The Boy Who Drew Monsters: A Novel (35 page)

The door swung open and Dr. Ogundipe entered, the same young Nigerian woman who had treated Jack earlier. When she found them, she tugged at the stethoscope around her neck as she approached. “Mr. and Mrs. Keenan…”

“You have some news?” Holly asked.

She sat next to Jack and flashed a smile at him. For the second time that day, he acknowledged a stranger’s greeting, a good sign. “Nothing about Nicholas, I’m afraid, no real changes, everything’s the same. He still hasn’t woken up. But his parents arrived at last and have had the chance to see him. They’re planning on coming to talk with you shortly.”

“How did they seem to you?” Tim asked.

“As you might expect,” she said. “Quite a shock, and they are tired from the journey. After you’ve had a chance to discuss matters with them, let me know what you think about my idea.”

Jack squirmed in his chair and put down the game. Earlier in the day the doctor had suggested that he come talk to Nick in the bed, that the sound of a friend’s voice might stimulate a response. When he had first heard her proposal, Jack had hidden behind his mother’s arm, but now that he had time to consider it, he was willing. He nodded his consent.

“Good boy.” The doctor patted him on the leg. “I’ll let you all know if we can arrange it.” In her crisp white jacket, she projected authority, but her charm had won over Jack. With a nod, she disappeared into the maze of the wards.

They went back to waiting.

“What are we going to tell them?” Tim asked at last. “That a monster showed up and chased them into the ocean? A monster our son made through his drawings. Good Lord, they’ll never believe it.”

“We’ll tell them the story we told them on the phone,” Holly said. “That the boys were out playing in the snow and went too close to the water.”

He folded the newspaper and tossed it on the coffee table. “They doubted it on the phone, I could tell. They know that Jip never leaves the house.”

“Stop calling him that,” she said. “‘Jip’ sounds insulting.”

Leaning across the chair, Tim tapped his son on the shoulder. “What do you think, J.P.? Do you feel insulted?”

“Just stop,” she said.

“I don’t know what’s gotten into you.”

“Everything, don’t you see? There’s a little boy lying in a hospital bed. And your own son put him there. And you, you never believe me. Out chasing things.” Her face was red with anger.

Fred Weller had slipped into the room and stood directly behind her. With a polite clearing of his throat, he announced his presence. Holly turned to greet him, and saw how his sunburned face had collapsed with worry. Melting in her own grief, she reached for him, and he embraced her as she collapsed into sobs. “I’m sorry,” she said. “So, so sorry.”

From over his shoulder, she saw Nell enter, flat and emotionless. She did not smile or frown, barely functioning under sedation. Tim rose to meet her, but Nell bowed her head and curved away and would not let him touch her. He seemed so helpless to Holly, abandoned and bereft, that she almost felt sorry for him in that instant.

On the sofa, Jack busily scrolled through the smart phone apps searching for a new game.

“Nell, I am so sorry,” Holly said. “It was an accident.”

Miles away, Nell stood all alone in the middle of the room. When she began to speak, her voice was strange and low and without affect. “He looks like he is just fading away. Yellow bird, yellow bird.”

“I’m sure he’ll come out of it,” Fred said.

No one moved. Only the hum of the fluorescent lights and Jack’s tapping at the screen broke the silence. At last Nell summoned the courage to raise her chin and look at Tim. “I cannot bear to lose him. We thought he was gone three years ago. How could you let this happen?”

“I’m sorry, Nell,” he said. “I would do anything to save him. He’s like a son to me.”

Her face snapped to anger. “Not yours, never yours.” She pointed at Jack. “That there’s your boy. That’s your son.”

Tim put his hand to his mouth and slumped into a chair. Holly positioned herself between her husband and her son and rested a hand on Tim’s shoulder.

“I’m sorry, Holly,” Nell said. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“They’re doing everything they can,” Holly said. “We all are.”

