The Boy Who Drew Monsters: A Novel (11 page)

“No trouble at all. Jip lives for the company.”

Red lipstick marked the edge of her cup. She leaned across the table and took his hand in hers.

“You are an angel. You both are, and I can’t thank you enough for taking Nick for the holidays. Fred and I need to get away. Some time to ourselves, patch things up a bit. You know how it can be, sometimes you just want to start all over. And, failing that, a few days on the cruise will make the winter that much shorter.”

He squeezed her fingers and then withdrew. For the length of a cup, they talked about the Caribbean trip, the ports of call, the likelihood of shuffleboard and endless buffets. Her excitement bubbled along, and he found himself watching how she spoke instead of what she actually said. He’d give a nod now and again, a smile to keep her there. He remembered that same contented look from years ago, animated by their secret. At last she looked at her watch, let out a sharp gasp, and said a hasty good-bye. From the open door, he watched her go, standing at the threshold long after she had driven away, an ache small and persistent in the pit of his soul. He waited till he caught himself shivering when the chill crept up his pajamas.

The boys did not answer when Tim called them, and he had no idea where they might be. In Jip’s room, most likely, but perhaps they were prowling around below in Tim’s workshop. He went to tidy the kitchen, pausing to look at the beach through the bay window, his thoughts drifting back to that summer’s day, the last time all of them had been outside together. Holly lost in a paperback on a distant rock, Fred asleep on a bright yellow towel. The boys, seven that year, were down in the water, as usual. A gull or two, white as paper, roamed the blue skies. Nell was stretched out facing him, a gesture intimate but guileless. Her maroon bathing suit clung to her curves, and they were talking of summer’s end, idly chatting in that circuitous way they spoke to each other, saying nothing that was not coded in a language of longing. No one saw what happened. No one could say for sure when precisely Jip and Nick had gone missing.

He turned from the view of the water, and there the boys had suddenly appeared at the kitchen table, intent on a notebook. In unison, they looked up at him and flashed two grins. The tip of Nick’s nose was red from sniffling, but they otherwise seemed quite normal. How had they managed to sneak in without his notice? He shook the befuddlement from his brain.

“You’re like a couple of ghosts. Time for me to hit the shower, boys. You two be all right without me?”

With a wide grin and a slow nod, his son dismissed him.

Curlicues of steam rose from the sink as he lathered his cheeks with shaving cream. He dipped the razor into the stream of hot water and began to shave in confident strokes. Just as he scraped the last bit of foam, the dull blade nicked his skin and a bright red berry of blood appeared on his throat. A short agitated cough escaped his lips, for he could not remember the last time he had cut himself shaving. He pressed his thumb to the spot on his neck below his left ear, and in a moment, the bleeding stopped. The hot water had fogged the mirror, and behind him, a cold breeze fluttered the curtain. Someone had left the window open, so he forced it shut. The snow had given way to pale sunshine. He shrugged out of his robe and stripped to the skin.

The room was freezing, so he let the water run till great clouds of smoke rose, and then he slipped into the shower and closed the glass door behind him. The heat and humidity unkinked his muscles and relaxed his joints as readily as a sauna. Working shampoo into his hair, he massaged his scalp. Images of Nell on the beach crossed his mind, how she leaned toward him close enough to touch. A line of perspiration runs between her breasts, and the fine hairs at her nape glisten in the sunlight. He cupped his scrotum in his free hand.
Where are the boys?
She was the first to notice, springing to her feet, casting a shadow over him as he turned on his belly. Shampoo began to drip in his eyes. The temperature dropped suddenly as though someone had opened the door, and when he strained to focus his stinging eyes, he thought he saw her enter the room. Just as abruptly, the sensation vanished, and he saw on the glass shower door, now visible in the condensation, a crude drawing of a naked woman, stylized and slightly misshapen, long curly hair, contours of breasts, the thumbprints of two nipples. He rubbed at the drawing, only to discover that it had been traced on the outside surface. “Jip,” he bellowed, but of course, the boy was too far away to hear, and besides, why would he have drawn such a thing? Surely, he is too young to be thinking of naked women. For all Tim knew, his son never thought of sex at all, or at least he had never said a word about it. The fog from the shower rose and bumped into the ceiling, billowing across the room and settling into every corner. He rinsed his hair and stepped from the shower, wrapping a towel around his waist.

