The Cartoonist

by Sean Costello

  “Do you mean it?” she said, smiling sunnily.

  “Would I kid about the Volvo? Anyway, I don’t like the idea of you going all that way in the Chevette, new or not. If you ever got hit in that damned thing...” He leaned over and kissed her, dripping bathwater onto her slacks. “Okay? I want you to go.”

  This was a lie. He wasn’t in the least looking forward to being alone in the house; it would be his first time since they moved in. It wasn’t that he was afraid or anything like that...it was just that he hated being alone. It was his personal neurosis.

  He continued his sales pitch. “It’ll do you both good. I’ll call Gerry if I need anything, and Anderson’s is only five minutes away. I feel a lot better today, anyway.”

  Krista arched a doubting brow.

  “Deal?” Scott said.

  “Deal,” Krista said after a considering pause. “I’ll do it.”

  * * *

  It was noon and they were standing by the idling Volvo, Scott in his bathrobe, Krista in shorts and a yellow tank top. The car was loaded with enough clothing and God knew what else to last the girls until sometime into the next century, and the day was clear and hot, ideally suited for a long drive in an air-conditioned sports car.

  “And don’t forget,” Scott said as Krista leaned into the back seat to secure the Coleman cooler. “When you stop for gas—”

  “Use only Shell high-test,” Krista said, finishing his sentence with noticeable exasperation. This was the third time he’d gone through his twenty-point car-care instruction plan. When it came to the Volvo, Scott was the original ‘old woman.’

  ”I’ll take care of your baby,” she said, returning his embarrassed grin. ”Okay?”

  Scott slapped her fanny. He was feeling much better now. The bath had loosened him up nicely, and afterward, he’d taken a short stroll along the private, tree-lined Cottage Road. The combination of hot water and gentle exercise had banished a lot of the stiffness. Now he felt only as if he’d overdone it in a game of touch football or somesuch the day before. That was bad enough, but he felt nothing like the rusted hulk he had when he crawled out of bed this morning.

  ”Where’s Kath?” he said.

  Krista’s smile evaporated, her brow furrowing with the same deep cleft Kath got when concerned. “Down at the dock. She’s still acting a little...funny. You know. I think your accident has affected her pretty deeply. I’ll go call her—”

  “No,” Scott said. “Let me.”

  He found her sitting on the dock with her legs drawn up and her chin propped on her knees. She was wearing a cute tan outfit with short pants and short sleeves. And she was crying.

  Scott felt something shift uncomfortably in his chest. He sat beside her, cradled her in his arms, and rocked her.

  “What is it, Patch?” he whispered.

  Kath looked up at him with wet eyes. She smiled weakly, then sputtered out a tears-and-spit giggle. She hadn’t been called Patch since she was five.

  “Do you remember why I used to call you that?”

  She nodded. “’Cause I was always tearing my clothes and Mom was always patchin’ ’em?”

  “That’s right.” He hugged her. “So, what’s up, Doc?”

  After a moment of mute deliberation, as if fearing the question somehow inappropriate, Kath said, “Are you gonna be okay, Daddy? While we’re away?”

  “Of course, sweetheart. I’m fine now. It’s all over, hon.”

  Kath grinned through renewed tears. “Promise you won’t go swimming till I get back?”

  Kath’s caring words conjured something cold in Scott Bowman, deep inside, and the pause that followed was unintentional. He had meant to immediately reassure his daughter, to allay her childish fears. But now the gentle sway of the dock was tilting his equilibrium, causing his stomach to flutter queasily. When he looked out over the water he thought he saw movement out there, just below the sun-dappled surface—something dark, bulky, amorphous—and terror flared like a match flame.

  But it was only a stray rain cloud rafting overhead, its dark face reflected in the mirror of the lake.

  “No way, kiddo,” he said. “No swimming for your old man. Not till his little lifeguard gets back.” Or maybe never again, he thought morbidly. “Now. Let’s get you up the hill. Mom’s waiting...and I think she’s gonna let you drive this trip.”

