” his father said. “Gives you bad dreams. It was just the wind you heard. Shook things up. No monsters, remember?”

“It was a nightmare,” his mother said. “Everything will look better in the morning light.” He stepped toward her and opened his arms. She touched him lightly on the arm and then brushed the hair from his eyes, and he was her little boy again.

vi.

His old-fashioned suitcase looked like a small coffin, or so Nick thought in the midst of his overwhelming anxiety that morning after Christmas. His parents were rushing around the house, preparing to go on their grand holiday cruise without him, leaving him instead with the Keenans for the rest of the week. He dreaded the whole idea the way he dreaded the last day of summer and the prospect of school, or the semiannual torture in the dentist’s chair, the wet kiss from Nana when she came to visit. He dreaded it the way he hated tuna noodle casserole and rope climbing in gym class and cleaning out his room. Dread sat like a troll on his stomach the whole time he had to wait for his parents. They had planned the trip months ago, but even now were wondering where was the hair dryer—no, the travel-size one—and did you remember to pack sandals? He sat on the sofa in his coat and hat, his suitcase at his feet, but he was not surprised to hear his father and his mother ask, independently, if he was all set and ready to go. I’ll never be ready, he thought, but I’ll go.

Strapped in the backseat of the car, Nick the prisoner was being driven to his place of execution. The early hour and overcast skies combined to extend the gloom of the night, and in the windows of the car, he could make out his reflection superimposed over a scattershot of frost. His glum face peppered white. In the front seat, his parents were discussing still what they might have left behind, and he secretly wished they had forgotten about him, like that
Home Alone
kid, to live by his wits. He could picture himself fighting the bad guys, outsmarting anyone who tried to break in.

The drive to the Keenans was much too short, and when they pulled up to the house, Nick realized that he just could not bear the idea of a week with Jack Peter, that he had changed his mind and would visit his grandparents in Florida after all, or if that was out of the question, would they consider smuggling him aboard the ship? He had always wanted to see the Caribbean and play the pirate,
savvy?
, but it was all too late. His father had killed the engine. His mother had already left the car and was jabbing the doorbell.

Mrs. Keenan answered the door in her robe, and Nick had the uneasy feeling that they had awakened the whole house with their early arrival. Tangled against one side of her head, her hair was unbrushed, and she still had a line from the pillowcase creasing one cheek. When she bent over to pick up the morning newspaper on the stoop, her robe and nightgown gaped open, exposing her naked breasts, heavy and full, with brown nipples at the curve, and he felt both a surge of strange excitement and awful embarrassment in a single instant. She did not seem to notice either the momentary exposure or his dumb amazement, and she waved them all in and clutched at her collar against the chill. Nick was not sure if his father, trailing behind him, had caught the same peep show, but if he had he kept the matter to himself.