Shadows

by John Saul

  Josh, who had followed the older woman into the kitchen, rolled his eyes. “Aw, come on, Mom. Mrs. Hardwick doesn’t need to come back. I can look out for Melinda myself.”

  “Really,” Brenda observed darkly. “I can’t even trust you to make it through the first day of school without getting thrown out, and now you want me to trust you with your sister?”

  Josh’s mouth dropped open and he felt his eyes fill with tears, but he turned away quickly, instinctively refusing to let either his mother or Mrs. Hardwick see the pain he was feeling.

  “Great!” he muttered. “If I can’t do anything right, I just won’t do anything at all!” He stamped across the room, disappeared into the short hall that separated the two small bedrooms and one tiny bath from the living room. There was a crash as the door to the room he shared with his baby sister slammed shut.

  Josh threw himself on his bed, burying his face in his pillow.

  It wasn’t fair! None of it was. Not what Ethan Roeder had done to him in the cafeteria, or Mr. Hodgkins not believing his side of the story, or his mother making him come home from school, or any of it. Why didn’t they kick Ethan out? He was the one who’d started the fight!

  And why wouldn’t his mother let him take care of Melinda? It wasn’t like he was a baby anymore. Lots of kids his age stayed home alone while their moms worked.

  It was Melinda.

  She didn’t trust him with Melinda.

  He sat up, glaring malevolently at the crib that occupied the opposite corner of his room.

  It wasn’t even his room anymore. Now it was Melinda’s room, too, and it seemed more and more like it was just her room. His eyes darted over the floor, fixing angrily on the littered toys.

  Maybe he should just open the window and throw them all out onto the dirt next to the building.

  He picked up Melinda’s favorite toy, a teddy bear that he himself had chosen for her right after she was born, and started toward the window. But even as he began to open the window, he had already changed his mind.

  None of what had happened was Melinda’s fault, he decided. She was just a little baby. Why should he punish her?

  He took the teddy bear to the crib and laid it on its back next to the pillow, so that it would be there for her the next time Melinda was put in her crib. Then he straightened out the blanket, carefully tucking it in so that the bear was nestled under the covers, only its furry head poking out, its shiny eyes looking up at him.

  The neatness of the crib—the simple orderliness of it—somehow made him feel better. Without really thinking about it, he started picking up the rest of Melinda’s scattered toys.

  Her alphabet blocks seemed to be everywhere. As he gathered them up he arranged them precisely on the brick-and-board shelves that served as not only his bookshelves, but her toy box as well. He put them carefully in order, leaving gaps for the letters he hadn’t yet found. When he was done, they were all there except for the C and the N. The C turned up under the bed, and he finally found the N stuffed down into the toe of one of his own slippers. The blocks arranged, he began picking up the large pieces of a simple jigsaw puzzle, putting them back in their cardboard frame and setting it up so it leaned against a wall. He moved on to the picture books and crayons that seemed to be strewn everywhere.

  Finally finished with his little sister’s belongings, he began on his own, a haphazard heap of possessions that littered his side of the room.

  Methodically, he started over, sorting through the various junk he’d collected, putting every item back exactly where it belonged.

  As he picked a dirty shirt up off the table by his bed, his gaze fell on the hunting knife his father had sent him for his birthday last year.

  No, not last year.

  The year before.

  Last year there hadn’t even been a card.

  He picked the knife up, staring at the blade. He wondered where his father was right then, and what he was doing.

  Did he even remember that he had a son named Josh? Or did he have another son now, another boy, whom he played baseball with, and took camping, and did all the things that fathers do with their boys?

  The things that Josh had never done with his father at all, since he couldn’t even remember his dad all that well.

  A thought flitted through his mind, but he quickly discarded it, putting the knife down and continuing with the task of storing his things away.

  But as he worked, the thought kept cropping up in his mind. When he had put the last of his dirty clothes in the hamper, and hung the last of the not-dirty-enough-to-need-washing shirts in the closet, he sat down on the bed and looked around the room.

