The Boy Who Drew Monsters

by Keith Donohue

  Tim had left the twinkling lights on, glowing softly like a chain of stars, guiding her into the driveway. Her Christmas boy was not ever going to be well. Pretty soon he would be stronger than she was, and bigger, some real violence in his fist. The day was coming when the ordinary demons of adolescence would wrestle with his private devils, and it could be a hell. And she knew that her love for Jack would not be enough to protect him forever, that one day she would have to give him up or send him away or have someone else, a nurse, a ward, a home to mother him.

  A lamp was on in one of the windows, and as soon as she faced it, the light went out so quickly that she could not determine from which room it had shone. Upstairs, yes, but Jack’s room or her own? Or perhaps it was one of them using the bathroom in the middle of the night. Seat down, fellas. Still, the sudden flicker unnerved her, as if the house itself had been spying, waiting for her to make the next move. The house was cold inside and the air damp against her skin as though the hazy vapors had crept in through the cracks. She turned up the thermostat a few clicks until the heat came on and pumped warm air into the room. During her absence, Tim had arranged the presents below the Christmas tree in a small mountain of many colors and ribbons and bows. She stood before the pile of gifts, admiring the artful care he had shown in placing each one. Just so. In the morning, he would play the elf, dispensing the packages one by one in an order of his own devising.

  She tiptoed up the stairs and changed into the nightgown hanging from the back of the bathroom door. As she readied for bed, the lateness of the hour weighed heavily. Other Christmas eves had been spent in last-minute preparations for the morning to come. Once Tim had stayed up till three, assembling a recalcitrant bicycle, now long neglected. The year Jack Peter was born, they spent the night listening through the baby monitor, hoping he might awaken, and nestling together for his midnight feed, all three of them asleep, the baby against her breast, her husband at her side. Or that terrible fight that one Christmas when she could not fully forgive Tim’s transgressions and amends. Ancient history, she thought, and slid into bed, careful not to wake her sleeping husband.

  * * *

  Belowdecks the sea poured in through the hole created when the ship struck the rocks. In their quarters, preparing for arrival in the new land, she and Tim were tossed to the floor by the scraping collision. The ship listed to the breach and knocked the feet from under them again as they tried to rise. Their trunk of clothes and goods slid across the room and burst open, and the small loose articles—a brush and hand mirror, a sheaf of paper and pens, a secret flask of rum—fell and scattered pell-mell. Seeping through the oaken decks and streaming beneath the door, the sea stained the wood, slowly at first like spilled milk, and then all at once, a torrent that gushed by inches as they regained their feet. She screamed at Tim to do something, but he simply sucked on the long stem of his clay pipe and considered the situation with a detached, almost amused air. The coldness of the water shocked and then numbed them. Tim sloshed to the cabin door, but he could not open it against the pressure of the incoming sea and he hulloed and called for the captain, but it was instantly apparent that no one could hear them. Holly struggled to his side in a panic as the water girdled her hips and waist, and she beat her fists against the door, hollering for help. Come save us. She drummed and cried out, but the ship rocked and pitched by thirty degrees, and the cold water rose to their shoulders. Tim banged against the ceiling, the sea sweeping them off their feet, so that they were treading water now, and the wooden walls burst ecstatically. They were under, breathing in the sea in one last desperate gesture, the air bubbling from their mouths, a bewildered look frozen on their faces. Suspended in the green sea, the bodies floated toward the cabin walls and then sank, white as fish bellies, dead as dead could be, bobbing in slow motion, and knocking dully against the confines of the little room in the coffin of the Porthleven.

  As if she had stopped breathing, Holly choked and gasped for breath. She opened her eyes from the nightmare, and almost reflexively, she sat up in the bed to check on her husband. Tim snored gently into his pillow. She threw off the covers and went to see about her son, gently opening Jack’s door. In the dim light, she made out his figure curled on the bed. He twitched in his sleep and his shoulders jerked as if she had caught him in some erotic throes, but his movements were sporadic, as if he dreamt of wrestling or of running or swimming away from her. The memory of those drowned bodies gave her a chill. She wanted to lay her hands on her son, but she knew that he might jump from her touch or scream or strike her. From the edge of his bed she spoke his name softly, and he rolled over and went still, sighing once. Just as quietly, she inched off the mattress and stood, watching him a moment longer.

