The Boy Who Drew Monsters: A Novel (16 page)

“A very Merry Christmas to you, Mrs. Keenan. I’m so delighted to see you here.” He squeezed her hand in his. “After you left so suddenly, I was afraid I had scared you off and would never see you again.” Noticing someone over her shoulder, he let go with his right hand but held on to her arm with his left. “Just who I was looking for.”

Bundled in her winter coat, Miss Tiramaku shuffled to his side. She gave Father Bolden a kiss on his cheek and offered her hand to Holly. In the soft light of the church, Miss Tiramaku was no more substantial than a will-o’-the-wisp, but Holly felt a strange warmth in her touch.

“Mrs. Keenan,” she said. “Merry Christmas. I was hoping to see you tonight. I think I may have left you with a bad impression.”

“No,” Holly said. “I was just a little thrown by our talk. And that painting of the shipwreck. And your ghosts.”

Miss Tiramaku was massaging her hand. “I’d like to talk with you about your son. He and I share the same condition, that is to say, we’re on the same spectrum, though they never called it autism when I was a child.”

“Asperger’s,” Holly said. “But you are fine now? Functioning?”

Suppressing a laugh, she nodded. “If you call this functioning. I’d like to meet your son sometime, see if I can be of any help.”

For a moment, Holly felt a surge of hope, a fleeting possibility that Jack might not be forever trapped inside.

The priest turned around to the two women.“Cinnamon buns in the morning, Miss T.?”

“It wouldn’t be Christmas without them.” She smiled. “May we meet again soon, Mrs. Keenan.”

“Holly,” she said. “And a very merry Christmas to you.”

Miss Tiramaku went on her way, pushing open the doors and disappearing into the night, leaving the church nearly empty.

“When I was a little girl, we used to come to midnight Mass every Christmas eve,” Holly said.

“Welcome home. And how is that boy of yours?”

“I need to talk with you, Father. It’s not just Jack but my husband, too. He’s been acting strangely. Wandering around at night, seeing things.”

“Seeing things?”

She leaned forward and spoke in a hoarse whisper. “He left the boys alone and went out by the ocean because he saw something. All day long, came back with these wicked deep scratches in his throat. He was a bloody mess. Claims it was ghosts.”

The von Trapps marched up to them in single file, a song waiting to be born if she ever saw one. In order to give them a proper greeting, Father Bolden released her, and shook each hand one by one and gave the littlest among them a pat on his sleepy head. The moment was ideal for her escape, but Holly found herself bound to the priest by invisible wires. She had said too much, and having heard “ghosts” emerge from her mouth, she felt slightly embarrassed by the ridiculousness of the word. She did not believe in ghosts, and thought all those who believed in them to be slightly mad. Even the Japanese housekeeper with her
yurei
. Perhaps Tim had gone mad as well, out wandering the shoreline, pursued by monsters. She wanted to retract her confession, rewind the conversation to its beginnings and beyond, to the moment she had ever decided to come to this place. Her husband and child were asleep in their beds. She should be home, dreaming of sugarplums.

Just as she was about to leave, Holly felt a tug at her sleeve and saw that the old priest had latched on to her again and would not let go. The last of the von Trapps bid him auf Wiedersehen, adieu, and they trooped off. Father Bolden drew her closer. He reminded her of a Cub Scout at a campfire, ready for the thrill of the story. “What do you mean by ghosts?”

“That was wrong. I’m not sure if he really meant ghosts or something else. What I meant to say was that he’s been acting strangely lately. My husband. My son, too. I just needed an hour’s peace. Jack will be up at the crack of dawn, waiting by the Christmas tree, and it’s just been madness. Chaos, the holidays, you know?”

“Better than most. A case of the Christmas spirits.”

She shrugged at his joke and offered him half a smile.

“The offer stands,” he said. “You come see me anytime you want or need to. There’s always a lull after Christmas.” He relinquished his grip and sent her on her way.

