The Boy Who Drew Monsters

by Keith Donohue

  Scraping his chair along the floor, Jack Peter inched around to face him, an intense expression in his eyes, flashing with a creator’s ardor. “Do you ever go swim in the ocean?”

  “Of course I do. Don’t you remember? You and me used to go swimming all the time every summer. Not in the winter, but I still go swimming in the summer. When it gets hot.”

  “People drown in the ocean. Ships crash on the rocks in a storm. The people get lost and confused in the dark, and they breathe in the water, and everybody drowns. Shipwrecks. Your mommy and daddy are going on a boat.”

  Mr. Keenan laid his crust of bread over the top of his bowl of stew. “In the olden days, Jip, but not anymore. No more shipwrecks. The lighthouse on Mercy Point helps them steer clear. Now turn around and finish your dinner.”

  Dutiful son, he scooched his chair back into position with his bottom, inch by inch. Nick took it as a signal to return to his place. “Who is that picture supposed to be?”

  Jack Peter did not speak but instead tapped a finger insistently against his temple. He would not stop the jabbing attack, and it alarmed everyone at the table. He poked his skull so hard that Mrs. Keenan was forced to grab her son’s wrist to stop the compulsion. She strained against his strength, the veins and sinews piping along her forearm, her face colored deep red.

  iv.

  He had gone outside to warm up the Jeep in the driveway, leaving the motor idling in the bitter cold. In the clutter of the mudroom, Tim stomped his feet and clapped his gloved hands to get the blood flowing. The cross-country skis in the corner rattled, his breath exploded in white clouds, and the windows were laced with frost. He made a mental note to go round in the next few days to the rest of the summer houses to make sure the heat had been turned on low for the season. Nothing worse than frozen pipes bursting in the thaw. Winter was a-coming. Hell, it was already here. A single step separated the mudroom from the kitchen, and out of habit, he kicked the riser to knock the sand and dirt from the treads of his shoes before entering the house proper. The boy was already waiting for him, mittens and hat and boots, wrapped like a mummy in his overcoat and scarf.

  “All bundled up and ready to go? All we need do is put a few stamps on your forehead, and we could mail you home.”

  Nick waddled forward a few paces and was nearly to the door when he was stopped by a tug on his sleeve. “Will you be back?” Jip asked.

  “Of course. I’ll come by one day after school same as always, and then we’ll have the whole week after Christmas. I’ll stay over.”

  “How many nights?”

  “From the day after Christmas to New Year’s Day.”

  “Would you stay, Nick? Would you stay if your parents shipwrecked?”

  Mrs. Keenan stepped between the boys. “That’s a terrible thing to say, Jack.” She turned her back on her son. “Now, don’t you go worrying about that. Your parents will be fine.”

  “They can swim,” said Jack. “But not in the cold. Don’t go swimming in the cold water, Nick.”

  The flat order seemed to bother him, and Nick hesitated before answering. “I won’t. It’s too cold. Feel the window.”

  Laying the flat of his palm against a windowpane, Jip smiled at the sensation. Tim put his hand next to his son’s. “What do you think, Jip? Below freezing?”

  “Cold enough to snow. Cold enough to ice. Be careful driving, Daddy.” He studied their translucent reflections in the glass and traced the shape of Nick’s face with one fingertip. “Okay, you can go now.”

  In the old days when he went about outdoors, Jip often walked the path along Shore Road and up and over the granite rocks at Mercy Point to Nick Weller’s house on the other side. They would gambol like billy goats on the rocks and while away many empty summer days. It was not more than a mile by foot, though the boys were only allowed to make the trip during daylight and in fair weather. By car, one had to dogleg inland to drive around the headlands and the cliffs, and the roundabout way turned it into a three-mile drive. Not that Tim minded the ten or fifteen minutes spent bringing Nick home. He was grateful that the boy still came over after all these years, putting up with Jip’s strangeness, providing a connection to the outside world, a semblance of normalcy.

