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.