The Boy Who Drew Monsters

by Keith Donohue

  Inside, they made another fire in the fireplace and warmed the milk on the stove, fussing over the policeman like a prodigal son. Their own Jack Peter lingered in the stairwell, listening to their conversation from the shadows while the adults gathered round the kitchen table. Tim held his chin in one hand and stared at the bone, now wrapped in an old kitchen towel. Steam from the mugs curled and vanished.

  “I’ve got another mystery for you,” she said. “Last night after Mass, I was driving home, and the fog was so thick I thought I’d never make it. In fact, I had to stop, and this was about one, one thirty a.m., and it was the most curious thing. First some kind of creature crossed the road ahead of me, not near enough for me to make out what it was but near enough to be something. And Tim has been seeing things in the shadows, and we were wondering if the police have come across an unusual amount of weirdness lately.”

  Pollock brushed cookie crumbs from the corners of his lips. “Can’t say that there’s been anything unusual. Same amount of weirdness.”

  “Thing is,” Holly went on, “I heard voices, too. People in trouble. Or fighting, screaming out in the dark. And I was wondering if the police took any calls last night, if you can tell me, for a domestic disturbance.”

  “Last night? No. Quietest Christmas in ages.”

  Tim sat up straight and addressed him pointedly. “Could it be something else? The noises. Some creature in the fog.”

  “Round here, nothing would surprise me. We have a pair of foxes behind the house. I don’t hear them so much, but my parents do. Sound like hell, my dad says, when they’re out there mating.”

  “Could it be coyotes?” Tim asked. “Friend of mine says coyotes have been seen around town. Right on the beach.”

  Pollock shifted his gaze around the room as if to ensure that no one was eavesdropping. “My guess is that you’ve been troubled by that big white dog running wild around here. Probably the same fella that dug up your beach. I’d be careful around dark.”

  Quiet as a ghost, Jip materialized in the kitchen. He must have slid across the wooden floors in his thick woolen socks to have arrived without a sound, without a twitch. His features were set still on his face, as though he had been listening for a while, and when Pollock met his glance, Jip gave no sign of distress or displeasure, not even a blink of the eyes. His mother rose to usher him over to the policeman. “How long have you been there, quiet as the morning?”

  “Officer Pollock,” Tim said, “this is Jack Peter. J.P. I call him Jip. Jip, this is the policeman they sent.”

  Pollock extended his hand, but Jip stood a safe distance from the stranger. They considered each other like two gunslingers, and the standoff ended when Jip noticed the holstered gun at his hip.

  “Are you a real policeman?”

  “Sure am. Past two years, least.”

  “Is that a real gun?”

  Pollock rested his hand on the butt of his pistol. “Sure is.”

  “Do you ever shoot anyone?”

  “Only if I had to, as a last resort.”

  “What about a German soldier or pirates or monsters? What if they were trying to kill you, could you shoot them so they would stop?”

  Tapping her nails on the table, Holly drew their attention. “That’s enough about that, Jack. Did you see his police car parked in the driveway?”

  He nodded but did not take his eyes off the pistol.

  “Did you see the lights, Jack?”

  “There’s a pattern,” he said. “My sweater is red and blue.”

  “Red and blue so people notice when you’re driving up behind them. Same idea with the siren.”

  “You ever see a dead body?” Jip asked.

  The policeman stood and paced the floor by the back window, facing the ocean. “I have to confess, I never have.”

  “I saw my friend Nick when he was dead.”

  Tim interrupted. “He wasn’t really dead, Jip. Just unconscious.” He turned to the policeman. “When they were seven, Jip and his friend Nick nearly drowned one day. We had to pull them out of the ocean, give them mouth-to-mouth.”

  “I drew Nick.”

  Holly gestured toward the picture hanging on the fridge. “That’s Nick right there. On the door.”

  His father stood, prepared to reach out to his son. “Yes, Jip, you drew him. Right, we see. But there’s no need to make a big deal out of it.”

  “But the bones,” Jip said.

  The policeman took the package from the table and peeled back the towel. “It’s an old bone. Washed up on the shore.”

  “I drew bones.” The boy raised his voice.