  A smile tugged at the corners of Kath’s mouth. “I love you, Dad,” she said, cuffing the tears from her cheeks.

  “Me too you,” Scott said.

  He stepped off the dock and felt better. Smiling, he took his daughter’s hand and together they made their way up the path, Scott limping, Kath doing her best to assist him.

  * * *

  “Are you sure you don’t mind me taking the car?” Krista said, a vague guilt coloring her excitement—she loved the Volvo.

  “Not at all,” Scott said, casting a glance into the shadows of the garage, at the dusty two-tone Chevette that would be his until Krista’s return. “You’ll call from your sister’s?”

  “That’s the plan, man,” Krista said, rolling her eyes resignedly. Her older sister, Klara, lived with her husband on the north bank of the Saint Lawrence. From Klara’s place it was only a ten-minute drive to the Canada-U.S. Customs crossing at Prescott. Stated mildly, the relationship between Krista and her only full sibling was strained. It would be a duty visit at best. Krista smiled wearily. “I hope she’s not in one of her drinking moods.”

  “Does she have any others?” Scott said. He leaned on the sill and traded kisses with Krista, then stumped around to the opposite window and kissed his daughter. “Have fun, you two,” he said, returning to Krista’s side of the car. “And call me.”

  “We will,” Krista said.

  Then, waving, she swung the car into the driveway and motored up the hill. In less than a minute they’d vanished from sight, only a gray-white dust plume visible over the crowns of the trees.

  9

  WHEN THE RUMBLE OF THE engine had diminished to an insectile hum, Scott cut back through the house to the deck and lowered himself into a lawn chair. There were things he could do inside, but he didn’t feel up to roaming the emptiness of the house just yet.

  He missed his girls already.

  Around him unfolded the perfect summer day, and he tried to think about that...hot, hazy, hypnotically tranquil, not even a power boat or a passing aircraft to mar the perfect quiet. The only sounds belonged to nature. The burring of a lone cicada, the lazy chuckle of songbirds, a faint whicker of breeze through the pines. Only the lake remained coolly mute, keeping its secrets hidden beneath its quicksilver surface.

  As he knew they would, though, Scott’s thoughts returned to the bottom of the lake. Thinking back on it now, he realized that his mind had begun to encapsulate the experience and to bury it. When he tried to visualize the finer details of what had happened, the way he could readily picture Krista doing her aerobics or Kath charging up the lane to greet him, he found he was unable. The memory of his underwater struggle had already taken on the transparent consistency of a dream. As a psychiatrist, Scott recognized this phenomenon as a kind of built-in safety valve for the psyche. Any input the mind judged insupportable, it simply chucked back out, denied—or, in this case, softened to the point of unreality. Of course he hadn’t forgotten that desperate sensation of suffocation, nor the brilliant, mind-bending terror that had seized him when he thought he was about to die. But the jagged-glass edges had been smoothed, the freshness of the experience dulled. It might have happened years ago or he might only have dreamed it.

  This clever mental safeguard made him think of Delia Horner’s letter and the black, years-old memory it unearthed. Operating here was another faculty of the mind, one that was anything but protective, one that Scott believed malign and powerful enough to dissolve the brain into so much functionless jelly. This faculty was instantaneous recall, the capacity of the mind to dredge up, abruptly and in hideously accurate detail, all the horrors it
had so painstakingly buried. Reading Delia’s letter the night before, Scott had reexperienced that long-ago summer’s morning as if it were just then happening. Those few drawn-out seconds had flashed before his eyes in such crisp and staggering detail that for an instant he had feared his mind might suddenly snap, leaving him vegetative and empty.

  He leaned back in his chair and let his mind work through it all again. He couldn’t have stopped it had he tried

  * * *

  After all these years—sixteen of them now—the shame was the worst. The shame seemed immortal. And even as he sat there alone on the deck—muscles tensing, palms sweating, his mind bludgeoning downward through meticulously stacked layers of denial, transporting him back to the cramped Volkswagen and that dark, twisting roadway—the shame was on him like a disease, a wet, weeping, bubonic disease that he could almost smell.