  Now that it was straightened up, it was surprising how little there was in it.

  Even the bookshelves seemed to have a lot more of Melinda’s stuff on them than his own.

  And in a little while, when she got too big for her crib, she would need a bed.

  The room wasn’t really big enough for two beds.

  And the closet, and the dresser, were already full.

  His eyes went once more to the hunting knife that still lay on the table next to his bed.

  He picked it up, turning it so that the blade glinted in the sunlight that poured in through the window.

  His finger touched the edge. He’d spent hours honing the steel to the point where it would shave the fine hair right off his arm without leaving so much as a scratch.

  He moved the blade over the skin of his wrist now, watching the hair fall away. If he twisted the knife just a little, then jerked hard on it—

  An image of blood filled his mind, blood spurting from his opened arteries.

  Why not?

  He asked himself the question silently, letting his thoughts drift over the answer.

  Who would care if he was gone?

  Not Melinda—she hardly knew him.

  And his father sure wouldn’t—his father had forgotten about him a long time ago.

  Nor were there any friends who would miss him.

  His mother?

  He thought about his mother for a long time. Finally he decided that she might miss him at first, but the more he considered it, the more certain he was that if he weren’t there, her life would be a lot easier. She wouldn’t have to worry about him screwing up anymore, and not “living up to his potential,” whatever that was supposed to mean.

  It was a phrase he’d heard all his life, from the first time he got a report card in first grade, and read the teacher’s comments on the back. Even now the words were still burned into his memory: “Josh doesn’t seem motivated to work up to his potential.”

  He hadn’t known exactly what it meant until he’d looked up the word when he got home that day. When he’d finally puzzled it out, he wondered what the teacher had meant. He could read and write better than anyone else in the class! In fact, when they’d started, he’d been the only one who could read and write at all. He’d already known his multiplication tables, when all the rest of them were just learning to add and subtract. Why hadn’t his perfect grades been good enough?

  His mother had told him it was all right; the teacher had only meant that Josh was a lot smarter than the rest of the kids. From then on he’d always had the feeling that no matter what he did, it wasn’t going to be quite good enough. Not for the teachers, not for his mom. Not even for himself. Anger burned inside him. What was he supposed to do? Was it his fault he liked to read and already knew all the stuff they were teaching in school? And every year it was the same.

  “Josh isn’t working up to his potential.”

  And he was always in trouble, too, and his mom was always getting called into Mr. Hodgkins’s office to talk about him.

  When that happened, it meant she couldn’t be at work, and Max wouldn’t pay her.

  The blade of the knife shimmered in the sunlight. The thought grew in Josh’s mind.

  If he were dead—

  If he were dead, he wouldn’t have to worry about anything anym
ore. Not about his mom, or about getting in trouble, or the other kids picking on him.

  He wouldn’t have to worry about not living up to what everyone expected of him.

  And his mom wouldn’t have to worry about him, either.

  She could just go to work, and come home and take care of Melinda, and stop worrying about him. And when Melinda got bigger, she could have this room all to herself.

  He held the knife in his right hand, his eyes fixing on the shining blade. He wondered if it would hurt.

  But even if it did, it wouldn’t hurt for very long.

  And it wouldn’t hurt nearly as bad as he’d been hurting most of his life.

  His hand tightening on the knife’s handle, his eyes wide open, he slashed the blade across his left wrist.

  Instantly, a geyser of blood spurted from his wrist, and he quickly transferred the knife to his left hand.

  A second later another red geyser spouted from the artery of his right wrist.

  Oddly, it didn’t hurt at all.

  But there was a lot more blood than he’d thought there’d be.

  Brenda’s eyes came back into focus as the soap opera ended and the commercials began. She glanced up at the clock over the television set, realizing that she must have dozed off. The half hour she’d allotted for herself after Mabel Hardwick had finally left was almost gone.

  Melinda was sleeping peacefully in her arms. Brenda slowly got to her feet. If she was careful, she could get the baby into her crib without waking her up, and by now Josh should be calmed down enough so she could apologize to him.