  Holly rose from her chair and insinuated herself between the child and the policeman. “He drew a picture of bones. We bought him an art set for Christmas. From Sharon’s. Superdeluxe. Pencils and markers and a giant sketch pad. He’s been drawing things. You saw his picture of Nick on the refrigerator. Jack, why don’t you get the drawing you were working on today? You can show Officer Pollock.”

  His stocking feet spun on the wooden floor like a cartoon character’s until he found traction and raced upstairs.

  Once her son was out of earshot, Holly said, “Look, he gets stuck in his head sometimes, and he needs a way out, so that’s why we’re urging the drawing. For when he is nonverbal.”

  After a sip of cocoa, the policeman had a light milky mustache above his lip. His face reddened against his navy shirt.

  The boy returned, laid the scroll upon the table, and backed away three steps. With a soft scraping sound, the paper uncurled to reveal the pile of human bones, a whole skeleton mixed in a hole.

  “That’s quite remarkable,” said Pollock. “Did you copy that picture from a book?”

  “I did it,” Jip shouted. “The bones, the hole.”

  “Easy there, sport,” Tim said.

  Frustration bubbled in the boy. He rocked and swayed where he stood, hands clenched, and under his breath, he muttered, “Murder.” Nobody else had noticed that Officer Pollock was now squeezing into his jacket and reaching for his hat.

  “I’ve stayed too long, and you seem to have a situation on your hands. Best I leave.”

  “Oh, no,” Holly said. “You haven’t finished your cocoa.”

  “Thanks all the same, but I’m really on duty. Sorry to have upset anyone. You going to be okay there, Jip?”

  The boy had turned toward the living room and the bright light from the fireplace, and he did not answer.

  Tim and Holly walked the trooper to the door. “Thank you for coming,” said Tim. “And sorry for the situation. He gets upset sometimes when he can’t make himself understood.”

  “Or when he thinks you don’t believe him,” Holly said.

  The policeman looked back at the boy framed now by the fireplace. He waved the bone at him playfully. “I’ll get this up to Augusta and we should hear soon. But dollars to doughnuts, it’s old as can be. Remember to fill in that hole, Mr. Keenan, before someone falls in and gets hurt. I’ll turn on the cherry top when I leave. For the boy.”

  At the door, they wished him a merry Christmas. Arm in arm, they went to the window to watch him get into his car and turn on the red and blue strobe, beating like the waves. As the black-and-white cruiser left the driveway, Holly turned toward her son to make sure that he was not missing the display. Jack was at the fireplace, carefully feeding strips of paper into the fire, his beautiful picture, bone by bone, turning to ashes, bits of blackness escaping from the hearth, rising up and out into the bare sky, the very opposite of snow.

  v.

  She could not sleep. In the dead of night, Holly prowled like a ghost through the dream house. Earlier that afternoon, while the turkey was in the oven and the potatoes boiling away, she had spent hours on the Internet, chasing link after link, the search engines churning up all kinds of doings in their algorithms. Bodies in water decompose quickly, depending upon the temperature and the depth, but bones are a bit more resistant to decay. In the right circumstances, bones can
last for centuries. She saw pictures of a skull from a shipwreck off the coast of Texas in 1686, and the Neolithic skeletons of a mother and child found in the Mediterranean Sea near Israel. In due course, she considered herself an expert on what happens to those who drown, but at some point in the process, the idea occurred that surfing hours online was an inappropriate way to spend a family holiday. Bleary-eyed, she found the boys on the sofa, catching the end of yet another football game.

  There had been a scene after the policeman left, a protracted negotiation from discord to blowup to harmony. Tim saw Jack throwing the papers in the fire and lost his temper, shouting at their son to stop. Despite his father’s warnings, Jack kept ripping strips of paper and tossing them into the flames, until the last of the evidence vanished.

  “What’s gotten into you?” Tim asked. “Get away from that fire. You could burn yourself.”

  The tears started flowing.

  “Jip, that’s enough. You know better than playing with fire. And why would you burn up your drawing?”

  Holly rose to intervene, but it was too late.

  “What is wrong with you?” Tim shouted. “You’ve been misbehaving for weeks. First, your mother. And then you leave the windows open, and how could you be so rude when we had company? He turned his police lights on for you and everything.”