  Tim was still sleeping when she crawled into bed, but he woke as soon as her cold feet grazed the warmth of his calves. He rolled over to her, and she could feel his gaze upon her.

  “You’re back,” he whispered. “How was church?”

  Midnight Mass seemed a lifetime ago. “Just fine,” she said. “Beautiful, really, but it’s been a strange night. On the way home, I could have sworn there was a group of people out there. A ship at sea, drowning. It’s so foggy, I couldn’t see a thing.”

  The hinge of his jaw made a snapping sound when he yawned. “Try to get some sleep. Who knows when our little boy will be up in the morning? Could be the crack of dawn. Just like when he was a baby.”

  Neither one of them spoke again, and soon her husband was asleep and snoring. She stared at the ceiling for a while and then at the gap between the window and the shade, that small space where in a few short hours the rising sun would slice through the darkness to announce another morning.

  ii.

  On Christmas morning, Nick remembered Baby. He had not even thrown off the covers, and Baby was on his mind, which was odd, because he hardly ever thought of Baby anymore, and he could not understand why it had to happen on such a festive day. This time Baby showed up fully made, swaddled in pastel blankets, bald and cheerful, a toothless searching mouth. Nick imagined it crying in the other room, in the crib that had never been assembled but still sat in a box in the attic, and he could almost smell the talcum powder and the baby shampoo, could almost see his mother cross the floor and bring Baby to him, and it would curl its fingers around his pinkie, and he could almost feel its phantom weight in his arms. But there was no baby, he knew, and there never was, but that did not alter the strength of the sensation that Baby was here, had come at last.

  His parents told him one day after school. In the beginning, the news meant no more to him than that night’s menu or their planned summer vacation up north to look for moose. They were happy, so he felt he should be happy, too, and he was. We’re going to have a baby, they said, a little brother or sister of your own. A due date around the Fourth of July. Which was miles away. Eons. He could barely remember last year’s fireworks, so the announcement that his mother was expecting was as mythical as every other expectation. What will come, will come. But once they told him about Baby, they could talk of little else. We have to get the spare room ready for Baby. You know when Baby comes, Nana and Pap will come from Florida and stay for a while to help. You’ll have to play quietly. Whenever guests visited the house, they wanted to talk of nothing but the plans for Baby. His father touched his mother on her tummy every night in case Baby wanted to kick, and one time, she asked Nick if he would put his hand on her to feel for Baby, but he did not. It was enough to see how her skin moved.

  His mother had disappeared one morning, gone early to the hospital, but not to worry, his father would take care of him. On a hot day in June, Nick had come home from playing with Jack Peter on the rocks behind his house. He burst into the kitchen with a plastic pail laden with bits of shell and small fishes they had trapped in the tidal pools, and he was excited to show his mother the treasures. The house was cool and dark, and the screen door slammed behind him.

  “Dad!” Nick yelled. “You’ll never guess what we
found out there—”

  There in the middle of the afternoon sat his father at the kitchen table, an ice-filled glass at his elbow, and the day’s crossword puzzle. He put a finger to his lips and said, “Hush.” Scraping the chair legs on the linoleum floor, he pushed away from the table and motioned for Nick to come sit in his lap. But that’s what he did when he was little, so instead he went to his father’s side and stood there, close enough to have a big arm around his shoulder. His father’s face looked puffy and red.

  “I’ve got a bit of sad news for you, Nick.” His father used his serious voice. “Your mother lost the baby, son.”

  “Lost Baby?”

  “Yes, you see, sometimes the baby won’t be able to make it out in the world, and then the mother has what they call stillborn—”

  “So the baby isn’t going to come?”

  His father bent his neck and looked down. “No, Baby died and isn’t coming. Not anymore, not ever.”

  “But Mom is going to be okay?”

