The Boy Who Drew Monsters

by Keith Donohue

  “Holly Keenan,” she said. “I was raised a Catholic.”

  “But you haven’t been back in some time?”

  “No. Not since I was married, and before that.” A century ago, before Jack, before Tim, when her greatest care was herself. Had she even had such a life?

  “Well, welcome back.”

  For a moment she considered his remark by chewing on her bottom lip. She thought of her mother, no doubt on the way to Mass at this very hour. “I’m not sure I’ve come back.”

  “Let’s just say ‘welcome.’ As in, anytime at all. Whatever you’re looking for, Mrs. Keenan—”

  He must have noticed my wedding ring, she thought. There was a balm in his voice, an unexpected patience.

  “If you ever need someone to talk to, someplace to go.”

  “Thank you, Father.” She felt strange calling him Father, after all these years away from priests. An old station wagon turned into the parking lot, the first to arrive for the next scheduled Mass.

  “You’re always welcome, Holly Keenan. Have a good run.”

  The bath had cooled, so she lifted her right foot and turned the hot water faucet with her toes till the warmth enveloped her. The morning seemed so long ago. Someone to talk to, he had said, and why else had she come? Someone to talk to about Jack. Someone other than Tim, who was nearly past any conversation about the boy, locked inside his misconceptions of how their son would outgrow his maladies and transform into a normal, fully functional child. She often wondered if Tim’s fantasies outstripped Jack’s delusions. No, she had not been able to talk about Jack with him in a long time. Many mornings she had jogged past the church without a thought.

  Of course, early on she had been tempted to go in, find help or solace or reconciliation, but Tim put more faith in doctors and neurologists, therapists and psychologists, brain specialists and herbalists to locate some remedy even as Holly knew none was to be had. In the beginning, when they first realized something was wrong with their son, she had longed for the comfort of the religion of her youth, its rites and ceremonies, but the plain fact was that Jack’s inability to connect with her, with anyone, had seemed such a cruel joke and prayer an empty promise. And that was when he was a little boy, but now, now, just tonight, he nearly had been too strong for her. Her face hurt. Her biceps still ached from the strain of trying to stop Jack from poking at his skull.

  She had left him downstairs, parrying with The Simpsons, knowing that he would not disturb her bath as long as the cartoon played. Besides, any minute Tim would be back from taking Nicholas home. She shut her eyes and imagined the priest, drifting, trying to relax for just a moment more.

  A loud noise, like a single knock at the door, interrupted her reverie, the sharp percussion of a large object striking a hard surface with considerable force. Holly sat upright in the tub, the water rolling off her shoulders and chest, and listened for a following sound, a reply to the first. Her son, perhaps, calling out in surprise or pain, but she could not hear a thing. “Jack!” she shouted. A few beats of silence passed as she waited for his answer, caught between her wish for just a few extra minutes alone versus her instinct to investigate. She could not pinpoint the source. Had something fallen downstairs, was he okay, or had the noise originated elsewhere, maybe Tim’s car door slamming? The old house creaked and shuddered in the wintertime, and every stray thud was made louder and more ominous in the emptiness of the season. Perhaps the wind had blown over the trash cans. It’s nothing, she told herself, and just as she slid back into the comfort of the water, another knock disquieted her. She pulled the plug from the drain and stood, dripping onto the bath rug, wrapped a thick towel around her torso, and swung open the bathroom door. Her feet left wet prints on the hallway floor.

  “Jack,” she called from the landing. The familiar swing-time tune from the cartoon’s ending credits filtered upstairs. He did not answer, so she went to the top of the stairs and called a third time. “Is everything all right down there?”

  “I’m okay, Mom.” An annoyed tone in his voice, but no fear or panic.

  Another thump sent vibrations through the house, though Holly could not tell if it came from within or without. She hurried into her bedroom, discarded the damp towel on the bed, and put on a nightgown, robe, and slippers. The banging grew frequent and insistent. What is that boy up to? she thought, and hurried down the stairs.

