Today, however, he merely cracked the text at hand and left it spread upon the table. He wandered through the old house as aimless as a ghost. In the living room, he peeked in the coat closet and stared at the hidden presents wrapped in bright Christmas paper. He turned on the lights on the Christmas tree and then turned them off again. In the kitchen, he opened the refrigerator and straightened out the bottles and leftovers on the shelves. Each time he passed a window, he checked the locks, and double-checked the front door and the side entrance. He wrote his name in the dust on the coffee table and erased it with his sleeve. At three o’clock, he went into the mudroom to stare through the picture windows at the road that wound through the fir trees. He counted off the minutes between the first flash of yellow in the distance to the moment when the school bus turned the corner and came into full view. At the next driveway, the Quigley twins skipped down the steps in their matching plaid skirts and green jackets. Alert to the possibility of any oncoming traffic, he watched them cross the road and followed with his gaze until they were safely through the front door. Their obsessive border collie nearly knocked them over when they stepped inside. “Hello,” he mouthed silently. “Good-bye.” The red lights of the school bus stopped blinking, and with a belch of smoke it rumbled away. Framed in the windows, the children’s heads bobbed like dolls.
Right after the twins got home, his father was due. Sometimes it was just a few minutes after, sometimes up to half an hour. There was no way to count on him. Better to go back to the kitchen table and pretend to be reading when he arrived. Pretend, because he had already read the book three times. First on Friday, when his father had handed it to him. They always overestimated how long it would take, and the books in the fifth-grade home curriculum were much too easy. For those first few books, when the hour finally arrived for his father to quiz him, Jack Peter often had forgotten some of the details, so now he spent the week going over the text again and again. His parents thought him a slow reader because he never seemed to get any further along in a book, but he was faster and smarter than they could ever guess.
His thoughts strayed from the page. Nick would be home by now, and he could picture his friend sitting down to an afternoon snack, Mrs. Weller flitting around in the background, asking about school, and good old Nick letting her know that everything was just fine, nothing new, and maybe he had drawn some monsters in his notebook.
At four o’clock, the front door opened suddenly and in came his father, tired and disheveled. A black slick of grease crossed his pants at midthigh, and his hands were covered with the same goo. He saluted his son and went to the kitchen sink to lather and scrub. “Sorry it got so late, Jip. I went over to check on the Hollisters’ place, up by the crescent, and something had gotten in through a hole in the crawl space. Dug a big, big hole and squeezed right in underneath and made itself at home. I could fit my whole self in it. Nothing worse than trying to keep out something that wants to come in.”
“Did you see who it was?”
“What?” He laughed and rubbed his hands furiously under the hot running water. “Not a who. A what. And, no, I didn’t ever find out if it was a cat or a raccoon or a whatever. Maybe a skunk by the smell of things, but I had a devil of a time fixing up the hole so it won’t get in again.”
Jack Peter sidled up to his father and leaned against the counter next to him. “Maybe it was a big mouse.”
“Right, like the one your mother said was hiding in your room. This old place is crawling with mice,” he said. “Just last week, I found a whole bunch of them had made a nursery school down in my workshop. Let’s go take a look. Get to the bottom of the secret of the hidden mouse.”
They went upstairs together, and though he had not heard the rattle from the desk since the morning, Jack Peter knew what to expect. His father removed his left shoe and held it in his hand. “They’re wicked quick,” he said. “You’ve got to be ready before you see ’em or you haven’t got a chance.”
“What are you going to do with that shoe?”
“If there’s a mouse in there, Jip, your mother said we’ve got to get rid of it. Don’t want it running loose in the house.”
“You’re not going to kill it.”
He put a hand on his son’s shoulder to steady himself. “Well … no, not if I can help it, I guess. We’ll just stun the critter and then I’ll take it outside and let it go, if you want. Now, slowly open the drawer while I get ready. One, two—”
“I don’t want to. You’ll kill it.”
“Never.” He pulled on the handle and yanked open the drawer with a start. There was no startling flash of brown, no tail zipping like a pulled string. No evidence that there had ever been a mouse at all, no seedy droppings, no chewed paper. Tim rooted around in the clutter and found nothing, and only as he was about to close it and admit defeat did he spy the scroll of paper. As he unrolled it, the drawing took shape, a picture of a boy alone on the shore, emerging from the sea, behind him the lines of waves breaking in the distance. Half unfurled, the picture amazed him, and had he bothered to open it all the way, Tim would have seen the legs of the other figure running off the page.
“When did you do this?”
But Jack Peter would not answer. His eyelids fluttered, and his eyes rolled back into his head, the whites showing as blank as clouds. He fainted onto the bed, and he remembered nothing more till the sound of his father’s voice gently calling his name brought him back fully into the world.
viii.
“Did you get rid of it?” Holly leaned across him and spat in the sink. Bits of foam stuck to the corners of her mouth. In the mirror, Tim was startled by his own reflection and his frown of disgust. He uncurled his lip and considered his appearance, the deepening lines across his forehead and the crow’s-feet radiating from his eyes. The outside man in the mirror looked back at the inside man, both thinking the same thoughts, just a second apart. He tried to remember his wife’s question.