The Boy Who Drew Monsters: A Novel (30 page)

“Jack, are you there? Where did you go? Don’t let the phone clunk like that. Did your father come back?”

“You told me to write it, so I had to get a pencil.”

“Read it back to me, Jack. So you’ll remember.”

“Star of the Sea,” he said. “Get Mommy in the Jeep.”

“You’re a good boy,” she said.

“You’re a good mother,” he said.

She laughed again and hung up. For a long time, there was only silence, and then the reassuring dial tone hummed in his ear, but when an angry sound, like an alarm, began to chatter, he dropped the receiver to the floor and stepped away.

Outside, the wind blew the showers across the sky, and the snow had subsumed Nick and his father. Jack Peter pressed his forehead against the windowpane as he peered through the flowing eddies, anxious for sight of them, but they were gone as surely as had they been erased. The trail from the sea to the house was vanishing, too, little more than an impression, and he went from window to window, seeking a sign of where they might have gone. He made a circuit around to the front of the house and there saw a figure approaching, white on white, as though a snowman had come to life and was struggling to find shelter from the storm. As it drew nearer, the figure gained clarity. It was not Jack’s father but the drawing man, ghastly thin and naked, his wild hair blowing in the wind, the snow caked in his beard around the horrid mouth. Come for him at last, come to take him away. Take Nick instead, he thought, and realized in the same moment that Nick was outside with his father, leaving him all alone. On bandy legs, the monster crept closer to the house.

His every thought was falling away and let loose into the world. The figure in the window got bigger and bigger, and just as Jack stepped back, the white man reached out both long arms as if to grab at him and pull him through the glass. His long bony fingers stretched and slapped at the windowpane with a report as sharp as gunfire. His face came fully into view, a wretched expression in his black eyes, threatening and imploring, a grimace full of teeth as ruined as tombstones. Jack had seen that face many times before, and now he realized his mistake in drawing it. He screamed, and the creature heard him through the glass. Turning its head as if mounted on a spit, the man glanced over its right shoulder, aware of another presence nearby. The creature quickly retreated, running away from its pursuers. Jack withdrew to the heart of the house, waiting in the kitchen for what was next to come. He was frightened by the uncertainty.

*   *   *

Tim and the boy had stood at the tideline, puzzling over what might have made the footprints that had risen from the sea. These weren’t the marks of a coyote or even the paw prints as big as that dead white dog’s. They were clearly evidence of a two-legged gait, a man. Tim’s mind jumped to the white man. He felt sure that Nick knew it, too, though he dared not ask for fear that he would worry him, for the boy was already anxious in his movements, casting his gaze up and down the shore, anticipating something emerging from the storm.

They slowly climbed the incline toward the house, guiding their steps through the trail they had carved. Curiously, Jip was not spying on them from the window as usual, and Tim wondered what might be occupying his attention. A trough in the snow skirted along the foundation, and below every window was a tramped-down area, as if their quarry had paused beneath each entry point to the house. The windows were all smudged and wet with dirt and melting snow. On the far side, the tracks veered sharply into the pines along the southern border of the property, and Tim and Nick followed them into the trees. Where the evergreen needles had fallen, the snow cover had thinned to a bare coating, and they nearly lost the scent, but the prints picked up again and the length between strides widened, as though the thing was running now and had crossed the road.

Panting, Tim stopped and considered the child at his side, cold and wet and tired. It could be anywhere, miles away, over the rocks or into the woods. As much as he wanted to put an end to the mystery plaguing them, he decided to abandon the chase. “This is no place for a child,” he hollered into the wind. “Time to get you safe inside.” They retraced the path their own boots had made and circled back to the door by the mudroom. A couple of old towels hanging on pegs allowed them to dry their wet hair into tangled manes. They wrestled free from their coats and boots and their soaking socks, turned up the cuffs on their wet jeans, and marched barefoot into the kitchen. Jip was at the kitchen table, drawing.

“Where were you so long?”

Nick looked like a wild thing, his cheeks bright red and his hair a shock. “We saw footprints out there. It’s a blizzard, and we tried to follow them.”

