Hush (30 page)

something to it, but he couldn't make out the words.
He moved up the wall until his eyes were even with the opening at the bottom of

the shade. He took another breath as quietly as he could. The air entered him in

shifts, as if his lungs were cranking open. Slowly, he stood up a few more

inches and angled his head so he could look right down at her. It had taken him

long minutes of quiet careful maneuvering to get into this position, and now his

rage threatened to rip him apart because she'd surprised him yet again. She had

some kind of board hiding her body, and she had a paper in one hand and was

petting the goddamn cat with the other; and she was turned away so he couldn't

see a thing. All that for nothing. He could feel his crotch and mostly he felt

nothing. Like he saw nothing. Goddamn her to hell. Nothing Nothing Nothing.
He stared at her brown hair, short like a boy's, and her small head. Everything

about her was small, and he knew she'd be easy.
But then he saw something that made him duck— the reflection of his eyes in the

mirror on the bathroom door. They had been plainly visible, as dark and present

as the night.
44
Celia started chewing on the end of the ballpoint again as she studied the only

window Davy had drawn in the triangular roof. He'd shaded it so much it was

black. More secrets, she thought, especially with all this crosshatching. He'd

covered the roof with it.
She put her pen down just long enough to scratch her left shoulder, and it

rolled off the tray into the tub.
"Oh shit."
She fished it out and dried it with the end of a towel hanging from the rack.

When it still wrote cleanly, she felt like rejoicing. She hated having to get

out of a tub once she'd settled in.
The deck creaked but the sound barely penetrated her consciousness. A second or

so later she thought idly of Pluto and figured he must be out on the deck. She

made a few notes in Davy's file.
She looked once more at the house in the House, Tree, Person Drawing and noticed

that Davy had not included a chimney. No sign of warmth, she thought. Well,

that's certainly consistent with everything else I've seen. She made note of

this as well.
She returned to the picture and noticed for the first time that the clouds with

the dirty rain hovered above the house. She hadn't made this connection till

now. How'd I miss that? It darkened her suspicions of Davy's home life even

more. It also caused her to take a second look at the tree, and that's when she

saw that he'd positioned it right under the fried egg sun. Of course. Look at

it. The tree— Davy's sense of purpose— was a horrid evergreen with spindly

branches all sloping sharply downward. It came to a peak pointy enough to serve

as a weapon. Celia bit down on the end of her pen again. Burnout, she decided,

this kid is toast.
Not a single living creature perched on those dead-looking limbs. This appalled

her. When healthy children drew trees they often included birds, bees, bunnies,

puppies, all kinds of animals and insects— appropriate or not— because they

wanted to fill their make-believe world with as much love, laughter, warmth, and

concern as their own childhood. But Davy's tree appeared as lifeless and dry as

tinder.
She made more notes, and then examined the person in the drawing. She viewed

this as a self-portrait. What she found most striking and disheartening was that

Davy presented himself as a stick figure— the only one she'd seen so far. Worse

still, he'd drawn his stick-figure self without feet, hands, ears, nose, or

pupils; and he'd formed its mouth with a single twisted slash.
Jesus, she whispered. She shook her head but kept her eyes trained on the

stick-figure boy. He was Davy devoid of flesh, of life, Davy as nothing but

bones connected with little more feeling than the dots on a coloring-book page,

the ones that eventually form the outline of a featureless face.
When she started to write, the words came feverishly: "No feet, wants to flee;

no hands, has no power; no ears, cannot hear or doesn't want to; no nose, cannot

express emotions; no eye detail, doesn't see his world; mouth distorted, closed,

cannot (will not?) talk. Stick figure looking away from house and tree.

Definitely wants out. Fear everywhere."
Pluto slipped in through the unlatched bathroom door and meowed. Celia looked up

and managed a smile despite the depressing material on her makeshift desk. She

put her pen down and rubbed his soft fur. She needed to connect with something

alive, warm, and caring in its own peculiar way.
"You are such a gorgeous little guy."
She did think he was a great-looking cat, one eye, scars and all. She scratched

his ear, and that's when it dawned on her that Pluto could not have made the

noise out on the deck a few moments ago. He was a big cat, but not big enough to

make a board creak. What's more, he'd been inside the house, and they didn't

have a cat door. Jack wouldn't hear of it. For Pluto to get in or out, either

the door to the living room or the one in the mud room had to be opened. She

stilled her hand and tried to remember if she'd locked up. Her fear was quite

simple: Pluto had come in the house when someone opened one of the doors. She

looked up and caught movement in the mirror. She did a double take and it was

gone, but she could have sworn she'd seen something. Eyes? In the window? Now

she saw only that narrow strip of darkness. Had Jack come home from Trout River,

opened the door, and let Pluto in? That would be strange.
"Jack?" she called out, hoping he had come home but knowing better. "Jack? Are

you back already?" She made an effort to sound casual, but her fear would not

let her.
She almost panicked as she tried to recall whether she'd let Pluto in the house.