  Perched on the couch where she had left him, an afghan wrapped around his legs, Jack now watched a nature program on public television. “Where is your father?” she demanded, but he had slipped into a TV coma and would not be distracted from the show. A brown bear lumbered across the screen. She stood in the middle of the room, alert to the possibilities.

  The next blow made her jump. It seemed to have come from the northeast corner of the house, but as she turned, the hammering began, a rapid-fire staccato that traveled the length of the waterfront wall. She raced to a window but could see nothing in the darkness. The southern wall came under attack, a rain of cannonballs against the siding.

  “What the hell is going on?”

  Curled beneath his blankets, Jack stared at the screen and smiled, as though he had not heard anything.

  Her overcoat hung on a hook by the front door, and Holly struggled to fit her robed arms into the sleeves. “Stay inside,” she said to Jack, catching the irony of her admonition as she stepped over the threshold.

  The air on her bare legs and wet hair chilled her quickly and crept up through her slippers and gripped the soles of her feet. Almost immediately she regretted her decision to leave the house. Tim should be out here in the cold, protecting them, looking for burglars or whatever strange thing was attacking their home. Where is that man? Where was that Father Bolden to protect her with his faith? She murmured a prayer from her childhood as she skirted the perimeter, creeping in darkness, listening for the whistle of cannon fire, watching for the madman with a maul, and shaking with anticipation. The thought of confrontation alarmed her. She had no weapon, not even a baseball bat, and she must have been a fearsome sight in her overcoat and slippers. Perhaps her attacker would perish with laughter. Windblown clouds passed between the moon and the landscape, creating patches of light and shadow on the beach and against the house. In the intermittent exposure, Holly inspected the siding for damage, but the blows had not so much as scratched a shingle. Where she had expected gaping holes with splintered edges, there was nothing. In the quiet of the night, the ocean, to which she had been long accustomed, fell and rose like a child’s respiration.

  Baby’s breath. When Jack was a baby, Holly used to hold him against her chest and sit out on the deck summer afternoons until she and the child breathed in rhythm to the tide. That first magical year when she could not get enough of him, before they fully suspected there was something wrong, before all the doctors, before all the talk of personality disorders. He was simply a baby. Asleep, he would leave a warm slick of perspiration against her skin, wet as a seal, face muzzled against her breast, his tiny fists working toward his mouth. Her baby. She missed him, wanted him to be outside with her, an infant in her arms or the toddler who held one of her fingers in the vise of his fist. Just as she looked for him in the windows, light pouring into the night, a shadow crossed the rectangle of glass and then a second shadow in pursuit. Jack was waving his hands above his head as though trying to scare away someone inside with him. Someone, she thought, that had been banging against the side of the house trying to get in. A man, a murderer, a monster.

  Rays of panic pierced her, and she scrambled through the pillowy sand, desperate to reach him. A hand reached out and grabbed her as she turned the corner, the monstrous thing that had been pounding to enter the house, but turning in the half-light, Holly realized it was only the sleeve of her coat snagged on the cyclone fence that ran along the border between the house and the beach. She tugged and stumbled free, falling into the sand and beach grass.

  When the thing did not pounce upon her, when it did
not swoop from the sky trailing a long tattered black shroud, when nothing overtook her but her own sense of the absurd, Holly laughed, sprawled on the ground. She had found nothing banging at the siding, no wolf at the door, huffing and puffing to get in. She convinced herself that Tim had come home, and that explained the second figure in her living room. All a misunderstanding, jangle of nerves. Picking herself up, she brushed the sand from her palms, certain that there was no one else inside with Jack, no maniac in a hockey mask, that indeed the only madness came from her own strung-out imagination. A relieved laugh, a laugh to stop from crying, a laugh she was afraid would never end.

  Through the fir trees, a pair of headlights appeared small and distant as Tim’s Jeep snaked along Shore Road, returning home at last. If that was Tim on the road, she thought, who was the second shadow? Abandoning her search altogether, she hustled inside the house, pulled off her coat, and hooked it by the door. “Were you walking around while I was outside? I thought I saw someone here with you.”

