“I used to think I could at least rely on you to talk to me.”
Tim grabbed Jack’s arm and shook him once, not hard, but startling in its suddenness. She watched her son’s eyes, saw how he vanished into his impenetrable depths. His left arm jerked out of his father’s grasp and then straight up as if pulled on a string, and then he reached around with his right hand to grab it by the elbow to keep the arm from flying away. His face reddened and his head swayed from side to side under the branches of his arms. Chirps escaped from his lips, birdsong with no melody. Holly stood by, paralyzed by indecision. No matter how many times she had seen him this way, she felt powerless. A bad mother. Tim, however, tried to reach through the barrier their son had constructed. “Jip, Jip, stay with me, boy. It’s Daddy, and everything’s okay. We don’t have to talk about the pictures.”
But the moment for rescue had passed. Nothing to be done but observe, to make sure he did no harm to himself or to anyone else. Three years ago, when the fits first began and they had no way to predict what might happen, he got loose from them on the way through the front door and bashed into the ceramic umbrella stand, sending it to the floor and breaking it into a dozen pieces. Jack had stepped on a shard in his bare feet and cut his heel deeply, the gash bright as a red smile pumping blood. Holly did not know which was worse, the accident itself or trying to get their hysterical child out of the house and to the emergency room. And it was just as bad on the way home, the stitches and bandages, the howling assault against the world passing just beyond the thin glass window. By hard experience, they knew now to leave him be until the episode played out. He would tire eventually.
Tim sat on the bottom step of the staircase, and Holly posted herself on a kitchen stool. They pretended not to notice him, for often he responded more quickly if he thought he was being ignored. She stole glances with her husband, trying to convey with the stoniness of her features her dissatisfaction with his direct and clumsy approach. The chirping stopped abruptly, and Jack unlocked the pretzel of his arms. Expression returned slowly to his eyes like tinder catching flame, and as suddenly as he had departed behind the veil, Jack returned. He blinked and then smiled at his mother. When he asked if he could run upstairs and work on his drawings, she let him go with a sigh.
The rest of their Christmas was quiet and uneventful. A turkey dinner with the trimmings. A video chat over the Web with her faraway sister. A long complicated board game for three before Jack was sent to bed for the night. He was asleep within ten minutes, as guiltless as a newborn, snug in his blankets. Tim turned in an hour later and was lightly snoring beside his lit reading lamp. Holly slipped in beside him as the clock struck eleven, but she could not let go of the day so easily.
When she could no longer bear the insomnia, she left Tim in the bed and wandered down the hall. The door to her son’s room was closed as she had left it, but she could not resist turning the knob carefully and opening the door, with a whisper from the hinges. His room was chilly, and through the window even the moon and stars looked cold. In the pale light, she saw the scattered papers and pencils on his desk, a sign that he had been busy working on some new project. She resisted the temptation to steal a look and resolved instead to ask about his drawings in the morning.
She floated downstairs, moving from room to room with no real purpose other than to defeat her restlessness. The Internet beckoned. She had a theory about the bones and the wreck of the Porthleven, but the thought of investigating more leads online just depressed her. She touched the glass tablet, which was smooth as ice.
Bones, she thought, who collects the bones? A ghoulish task. Who came to retrieve the drowned, how did they recover those shipwrecked corpses washed ashore? Near her head, the window rattled long and hard as though something was trying to force its way inside the house, and in the rooms above, someone had awoken and was moving the furniture.
*