The clouds had fallen during the service, and a soft fog settled upon the landscape. In the mist, the lights in the parking lot sprouted halos. A minivan purred to life, its headlights picking the way through the gloom. The von Trapps, she imagined, heading home to bed, and in the morning there would be confetti of wrapping paper and ribbons and bows, and whiskers on kittens, and a few of her favorite things. Why isn’t my life more like a musical? As she reached her car, Holly stuck her hand inside her purse to search for her keys but was surprised instead by the candle and its cardboard circle concealed like a gun. She debated whether she should return it to the church, but decided a small white sin was preferable to further embarrassing conversation with the priest.

Gripping the steering wheel, she leaned close to the windshield to try to see where she was going. The thick mist parted as the car pushed forward, and she toyed with the wipers to little improvement. She drove cautiously, grateful that no one else was around, and to ease her anxiety, she replayed the Christmas hymns on the soundtrack in her mind. At the turn onto Shore Road, a shadow crossed the pavement in front of her, and she braked, uncertain of what she had seen. Ahead on the driver’s side, the object seemed to move again, the mist rippling in its wake, and she rolled down her window and stuck out her head into the dark night. “Hello,” she said, but only the purr of the engine returned her call. Bitter air rushed into the car, and the blast rejuvenated her in that sleepy hour. The clock radio read half-past one.

An answer rose up from the silence. Initially she thought there must be a problem with the car, the scrape of the wipers on a dry window or whining from the parking brake. She pulled onto the shoulder and shut off the engine. The ever-present ocean bashed against the rocky coast somewhere below, but on top of that familiar rhythm a human sound filtered through the dense cloud, like a party nearby, the last of the revelers blurting out a song, and then she took it for an argument heading to violence, a husband and wife hollering at each other. Or Fred Weller’s pack of coyotes howling at the moon, but those were no animal sounds. The voices had a different tenor, a tone of desperation. She opened the door and stepped out into the night.

Where were they coming from? Holly crossed the road and looked down the embankment toward the water, but it was hopeless. The mist around her swallowed everything, made all invisible. She could be forty yards or four hundred yards from the edge, and even if she could manage to find the shore, what then? Far off and out at sea came the sounds. Voices, she imagined, in the cold and darkness, the passengers from the
Porthleven
, begging for rescue and an end to their terror. Couldn’t be, but still, something out in the water could not be seen, could not be saved. Her heart raced and panic tugged at her limbs. She felt the urge to plunge forward and launch herself into the rocks, but an equal force kept her locked to the spot, dread rising in her gut. The fog tasted of salt. She bent over at the waist and rested her hands on her knees to prevent hyperventilating, and when she looked up, there was no wooden ship sinking in the ocean. As abruptly as the screaming began, it suddenly stopped, like a recording cut off in midmeasure.

The calmness frightened her more than the sound. She listened in vain, waiting for the screams to resume, but the voices had been interrupted and abandoned. Fear crystallizes time, makes it slow and still. Only once before had she experienced this feeling, the day her son had vanished from the beach. To make the world spin again, she would have to will it to motion, so she inhaled a deep breath and let it spool from her lungs. The car across the road seemed miles away, the murkiness as thick as blood. Her husband and son were asleep in their beds, the Christmas house was waiting for her to return. For a few moments, she sat in the car, running the heater. It’s late, she told herself, I should just crawl into bed. The ocean was just an idea, a sound and nothing more. No
Porthleven
rock-riven and filling with cold water. No mysterious lupine figure wandering in the night air. No pair of boys playing in the surf and tumbling beneath the waves. No inside boy, no strange and penetrating stares from the babe at her breast. No strangers accusing her. No husband. How long ago had she known? How soon had her instinct told her the truth about Jack? The world of ifs, the land of so.

Tim had left the twinkling lights on, glowing softly like a chain of stars, guiding her into the driveway. Her Christmas boy was not ever going to be well. Pretty soon he would be stronger than she was, and bigger, some real violence in his fist. The day was coming when the ordinary demons of adolescence would wrestle with his private devils, and it could be a hell. And she knew that her love for Jack would not be enough to protect him forever, that one day she would have to give him up or send him away or have someone else, a nurse, a ward, a home to mother him.