  Serene as a Buddha, Jack sat on the couch just where she had left him, still tuned in to the nature program, a gang of grizzlies catching salmon as they laddered their way up a stream. His expression had not changed. He seemed not to have moved. She ran her fingers through the frost clotting her hair and kicked off her slippers under the Christmas tree.

  “You saw no one? You heard nothing?” she asked, and he nodded without looking at her, though she could not tell whether he had been unaware or was consenting to a conspiracy. Dashing from room to room, she confirmed the house was just as she left it. At the foot of the stairs, she listened for a stranger hiding above, and she called once and was embarrassed by the echo of her voice. Every time she passed him on the couch she noticed Jack’s stare, as though he was daring her to ask again. He looked as though he had snatched the truth in his mouth and it was still squirming behind his teeth.

  By the time the Jeep pulled into the driveway, the scene was set. Holly had positioned herself next to their son and crossed her arms, affecting nonchalance.

  Blooms of red dotted Tim’s cheeks as he came in from the cold, smacking the meat of his arms and stomping his feet. “Brrr…” He shivered and chattered his teeth with great exaggeration like windup choppers. Jack squealed with delight.

  “Where have you been?” Holly asked.

  He unwound the scarf from his neck as he crossed the room to greet her with a kiss, the taste of liquor on his lips. “Sorry that took so long.”

  “Have you been drinking?”

  “Mr. Jip, isn’t it getting time for bed?” He checked his watch and mussed the boy’s hair. Squirming out of reach, Jack burrowed deeper beneath the afghan and snuggled closer to his mother. “Just one,” Tim said to her. “You know Fred and Nell. They are so grateful that we’ve agreed to take Nick off their hands. Second honeymoon, what do you think of that? What have the two of you been up to?”

  She considered letting the moment pass, but could not resist. “There was a noise. Outside.”

  “What sort of noise?” He seemed nonplussed by her demeanor. “Jip, seriously, time to hit the sack.”

  Irritation floated in her voice. “At first it was just a random knock, I thought something falling over, but then it went on, bang-bang-bang. Striking the siding like gunshot. And you weren’t here to go check, so I had to hop out of the bathtub sopping wet to see what was the matter. And then I thought there was someone in the house when Jack was all alone. I swear there was something else inside.” With a sneer, she added, “While you were out, sipping Scotch with Fred and Nell Weller.”

  With a bow of his head, he showed his contrition.

  “Honestly, Tim, I was out creeping around in the dark like some teenager in a slasher movie. Lord knows what’s waiting behind the corner—”

  “So what did you find?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “I have no idea what was making those noises.”

  Jack’s head popped out from beneath the blanket. “Trying to get in.”

  Tim snatched away the blanket. “Seriously, bud, let’s go. Say good night to your mother.”

  The boy stood, snapped to attention. “G’night.” He saluted and marched upstairs. Even after all these years, she was still disappointed that he did not kiss her before going to bed. She could not remember the last time he had kissed her good night.

  After Tim apologized once again, they did not discuss it any further. Without evidence was there a crime? She had Christmas cards to write, and he did penance by folding a load of laundry. In the background, Jack made his slow retreat to bed, stalling in the bathroom before the mirror, brushing his teeth with meticulous care, undressing in slow motion, and then quickly donning pajamas against the cold. His light went out at half-past nine, but his parents knew to give him another thirty minutes to fall asleep.

  The house grew still and quiet. Holly sneezed in the kitchen, and Tim said gesundheit from the bedroom upstairs. When she came to bed, she found him already beneath the covers, staring at the curtains drawn across the window on his side. She turned off the light and slipped in beside him. “Something on your mind?”

  He rolled over to face her and laid his hand upon her hip. “I’m truly sorry. You know, Jip could be right, could have been something trying to get in. Fred Weller was telling me that people have been spotting coyotes in the area. First thing tomorrow, I’ll do a thorough check around the premises—”

  “You’re forgiven,” she said. Silly man. They both knew he would forget by morning. In the pitch dark, she reached out to find his face, laid her palm against his cheek, and waited to feel his smile. He kissed her and fingered his way to the hem of her nightgown and slid the thin fabric to bare her skin. She raised no objections to his touch, but moments later, when he climbed upon her, she breathed out the softest of sighs.

  vi.

