The paper curled slightly along the edges, the drawing smeared where he had laid an oily fist to steady it, but when he looked down upon his work, he was well pleased. Rolling it into a scroll, he carried the page to his room and spread it out upon the bed so that he could compare what he had created with the scene outside his window. A conspiracy of ravens gathered on the storm fence that ran along the path to the sea. A stray gull, far north for this time of year, had spotted the bones and was laughing on the dune. High tide rolling in had swept clean any footprints on the beach, but the big hole in the sand remained.
Back and forth he went between his drawing and the landscape, comparing the differences in detail. Lost in the process, he did not hear his mother come in. From the doorway, she watched her son, first his reflection in the mirror, framed by the sea, and then the real boy at the window. Distracted by the optical illusion of two boys, she failed to notice both his drawing and the scene on the shore below. He was surprised to see her and wondered how long she had been there.
“What have you been up to, Jack? We miss you downstairs. Hardly seems Christmas with you locked away.”
“I was drawing,” he said. “With my new paper and pencils.”
“All day? You must really like them, I’m glad.”
“All day.”
She stepped into the room and struck a casual pose by leaning against the edge of his desk. Careful not to look at him directly, she stared instead at the toys on the bookcase. He tracked her movements warily, wondering why she had come. These days she seemed frightened to enter his room or wake him in the mornings, and she only came in when he wasn’t there, to tidy up or put away his clean clothes in the dresser.
“Can I ask you a question, Jack? I don’t want to scare you, but do you know anything about the strange things that have been happening around here?”
“You don’t scare me.”
“I’m glad about that.” She laughed. “But, seriously, have you seen anything unusual?”
Twisting his arms over his head, he tried to escape her question.
She took a few steps closer to him and bent down to see his face. “Or voices in the night. Do you ever hear voices out there, in the ocean, like someone calling for help?”
He looked at her as if she had gone crazy.
“What about the other day when your father left you and Nick alone in the house?”
“We were good. We didn’t mean to make a mess.”
His mother sat on the window seat, her face halved in the afternoon light. She had approached him cautiously, and he felt bad again for having hit her, but it was an accident. One minute she was across the room, and the next, she could have held him in her lap. “Have you ever seen that thing your father was chasing?”
“The monster.” He held up his fingers curled into giant claws.
She laughed again. “Mr. Weller thinks it might be a coyote or a dog run wild.”
“A dog with a bone.”
“There’s something out there,” she said. “I just don’t know what.”
Out there. Jack looked through the glass. The sun shone in a cloudless sky, and he could see the dry grass and bare beach rosebushes move in the breeze. His father had followed the thing across the rocks and then disappeared. You could be so easily lost, over the horizon, into the sea. One minute here, one minute gone. Nothing certain.
“Sometimes I see things,” he told his mother. “And then they go away. But I have never seen anything in here. Not even a mouse.”
“‘Not a creature was stirring,’” she said. “‘Not even a mouse.’”
He remembered how she used to read “The Night Before Christmas” to him each year. Sitting in her lap, he had learned to memorize it and then read it himself. His mother taught him to read, taught him how to write. She wrapped her hand around his, around the pencil, and together they made the lines, the circle O and the combed E and the wavy W. Spelling was hard to remember, and even now he was not the best of writers, but he could draw.
He smiled at her. “Safer in here.”
She did not answer him but went far away in her thoughts. Her silence unnerved him, and he drummed his fingers on the windowsill until the noise reached her. Waking from her reverie, she smiled at him and laid her hand over his beating fingers. “So, what have you been drawing? Show me your latest masterpiece.”
With a grand flourish, he gave her the binoculars and told her to look toward the rocks on the left. She soon found the hole on the beach and a strange white sticklike object raised in the sand next to it.
“What’s that?” she asked.
He unrolled his drawing and spread the paper along the width of the windowsill. Her hand flew up to cover her mouth. Her eyes darted from the bones on the paper to the rocks and sea.
“Like an arm,” she whispered, and then she was at the door, calling loudly for Tim to please come upstairs right away.