  She moved silently to the kids’ bedroom door, quietly opened it, then froze in shock at what she saw.

  Josh, his face pale, was standing in the middle of the room.

  There was blood everywhere—his clothes were covered with it, as was the bed, and the carpet on which he stood was no longer avocado green, but a dark, muddy maroon.

  The moment in which her eyes took in the scene seemed to stretch on forever as a series of snapshots were etched into her memory forever.

  The hunting knife, its blade covered with blood, lying on Josh’s pillow.

  The sunlight, glowing redly through a smear of blood that had somehow gotten onto the window.

  The look of puzzlement in Josh’s eyes; the dazed expression on his face.

  For a long moment mother and son stared at each other in silent horror. It was Josh who finally spoke, his voice quavering.

  “Mom? I—I’m scared.”

  The words galvanized Brenda. She rushed to the crib, snatching up the blankets with one hand as she laid the startled Melinda, now wide awake again and screaming with outrage, on the mattress. Ignoring the cries of the baby, Brenda flung herself on Josh, grabbing first one wrist, then the other, and wrapping them tightly in the blanket.

  “Help!” she screamed. “Someone help me!”

  Josh flinched away from her shout, but she hung onto him, fumbling with the blanket. His right wrist slipped free, and a shower of blood sprayed across her pink uniform. Ignoring it, she half carried, half dragged Josh into the bathroom, threw the blanket aside and began wrapping his wrists with the small hand towels that hung next to the sink. Even as she worked, she heard the front door open and Mabel Hardwick’s voice calling out.

  “Brenda? What’s wrong? Was that you yelling?”

  “Call 911, Mabel,” Brenda shouted. “It’s Josh! He’s cut himself.”

  A split second later Mabel had appeared in the doorway and elbowed Brenda aside. “From the blood, it looks like arteries,” she said. “You call the ambulance. Let me take care of this.” Before Brenda could protest, Mabel had pushed her out of the bathroom and shut the door. Alone with Josh, she unwrapped the towel from his right wrist, twisted it into a thick rope, then placed a bar of soap on the inner side of his right forearm. Looping the towel rope around the arm to cover the bar, she twisted it tight. As the makeshift tourniquet pressed down on the artery, the blood suddenly stopped flowing.

  “Hold that,” she commanded Josh, her tone leaving no room for argument. As he grasped the towel with his still-bleeding left hand, she grabbed the belt from a robe that was hanging inside the bathroom door and made a second tourniquet to stem the flow of blood from the boy’s left wrist. “There,” she said as she finished. “Now you just hold still a minute while I take a look at this.”

  Turning on the water, she rinsed the blood away from the wounds on Josh’s right wrist, and felt a wave of relief. At least he’d cut across, and the bones of his forearm had prevented him from cutting too deeply. Just a nick, really. “Where’s the adhesive tape?” she demanded, and Josh mutely nodded toward the medicine cabinet.

  As she began taping up the wound on his right wrist, the door opened and Brenda, her face almost as pale as Josh’s, wriggled into the cramped space. “They’ll be here in five minutes. Is—Is it bad?”

  Mabel Hardwick kept working as she talked. “Not so bad as it could be. Looks a lot worse than it is. When they get here, you go with him in the ambulance, and I’ll stay with the baby and start cleaning up.” Looking up for the first time, she saw the shock and panic that seemed about to overcome Brenda. “Don’t you even think of falling apart, Brenda MacCallum. Lots worse than this has happened to me, and nobody ever saw me getting ready to faint. Now you go throw some water on your face, and get your purse!”

  The sharp words cut through the fear that had gripped Brenda. They set her in motion, automatically doing precisely as Mabel Hardwick had commanded. By the time the ambulance arrived a few minutes later, Brenda was ready, her wits gathered around her once more. The medics insisted that Josh lie on a gurney, despite his objections. As Brenda followed them down the stairs to the waiting ambulance, she called back to Mabel.