  The rest of his memory exists in a fog. He could not remember if his mother was at home that afternoon or had gone to the hospital for another day or two. Mrs. Keenan came and fetched him, and he stayed with Jack Peter overnight or longer. When he came back home, he found his mother lying on the couch in a robe and pajamas, bundled in June as though for December. His mother was never sick, and he never before saw her resting on the couch in the middle of the day. His father, yes, asleep in front of the TV tuned in to some dumb golf match, but never his mother. She was a life force, whirl of motion, always making and doing, and now washed out and wasted. Without the baby in her middle, she looked smaller and weaker than ever before. He could not tell, really, with her robe and pajamas as she stretched out, but it looked as if Baby was gone for good. “Come here, pet.” She held out her arms and he rushed into her embrace, and she engulfed him so tightly that he could feel the pulse in her neck beat against the side of his cheek. “Daddy tell you?”

  He nodded in the swim of her, warm and soft and clean.

  “I’m so so sorry, Nicky.” He did not understand why she was apologizing to him. Losing Baby was not her fault, and besides, he was not sure if he wanted Baby to come at all. She was crying softly in his ear. “It was a brother. A beautiful boy.”

  For that whole summer she cried, or so it seemed at the time, but now he realized that only a few days passed when she could not bother to dress or leave the couch. When he was seven, he thought her sorrow would never end, and as she suffered, so did he. He moped about the living room, staring at cartoons on the television, not letting her far from his sight. He watched his father come from work and fill a glass with booze and drink until he remembered to order Nick to bed. He tiptoed around their misery. Sent out to play, he would sit on a rock and stare at the ocean. More often, he was shipped off to spend some time with Jack Peter, who never seemed to care about Nick’s feelings, unaware of anyone’s emotions but his own.

  She got better like she said she would. The weight fell away in her sadness, and sometimes the whole pregnancy seemed nothing but a dream from beginning to end. His mother slowly came back into herself, and by late August, she was well enough to accept an invitation to the clambake the Keenans had planned to mark the end of another summer. Nick had looked forward to it for ages, a chance to return to normalcy, the Wellers and the Keenans on their own private stretch of paradise, just in sight of their dream house by the sea. The days were hot enough to go into the water, and the two boys were jumping over waves as they ran to the shoreline. They had been getting along just fine that day. He looked back over his shoulder. His mother was chatting with Jack’s father, his hand on her bare shoulder. Mrs. Keenan sat alone, reading a book, but he could not find his father anywhere. Nick pulled Jack into deeper water so that the swells nearly knocked them over. And then, in the middle of the ocean, Jack Peter had to ask about how they lost the baby. Why couldn’t he have been quiet and pretended all of it had never happened? Why did he have to make him angry? A word from Jack Peter about Baby, and he could have killed him on the spot.

  Like a siren, the stereo downstairs blared with the soundtrack of Christmas and broke his memories. The same songs every year. His mom and dad were up and puttering about in their robes, probably wondering where he was and what was taking him so long and what kind of kid doesn’t come running on Christmas morning to see what Santa left and why is he the way he is. His mother would be putting cinnamon buns into the oven, the first whiff of hot sweetness just moments away. His father would be running the old electric train from his youth, the elaborate village set up beneath the tree with its endlessly fascinating circulation on the tracks. One or the other parent would be calling him soon, and he resolved to beat them to it by springing downstairs with a smile pasted on his face.

  They hugged him and they kissed him, and they all wished one another a Merry Christmas. The cinnamon rolls popped out of the oven in gooey glory, and the train went round and round with a giraffe bobbing its head up and down, and they opened the gifts they had for one another with oohs and ahs and thank-yous. He watched his mother more intently than usual, following her actions so closely that several times she gave him a slightly reproachful look, and he would stop and pretend to be entranced by hockey skates or some new book rather than the changing patterns of her face. In some respects, his mother was the same as she had been that awful summer, and in her robe and jammies, she echoed the woman who had been stretched out on the sofa, mourning Baby. But in other aspects, she appeared much older, worn somehow, a crease in her brow every time she frowned. Faint lines at the corners of her eyes. A thin streak of gray spiraling from the hairline. The veins in the backs of her hands thick as vines. It wasn’t just the physical traits, really, but her manner that had aged her. She rarely laughed without restraint any more, not when she was sober, that giddy head-thrown-back cackle. Nick watched her watching her husband, regarding him coolly as if he had done something wrong that could never be forgiven.

