The Cartoonist

by Sean Costello

  “Sure I can’t get you anything?” Krista said again, once Scott was stretched out and covered.

  “I’m okay,” he said. “Really.” Then, trying inexpertly to sound casual, he added: “Did anyone pick up the camera?”

  “What camera?” Krista said, shaking her head.

  “I forgot,” Kath murmured, looking both guilty and forlorn.

  “What were you doing down there, anyway?” Krista said.

  Not wanting to explain the real reason, which seemed pretty far-out in the face of what had happened, Scott fibbed. “Nothing, really. I just took a notion to try out the Minolta. There were some sunfish down there, in around the weeds. I was trying to get off a few shots. Would you mind having a look for it? The camera, I mean?”

  “Okay, Professor Cousteau,” Krista said. “Anything to please.” She kissed him lightly on the forehead. “I’m just so glad you’re all right.” Smiling broadly, she left him alone with their daughter.

  Scott patted the edge of the couch with his hand. “Come sit over here,” he said with affection. Kath obeyed, but in a dazed, automatic way. He drew her close and kissed her on the cheek. Her skin felt feverish against his lips.

  “I’m okay now, sweetheart,” he said, and Kath’s mouth quivered as she bit back tears. “I really am. And Bob was right, you know. I’ve got you to thank for it.” The quiver became the beginnings of a smile...but a lone tear appeared, coursed quickly down her cheek and then fell. It landed on the back of Scott’s hand.

  “Are you really okay, Daddy?” Kath said, more tears brimming now.

  “Okay as ever.”

  Kath hugged him then, suddenly, viciously, painfully, and let the tears come in great sobbing rushes. Still shivering, Scott did his best to console her.

  * * *

  Wearing one of Scott’s windbreakers like a cape, Krista trod barefoot down the hill to the lake, being careful not to slip on the rain-beaded grass. The sky, which had cleared enough to allow the sun to wink briefly through, was lowering again, and the air was beginning to stir. As she stepped onto the dock, Krista heard the chop and chuckle of water under her feet, and drew the jacket more snuggly around her. The morning’s insanity had temporarily short-circuited her capacity for thought, and it took her a few blank moments to recall why she’d come back down here in the first place.

  The camera.

  Questions bobbed up in her mind as she toured the outer edge of the dock, looking down, watching for a bright yellow flash. Sunfish? a voice kept repeating. Why would he go down there after sunfish? But there were no answers, only the dry electric hum of relief and the phantom weight of her terror.

  She’d almost given up when she spotted it, snagged in the half-submerged branches of a willow at the western edge of their property, bobbing like the questions in her mind. She had to wade in past her knees to retrieve it, soaking her jeans but not caring. She scooped it up and shoved it directly into a pocket, disturbed by its flat yellow glare in the light of the coming squall.

  When she got back from the lake, Krista found her daughter and husband asleep on the couch. They stayed that way for another hour. By then the morning storm had come full circle, returning more heavily armed than before, and a thunderclap brought the two of them awake with identical, startled cries.

  7

  “WHO ARE YOU CALLING?”

  It was ten-thirty and they were in bed, Scott propped against the headboard, Krista angled toward the phone with the receiver in her hand. Kath was asleep in her room. Scott had taken some Valium before crawling into bed. The drug would do nothing for the pain, he knew, but he thought it might help him nod off...and for what ailed him now, rest was the only cure.

  “I’m calling Caroline,” Krista said. “I tried her this afternoon, but there was no answer. I want to warn her that Kath and I won’t be coming to Boston this weekend.”

  “Why not?” Scott said...but he knew.

  “You know why not. I can’t leave you alone like this.”

  “Listen, Kris,” Scott said. “Hang up the phone and talk to me for a minute, will you?” She did. “There’s no reason for you not to go. I’m fine now. I’m going to ache for a few days, but that’ll be all. I’ll have Steve Franklin take a look at my hip on Monday—”

  “You’re not going in to work on Monday,” Krista cut in, nearly shouting. “Cripes, Bowman, I can’t believe you. Here you are nearly drowned and already you’re thinking about work?” There was some real anger flaring now. “I thought if anything you’d take the week off, maybe even fly down to Boston on Tuesday if you were feeling better.”