  You ran, a nearly forgotten voice reviled him. You ran.

  The truth of those two words seared through him like a high-voltage backsurge. It had still been dark, and quiet...that ephemeral, almost mystical interlude between nighttime and day. Scott had been kneeling over the dead child, his mind skidding dangerously close to an inner precipice he hadn’t realized existed, when he looked up into Jake’s eyes and knew what his friend was thinking. There had been nothing supernatural about the insight, no ESP or mental telepathy. It had simply been a thought shared simultaneously by all three.

  We’ve got to run.

  They were lost, full of booze, miles off their home turf, Laking’s bag of grass had spilled all over the back seat of the car when Scott slammed on the brakes....and the kid was dead; nothing could be done about that.

  And inside of a breath they had known, without so much as a word passing between them, that to stay, to admit their guilt, would mean their ruin.

  So they piled into the Beetle and ran, switching from road to road with a randomness born of shock and heart-clutching fear. They were running and it didn’t matter where they were going as long as they were stacking up miles, widening the distance between themselves and the horror of that early morning, a horror lodged forever in the stuff of their memories.

  In the lawn chair on the deck of his Gatineau Hills home, Scott Bowman shifted position, bracing himself like a man in a plane that was about to crash. His eyes were on the lake, but they were hazed and unseeing. He had never believed in God, not in the accepted sense—but he could feel the Eyes of Judgment on him now, as he had all those years ago.

  Later that morning it had rained, an abrupt, cleansing downpour that had scrubbed away the bloody evidence from the car. The full tank of gas they’d put in outside of Boston carried them all the way into Springfield, Vermont, where they stopped at a self-serve carwash and vacuumed up Jake’s spilled marijuana. Afterward, they pooled their resources and bought a new windshield for the car. As fortune had it, the autoglass shop in Springfield had a matching windscreen in stock, and no other business but theirs. They were back on the road inside of an hour, sticking carefully to the speed limit, not a word passing between them.

  It wasn’t until some four hours later, when they crossed the border into Ontario—the Customs official, after mouthing the usual queries, had waved them through without even a hint of suspicion—that the sustained, fear-born energy started to wane, and the unspeakable ugliness of what had happened began to seep through. A mile or two north of the border, Scott pulled the car onto the shoulder, buried his face in his hands and wept. Brian Horner, who had been mute since the accident, joined him, letting out wave after wave of shuddering sobs. Fidgeting nervously in the back, Jake stared out through the new windshield, wishing the three of them had never met.

  They stayed there awhile, each entangled in his own breed of misery, then resumed the drive home, not even bothering to agree on a story to explain their return almost a month ahead of schedule. Scott’s flesh still ran cold when he thought of the last words Jake had spoken to him. They had been parked in front of Jake’s parents’ house in Ottawa South, and a light rain had been falling.

  “If you lose your nerve, Bowman,” Jake had said without emotion, “if you lose your nerve and spill your guts about this thing...I’ll kill you, man. I’ll kill you dead. I mean that.” Then he had gone.

  Scott hadn’t lost his nerve, no...but he had nearly lost his mind. For the first two weeks sleep had been impossible. Each time he closed his eyes, there she was—slamming into the hood, shattering the windshield, lying in a spreading pool of her own blood. He became morose, lost his drive, his appetite, until finally he fell ill and had to be admitted to the hospital. At first they thought he had mononucleosis or an ulcer, then it was a brain tumor, and finally, cancer. When nothing could be found to support these diagnoses, psychiatry was called in. And Scott almost told the tall, soft-spoken man who became his shrink, and later one of his most respected teachers. He almost told it all.

  But finally he kept it inside, where it festered and flared and infected his dreams.

  Life seemed to come slowly apart during that first long year. Because of his hospitalization he was late starting med school, a fact that nearly cost him his position. He withdrew from his parents and friends—Jake was at Harvard, Brian in Winnipeg—and immersed himself in his studies. Yet even with that his marks were only borderline, and more than once he was ostracized by his professors.

