In the Blood

by Lisa Unger

  But when I looked at my husband, I didn’t see the mirror of my own despair. He didn’t seem shattered the way I felt. But, of course, he left for the office every day. Our front door was his portal back to the normal world where people work, and went out to lunch, and surfed the Web at their desks in the afternoon, and met for drinks. People laughed and had thoughts, important thoughts that didn’t fly out of their heads like owls delivering secret messages.

  He disappears through the portal by seven in the morning (before the baby, he never left until eight-thirty at the earliest). Sometimes he comes home as late as eight. He says he has to work more now, because of the baby, because I have decided not to go back to work and to stay home with our child. I felt the first trickle of resentment the minute he walked out the door his first day back, clutching his little book of photos. Six weeks later, my resentment has bloomed into a full-blown rage. But I bury it, deep inside. I know it is wrong. I wasn’t really angry with him, was I? After all, he was supporting us now. And it was I who had pushed for a baby.

  “We had a hard few weeks,” he says. “But he’s doing a lot better, isn’t he?”

  I don’t say anything. There’s a glass of wine for me on the table, but I don’t want it. If I drink it, I’ll have to pump and dump. I hate hooking myself up to that machine, sitting and listening to it sigh and whir as it drains the milk from my breasts.

  “The crying,” he says. “That was so hard. But it’s stopped, other than what’s probably normal. And he’s sleeping a lot.”

  “He doesn’t seem right,” I say. It sounds weak and a little whiny. I can’t put into words what I feel in my body. My husband stares at me in that way that he has, so present, so earnest. He has his hand on my leg.

  “The labor, the C-section, the colic,” I say into the thick, expectant silence. “Maybe it hurt him.”

  He is tender, tries to talk it through with me. (He’s just a baby. We’ll all adjust, because everyone does, don’t they? Maybe we got all the hard stuff out of the way, maybe we’ll sail through the terrible twos and adolescence, he joked.) But I had a feeling that we wouldn’t be sailing through anything ever again.

  “My father,” I say. And I hate the words before they’ve even tumbled out of my mouth.

  “No,” he says, horrified, as though the thought has never crossed his mind. “Don’t.”

  “He looks just like my father.”

  So much for “date night.”

  The next day, he calls in sick to work. Appointments are made—not for the baby, but for me.

  My ob-gyn quickly diagnoses me with postpartum depression. And my husband and I sit in her pink, sunlit office while she explains how the massive hormonal shifts that occur after pregnancy don’t regulate right away for everyone. She kept calling it the baby blues, which I think she did to take the edge off of it. Because while “baby blues” sounds soft and pastel-colored, easily managed, postpartum depression is black and red, with thick, hard edges; it bludgeons. It was likely, said the doctor, that my traumatic labor, the emergency C-section, followed by the colic, have contributed to my descent into PPD.

  “It all feeds into each other,” said my doctor patiently. “And—P.S.—none of this is a walk in the park under the best of circumstances. More women suffer PPD in a given year than will sprain an ankle or be diagnosed with diabetes. So, you’re not alone.”

  To my husband: “Let’s make sure Mom is getting plenty of rest. Can you take the nighttime feedings?”

  “Of course,” he says. “Of course.”

  And for me, a low-dose antidepressant, the decision to go to formula and stop breast-feeding—which was already on the table because the baby was gaining weight too slowly.

  Another failure for me: drugs during labor, emergency C-section, colic, unable to nurse beyond two months. No wonder my baby hates me. I have failed him in every single way and he’s not even three months old.

  In the mirror, there’s no trace of the happy pregnant person I was. My ripe bosom, my glowing hair, my round belly—it’s all gone flat. I am dull and deflated, abandoned by life and joy and expectancy. I am flabby and gray.

  I have started taking the pills and I pray that everyone is right, that I have been sabotaged by my own brain chemicals. And that the little blue pill is going to put things right again.