  So that was it.

  “I didn’t say anything about work,” Scott said. “If I feel even half this rough on Monday, I won’t be going in to work. All I said was I’d like to have Steve take a look at my hip.” Steve Franklin, a friend of Scott’s, was an orthopedic surgeon. “I can’t take the week off, hon. We’ve already been through this. There’s just too much going on.”

  He pulled her close against only a cursory resistance. “Wait until tomorrow before you decide, okay? Call Caroline now if you must, but tell her you’ll be getting in on schedule. You can still have a great time together. All right?” Krista allowed him a begrudging nod. “I’ll have Gerry over if I need any help, but I’m sure I’ll be fine. It’s only sore muscles.” He grinned. “Anyway, I’ll be giving myself a nice Budweiser anesthetic all day tomorrow...no need to fret over me.”

  Uncharmed but at least resigned, Krista turned and made her call. Afterward, she fell asleep that way, with her back to Scott.

  * * *

  By midnight the Valium Scott had taken was finally hitting home. He wasn’t asleep, but a dull sort of mental and physical numbness had crept over him; under the circumstances, he supposed it passed for relaxation. Krista lay snoozing beside him, restless, probably dreaming. From the hallway leading to Kath’s room came only silence. The house was asleep again.

  Outside, like a river, ran a low and choppy wind, the dying exhalations of the storm. In those erratic last breaths, the sheers belled and twisted before the open north window. Every once in a while the metal dock joiners moaned lonesomely, and from somewhere out on the lake a loon gave an answering cry.

  But Scott heard none of these sounds. The waves...he heard only the waves. Rolling, breaking, brushing the barrels, caressing the shoreline like practiced fingertips, strumming, reaching up... The sound made him think of the weeds, their swaying death dance, and he listened compulsively to the rhythm, its hypnotic symmetry.

  Gradually, lulled by it, he dropped into sleep.

  At the bottom of his descent was a pool of black water, and he entered it feet-first...but it wasn’t water, it was quicksand, a foul and sucking quagmire, and he was in it up to the waist, sinking fast. Around him spread a formless green gray, a mist so thick it might have been liquid.

  From out of the silence came the padding of tiny feet—unhurried footfalls, rhythmic, relaxed. Scott cried out pleadingly in the liquid mist, but no sound issued from his throat, only a great and wasted rush of air that bubbled up into the gloom.

  The footfalls became a face...ghostly pale, disembodied in the dimness, with crimson eyes and an elfin, somehow familiar grin. It drifted closer, seeming to diffuse through some muddy membrane... then it was Kath’s face, grinning her most playful grin.

  But her eyes were still red...red and dull and hate-filled.

  He blinked and now Kath was whole, blue-eyed and perfect, dressed in her orange and white swimsuit. She stepped in closer to the bog, leaned provocatively over, and smiled.

  “Hi, Daddy,” she said in a voice that was not her own. “You’re going to die in there.”

  From the fingers of one hand dangled the yellow Minolta. Smiling, Kath lifted the camera to her eye. The flash exploded light. Far, far above, the undersurface of the dock flickered detail.

  “Help me, pet,” Scott pleaded, pinpoints of light pulsing on his retinas. “For God’s sake, help me.”


  Kath only grinned and leaned out farther over the bog, offering the camera. “Here, Daddy,” she murmured. “Now you take my picture.”

  Scott spat quicksand from his mouth. He could feel the stuff gritting between his teeth and knew that soon it would cover him completely....

  But he took the camera and brought it up to his eye.

  And as the flash cut the dimness he saw through the viewfinder that it wasn’t Kath he was shooting, but someone else—something else, something with bloodless white skin, silver white hair...and those baleful red eyes, like the eyes of a road animal caught in the dazzling deathglare of onrushing headlights.

  The quicksand sent cool tendrils up his nose. He dropped the camera and it bobbed away, into the green gray stuff overhead. Barely able to breathe, he lifted his chin from the ooze. It was seeping into his ears....