“What was it?” Jip asked.

“I don’t know. Can’t tell,” his father said. “Did you see anything from inside?”

Bending down to his paper, Jip resumed his drawing. “Nothing. Just waiting.”

They left him at the table and went to change into dry clothes. Tim lit a fire in the fireplace, warm heart to the quiet house, worrying about Holly out in the storm. Nick kept watch at the window, imagining a monster in every shadow. An hour passed before Jip stopped his drawing long enough to report about his mother’s phone call and how she said to take the Jeep and find her at the Star of the Sea.

iii.

“I’ll not have another word about ghosts,” Father Bolden said. “You should be ashamed of yourself, filling Holly’s head with such tales. A ghost is little more than a trick of the mind at war with itself. A temporary manifestation of psychological conflict.” He rubbed his stomach and licked the last of the cherries from the tines of his fork. “No more of your folktales, Miss Tiramaku.” He turned to Holly. “Why don’t you tell us about what brought you here in the first place? Why don’t you tell us about your son?”

At one end of the mahogany table, Father Bolden and Miss Tiramaku sat together as familiar as a long-lost uncle and aunt welcoming her back to the family. The snowy day brought memories of the slant light of other such afternoons, holiday times with her parents and sister, catching up after extended absences, of cups and saucers, dessert plates dotted with crumbs, and feeling that they might never again have the chance to talk this way. She wanted to confess what she had done and what she had failed to do, what she had said and what she had failed to say. She had yearned to tell someone about her dreams and her boy for a long, long time.

“We came to Maine because of Tim. When we were first married, I would have followed him anywhere. It was his dream to come north, find a nice place on the ocean, settle down, and raise a family. His soul, he says, finds its natural rhythm in the tides. He was out of the service and thought he could go back to college here. Study the sea. And I had a postcard view of life, the boats in the harbor, lobster in the summertime, and the light in late September. We were happy here at first, and it seemed that the next part of the dream would come along right away. We’d start making babies, little water nymphs, and set them outside in the sunshine and clean air and salt water and watch them grow big and strong and healthy.”

Miss Tiramaku shifted in her chair, and Holly wondered if her story was hitting a sore spot with her.

“We couldn’t get pregnant for a long time, and I hope you don’t mind, Father, but we tried everything in every conceivable way.…” She blushed at her accidental word. “I don’t mind saying that I even prayed for a child. Hope had all but run dry, and then a small miracle. Pregnant at last, and those first few months I was expecting, I was deliriously happy. And then I found out what happened between Nell and Tim right before I got pregnant.”

“And who is this Nell?” Father Bolden asked.

“She was my best friend. Is. She and Fred invited us over at the end of the summer, and it was nothing really, an indiscretion. We had been drinking, all of us, and they ended up in bed together.”

The priest shoved the strudel in his mouth. “Did your husband confess?”

“He never said a word, but she told me, eventually. Months later. Look, if we hadn’t both been pregnant … I’m over it,” Holly said. “Moved on, and our babies coming together made it easier to forgive and forget. Or forget, at least. Though I’m not so sure about Nell. Maybe she brings Nicholas over so much because she still feels guilty.”

“Nell is Nicholas’s mother?” Miss Tiramaku asked.

Holly nodded and continued her story. “Look, I had a baby growing inside of me, I was so sure it was a girl, and I dreamed of seeing her, holding her, dressing her the way I used to with my baby dolls when I was little.

“Just as my belly was getting big enough to make it seem real, my anxieties took over. Something wrong with the baby. I dreamt it was a fish thrashing around inside, pulled by the tides. So many premonitions and omens. Just hormones and unbridled intuition. But who could I tell those to? Not Tim, surely, because he was just elated, and this baby was the missing piece that would make us happy.”

To calm her nerves, Holly took a sip of coffee. “There was Nell, but she had her own pregnancy to think about, so our problems simmered just below the surface. I just spent the last weeks afraid that the baby would not be what I thought it should be. When Jack was born, he was such a beautiful boy, it went out of mind. Until, of course, I saw the infants together over time. Nell’s son, Nicholas, was so different. Where Jack was quiet, almost eerily calm, Nicholas was fussy but animated and curious. And even though they say it’s best not to compare, what mother can resist to some degree? Especially when it begins to sink in that there’s something missing, something odd about your child.”