  “All the hard stuff just goes away—the pain, the stress, the sleep deprivation,” my mom soothed in the car. “You just don’t remember any of it later on.”

  Please, please, please, let them all be right. Let it be me. Let there be something wrong with me. Something normal that can be fixed quickly and easily. Please let there be something wrong with me, and let it not be something wrong with him.

  8

  Luke was waiting for me on the porch when I arrived. A light snow had started to fall, and I’d wiped out twice on the slick roads. I was going to need a ride home from Luke’s mom. He was sitting on the porch swing, emitting a sullen and self-pitying energy.

  “You’re late,” he said as I swung off my bike. My pants were ripped, and my knee was bleeding from the second fall.

  “She left you?” I said. A red Volvo usually dropped him off, waiting in the street until I opened the door. Whoever it was, a slight woman with a wild frizz of red hair, she’d never gotten out of the car. Her name and phone number were scribbled on the chalkboard in the kitchen. But it was not information I had committed to memory.

  “She didn’t wait,” he said. “By the time I realized that you weren’t there, she was gone.”

  “You have a key,” I said, climbing the steps.

  He pumped his legs lightly and the swing emitted an irritating squeak as it moved back and forth. Something about the noise, about his pouty face, sent a skein of irritation through me. What a baby.

  “I was afraid to go in alone,” he said. I didn’t buy it. I’d been spending time with Luke for about three weeks. He was lots of things—a scaredy-cat wasn’t one of them.

  “Afraid of what?” I asked. I stood in front of him and gave him a light tap on his foot with my toe.

  He shrugged and looked up at me. His eyes were a little damp but he wasn’t crying.

  “I just didn’t want to be alone in there.”

  I remembered coming home from school alone when I was a kid. Occasionally, I had to let myself in, make my own snack, and do my homework until my mother came back from wherever she was. When the school day had gone well, it was heaven. I’d eat anything I wanted, lie on the couch and watch television, giddy with my own personal freedom.

  But when the day had been bad—if I’d done poorly on a test, or been bullied in gym class, which I often was, or if there had been some “incident,” or I hadn’t eaten my lunch because of some kind of cafeteria torture, I’d hate that empty house. I’d hate the way it echoed and was dark when I entered. I hated how no lights were on, and nothing was cooking in the kitchen, no music, no television sound. No mom to metabolize the events of the day.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “For real.”

  I held the door open for him, and he walked inside. He went straight up to his room, where I knew he’d drop his backpack and change his clothes. And I made his snack—apples and graham crackers with peanut butter and a glass of milk. My hands were shaking as the knife sank into the white flesh of the apple. I was trying to keep it all at bay—Beck, my father. But I was shaky and fragile, ready to shatter.

  As I put his snack on the table my phone chimed. It was a text from Ainsley:

  Still no sign of Beck. Her parents are here. Can u come back? I’m losing it.

  “What’s wrong?” Luke stood in the doorway, watching.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just some problem with my roommates.”

  I didn’t know what was okay to say to him. Even though I hadn’t wanted him to, Langdon had apparently asked around about Luke.

  “He’s very smart,” Langdon had told me. He’d held me after class. “His IQ is higher than most of the doctors on staff,
including mine. He has a history of violence with other children, teachers. He is disruptive in the classroom, a wild and incorrigible liar.”

  “I haven’t seen any of this,” I’d told him.

  I’d sat back at my desk in the front row. The room was a windowless space with plush stadium seating. It was in one of the more modern buildings. There were power outlets every few feet on the floor. The seats were generous and comfortable, the half-moon desktops polished wood. No expense was ever spared at Sacred Heart, no corners ever cut. We had a chef in our kitchen, Chef Bruce, and the restaurant served things like Chilean sea bass with lentils and saffron rice accompanied by a vegetable medley, as well as staples like free-range chicken sandwiches (with apple-wood bacon and white cheddar), or all-beef hot dogs with hand-cut fries, fresh-mozzarella Margherita personal pizzas, and organic beef hamburgers.