  As if things were ever normal. Maybe, once upon a time, when he was a brand-new baby and would return a smile. That was the first sign, surely, that something was wrong when his reaction to every cootchy-coo was listless. He wasn’t as closed off as some of the other boys Holly and Tim had met in those damned support groups. He talked where others were lost in silence or trapped in a handful of words or sounds. He could bear, with warning, to be touched, although this morning’s incident gave Tim some doubts. It’s a spectrum, the shrinks had said, and Jip was on the high-functioning end, but even so, it was far from normal to refuse to set foot outdoors, far from normal to live so deeply inside the mind. But Nick didn’t seem to care, or perhaps his sense of loyalty trumped his aversions. Tim clamped a hand on his shoulder and led him into the cold.

  The boy climbed into the Jeep and buckled his seat belt. A wave of longing flowed through Tim as he watched the boy ready for travel. Polite, obedient, a bit on the shy side, but mostly just an ordinary boy. Tim checked his emotions and shifted into reverse. “On the road again,” he sang as the Jeep rolled down the driveway to Shore Road. The winter sky was filled with stars and a half-moon pulling the tides. They glided as quiet and alone as a ship on the sea.

  “Sorry about that scene with the picture,” Tim said. “You know Jip. Sometimes he can’t find the words.”

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Keenan.”

  “Do they still teach art in school? Do they still teach you kids how to draw?”

  “We have art two days a week,” said the boy. “And music on Fridays.”

  Music, he had forgotten about music for Jip. Music might do. Something to add to the home-school curriculum, and they could begin in the new year. The practice, the discipline would be good for his son. A wind instrument, perhaps the clarinet would be cool. He turned inland and began the horseshoe curve around Mercy Point. For a few hundred yards, the beam from the lighthouse crossed the road, and its brilliance never failed to surprise him. Backlit, Nick’s reflection appeared in the windshield, animated as he talked. “We did drawing at the beginning of the year. And cutting shapes out of paper, a mosaic. And watercol—”

  Tim mashed the brakes and stopped the Jeep, wheels crunching the gravelly shells along the edge of the road. Beyond the boy’s transparent reflection in the glass, something stirred not twenty feet ahead. Uncoiling, the white mass transformed itself into a living figure rising from a crouch, its pale skin glowed sepulchral blue in the moonlight, and it turned with a hunch of the shoulders and began to shuffle away. In the beam from the lighthouse, it looked back once, illuminated for an instant. In long, urgent strides, it sped over the rocks toward the sea and then disappeared into the darkness so quickly that Tim was not sure if it had happened at all or exactly what had been spooked by the car.

  “Did you see that?” he asked the boy.

  Nick was rubbing his neck where the seat belt had caught him as the Jeep suddenly stopped. He did not appear to have seen a thing. “What is it?”

  “Something out there. On the road.” Tim shifted into park and cut the engine.

  As he stepped from the Jeep, he noticed that the wind had picked up, making a cold night bitter. He took a few steps in the direction of the lighthouse where the creature had fled. Back in the car, the boy watched him, his face a puzzle under the dome light. Tim listened in the stillness but heard nothing but the far-off pulse of the surf against the rocks and the wind wrapping around the fir trees and every upright thing. No sign of it, and the thought of calling out after such an illusion blew away in the breeze. He considered the abstract landscape one last time, not much more than dark contours under a dark sky, and convinced that the creature was gone, he got back into the Jeep.

  “Are you okay?” he asked the boy. “Are you
sure you didn’t see anything out on the road?”

  Nick shrugged. “I saw you.”

  “I thought there was—”

  “But I’m okay.” He showed him his neck.

  “Couldn’t be,” Tim muttered and shook his head to rid it of the vision. He flipped on the high beams and drove on, gripping the steering wheel as if it were going to slip out of his hands. At every bend, he imagined another shadowy presence in the darkness, and he could not force himself to relax until they had cleared the horseshoe turn and had the ocean again on their right. Tucked amid the white pines, the Weller home glowed in the December lonesomeness. A string of colored lights ran along the eaves and framed the windows and front door. No other house on this side of Mercy Point had so much as a candle for as far as the eye could see.

  Fred Weller answered the door with a highball in his hand. Despite his jovial rotundity, he had the look of a man who could never get warm in the wintertime. Even indoors he bundled himself in a thick Irish sweater cinched at the waist and woollen socks beneath his slippers. He wore an expression of mild bemusement on his face, as though he wasn’t expecting Nick to return that evening, and indeed, the boy slipped by without a word, shedding his hat and coat as he disappeared.