  Baby would have changed everything. A little kid around the house who still believed in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy and the bogeyman. Nick would be a big brother, not the only child, not the only one to take care of them. And maybe they would not drink so much, and maybe Nick could play with Baby instead of having to go to the Keenans all the time. The last gift exchanged and unwrapped, they all settled into their places, the easy chair, the sofa, the floor. Over the next hour, they drifted away, each heading nowhere, and by midday the morning’s happiness was but a memory.

  * * *

  “Don’t forget to pack your things,” his mother said later that afternoon. Sunlight struggled through the dirty windows, and he felt the day was ending all too soon. Alone in his room, he was working on the final pieces of a plastic hybrid man-machine, a postmodern warrior that snapped together in forty-nine easy moves. Lost in the task at hand, Nick did not comprehend at first what she was talking about.

  “We have to leave early to make our flight in order to catch the boat on time to make the cruise. We drop you off at half-past eight in the morning, so be ready.”

  He tossed the toy on the bed and tried not to look crestfallen. If Baby were here, they would never leave.

  “You could have gone to Florida, Nick. Seen your grandparents for a few days. It was your decision.” His mother picked up his discarded soldier. “What’s the matter, pet?”

  “Couldn’t I just stay here alone? I can take care of myself.”

  “We’ve been over this a million times. It’s just a few days, and he’s your oldest friend in the world. It won’t kill you to be nice to him for a little while. He has no one else, really.” She marched the toy soldier across the blankets and pretended it was attacking her son. He swatted her away playfully.

  “Do you want me to help you pack?”

  “I can do it myself.”

  She rose to leave. “You’re such a big boy,” she teased at the door. “You were always like that, so independent. All grown up before I
knew what was happening to my baby.”

  He opened the closet, wary of the bodies that had been there, and worried about his parents on that ship far out to sea. He pulled down his suitcase from the shelf and began counting out socks and underwear for each day, and crammed in some pajamas, two jeans, and a couple of shirts and sweaters. On top of the packing, he laid his monster journal and pencils. Sick to his stomach, he did not want to go. Jack Peter was weirder than ever. Mrs. Keenan was hearing voices, and Mr. Keenan was seeing things. The man lurking out there. He put on his pajamas and waited for his parents to tell him it was bedtime.

  They were seven years old and playing in the surf that August afternoon, letting the waves crash into their thin bodies while they stood their ground. Up on the shore, his mother was alone with Jack’s father, who seemed to be consoling her, his hand upon her shoulder. A pair of gulls circled overheard in the bright blue sky. The boys were laughing, having fun, daring the sea to defeat them. They went in deeper.

  Jack Peter wiped spray from his mouth. “Won’t this be funner when we can bring your baby brother?”

  A swell buoyed against Nick’s chest, so he jumped and landed on his toes in the soft sand. “Baby’s dead,” he yelled. “My mother lost the baby.” He had not said so aloud to anyone, and only in so saying did it become real. He wanted to get out, leave right now, and be away from Jack Peter and everyone, so he would not cry.

  “What kind of a stupid loses a baby that’s not even born?” The question angered Nick, and his mother was not stupid, Jack Peter was. Stupid, stupid. When the next wave curled over and threatened to swamp them, Nick took a deep breath and pulled him under, dragging him to the bottom. The dark water rolled over them and churned the sand and shells against their skin, and the ocean tossed them like rag dolls, but Nick dug in his feet in the grit and pressed his hand against the boy’s chest with all the strength he could muster. In the green murk, he opened his eyes and saw Jack Peter staring back at him, playing some private game, blank and untroubled, ready to stay down. Nick wanted to hurt him for saying that about his mother. He wanted to make him go away and bring back his mother’s lost child, and so Nick held him there until they both began to thrash for breath and the adults came rushing into the waves to search for their missing sons.