“Were you thinking about Nick?” She sat next to him on the floor, and he allowed her to put her arm around his shoulders. After a while, he laid his head against her chest, and she felt a wave of joy rise through her body. They remained together that way for some time.
“Good grief,” she said at last, looking toward the space between the desk and his old toy box. “We seem to have caught a mouse.”
The forgotten trap had been sprung and the killing bar lay neatly against the mouse’s neck. He remembered how Nick had wanted to stick his finger in there. The tiny body was stiff with rigor mortis. His mother got up at once and fetched a plastic bag from the linen closet and wrapped it around her hand and forearm like a long evening glove. Looking away from the body, she picked up the mousetrap and its victim with one hand and tied a knot in the bag.
“Be a lamb,” she said. “Take this to your father to dispose of properly.”
Jack grabbed the top edge of the bag and held it at arm’s length, taking care not to let the dead thing touch him as he walked downstairs. Slumped in an easy chair, his father watched the New Year’s Eve festivities on TV, numbed to the presence of his son. His head rested on a wing of the chair, and on his neck, the wounds had healed to pale red stripes, sure to leave faint scars in due course. Jack showed him the bag.
“Mouse,” he said. “Mommy wants you to get rid of it.”
Tim lifted himself from the chair and accepted the burden. “I will,” he said. “And go tell your mother that the show is about to begin.”
On the upstairs landing, Jack listened to the soft sounds coming from his room, his mother’s exclamations of surprise and wonder. She was seated where he had left her, between the desk and the now open toy box, and she had found his hidden secret. A stack of papers spilled from her lap and smaller piles surrounded her. She looked up when he came into the room, her eyes wide and questioning. She flipped through the drawings and held up a picture of Nick flying a kite.
“These are all of Nick?” she asked.
He bit his bottom lip.
Nick in a classroom bent to his lessons, Nick swinging on a rope over a lake, Nick banging on a toy drum, Nick and his parents sitting on a mountain, Nick dressed for church, Nick catching a baseball, Nick in the winter, spring, summer, and fall. Nick at seven, eight, nine, and ten. Growing older, changing his hair, the style of his clothes, the number of teeth in his smile. A thousand Nicks.
“When did you have time to draw all these?”
He did not know what to say. “Every day.”
“What do you mean every day? How long have you been making these pictures of Nick?”
“One drawing every day since he drowned. But I got tired of having to do it. So I drew monsters to chase him away, not me.”
Lines of confusion furrowed her brow. “No, honey, that can’t be right. That was only two days ago when you and Nick went in the water, and there must be more than a thousand pictures here.”
“Not then,” he said. “The first time he drowned. Three years ago.”
“But why—”
“Made him up,” he said. “Since he died. To keep him alive.”
“What do you mean made him up?” She pushed her way to the bottom of the stack and saw the seven-year-old dream boy that Jack had made, and at last she understood. A thousand drawings, a thousand boys, a thousand days. And now Nick was in a hospital bed, fighting to live.
“You can’t stop,” she said. His mother rose from the floor and grabbed him by the wrist and led him to the desk. Holly shoved him to sit in front of the paper and forced a pencil into his hand. Wrapping her trembling fingers around his, she held him to the page. “Draw,” she ordered. “Draw him again.”
He faced the blank page and laid down a line.