  With a smile and a wave, Fred drew Tim into the living room. “What’s your poison? Something to warm you up now that winter is finally here?” Fred went over to the bar and poured another Scotch.

  Tim considered the invitation and was won over by the arrival of Fred’s wife, Nell, who appeared by magic at the sound of new life in the room. In an old-fashioned dressing gown, she slunk across the floor, rolling her shoulder blades and hips, and kissed him on the cheek, the smell of juniper warm on her skin. “Timothy Keenan, I did not hear you come in. I hope Nick was no trouble—where is the boy?”

  “No trouble at all, although…”

  She laid a manicured hand against his chest. “Why you’re as pale as an oyster, and your heart is just racing. What’s the matter, dear soul? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “That’s just it. I saw something on the way over here. Out on the road down by the lighthouse.”

  Fred handed him a tumbler. “Seems you could use this drink after all. What was it?”

  The first sip was as warm as a match.

  “I can’t say for sure. We were just making the way around Mercy Point when I saw this thing, white as paper, I thought at first, a naked man—”

  A laugh burst through Nell’s lips. “Maybe I should have a drink, too. Naked as a jaybird?”

  “Right, couldn’t be,” said Tim. “A person without any clothes would freeze to death on such a night. Hypothermia in ten minutes flat. So it simply couldn’t be a man.”

  From the bar, Fred grunted his agreement as he ladled ice into a glass.

  “And there’s the way that it moved. No sooner did I see it, but it just skittered up the rocks like a kite that’s snapped its string, and then the wind grabs ahold and pushes it so hard that it vanishes in an instant.”

  Fred handed Nell a small cocktail. “Happened to me once. Nicky and I go fishing out at the Long Pier, and just as we climb onto the boards, a breeze snatches my Red Sox cap clean off my head, and it cartwheels the whole length till it ends up cattywampus in the ocean. My hat, not my head. My favorite one.”

  “Honestly, Fred. You’re comparing some ratty baseball cap to a naked man in the middle of the road on the coldest night of the year—”

  “He just said it couldn’t have been a man. Not to be blown about like that. I was making a simple comparison.”

  “And I’m just pointing out the flaws in your analogy.”

  “Not an analogy. Just an observation. A comment on the power of the wind.”

  “You’re being a bit windy yourself,” said Nell. “Let the poor soul finish his story.”

  Tim downed another slug of Scotch and set the empty glass on the table. “That’s the long and short of it, I’m afraid. I got out of the car to take a look, but the thing was gone. And Nick didn’t see it at all. You may want to check up on him. He caught his collarbone on the seat belt when I hit the brakes. For the life of me, I can’t imagine what else it might have been.”

  “A dog,” said Fred. “A big hairy white dog. Or a coyote.”

  Nell sneered at the proposition.

  “What, I saw a coyote round here just last summer coming down a cul-de-sac. Could have been a wild animal. A deer.”

  “Don’t be absurd,” Nell said. “You really don’t listen, do you? He said it was white as a sheet.”

  “An old beach towel. A blanket. One of those beach umbrellas caught in the wind.”

  Nell smiled to herself. “I still think it was a naked man.”

  “You’re always imagining naked men,” Fred said.

  Nobody could think of a proper retort, so they all waited for a change of subject. Ice cubes rattled in empty glasses.

  “How is Holly?” Nell offered at last. “And your boy?”

  “Ah, Jip … Nick and I were talking on the way over, and perhaps we can invite some of his school friends to the house while we have the two of them over Christmas break.”

  Some signal passed between the Wellers, a sideways glance that the couple had imbued with shared meaning over the years. They offered no reaction to his suggestion, and he began to regret having raised the possibility.

  “I think we might have discovered a hidden talent. He’s taken up drawing.”

  The notion sparked her interest. “You ought to get him one of those artist’s kits for Christmas.”

  “Does he take commissions? Perhaps my wife would model for you.”

  “Honestly, Fred.” She swiveled to put her back to him. “You know, Tim, one of those sets of colored pencils and some fancy paper and maybe some simple paint. Watercolors. Courage the boy.” She laughed at her tipsy slip of the tongue.