  From the darkness of his room, Nick listened to the dying of the evening, waiting for them to go to sleep. The plain white sheets and his thick comforter covered him, and he did not move while his parents were still up and about. Their muffled conversation slow and regular as the tides, the sound of a glass against a bottle, weary tread upon the stairs. Not too long, usually, when they were besotted, and then they would pass out, exhausted, and purr like kittens in their dreams. Drunken kittens. The telltale signs began: his father singing in falsetto as he stripped off his shoes, his mother stumbling and cursing the rug. After these weekend binges had become routine, Nick could time almost to the quarter hour when they would end. In the beginning, his parents used to show up plastered and sloppy and throw open his door to watch him sleep, but he stopped all that one evening when he screamed in their faces as they hovered over him. That night he had scared them away once and for all.

  When it was safe and quiet, he clicked on the lamp and tiptoed to his dresser, opened the bottom drawer, and reached beneath the sweaters stuffed inside. Curled into a tube, the paper seemed a pirate map entrusted to him for safekeeping, though he knew already that it revealed no treasure. At the Keenans’ house, as they were saying good-bye, Jack Peter had pressed the scroll upon him in the mudroom. “Don’t open it till you are in secret where no one can see,” he had said, but Nick could not resist. He had sneaked a look at it in the Jeep while waiting for Mr. Keenan to drive him home. Sitting on the edge of his bed, Nick unfurled it again and smoothed the edges.

  Sketched in pencil was that man from the road, the figure that he and Mr. Keenan had encountered earlier that evening. No mistaking the scarecrow features, the pale skin stretched taut over bones, and the deranged hair twisted like a mop. Jack Peter had captured him in the act of rising from the ground, one hand lifted and begging, the other flat on the ground, supporting his weight. The drawing showed the same incomplete face and the figure’s blank stare, as if Jack Peter, too, had witnessed him on that same deserted road. He knew it was impossible, but Nick could not ignore the similarities. Above the man, penciled in his friend’s familiar block letters, were the instructions: DRAW MO
RE MONSTERS.

  They had been playing this game for years, passing secret messages to each other, hiding notes in coat pockets and underneath pillows where they surely would be discovered later after the friends had parted. For the past month, Jack Peter had been obsessed with war. Through a series of orders and communiqués, their mutual forces had been marshaled. Old soldiers, long forgotten, emerged from their hiding places in shoe boxes on closet floors and dusty cookie tins rescued from underneath the bed. Epic battles featured cowboys versus Nazis, Indians versus the French foreign legion, the blue minutemen versus the red Russians. One battle begat the next in a war without end. Maps to imaginary lands were plotted and then destroyed to prevent the intelligence from falling into enemy hands. Week after week, the carnage continued in the bedroom, behind the Christmas tree, and in one daylong siege in the workshop in the basement among all the dangerous tools. Many men were lost, abandoned beneath sofa cushions or dropped into the abyss below the heating registers.

  Before the wars, it had been board games. Hours and hours of Monopoly and Risk. Two weeks to master checkers, and a month of chess. Before the games began, they had gone through a phase of comic books, beginning with Batman and Superman and ending with Tintin, reading side by side with hardly a word between them. They never bothered with the Internet or video games on the computer. The closeness of the big monitor and the brightness of the screen and the quickness of the action gave Jack hammering headaches. Summertime was given over to baseball on the radio, the Red Sox mostly, but on long August nights, they could pick up on AM radio faraway Pittsburgh and Chicago and, for one magic evening, the golden glow of a Dodgers game all the way from southern California. Last spring they had devoted to model ships, whalers and clippers, and over a long Easter break, a scale model of the U.S.S. Constitution, complete with cloth sails and string lines and the intoxicating smell of glue and black paint. What mania came before that, Nick could no longer remember, but anything was acceptable, as long as it was safely indoors.