  “He was a little prickly that first day,” I said. “But since then, we’ve gotten along fine.”

  “There were other incidents. A fire in a wastepaper basket—though no one could prove conclusively that it was Luke. Playground fights, which might or might not have been his fault. In second grade, he was so viciously unkind to an overweight girl, such an unrelenting bully, drawing support from other bad personalities in the classroom, that her parents moved her to another school. Luke was reprimanded, but his abuse was only verbal, so no real action was taken. It was almost as if he was already learning how to work the system. He had already learned how to pick on people who were vulnerable, and do it in such a way that he couldn’t quite be punished. He was a natural leader, mainly because children feared him.”

  “I have to be honest,” I said. “I can’t reconcile any of that with the boy I know.”

  But Langdon went on.

  “In fourth grade, he developed an unhealthy attachment to his teacher, a young married woman in her late twenties. When he learned she was pregnant, he turned hostile, verbally abusive. He called her a whore, told her that he hoped she miscarried her baby. Finally, he tripped her as she was walking through the aisles during an independent work period. He was expelled.”

  “Expelled?”

  “Yeah,” said Langdon. “Kind of a big deal for an eight-year-old. But it was the total lack of remorse that really unsettled the headmaster. He wrote that Luke didn’t seem to care, or even to understand, what he had done. He maliciously tripped a pregnant woman; lots of kids saw him do it. When asked if he’d like to draft a letter of apology to his teacher, he refused. ‘She should apologize to me,’ he allegedly said. ‘She said she loved me.’ ”

  I involuntarily shuddered as a sudden chill settled over the room.

  “His mother homeschooled him after that,” he said. “Finally, she enrolled him in Fieldcrest. We only have her account of the last two years, which she describes as ‘challenging.’ But since he began at Fieldcrest this fall, he has been a model of good behavior, and is well beyond his age as far as academics are concerned. So she obviously did something right. Or he’s very motivated to stay at Fieldcrest for some reason.”

  “There are locks on the outside of his door,” I said.

  Langdon raised an eyebrow at that. “Is that so?”

  “I don’t know if they were already there when they moved in,” I qualified.

  “And?” He seemed to know I had something else I wanted to say.

  “He had a terrible bruise on his shoulder,” I said reluctantly. I really liked Rachel, and I knew that saying things like this was raising a red flag. “He claimed to have fallen down the stairs.”

  “Children like Luke tend to elicit a lot of anger from their parents,” said Langdon. “But by all accounts, she’s a present and concerned mother. She cares and is doing everything she can for a boy who, quite honestly, is exhibiting all the signs of a callous-unemotional. You know—a childhood psychopath.”

  He must have read something on my face. “Of course, that’s not a diagnosis,” he continued. “Just a conclusion from what I’ve read. He’s not my patient.”

  “He’s been fine.”

  “Just be careful with him,” said Langdon. He leaned back, ran a large hand through his hair. “Make sure he’s not running an agenda with you. And don’t forget that he’s way smarter than you are.”

  “I’ll remind you that this was your idea,” I said.

  “So it was,” he said. He issued a little cough. “Maybe I should have done my homework before encouraging you.”

  “You look upset,” Luke said now. He sat at the table and started eating.

  “I’m fine,” I said. I knew I should call his mother and tell her I had to go. I really should get back to Ainsley and to Beck’s parents. But I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to face what might be happening. I was still hoping it would all go away.

  “I heard there’s someone missing at your school,” said Luke. “Is that true?”

  There was an expression on his face that I didn’t like at all, as if he were hungry for drama, for news of mayhem. I worked not to react. How could he have heard that? I asked.

  “I heard some teachers talking in the lounge, on my way back from the bathroom.”

  I didn’t think there were unsupervised walks to and from the bathroom at Fieldcrest, nor did I think anyone would be discussing Beck in the faculty room, not yet. I didn’t say so. But how else could he have known?

