The Boy Who Drew Monsters: A Novel (8 page)

“So how are we doing these days, Jack? Ready for Christmas?”

Jip said nothing and tucked his chin to his chest. The doctor bent forward, made himself smaller, and put his face closer. “Come now, it’s me. What’s new and exciting? Are you working on anything?”

“He’s doing much better,” Tim volunteered. “Been drawing, haven’t you?”

Like a hummingbird, Jip’s hand darted forward and he used one finger to trace a pattern in the air.

“What do you like to draw?” Dr. Wilson asked.

Jip dropped his hand back into his lap and stared straight ahead.

“What is it that you see?”

He rolled his eyes quickly in the direction of his father. Like a wooden contraption, Wilson unfolded himself, straightening his body, and then leaned back in the chair. He put the tips of his index fingers against his lips, considering his next steps, before addressing Tim. “Perhaps you could leave us alone for a while. Perhaps there’s something Jack would like to talk about in private?” He arched his eyebrows, eliciting a small smile from the boy.

“I’ll call you back in when we are done,” Wilson said. “And we can talk about his routine, whether his meds are working for the anxiety. We won’t be long, eh, Jack?”

In the reception room, Tim waited with the other parents and their children arranged on the furniture, each caught up with a private malady. A yawning boy with circles dark as a raccoon’s mask. A teenaged girl twisting a tissue in her nervous hands. Another child, face upturned and as blank as a stone, counting the tiny squares in the ceiling tiles, a kindred soul perhaps. Twenty minutes passed like eternity. When at last they stepped out into the room, Jip and Dr. Wilson looked as chummy as conspirators.

“You have yourself a good Christmas, Jack,” the psychiatrist said. He towered over Tim and put a hand upon his shoulder. “Mr. Keenan, I think we’re okay for now with the dosage, but I want you back here next month, and we really should talk about group again, or somewhere he can talk, let some of his anxieties out in a constructive way.”

“It’s just so hard to get him out of the house, doctor.”

“I’m not sure how much his agoraphobia is actually making his overall anxieties worse, but he’s worried that whatever he’s afraid of outside is trying to come inside the house. It’s probably best we tackle this latest beastie while we can. Let’s give it a try, maybe in the new year? Meanwhile, I think it’s healthy to encourage the drawing, eh? Jack, why don’t you grab your coat and get your father’s.”

When the boy was out of earshot, Wilson took Tim aside and spoke softly. “Keep an eye on what he’s drawing, would you? Bring some in next time. There’s usually a story there.”

Lunchtime had come and gone by the time they made it back home and repeated the whole process in reverse, shuttling him from the Jeep and those fifteen feet into the mudroom. Tim unwound the swaddling from the boy, and he was whole again. They talked about his homeschool lessons over tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. At two o’clock, as usual during the school year, his father left to attend to the few chores and errands of the day, checking on the properties he looked after, making sure the winter was not invading the summer homes of his wealthy clients. For a glorious hour or so, Jack Peter had the whole house to himself.

He was supposed to be reading. That was the deal they had made that past September when Tim and Holly finally agreed they could leave him alone for a small part of the day. Prior to that, one parent stayed at home while the other was at work, and during the summertime, when Tim’s duties kept him busy, there had been a nurse two afternoons a week and a string of babysitters, college girls mostly, whose company he both enjoyed and resented.

“I’m almost eleven,” he had argued. “Too old to be babysat.”

“You’re just ten,” his mother had said. “How do we know we can trust you?”

“He’ll be fine with a book,” his father had countered, and that settled the matter.

Today, however, he merely cracked the text at hand and left it spread upon the table. He wandered through the old house as aimless as a ghost. In the living room, he peeked in the coat closet and stared at the hidden presents wrapped in bright Christmas paper. He turned on the lights on the Christmas tree and then turned them off again. In the kitchen, he opened the refrigerator and straightened out the bottles and leftovers on the shelves. Each time he passed a window, he checked the locks, and double-checked the front door and the side entrance. He wrote his name in the dust on the coffee table and erased it with his sleeve. At three o’clock, he went into the mudroom to stare through the picture windows at the road that wound through the fir trees. He counted off the minutes between the first flash of yellow in the distance to the moment when the school bus turned the corner and came into full view. At the next driveway, the Quigley twins skipped down the steps in their matching plaid skirts and green jackets. Alert to the possibility of any oncoming traffic, he watched them cross the road and followed with his gaze until they were safely through the front door. Their obsessive border collie nearly knocked them over when they stepped inside. “Hello,” he mouthed silently. “Good-bye.” The red lights of the school bus stopped blinking, and with a belch of smoke it rumbled away. Framed in the windows, the children’s heads bobbed like dolls.