A lamp was on in one of the windows, and as soon as she faced it, the light went out so quickly that she could not determine from which room it had shone. Upstairs, yes, but Jack’s room or her own? Or perhaps it was one of them using the bathroom in the middle of the night. Seat down, fellas. Still, the sudden flicker unnerved her, as if the house itself had been spying, waiting for her to make the next move. The house was cold inside and the air damp against her skin as though the hazy vapors had crept in through the cracks. She turned up the thermostat a few clicks until the heat came on and pumped warm air into the room. During her absence, Tim had arranged the presents below the Christmas tree in a small mountain of many colors and ribbons and bows. She stood before the pile of gifts, admiring the artful care he had shown in placing each one. Just so. In the morning, he would play the elf, dispensing the packages one by one in an order of his own devising.

She tiptoed up the stairs and changed into the nightgown hanging from the back of the bathroom door. As she readied for bed, the lateness of the hour weighed heavily. Other Christmas eves had been spent in last-minute preparations for the morning to come. Once Tim had stayed up till three, assembling a recalcitrant bicycle, now long neglected. The year Jack Peter was born, they spent the night listening through the baby monitor, hoping he might awaken, and nestling together for his midnight feed, all three of them asleep, the baby against her breast, her husband at her side. Or that terrible fight that one Christmas when she could not fully forgive Tim’s transgressions and amends. Ancient history, she thought, and slid into bed, careful not to wake her sleeping husband.

*   *   *

Belowdecks the sea poured in through the hole created when the ship struck the rocks. In their quarters, preparing for arrival in the new land, she and Tim were tossed to the floor by the scraping collision. The ship listed to the breach and knocked the feet from under them again as they tried to rise. Their trunk of clothes and goods slid across the room and burst open, and the small loose articles—a brush and hand mirror, a sheaf of paper and pens, a secret flask of rum—fell and scattered pell-mell. Seeping through the oaken decks and streaming beneath the door, the sea stained the wood, slowly at first like spilled milk, and then all at once, a torrent that gushed by inches as they regained their feet. She screamed at Tim to do something, but he simply sucked on the long stem of his clay pipe and considered the situation with a detached, almost amused air. The coldness of the water shocked and then numbed them. Tim sloshed to the cabin door, but he could not open it against the pressure of the incoming sea and he hulloed and called for the captain, but it was instantly apparent that no one could hear them. Holly struggled to his side in a panic as the water girdled her hips and waist, and she beat her fists against the door, hollering for help.
Come save us
. She drummed and cried out, but the ship rocked and pitched by thirty degrees, and the cold water rose to their shoulders. Tim banged against the ceiling, the sea sweeping them off their feet, so that they were treading water now, and the wooden walls burst ecstatically. They were under, breathing in the sea in one last desperate gesture, the air bubbling from their mouths, a bewildered look frozen on their faces. Suspended in the green sea, the bodies floated toward the cabin walls and then sank, white as fish bellies, dead as dead could be, bobbing in slow motion, and knocking dully against the confines of the little room in the coffin of the
Porthleven
.

As if she had stopped breathing, Holly choked and gasped for breath. She opened her eyes from the nightmare, and almost reflexively, she sat up in the bed to check on her husband. Tim snored gently into his pillow. She threw off the covers and went to see about her son, gently opening Jack’s door. In the dim light, she made out his figure curled on the bed. He twitched in his sleep and his shoulders jerked as if she had caught him in some erotic throes, but his movements were sporadic, as if he dreamt of wrestling or of running or swimming away from her. The memory of those drowned bodies gave her a chill. She wanted to lay her hands on her son, but she knew that he might jump from her touch or scream or strike her. From the edge of his bed she spoke his name softly, and he rolled over and went still, sighing once. Just as quietly, she inched off the mattress and stood, watching him a moment longer.

Tim was still sleeping when she crawled into bed, but he woke as soon as her cold feet grazed the warmth of his calves. He rolled over to her, and she could feel his gaze upon her.

“You’re back,” he whispered. “How was church?”

Midnight Mass seemed a lifetime ago. “Just fine,” she said. “Beautiful, really, but it’s been a strange night. On the way home, I could have sworn there was a group of people out there. A ship at sea, drowning. It’s so foggy, I couldn’t see a thing.”

The hinge of his jaw made a snapping sound when he yawned. “Try to get some sleep. Who knows when our little boy will be up in the morning? Could be the crack of dawn. Just like when he was a baby.”