  Holly could see her son’s face reflected in the glass door of the fireplace, a pale replica of the boy that appeared to be consumed by fire. He quaked on the spot, threatening tears again. “Go easy,” she said.

  “I will not go easy.” Tim turned from her to their son. The red scabs on his neck had opened and thin lines of watery blood oozed from the cracks. “I would like some answers, young man. You have to talk to people when they talk to you. Otherwise they will not want to turn on their siren for you or talk to you about being a policeman or even want to come into the house. Do you understand? Is that what you want?”

  “No,” he said. Simply and slowly, revealing none of the emotions she knew swirled within him. Holly was shocked that her son replied at all, that he had summoned the courage rather than retreat into the safety of his mind.

  “If that’s the case, Jip. If that’s the case, then you need to make more of an effort. If you want people to be nice to you, you have to be nice to them. Or at least pretend. You can’t just say nothing.”

  He had nothing to say, but simply bent away from his father’s approach.

  “And why would you rip up your drawing and burn it in the fire? You worked so hard all day long.”

  The boy blinked and said nothing.

  “I used to think I could at least rely on you to talk to me.”

  Tim grabbed Jack’s arm and shook him once, not hard, but startling in its suddenness. She watched her son’s eyes, saw how he vanished into his impenetrable depths. His left arm jerked out of his father’s grasp and then straight up as if pulled on a string, and then he reached around with his right hand to grab it by the elbow to keep the arm from flying away. His face reddened and his head swayed from side to side under the branches of his arms. Chirps escaped from his lips, birdsong with no melody. Holly stood by, paralyzed by indecision. No matter how many times she had seen him this way, she felt powerless. A bad mother. Tim, however, tried to reach through the barrier their son had constructed. “Jip, Jip, stay with me, boy. It’s Daddy, and everything’s okay. We don’t have to talk about the pictures.”

  But the moment for rescue had passed. Nothing to be done but observe, to make sure he did no harm to himself or to anyone else. Three years ago, when the fits first began and they had no way to predict what might happen, he got loose from them on the way through the front door and bashed into the ceramic umbrella stand, sending it to the floor and breaking it into a dozen pieces. Jack had stepped on a shard in his bare feet and cut his heel deeply, the gash bright as a red smile pumping blood. Holly did not know which was worse, the accident itself or trying to get their hysterical child out of the house and to the emergency room. And it was just as bad on the way home, the stitches and bandages, the howling assault against the world passing just beyond the thin glass window. By hard experience, they knew now to leave him be until the episode played out. He would tire eventually.

  Tim sat on the bottom step of the staircase, and Holly posted herself on a kitchen stool. They pretended not to notice him, for often he responded more quickly if he thought he was being ignored. She stole glances with her husband, trying to convey with the stoniness of her features her dissatisfaction with his direct and clumsy approach. The chirping stopped abruptly, and Jack unlocked the pretzel of his arms. Expression returned slowly to his eyes like tinder catching flame, and as suddenly as he had departed behind the veil, Jack returned. He blinked and then smiled at his mother. When he asked if he could run upstairs and work on his drawings, she let him go with a sigh.

  The rest of their Christmas was quiet and uneventful. A turkey dinner with the trimmings. A video chat over the Web with her faraway sister. A long complicated board game for three before Jack was sent to bed for the night. He was asleep within ten minutes, as guiltless as a newborn, snug in his blankets. Tim turned in an hour later and was lightly snoring beside his lit reading lamp. Holly slipped in beside him as the clock struck eleven, but she could not let go of the day so easily.

  When she could no longer bear the insomnia, she left Tim in the bed and wandered down the hall. The door to her son’s room was closed as she had left it, but she could not resist turning the knob carefully and opening the door, with a whisper from the hinges. His room was chilly, and through the window even the moon and stars looked cold. In the pale light, she saw the scattered papers and pencils on his desk, a sign that he had been busy working on some new project. She resisted the temptation to steal a look and resolved instead to ask about his drawings in the morning.