  Kath’s face was disembodied again, and now it was blurring toward him through the gloom, distorting, coming apart, spattering blood...

  But it couldn’t get to him. No. Because now the quicksand was covering his eyes.

  And he was drowning in it, drowning in it, drowning...

  * * *

  Scott’s scream brought Krista awake with a frightened cry of her own. When she opened her eyes she found him tangled in the sheets, struggling to his knees in bed.

  “Scott,” she said, grabbing the rigid column of his arm. “Scott, what is it?”

  Wheezing like an engine, Scott opened his eyes and saw the billowing curtains, the familiar shapes of the bedroom furniture, Krista... then he slumped against the headboard in a sweat. Krista drew him down, kissed him, lay with her chest against his back, comforting, murmuring over the wind.

  Before sleeping again, this time dreamlessly, Scott asked her to close the window. She did this without question. As she returned to bed, Scott noticed the sheers behind her, hanging dead against the wall.

  It was better with the window closed. He couldn’t hear the waves.

  He slept.

  And later, when dawn spilled bleach into the heavens and Krista hurried out to Kath’s bedroom to comfort the child in the wake of her own nightmares, Scott didn’t notice she had gone.

  8

  AFTER GETTING KATH SETTLED, KRISTA returned to bed. She drowsed fitfully for another hour, then got up. In spite of her poor night of sleep, she could remain in bed no longer.

  She stood naked in the gray morning light, looking down at her husband for what seemed like a long time. He lay on his side with his knees drawn up, one arm wrapped loosely around his pillow. His respirations were deep and the corners of his mouth twitched like the muzzle of a skittish horse. Krista noticed that his eyes darting crazily beneath their lids and wondered what he was dreaming.

  It dawned on her then, with the brute force of a hammer blow, that she might have awakened to an empty bed this morning...and every morning for the rest of her life. Another minute, maybe two, down there at the bottom of the lake, and they would have been dragging for her husband’s body instead of wrenching it to the surface to gasp and grapple and live.

  At this thought Krista shuddered, her skin bristling at every follicle. She grabbed her housecoat and pulled it on....

  And suddenly she wanted to wake him. Suddenly his stillness disturbed her to a degree that was as irrational as it was blackly terrifying. She recognized this irrationality immediately—but still, the urge to wake him, to hold him and to hear his voice, was almost overpowering.

  She glanced at the bedside digital as she stooped forward to rouse him, hesitated, then decided to let him sleep. It was still only a quarter of six.

  As if sensing Krista’s unease from the dreamscape of his slumber, Scott moaned and shifted onto his back, dragging his pillow along with him. Still shaky but somehow relieved, Krista turned and left him to his healing sleep.

  She was unsurprised when she found Kath’s comforter folded back and her bed empty. Stepping into the room, she touched the hollow where Kath’s body had been and found it cool. Concerned, she hurried downstairs and ran a systematic search of the house.

  But there were no signs of Kath anywhere. She hadn’t even had her ritual bowl of Cocoa Puffs. More than a little frightened now, Krista stepped out onto the deck, her eyes cutting through the fine morning mist to the lake.

  There, alone on the dock like some winsome figure in an oil painting, sat Kath.

  Wrapping herself in her housecoat, Krista walked barefoot through the dew toward her musing daughter. She sat beside Kath on the dock...the Bowman harem, as Scott liked to call them. Kath’s feet were dangling in the water and she was watching a trio of loons.

  “Neat the way they dive, eh, Mom?” she said as the loons submerged in silent sequence. Her voice was lifeless and flat.

  Disturbed by her daughter’s tone, Krista went momentarily blank. She simply could not think of how to answer. “Uh-huh,” she said finally. “They sure can hold their breath. Let’s see how long they—”

  “What happened to Daddy yesterday, Mom?”

  Krista turned to face her only child, so small and vulnerable looking in the sketchy dawn light.

  “It was like he said in the rec room yesterday, hon. Your daddy got stuck in the rocks down there and couldn’t get unstuck.”