Yes, you did. Remember? You let him out, then you let him in. That's right, she

said softly. But then another fear gripped her: What made that noise?
She studied the window again. There was only that band of darkness, but she

realized it was wide enough to let someone look in. Maybe someone had been. That

possibility terrified her, and she wrapped her arms across her breasts as she

concentrated on what she'd seen in the mirror. She wanted to remember nothing,

but she could have sworn that for a split second a pair of eyes had been looking

back at her. Dark eyes. Or had she seen something that wasn't there, like Harold

with those horrible beetles? This possibility also scared her, that her fears

had so overwhelmed her mind that even the world of appearances had begun to

assume its most frightful forms.
Then she noticed that the window, like the shade, had not been closed all the

way. "Oh no," she said to herself. Just those two words—"Oh no"— cinched as

tightly as a packsaddle. She sat there for at least another thirty seconds

before urging her arms and legs to move. Just push the tray forward, stand up,

and lock it. Simple. But it wasn't simple, she was too scared to move.
Several minutes of absolute stillness passed. Her arms pressed against her

chest. She no longer looked at Davy's drawings but at the window with its inch

of darkness opening out into the night. The bathwater cooled, and the air draped

her with a velvety chill. She saw goose bumps on her skin.
Yes, that's right, you're cold. Now shut the window.
She slid the tray forward as quietly as she could and raised herself into a

crouch. She had a wall of fear to climb as she stood up, and when she reached

the bottom of the window she paused for a moment to peek. She couldn't see much

because of the shade. Her legs straightened and she lifted it aside. It was

still very difficult to see because of the bathroom light shining behind her,

but then suddenly a strained-looking face appeared no more than an inch or two

away. Her heart thumped so loudly it echoed in her chest, and she lost her

breath as she ducked. She saw it move too, and she hugged the cold tile wall

before realizing that it was her own reflection in the glass that had frightened

her so.
Her breathing slowly steadied, and she stood back up.
Celia, close the window.
But she was so tense when she reached up that her arms moved slowly, as though

unfreezing by degrees. She also felt water trickling down her thighs, drips as

cold as the metal frame of the window itself. She slid it into place.
The lock, turn it.
She did this too, nice and tight. Then she pulled the shade all the way down.

She wanted no more of the night, not the stars, the moon, and certainly not the

darkness.
45
Davy felt his stomach rumble, heard it too, like a bear. He worried about bears,

especially in the dark, roaming around hungry, looking for something to eat,

something like Davy. He was hungry, too. He'd had one of the peanut-butter

sandwiches before it got dark but he wanted more. Some warm milk, like his mom

used to make for him late at night, heating it up in a saucepan and stirring it

around till it steamed. Then she'd pour it in a glass and he'd drink it while

she watched. Sometimes she'd play with his hair too, her fingers lifting it up

and letting it go. That was before Chet took him to the barber. On the way he

told him he'd be getting a buzz cut. "It's easy, you don't even have to comb it,

and I like the way it feels." He must 'cause he was always touching it. But not

like his mom. He hated the way Chet touched him, always at night. That's when

he'd do it to him.
Davy wanted to open the car door just enough for the light to come on, but Chet

had told him about draining the battery. It better start when I want it to. So

he sat in the dark and heard the night noises and hugged his pad and felt bad

about Batman. He wondered if he'd ever get it right. All those holes in the

paper. He moved his foot back and forth and heard the pictures that he'd messed

up shifting around. They sounded like a pile of dead leaves. Then he stopped and

it was still, still as air. Again he heard the night noises. It could have been

a bird, that's all, not a bear. But it could have been something else. He

shuddered and closed his eyes tightly, scared that something really would reach

in and grab him. Something like Chet.
46
Celia yawned and curled up on the couch in the living room with the last of

Davy's efforts, his Kinetic Family Drawing in color, which he'd done completely

in red. Well, not quite completely, she corrected herself as she pulled it out

of the folder. Under the bright table lamp she'd detected faint pencil lines

above an otherwise boldly colored drawing. More shading, she thought right away.

But why so light?
She moved the KFD directly under the lamp, and saw that the pencil lines formed

an odd shape; and then as she studied it she recognized the crude form of an

angel. It appeared to float above the red stick figure of a boy. She could just

make out the wings extending from the body, no arms but definitely wings; and

legs protruding from the bottom of a gown, which lent the figure a distinctly

feminine cast. His mother, thought Celia, that's got to be his mother.
But what Davy had not drawn proved most arresting of all: the angel had no head.

The wings rose to the shoulders but the shoulders rose to nothing. No neck,

eyes, ears, nose, nor mouth. No face.
There are no accidents in art, Celia reminded herself. Davy's omission of a head

said as much, if not more, than all the details he'd included. Perhaps his

mother's face had been too painful to contemplate. But why? Why would the face

itself be such a source of pain?
Celia looked up at the ceiling and tried to puzzle out what she could not see.
Put it in context, she advised herself. You've got to do that first. She lowered

her eyes to the drawing, pausing long enough to glance at the shades drawn over

all the windows in the living room. She noticed strips of darkness along the

edges, the night peeking in as it had in the bathroom. She stared at the window

closest to her, and after reassuring herself that nothing was amiss—No, nothing

at all— she returned to Davy's picture, which was a striking study in contrast:

those barely visible pencil lines, and the rich red he'd used everywhere else.
Colors were tricky. They were linked closely to feelings, but Celia was

reluctant in any evaluation to ascribe meaning to them quickly. Common wisdom,

for example, saw red as an angry color— the color of blood and rage; but red was

also Santa's color and the color of Valentines Day. No simple formula existed

for analyzing a child's color choices. A girl might grab a green crayon or felt

tipped marker because it was easiest to reach, or a brown one for the same

reason. But Celia doubted that Davy's choice of red was an accident. Color was

all in the context, and the context, she was beginning to see, was not simply

abusive, but brutal.
The KFD was supposed to show Davy and his family in an activity. Most children

drew scenes of picnics, gardening, or families playing games. Even deeply

disturbed kids generally managed to suggest a degree or two of normalcy in a

picture like this one. It was as though they felt they had to. Not Davy.
The horizontal drawing featured an outsized Mr. Boyce on the left side. He

appeared to be on the verge of splitting a log in the center of the page, and

the stick figure of Davy held what looked like a wedge just above the log. A