  She floated downstairs, moving from room to room with no real purpose other than to defeat her restlessness. The Internet beckoned. She had a theory about the bones and the wreck of the Porthleven, but the thought of investigating more leads online just depressed her. She touched the glass tablet, which was smooth as ice.

  Bones, she thought, who collects the bones? A ghoulish task. Who came to retrieve the drowned, how did they recover those shipwrecked corpses washed ashore? Near her head, the window rattled long and hard as though something was trying to force its way inside the house, and in the rooms above, someone had awoken and was moving the furniture.

  * * *

  He could not sleep. In the dead of night, Tim opened his eyes and realized he was alone in the bed. His wife was gone, sleepless too, no doubt. Lately Holly had been uneasy and agitated, seeing and hearing things, strange things that were not there, but then who was he to judge? Not with that pale wild man running naked over hill and dale, or was it just a chimera, a conflation of a white dog and his own frazzled nerves? Turning over in the bed, he flipped his pillow to the cool side, trying to go back to sleep. Useless.

  Huffing, he threw off the covers and swung his legs over the edge to sit up in the bed. The room was gloomier without her in it. As a boy he could not bear to stay alone in a darkened space. Where had she gone, what was she chasing now? He walked across the creaky floorboards and threw on his robe. Just past midnight, the alarm clock said. Another Christmas come and gone. That Weller boy would be over in the morning, just hours away, their houseguest for the next week. He envied Fred and Nell, ditching the kid and heading for warmer climes, a week at sea away from the wintery murk of Maine. He imagined them promenading on the deck, Fred in a tuxedo and Nell in an evening dress, and then at once he laughed at the absurdity of his vision, the notion that people today traveled like they were Astaire and Rogers in some black-and-white 1930s film, when in reality it was probably polo shirts and khaki shorts, or maybe a charming little sundress, her peach one that gives the impression that she is wearing nothing at all. He banished her from his thoughts.

  As soon as he stepped into the hall, Tim could t
ell where Holly had been. The door to their son’s room was ajar, so he traced her steps and pushed it open with his toes just enough so that he, too, could spy on Jip asleep. A crack of light zigzagged across the boy’s face, giving it a gentle and peaceful aspect, a marked contrast to the sullen child hours ago who could not be contained. Why did he push his son so hard? Why did Jip have to go so far away sometimes? Love from a distance was so much more difficult when it is your own child. And Tim loved Jip with a depth that amazed him in such quiet moments. Still, he cursed the doctors and the therapists, wishing for a thousandth time to have a different boy.

  Perhaps Holly was right, perhaps their son wasn’t ever going to be normal. Surely they had more difficulty recently in forcing him to comply with their wishes. Jip had deliberately torn apart that drawing long after he had been told to stop, and he persisted despite their warnings. They would have to work harder with Jip, Tim thought, at listening and obeying. Go easy, Holly had said, but that was just the problem. They had been too easy on the boy, coddling him, when he’s smart enough to understand the moral consequences of his actions, right from wrong. He’d talk with Dr. Wilson next time. He’d find a way to get Jip to obey more readily once it becomes clear that he has no choice. They would work harder on achieving some equilibrium.

  How much easier it had been in the beginning, before they knew the facts about Jip. He came into the dream house as an answer to their long-held prayers for a child. After years of trial and failure, the miracle pregnancy, and nine months later the baby was born, pure and simple, a baby who did baby things. Who would know, without any experience in raising a child, what to expect at each stage of development? They took his affect as normal, his long naps were a blessing. Aren’t you lucky, Fred Weller had said, to have one that sleeps through the night? The baby’s sudden disinterest in play or food was chalked up to boredom. Only when periods of withdrawal grew more frequent and alarming did they begin to suspect. They made countless trips to the doctor, but they resisted nearly every diagnosis. On the spectrum, one had said. Asperger’s, said the next one. But he refused to believe it for the longest time, and even now, he pressed against the cold hard language every chance he could. Words, words, but no real explanation, no cure. An abnormality—one quack had actually used that word. As if that was a reasonable way to talk about a human being or to discuss the future of a child with his parents. Tim looked at his son, sleeping like a baby, and wished he could buy back those days and hold him in his arms again, unaware of the darkness ahead. Bring me back my baby, my little boy.