  Yes, he thought as he rose to make his good-byes. Young artist. Self-expression and all that. What boy, even his own, could not use a proper bit of encouragement?

  He was not used to drinking, never more than one beer unless he was out with the neighbors or the vacation home owners, and then only to be sociable. The Scotch grumbled in his stomach, and his head felt heavy as Fred and Nell wished him good night. In the driver’s seat, he took a few deep breaths to stave off the light dizziness. She never changed, desirable as ever. His lips buzzed numbly, so he kissed the air a few times, pretending it was Nell, before driving away.

  Ordinarily he loved the deserted shore on a winter’s night, enveloped in solitude for a few moments out of his crowded life. But tonight he could not rid his mind of the image by the roadside. Rounding Mercy Point, he slowed, filled with dread and hope of another sighting. When it did not appear, he pulled off at the spot of his earlier encounter with that strange hallucination. He shut the engine but left the headlights on and slid out of the Jeep. Starry, starry night, and the bitter air filled his lungs. No sign of the thing, not so much as a footprint in the sand. Tim climbed the rocks toward the lighthouse, blinded momentarily by its intense glare, and stopped only when he was high enough to see the whitecaps on the black tide, phosphorescent in the distance, line upon line rolling in.

  He should be getting back. They would be wondering what took him so long.

  What was out there? Nick hadn’t seen a thing. What had the creature been, after all, but an illusion, a spot of indigestion from Holly’s bouillabaisse? A dog, a deer, a white coyote? Or a figment of an overtired imagination, a phantom conjured by the wildness running through his son. A boy who hits his mother when she wakes him from his dreams. His boy, always just beyond reach, always swirling away from him like a windblown kite. More encouragement, she had said. More courage. He inhaled one last taste of the salt-sweet tang of the sea and then made his way home.

  v.

  Holly held her breath and sank beneath the water’s surface until she was resting completely on the bottom of the bathtub. Her hair floated like
seaweed above her face, her hands bobbed weightlessly, and once she held still, she could hear nothing but the intense rhythm of her own pulse. She closed her eyes so that the only sensation came from the warm water against her skin and the pressure from the air trapped in her lungs. After a moment, a few bubbles escaped through her nose. This is what it must feel like to drown, she thought, and how strangely peaceful in the end. Fifteen seconds more passed before the initial impulse of panic and survival. She arched her back and lifted her shoulders until she could breathe again, and she opened her eyes and saw the white porcelain of the tub, the turquoise tiles on the bathroom wall, and the ceiling bright as a cloud. The skin above her cheekbone throbbed in the humidity. She rolled a towel and laid it beneath her neck and leaned back to rest. Wisps of steam rose from the freckled skin of her knees, a pair of islands peeking out from the water.

  The steam reminded her of the priest that morning and his frosty breath as he stood outside Star of the Sea Church, greeting the eight o’clock parishioners after Mass. Cold enough on the steps to see the puffs of air escape with his words. She wanted to sneak past him, just as she had sneaked inside, but he reached for her, extended his hand, and it would have been impolite to refuse the gesture. “Good morning,” he said, as earnest as a politician, and when he grasped her hand in both of his and held her in his palms, she could feel the blood warm her cheeks. He was as old as her father, long gone from this world. The people all got in their cars and drove away, and there was nobody left in the church. Last one out.

  “Going for a run?” the priest asked.

  She wrapped her coat more tightly over her sweatshirt and leggings and shuffled her feet beneath her as if she could hide her sneakers. The decision to come to Mass after all these years had been spontaneous, and she was not dressed properly at all. That morning she had put some concealer on her black eye and donned her jogging gear and bolted from the house, intending to drive down to the high school for a few laps around the oval track. When she saw the handful of cars dotting the church’s parking lot, she pulled into Star of the Sea instead. An apology worked its way to her lips, which the priest anticipated and dismissed with the wave of a hand and a wan smile. “We’re happy to have you in any disguise. Father Bolden. Joseph.” He introduced himself with a curt bow and a smart click of the heels like a Prussian officer washed up on New England’s shores.