Right after the twins got home, his father was due. Sometimes it was just a few minutes after, sometimes up to half an hour. There was no way to count on him. Better to go back to the kitchen table and pretend to be reading when he arrived. Pretend, because he had already read the book three times. First on Friday, when his father had handed it to him. They always overestimated how long it would take, and the books in the fifth-grade home curriculum were much too easy. For those first few books, when the hour finally arrived for his father to quiz him, Jack Peter often had forgotten some of the details, so now he spent the week going over the text again and again. His parents thought him a slow reader because he never seemed to get any further along in a book, but he was faster and smarter than they could ever guess.

His thoughts strayed from the page. Nick would be home by now, and he could picture his friend sitting down to an afternoon snack, Mrs. Weller flitting around in the background, asking about school, and good old Nick letting her know that everything was just fine, nothing new, and maybe he had drawn some monsters in his notebook.

At four o’clock, the front door opened suddenly and in came his father, tired and disheveled. A black slick of grease crossed his pants at midthigh, and his hands were covered with the same goo. He saluted his son and went to the kitchen sink to lather and scrub. “Sorry it got so late, Jip. I went over to check on the Hollisters’ place, up by the crescent, and something had gotten in through a hole in the crawl space. Dug a big, big hole and squeezed right in underneath and made itself at home. I could fit my whole self in it. Nothing worse than trying to keep out something that wants to come in.”

“Did you see who it was?”

“What?” He laughed and rubbed his hands furiously under the hot running water. “Not a who. A what. And, no, I didn’t ever find out if it was a cat or a raccoon or a whatever. Maybe a skunk by the smell of things, but I had a devil of a time fixing up the hole so it won’t get in again.”

Jack Peter sidled up to his father and leaned against the counter next to him. “Maybe it was a big mouse.”

“Right, like the one your mother said was hiding in your room. This old place is crawling with mice,” he said. “Just last week, I found a whole bunch of them had made a nursery school down in my workshop. Let’s go take a look. Get to the bottom of the secret of the hidden mouse.”

They went upstairs together, and though he had not heard the rattle from the desk since the morning, Jack Peter knew what to expect. His father removed his left shoe and held it in his hand. “They’re wicked quick,” he said. “You’ve got to be ready before you see ’em or you haven’t got a chance.”

“What are you going to do with that shoe?”

“If there’s a mouse in there, Jip, your mother said we’ve got to get rid of it. Don’t want it running loose in the house.”

“You’re not going to kill it.”

He put a hand on his son’s shoulder to steady himself. “Well … no, not if I can help it, I guess. We’ll just stun the critter and then I’ll take it outside and let it go, if you want. Now, slowly open the drawer while I get ready. One, two—”

“I don’t want to. You’ll kill it.”

“Never.” He pulled on the handle and yanked open the drawer with a start. There was no startling flash of brown, no tail zipping like a pulled string. No evidence that there had ever been a mouse at all, no seedy droppings, no chewed paper. Tim rooted around in the clutter and found nothing, and only as he was about to close it and admit defeat did he spy the scroll of paper. As he unrolled it, the drawing took shape, a picture of a boy alone on the shore, emerging from the sea, behind him the lines of waves breaking in the distance. Half unfurled, the picture amazed him, and had he bothered to open it all the way, Tim would have seen the legs of the other figure running off the page.

“When did you do this?”

But Jack Peter would not answer. His eyelids fluttered, and his eyes rolled back into his head, the whites showing as blank as clouds. He fainted onto the bed, and he remembered nothing more till the sound of his father’s voice gently calling his name brought him back fully into the world.

viii.