Each adult retreated to a private misery. Jack tapped out another code on the phone and handed it to his mother. A word game in which you used digital letters on faux wooden tiles to spell out words. He had written “wicked.”

She laughed bitterly to herself.

When summoned at last by a nurse, they all filed to the restricted area and followed her down the winding corridors. Most of the doors along the way had been left ajar, and they passed strange and sad tableaus of sleeping patients; tired old men staring at overhead TVs; families and friends clustered around a privacy screen, crammed into tiny spaces; and oddest of all, the empty rooms with unmade beds. Nurses came and went, crossing their path without a glance, and they arrived at last at the white room where Nick lay all alone. The curtains had been opened and the last sunset of the last day of the year poured weakly across the foot of his bed. A vase of white roses, sent from the Florida grandparents, perfumed the air. Pale and unconscious, Nick breathed quietly. Oxygen flowed through the thin tube at his nose, and in his arm, a plastic port had been installed, his hand colored with a plum bruise, an ID bracelet curled around his wrist. The thin blanket and sheet over his body were smooth and undisturbed.

Dr. Ogundipe arrived five minutes later, less animated in the presence of the child. After glancing at his chart, she went to Nick’s side and held his thin wrist in her hand, counting his pulse, and then she laid his arm against his side and studied the saline drip. “You can talk to him now, Jack.”

“I don’t know what to say.” Jack would not look at the boy in the bed.

“Tell him hello,” the doctor said. “Say whatever you are feeling.”

Like a wild bird he approached gingerly, two hops forward, one step back, ready to fly away at any threat. At last he found his way a few feet from his friend’s head on the pillow but no closer. He cocked his head and looked at Nick slantwise.

“Hello, Nick,” he said and waited a few beats for an answer. “Hello, Nick,” he repeated in a louder voice. The boy in the bed did not move at all, and Jack frowned at the doctor, confused and uncertain.

“Go head,” she said. “He can hear you.”

Jack’s right hand twitched and his fingers danced. “No more monsters,” he said. “All the monsters are gone away.”

“Whatever is he talking about?” Fred asked. “What monsters?”

“He won’t get up,” Jack said.

“Try some more,” Tim said. “Tell him you are sorry.”

“I don’t blame you anymore, Nick. I’m not mad at you. I am just tired of drawing all the time. No more monsters. You can get up now.” His shaking hand stilled, and he turned away from the unconscious boy and faced his mother with tears in his eyes and then rushed to her arms.

In the dying light of the day, the others took turns speaking to Nick until there was nothing left to say. The Wellers would be staying the night, but they told the Keenans to go, get some rest.

“Come back tomorrow if you wish,” Fred said. “We’ll be sure to call you if anything changes.”

*   *   *

Blue moonlight reflected off the snow, and the ride home was like driving through a dreamscape, the familiar streets and landmarks transformed by a smooth white cover. Jack studied the windows to catch his reflection when the light was right, so that he could see both himself and the outside world pass by at the same time. As they pulled up in the driveway, their old house same as ever, he imagined his friend Nick waiting there for them to start their next game. But Jack knew he wasn’t inside. When her cell phone buzzed, Holly fished it from her purse and lit the tiny screen to read the latest.

“It’s the police,” she said. “The bone’s gone missing. They opened the box and found nothing but ashes.”

His father said it would be all right to stay up and watch TV till the ball dropped in New York City, and his mother agreed that it would be okay if he would first change into his pajamas. The empty bed reminded him of Nick in the hospital, but he would soon be just another imaginary now, gone like Red and all the others. On his desk, a quiver of sharp pencils stood in a cup beside the last pages of his sketch pad. It would be easy to sit in his chair and continue as he always had, but he set his mind to resist the temptation. Jack changed out of his clothes and sat cross-legged on the carpet, looking up at the dresser mirror and the moon reflected in the glass, trying to push the last of his friend out of his mind. The lady with the cloud in her eyes would help him. He would talk with her next time. Tell her the whole story.