She stopped herself. Her eyes began to water, and she knew she would cry if she went on talking, and she did not want to cry, told herself that she should not. The room went quiet except for the murmur of snow falling against the windows. Father Bolden leaned back in his chair, looking older than his years. “God often gives us burdens as a reminder of the call to sacrifice.”

“Please,” Holly said. “I would trade that sacrifice to have a normal life for my son. There’s no sanctity in the suffering of a child.”

“I only meant—”

Miss Tiramaku interrupted him. “He did not mean to diminish what you’ve been through.”

“My apologies,” she said. “It’s just that people sometimes want to ennoble his condition and struggles, and I would give anything, trade anything, do anything for him to be … ordinary.”

“I meant no harm,” the priest said.

“Tell us how he developed his phobia of the outdoors,” Miss Tiramaku said. “What happened that day on the beach?”

“When he was seven, Jack nearly drowned. It was the end of summer, a last day on the beach. Jack and Nick were sitting in the wet sand, just on the edge. The incoming waves were lapping along the shore and wetting their legs and swimming trunks. What could go wrong? It was a bright blue August, a few clouds in the sky. I was reading a novel, an old favorite du Maurier, and looked up from the book and saw that they weren’t there anymore. And then I saw Tim racing, kicking up sand, and behind him Nell. Fred was just standing there, dazed in the sunshine, and I knew at once that the boys were under the water. We weren’t keeping watch like we should, and I thought the boys were gone. I was paralyzed and couldn’t move to save them.”

“You were afraid,” Father Bolden said.

“No. I wanted to help, that was my first reaction, my instinct, but almost immediately I was, I don’t know, relieved that they were gone. Like an act of God was taking them. It was a horrible sensation. It lasted just an instant, but I blame myself for having wished him away.”

She stopped suddenly and caught her breath. “I’ve never confessed before, but I’m sorry, so sorry. I raced across the beach, guilty, guilty, and they had reached them and were pulling them up from the bottom. Jack was alive, sputtering and coughing, but we couldn’t find Nick until my husband pulled him from the sea. We all thought Nick was dead, pale and blue and had swallowed the ocean. Jack stared at him, intently, blankly, like he sometimes does, lost in his mind. And then when Tim pressed on Nick’s chest, out shot a stream of water. He gasped and came back to us. But they were never the same.”

For a second time, she stopped herself on the verge of tears, and she pushed away from the table, turning from the gaze of the priest and the housekeeper. Through the window, she could see the snow shaken from the sky in steady waves. “Look at it coming down. I should have taken the Jeep. I should go before I get stuck.”

“I could run you home,” the priest said.

“Oh, no, Father. My husband can pick me up, if you don’t mind me leaving my car in your parking lot. He can bring me back to retrieve it when the roads are clear.” She began rummaging in her purse for her phone.

“Of course not,” he said. “But it would be no bother.”

“No, no. Just point me to the phone. I seem to have lost my cell again.”

On the tenth ring, someone answered the call, and she knew at once that it must be Jack by the resounding silence on the other end. She kept explaining where she was, and he kept dropping the phone to the floor. Each time, she turned to her companions with a look of bemused exasperation. She couldn’t imagine why Tim had left him all alone in the house.

“He’s done it again,” she said. “Everything is so literal with that boy, gone to fetch a pencil I suppose. Jack, Jack, are you there?”

They finished their conversation, and when she was reasonably sure he had taken down the message, she hung up.

“He said the most curious thing. He said I was a good mother.”

Miss Tiramaku put her hand on Holly’s shoulder and led her back to the table. “He’s right, you know. You are a good mother.”

“Sometimes I wonder,” said Holly.

With a brief smile, Miss Tiramaku forgave the self-deprecation. “Your husband is on the way?”

“He will be as soon as he comes back inside.” Holly returned her smile. “According to Jack, he’s out chasing monsters again.”

iv.