Slowly swiping his hand, Tim erased the image on the glass, leaving behind a beaded trail. He felt like a criminal destroying evidence and could not shake the sensation that there was a conspirator in the room, just behind him. As he turned, a face in the mirror leapt into view. Finger-drawn on the surface was another face, a woman’s surely, but more haggard and distorted than the other. The hair was just a suggestion on a high and prominent forehead, and one eye drooped, its iris clouded and vacant as the blind gaze of a Roman statue. As he smeared the drawing, Tim wondered momentarily how he had not noticed it earlier when he shaved. “That kid,” he muttered to himself. “He’s drawing everywhere.” Just beyond his reflection, he thought he saw the one-eyed woman again, and in the glass of the shower door, the memory of the naked woman seemed to rearrange itself from the constellation of water drops. He quickly combed his hair and dressed in a pullover and sweatpants, anxious to be out of there. The mist followed him into the hallway, and he raced down the stairs.

The kitchen was cold as a morgue, but the boys were just where he had left them, busy at the table with a pile of papers. Around their heads they had fitted the hoods of their sweatshirts, so they resembled a pair of medieval scribes illuminating a manuscript. In a frigid cell without a fire. He shivered and found the problem at once: an open window funneled winter into the room. Hurrying to close it, he barked at his son. “What’s wrong with you, Jip? Why are you leaving all these windows open in the dead of winter? The bathroom was as cold as a witch’s tit, and now this. And the heat has been on all day.”

Jack Peter stopped his drawing in the middle of a line. The point of his pencil hung an inch above the surface, and he sat still and expressionless, as his father stormed around the room looking for other open windows. Nick followed with his gaze, waiting for the chance to answer the charge.

“We didn’t do it.” A line of clear mucus escaped from his nose, and he sniffed and wiped it with his sleeve.

With grave concentration, Jack Peter tapped his pencil on the tabletop, slowly at first, but then with greater speed and force.

“Don’t,” his father said. “You’ll ruin it, J.P.” But the boy kept tapping.

“Stop, Jip. I said stop.”

He was more frantic and forceful. The point left small marks in the soft wood.

“It wasn’t us,” Nick said.

The pencil sounded like a woodpecker hammering on an oak. Tim grabbed his son’s wrist, the boy’s pulse racing in rhythm to the tapping. By tightening his grip, Tim forced him to stillness. “Dammit. Just quit, Jack. Who did it then? Who let the cold in?”

“Him,” he growled. “The monster.”

“The what?” He looked carelessly at the drawings on the table, fabrications of the ten-year-old mind. “Don’t be silly.”

His son refused to look him in the eye.

“What is he talking about, Nick?”

“Maybe Mrs. Keenan left it open before she went out. Or maybe you forgot. It wasn’t us, I swear.”

With a sigh, Tim loosened his grip around his son’s thin arm, and Jip wriggled free like a bird from a snare and skittered from the table to a chair in the breakfast nook. He turned his back on his father. There was no reasoning with him when he was so angry, Holly would say. Leave him be.

A bolus of air, cold as the December sea, tumbled across the room and wrapped itself around his legs and lower body. He whispered a curse and searched for the source of the sudden gust, but the windows and doors were shut fast. The boys seemed unaware of the lump of winter sitting in the room. At the dining table, Nick contemplating the space between his two hands against the wood. Jip remained at the window, chanting barely audible nonsense like some mad monk at prayer. Seeking forgiveness and the restoration of equilibrium, Tim carefully approached his son, and bent down so their faces were on the same plane.

“Why is it so cold in here?” he asked.

Jip stopped muttering and leaned forward to tap his finger against the glass. “Him. He’s trying to come inside.”

“Who him?”

“The man, the monster.” He spoke quietly, glaring at his father. “Don’t you know anything?”

He reached out to his son, but stopped his open palm inches from the boy’s hair, afraid that Jip would flinch and withdraw from the touch. A wave of helplessness nearly overcame him. “There are no monsters.”

The boy faced him, a baleful expression in his eyes. “Just look, Daddy. He’s out there now.”