A soft knock at the door broke his concentration. His mother appeared at the threshold, and when he nodded she came in. “What have you been doing up here all this time? We’ve been waiting for you to join us. Don’t want to miss the countdown.”

He rocked gently to and fro, unable to put into words what he was feeling.

“Were you thinking about Nick?” She sat next to him on the floor, and he allowed her to put her arm around his shoulders. After a while, he laid his head against her chest, and she felt a wave of joy rise through her body. They remained together that way for some time.

“Good grief,” she said at last, looking toward the space between the desk and his old toy box. “We seem to have caught a mouse.”

The forgotten trap had been sprung and the killing bar lay neatly against the mouse’s neck. He remembered how Nick had wanted to stick his finger in there. The tiny body was stiff with rigor mortis. His mother got up at once and fetched a plastic bag from the linen closet and wrapped it around her hand and forearm like a long evening glove. Looking away from the body, she picked up the mousetrap and its victim with one hand and tied a knot in the bag.

“Be a lamb,” she said. “Take this to your father to dispose of properly.”

Jack grabbed the top edge of the bag and held it at arm’s length, taking care not to let the dead thing touch him as he walked downstairs. Slumped in an easy chair, his father watched the New Year’s Eve festivities on TV, numbed to the presence of his son. His head rested on a wing of the chair, and on his neck, the wounds had healed to pale red stripes, sure to leave faint scars in due course. Jack showed him the bag.

“Mouse,” he said. “Mommy wants you to get rid of it.”

Tim lifted himself from the chair and accepted the burden. “I will,” he said. “And go tell your mother that the show is about to begin.”

On the upstairs landing, Jack listened to the soft sounds coming from his room, his mother’s exclamations of surprise and wonder. She was seated where he had left her, between the desk and the now open toy box, and she had found his hidden secret. A stack of papers spilled from her lap and smaller piles surrounded her. She looked up when he came into the room, her eyes wide and questioning. She flipped through the drawings and held up a picture of Nick flying a kite.

“These are all of Nick?” she asked.

He bit his bottom lip.

Nick in a classroom bent to his lessons, Nick swinging on a rope over a lake, Nick banging on a toy drum, Nick and his parents sitting on a mountain, Nick dressed for church, Nick catching a baseball, Nick in the winter, spring, summer, and fall. Nick at seven, eight, nine, and ten. Growing older, changing his hair, the style of his clothes, the number of teeth in his smile. A thousand Nicks.

“When did you have time to draw all these?”

He did not know what to say. “Every day.”

“What do you mean every day? How long have you been making these pictures of Nick?”

“One drawing every day since he drowned. But I got tired of having to do it. So I drew monsters to chase him away, not me.”

Lines of confusion furrowed her brow. “No, honey, that can’t be right. That was only two days ago when you and Nick went in the water, and there must be more than a thousand pictures here.”

“Not then,” he said. “The first time he drowned. Three years ago.”

“But why—”

“Made him up,” he said. “Since he died. To keep him alive.”

“What do you mean made him up?” She pushed her way to the bottom of the stack and saw the seven-year-old dream boy that Jack had made, and at last she understood. A thousand drawings, a thousand boys, a thousand days. And now Nick was in a hospital bed, fighting to live.

“You can’t stop,” she said. His mother rose from the floor and grabbed him by the wrist and led him to the desk. Holly shoved him to sit in front of the paper and forced a pencil into his hand. Wrapping her trembling fingers around his, she held him to the page. “Draw,” she ordered. “Draw him again.”

He faced the blank page and laid down a line.

Also by Keith Donohue

The Stolen Child

Angels of Destruction

Centuries of June

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

K
EITH
D
ONOHUE
is an American novelist, the author of the national bestseller
The Stolen Child, Angels of Destruction,
and
Centuries of June.
He also has written reviews for
The Washington Post.
Donohue has a Ph.D. in English with a specialization in modern Irish literature and wrote the introduction to
Flann O’Brien: The Complete Novels
. He lives in Maryland.