  “Call the café, will you, Mabel? Tell Max I won’t be back today.” Not waiting for a reply, she ducked into the ambulance and crouched by the stretcher as one of the medics slammed the door. As the ambulance screeched out of the parking lot, its siren wailing, she gazed down into Josh’s pale face.

  “What happened, honey? What on earth were you doing?”

  Josh looked back at her for a moment, then his eyes shifted away. “I just wanted to get out of the way, that’s all,” he said, his voice barely audible.

  For the first time since she’d seen Josh standing in his room, his wrists spurting blood, she realized that his cuts had not been some kind of terrible accident.

  Her son, her wonderful, brilliant, ten-year-old son, had tried to kill himself.

  The half hour Brenda spent in the small waiting area at the front of the emergency room of the county clinic seemed like an eternity. She’d called the café herself, and been relieved when Annette had answered the phone rather than Max. Annette had assured her that Mabel Hardwick had already called, and told her she wasn’t to worry about anything. Max had even said she shouldn’t come in tomorrow if she didn’t want to. He was planning to send a pie down to Josh. He was working on it right now, and putting in twice as many pecans as usual.” ’Course he had to say something about having to ‘bribe the little shit,’ just so he can keep some decent help around the place, but that’s just Max,” Annette finished. “Now don’t you worry about a thing. Soon’s I get off, I’m coming over to your place and fix dinner. And no arguments, okay?” Then, even precluding Brenda’s thank-you, she hung up.

  Briefly, Brenda considered trying to contact Buck MacCallum, but quickly gave up the idea. She’d long ago decided that trying to collect child support from him was a fruitless endeavor. In truth, for the last couple of years she hadn’t even been sure where he was living. Feeling desperate, she found herself dialing her parents, waiting apprehensively at the empty sound of ringing at the other end. They had moved away from Eden five years ago, when her father had decided it was time to go into business for himself and sold his house, over her mother’s objections, to buy a bait shop on the Gulf coast in Texas. Finally, her mother answered. She listened to Brenda’s fragme
nted story in silence, then said that she’d always known there was something wrong with Josh; this wasn’t anything Brenda shouldn’t have been expecting.

  “Thanks, Mom,” Brenda said coldly. “Sorry I bothered you.” Hanging up the phone, she shook her head. She shouldn’t have been surprised, really. One of the reasons she’d married Buck in the first place was simply to get away from her parents. It was, she reflected, as if the heat of the desert had baked the humanity right out of them.

  And then, as she paced nervously around the waiting room, she began turning her own thoughts over in her mind. Was that why Josh had done it? Did he think she didn’t care? She’d been so careful always to make sure Josh knew how much she loved him, how proud she was of him.

  But what else could it have been?

  Children his age didn’t try to kill themselves, did they?

  Of course not! They didn’t even think about such things.

  But Josh had.

  She was startled from her thoughts by a woman’s voice. A nurse was telling her she could see her son now.

  He was sitting up in bed, his face still deathly white, and he looked even younger than his ten years. A doctor stood by the bed. As Brenda came into the room, he gave her an encouraging smile.

  “This little guy may have made a terrible mess, but if he was really trying to hurt himself, he didn’t do a very good job of it. Three stitches in each wrist, and the bandages are mostly for show. I could easily have made do with Band-Aids.” He grinned down at Josh and tousled his hair. “Next time you want to come to the hospital, just walk in the door, okay?”

  He started toward the door, pausing only to ask Brenda to drop by his office after she’d visited with Josh. Then he was gone, and Brenda was alone with her son. Suddenly she realized she didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to him. She simply stood still, heart pounding, looking at him. At last his eyes met hers.

  “A-Are you really mad at me, Mom?” he asked, his frightened whisper bringing tears to her eyes. Immediately she knew what to do. She went to him, put her arms around him and held him close.

  “Mad at you? How could I be mad at you? You’re the best son anyone could ever have. I’m just sorry I was so hard on you today. It’s just … Oh, honey, I guess it’s just that sometimes I’m not a very good mother.”