  A deep cleft furrowed Kath’s brow between her tired eyes. She kicked with one brown foot at the water, as if to punish it.

  Then she looked squarely at her mom, fixing Krista’s gaze as only a child’s eyes can. Her next question seemed to quiver on her lips, a question she’d been prodding and poking at since late the morning before.

  “Could he have drowned? Really drowned?”

  There was only one answer to this question, and it was one Krista hated to give. For a cowardly moment she considered lying, telling Kath her dad would have gotten out just fine on his own after another minute or two...but she choked off the idea as quickly as it raised its deceiving head. There was no room here for a lie. Later, it would not be forgiven.

  The answer was a simple affirmative, a single syllable that cut the legs out from under every child’s innate belief that their parents were invulnerable.

  “Yes, honey,” she said. “Your daddy could have drowned.”

  Kath fell silent then, her eyes resuming the same glassy blankness they’d acquired in the rec room the morning before. After a moment she stood.

  “I want to go see if Daddy’s okay,” she said softly.

  Krista took her hand. “Not now, sweetie. He’s sleeping. Let him sleep. He’s all right. You can see him later.”

  Kath hesitated, looking up at the house and her parents’ curtained window. Then she sat again. She kicked at the water, thoughtful. After a while she went in for a swim.

  * * *

  At about nine-thirty on that sunny Sunday morning, Scott cranked himself up into a sitting position on the side of the bed. His first thought was that he had never been so stiff...even yesterday had not been this bad. And now his head was in on it, too. He felt as if he’d just put the wraps on a giant, week-long booze fest.

  The Valium, he thought as he rose unsteadily to his feet. The Valium had done its job. Wobbling like a wino, he took an uncertain step forward and had to prop a balancing hand on the night table. He waited for his head to clear, then shuffled carefully into the bathroom. More than anything he wanted a shower, but when he thought of standing there for the ten or so minutes it would take, he opted instead for a bath. Lounging in a tub of hot water would do more for his tender muscles anyway.

  While he was sitting on the toilet and peeing forever, Krista popped in and drew his bath. Just as abruptly she vanished, only to promptly return with a tray of French toast and a pot of hot coffee. She helped him into the water, which was just this side of scalding, then rested the tray on the edge of the tub.

  “Sore?” she said, twining her fingers in his chest hair.

  Scott nodded between gobbles of toast; he was voracious. “Understatement,” he said after clearing the pipes with a
mouthful of coffee.

  Krista began kneading the muscles of his right calf. In appreciation, Scott’s eyelids drooped to half-mast. He finished his breakfast quickly and then stretched out, allowing the water to work its way up to his chin.

  “You sure gave me a scare last night, mister,” Krista said, donning an oversized sponge-glove and starting on the muscles of his thigh.

  He regarded her quizzically. “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t tell me you don’t remember. The nightmare you had? You sat up in bed—stood more like—then you asked me to close the window.”

  Scott shook his head. The last thing he remembered was Krista calling Caroline in Boston, and even that seemed curiously fragmented. The Valium, he thought again, searching his memory, trying to pick up an image of the events following the phone call.

  “Can’t recall,” he said.

  “I find that hard to believe,” Krista said, temporarily suspending the massage. “I mean, you were right up on your knees, and you looked straight at me when you asked me to close the window.”

  Scott explained to her that one of the properties of Valium, particularly when used in conditions of stress, was the production of amnesia. He told her this was the main reason the drug was so popular as an adjunct in anesthesia. Krista nodded with patient uninterest.

  Then Scott asked her about her plans regarding Boston.

  “I still don’t know,” she said, looking down at her folded knees. “I’d feel terrible if anything happened to you here all alone. You could fall or...or...”

  “Or what?” Scott said, not really expecting an answer. “Look, I’ll make you a deal. If you go, you can take the Volvo.”

  Krista’s face lit up like a child’s on Christmas morning. Just as quickly, it clouded over again. “Are you trying to get rid of me, Scott Bowman? Are you having an affair?”

  For a heartbeat Scott thought she was serious, and he was just getting ready to tell her how ridiculous a question that had been when Krista giggled and splashed him.