  “I wouldn’t say she was missing,” I said. “She hasn’t come home since yesterday.”

  “And that’s not missing?” The gaze he held me with was open and inquiring. But there was something swimming beneath those black pools.

  “Well,” I said. How much could you really say to a kid? I couldn’t offer my various theories: she might be on a bender, sleeping around? “She might be with a friend.”

  “Or playing a joke,” he said. “Messing with you?”

  It was a really odd thing for him to say, but I shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “Why would she do that?” Again, his face was a mask of innocence. Was he goading me? I was rankling as if he was.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Our relationship is complicated.”

  “Like ours?”

  “Our relationship is not that complicated,” I said. This elicited a little frown. “You’re a kid. I’m your babysitter.”

  “If you say so,” he said. He offered a shrug. “So where would your friend go, if she was messing around with you?”

  “A bunch of places,” I said. “She could have gone anywhere.”

  “But you don’t think she did,” he said. He was chewing his apple loudly. “You look really scared.”

  “Let’s talk about something else,” I said.

  There was a flash of something on his face—delight. As though he’d discovered something about me, a weakness, and would squirrel away the knowledge for his future use. But maybe Langdon had just made me paranoid about him.

  That’s what they do, psychopaths. They figure out your language, your currency, your needs, your dreams and fears. Then they figure out how to use those things to get what they want from you. Most of us wear it all on our faces. We telegraph our inner lives with what we choose to eat, how we eat it, what we wear, how we carry ourselves, the words we use and don’t use. We tell about ourselves in a million small and large ways. And most people don’t even notice, because they’re so busy telling about themselves, listening to the symphony of their own inner lives. But the psychopath doesn’t have an inner life—no attachments, no feelings, no self-doubt, no regrets. Psychopaths just have their own desires, and a single-minded focus to achieve those desires—whatever they happen to be. So they have a lot of attention to direct at their chosen quarry, figuring, testing, planning, exploiting. But that wasn’t Luke, was it? It couldn’t be.

  “So,” he said. “Let’s start our game.”

  There it was again, that sweetly mischievous grin.

  “Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

  I was happy for the distraction. There was only an hour before Ra
chel had said she’d be home. After that, I’d have to reenter the real world, face the ugliness of it all.

  “So this hunt will be like a history lesson,” said Luke. “How much do you know about The Hollows?”

  “Some,” I said. I knew quite a bit about the sleepy, spooky little burg in which my college nestled. But I didn’t want Luke to know how much I knew. I figured that would give me a much-needed leg up.

  He took something from his pocket and clicked it on the table. It was a rusty old key. Tied to it with a piece of red yarn was a blue-lined index card.

  “What’s this?” I said with a smile. I held up the key and looked at it. It was warm from his pocket, with a heart-shaped bow and a long stem. He watched me intently as I turned it in my hand.

  “Where did you get it?”

  “Read,” he said.

  I turned the card toward the light. It read:

  Within its walls,

  For a hundred years,

  People have learned and prayed and died.

  Now, some believe, a tortured soul is trapped inside.

  On a winter’s night when the moon was full,

  A broken man decided that his life wasn’t much fun.

  So he drank a bottle of whiskey

  And ate the barrel of his gun.

  Why did he do it?

  What secret did he hide?

  What led him to end his life

  While his children cried and cried?

  I stared at it a moment. It was written in the careful print letters of a child’s hand. When I raised my eyes to Luke, he was staring at me with an odd and unsettling grin.

  “I’m a poet,” he said. “And you didn’t know it.”

  Just then, we heard a key in the door and we turned to see his mother walk through, brushing snowflakes from her coat. I couldn’t help but notice her shoes, a practical but decidedly unstylish pair of boots. They seemed not to belong to her, and I found myself hyperfocusing on them for reasons I couldn’t explain. But I guess when it came to snow boots, it was function over form, even for the most fashion-conscious. The snow outside was falling heavily now, and the sky was turning black. I shoved the note and the key in my pocket.