The green ocean filled the window frame in a band across its width, and above it only sky, thick with gray clouds stretching to the far horizon. To see the shoreline, Tim had to come closer and nearly press his nose against the pane, his breath leaving a fog on the glass. To the right, the rocks wandered in the sand, and directly below the window he could make out the bow of a small wooden boat stored beneath the house. To the left, the headlands rose gradually to the lighthouse, and he worked his gaze back from that landmark to the irregular granite. He would have surely missed the figure crouched in the ledges had he not been expecting to find something. Straining to get a better look in the dim light, he bumped his forehead against the glass. He pushed ever so slightly, as if that slight pressure might burst the seam between the inner and outer worlds. The figure on the rocks moved, shifting in its crouch, and it cocked its head toward the house. Tim could not be sure, but it appeared to be a man, a figure that reminded him of the strange thing he had seen that night on the road. White as winter, the hair a clot of whirls, a mangy beard. A wild and lonesome thing.

“What the hell is that?” He peeled himself from the window and went straight to find his boots and coat.

“We didn’t do it,” Nick said from the table.

“You boys stay here. I just want to see what that is.”

On the mudroom floor, a trail of sandy clumps led from the kitchen to the outer door. Tim left his boots untied and coat unbuttoned and hurried round to the back of the house, scrambling to the shore. Where the man had been, there was nothing.

He stepped into the empty landscape, hoping to catch sight of the figure, but it had vanished. A sudden patch of sunlight brightened the rocks and sand, throwing momentary shadows until the clouds passed by and erased the fine detail. Glancing over his shoulder, Tim saw the boys standing side by side in the frame of the bay window. Jip’s head was turned to the northeast, as though he was watching something, trying to direct his father’s attention. Tim followed his son’s gaze, spying at last a flash of white movement, quick as a breath. He raced toward it, coat flapping in the wind, bootlaces lashing his shins, sinking in the sand, and scrambling across the rough rock.

It was impossible, he told himself, for the naked man to have outrun him, even with such a head start, but after that one glimpse, he saw him no more. Only the illusion of movement, the desire of the chase. On a promontory, he stopped to catch his breath and surveyed the sighing sea, the desolate rock, and realized how the world had swallowed them both. He was panting, his chest pounding, and feeling a bit dizzy. Exhausted, he bent over, resting his hands upon his knees, allowing his head to hang down. Between his feet, fresh wet drops had darkened the ground, and at first, he wondered if the thing he was chasing had passed this same way, wounded and bleeding. A bright red coin splashed on the rock, and then another. He raised a cold hand to his warm throat and felt the slick where he had cut himself earlier, shaving, and when he drew back his hand, he was surprised to find it covered in blood. At the sight of it, he fell to the ground in a dead faint.

iii.

The first thing Nick saw that morning was a swath of red velour stretched tightly across the drum of his father’s belly. From his bed, his faced muffled by a pillow, Nick blinked to focus, and the red balloon in his field of vision swelled and receded. He rolled over to get a better look.

“Ho, ho, ho. Something wicked this way comes.”

Nick rubbed the sleep from his eyes. His father wore his annual Santa Claus outfit, sans beard and cap.

“Sure you don’t want to come with? It’s going to be a real fun party.”

“Dad—”

“Had to make sure the suit still fits. One of these years I’ll be too fat.”

“—do I have to?”

“Too old, are we? Where are the sons of yesteryear? How our childhood swiftly passes. Once around the block in a little red wagon and then you’re all grown up. Now look at you. Can’t get out of bed in the morning. Even when it’s snowing.”

His father pulled up the blinds. A few flurries danced across the sky. In the light from the window, motes of dust caught in the draft drifted and fell. Nick wanted nothing more than to sink into the warmth of his bed.

“Your mother will take you over to the Keenans. But you better hop to. She’s already in the bathroom, working her magic. Mirror, mirror, on the wall.”

Nick sat on the edge of the bed and stared at his bare feet. “Do I have to go over there? Can’t I stay home by myself?”

“Not unless you want to see me sent to prison. The law is very clear on this point: you’re too young to be left alone all day by yourself.” His father sat next to him, the mattress sagging under his girth, the bedsprings complaining of the burden. “Imagine what those outlaws would do if old Santa Claus showed up in the holding cell. Destroy their faith in mankind, it would.”