  But gradually the sheer volume of the work began to act on him like a balm, and, aided perhaps by the rapid passage of those first four academic years, the memory of that tragic summer morning began to sink mercifully into the mud of his unconscious. But the experience changed him. Gone was the cocky, self-assured young man who come hell or high water was going to become an obstetrician. Gone was the bright-eyed boy who believed that life held nothing but good in store. How could he enter a specialty like obstetrics, become a bringer of life, when before he’d even started he’d taken one, brutally and heedlessly? How could the future hold anything but guilt and shame?

  The shame...the unutterable shame. The shame had outlived the horror, even the guilt. It had been there long after the nightmares had faded.

  But then he met Krista, and even the shame began to subside. For a while after their marriage the dreams reared up again...but by then Scott had changed even more. Krista’s love had changed him. And their child. By then, too, he had chosen his specialty. And as he studied it, as it helped him probe more deeply inside himself, the old wounds finally started to heal.

  Gradually, it was all buried. Not forgotten, but buried.

  * * *

  That night, before engaging in a hard-won battle with insomnia, Scott called Vince Bateman at his home. He told the department head about his near-drowning and informed him that he would be taking Monday off. He promised, however, to show up for the department’s annual business meeting Monday night, and for that Bateman was grateful. It was Scott’s turn as chairman.

  Krista called around eight-thirty to tell him they were fine, Klara was in her usual drunk and disapproving form and Klara’s husband, Joe, was, as always, henpecked and muttering. Avoiding mention of his hip, which throbbed something awful and caused him to limp like a cripple, Scott spent a long while reassuring Krista that he felt much better, just a little stiff was all. Then Kath came on the line and Scott was relieved to find her sounding more like her usual self: cheerful, dauntless, excited about the trip. She said she loved him and gave him a sloppy kiss over the line, and Scott’s heart ached a little when she hung up the phone. A part of him wished he could just chuck the whole week and sneak off to Boston to join them.

  At some point during the course of that night, aided perhaps by the painkiller he had taken before lying down, Scott won the battle with sleep and dropped off into a dreamless slumber. Late the next morning, after a relaxing hot shower, he consumed a huge, artery-clogging breakfast, then got dressed. Before leaving the house, he removed the film cartridge from the Minolta and pocketed it. He did this almost without thinking. His heart sagged when he
got to the garage and found Krista’s Chevette waiting for him. He’d forgotten she’d taken the Volvo.

  On his way to the city, in an effort to bury the Chevette’s rattling road noise, Scott cranked the radio up to near full. Outside, the day was drab and overcast, and it looked as if it might stay that way forever.

  10

  THE PRINTS WOULD BE READY in an hour, the attendant at the photo booth told him, and if he wanted while he waited, Scott could find coffee and doughnuts at the nearby Dunkin’ Donuts.

  He wanted. The coffee went down like warm, sweet medicine.

  A dark excitement stirred within him as he waited for the film to be developed. In the immediate aftermath of his near-drowning, he’d all but forgotten about the old artist and the oddball drawing that had triggered something deep in his memory. He hadn’t altered his entirely reasonable expectation that it would all amount to nothing.

  But still...

  He finished his coffee and left the doughnut shop. The prints were just starting down the narrow conveyor as he returned to the photo booth. He could see them through the clear Plexiglas sidewalls.

  The first few made him smile. They were Christmas pictures, their first in the new house. Leading the file was a shot of Kath on her haunches in front of the bauble- and tinsel-hung tree, smiling and showing off the best of the season’s booty. Then came one of him and Krista, Kath’s finger poking unprofessionally into the frame. Krista was embracing him, her eyes happy-wet, her new (and expensive) diamond earrings glinting lavishly in the glare of the flash. Here was another of Kath, modeling a new blue ski jacket over cotton Alf-print pj’s. And there were others, good memories all.

  Then, algae-green and underexposed, the shot he’d taken under the dock came slowly down the conveyor.

  Scott took a ragged breath. It was a crummy shot, but it would do. He could compare it to the drawing.

  The last two prints came down blank.