“Did you get rid of it?” Holly leaned across him and spat in the sink. Bits of foam stuck to the corners of her mouth. In the mirror, Tim was startled by his own reflection and his frown of disgust. He uncurled his lip and considered his appearance, the deepening lines across his forehead and the crow’s-feet radiating from his eyes. The outside man in the mirror looked back at the inside man, both thinking the same thoughts, just a second apart. He tried to remember his wife’s question.

She rinsed the toothpaste from her mouth and checked her teeth, running her tongue over the enamel. “Well, did you get rid of it?”

The mouse, right. He had nearly forgotten the mouse given their son’s peculiar reaction to the hidden drawing. “I put down some traps.”

Moving on in her preparations for bed, Holly took up the brush and ran it through her hair, counting the strokes, the numbers passing stealthily through her lips. “Not where Jack can hurt himself?”

“Of course not. One in the back of the closet and one between his desk and his old toy box.”

Like a marionette on a string, she tilted her head so that her long hair spilled to one side, and she brushed the flow of it. “Make sure you check on those traps. I can’t imagine anything worse than a dead mouse in the room for a couple of days.”

He had stopped looking at himself and now squeezed behind her on his way out of the bathroom. “Not that there was any sign of it. No droppings, no shredded tissues on the floor.”

“I didn’t see it,” Holly said, “but I sure heard it in the desk drawer. Jack’s not going to step on a trap in the middle of the night?” She turned and followed him into the bedroom. The small table lamp was the last one on in the house, and Tim imagined how it might appear to those out on the sea, a tiny pinprick of illumination against the blackness of the night, one small star upon the shore. If there were a man out there in the cold, he would be drawn, surely, to any sign of life.

“No way he can step on the one in the closet, and I’m sure he doesn’t go near that toy box anymore. Why do we keep it, anyhow? It’s probably full of nothing but baby things and stuff he’s outgrown.”

Holly folded back a triangle of the covers and bedsheet, but rather than climb in, she sat on the edge of the mattress as though trying to remember some unfinished task before going to sleep. “How was he at the psychiatrist’s?”

“Same as ever. Lots of questions, few good answers.”

They slipped into bed and lay flat on their backs side by side, and Tim turned out the light.

“Honestly,” he said, “I don’t know why we keep going to that guy. Jip is never different afterwards, just gets a different pill.”

“To keep Jack under control.”

“That’s just it. Maybe keeping him under control is what’s keeping the problem alive. Maybe if we trusted him, Jip could make it on his own. Without the pills. Everybody is on something these days. It’s a racket. Overprescribing, masking the problem.”

“I can’t have this argument again,” she said. “I’m tired.”

“I’m just saying that maybe there’s less than meets the eye. Take the Weller boy. He’s shy, introverted, but you don’t see Nell rushing off for a pill.”

“Please”—her voice cut the darkness—“don’t hold up Nell Weller as your example.”

Without another word, Tim rolled away from her and into the privacy of his thoughts. She said nothing either, but he could hear her breathing, steadily and in sync with the ticking of the alarm clock. Longtime combatants on this matter, each could not find sleep easily, and an hour passed in wary détente.

Just past midnight, he heard her calling his name softly from a faraway spot on the opposite shore of his consciousness. She laid her hand upon his shoulder. “Tim, are you awake? Did you hear that?”

Halfway between sleep and dreaming, he opened his eyes in the darkness of the room and struggled to orient himself. Familiar objects, shades of gray, began to take shape, and he became aware of his wife’s entreaties. “Listen,” she commanded in a hoarse whisper, and he strained to discover what she had heard, but he could find no stray sound.

“There’s someone in the house.”

He heard nothing.

“Something’s walking around.”

“Are you sure it’s not Jip, going to the bathroom?”

She cricked her neck toward the bedroom door and looked at the gap where it met the floor. “The hall light’s not on. He’s afraid of the dark and always turns on the light.”

Fumbling for the table lamp, he nearly knocked it off the nightstand and had to grab the base to stop it from rocking. In the burst of light, he blinked and then hoisted himself against the pillow. She was already up, the quilt pooled across her lap, her feet twitching under the covers.