“You need to tell me. Where’s the one of the ocean coming into the house? I know you made that happen.”
Nothing could deter Jack Peter from creating the monster at hand.
“Where’s the dog? The one I heard two nights ago.” Nick tossed the papers back on the desk. “In the trash? Shredded to pieces?”
Jack Peter refused to answer and could not be further distracted from the drawing in front of him. He bore down, concentrating on the unfinished man, moving his gaze from line to line, imagining how to complete it. No expression, just an intensity to his eyes, a furrow bisecting his forehead. The pencil snapped in his hand. They could play this game all day, Nick decided, and Jack Peter would not budge an inch. He was stronger that way. Stubborn.
“Did you put the bodies in the closet?”
“Were you scared?” Jack Peter asked, picking up a fresh pencil. “Did you want to run away? Why don’t you go away, and I can stay here.”
No course remained except surrender. With a sigh that began deep in his core, Nick withdrew and plopped down on the bed. He stared at the reflection of the gray sea and gray sky in the dresser mirror, slowly realizing that the spots in the glass were not flaws in the silvering, but the movement of falling snow. The weathermen on TV had been calling for a nor’easter all week, and it was finally here. The thought of snowmen and sledding gave Nick a thrill, a chance to be outside, and he roused himself from the bed and went to the window to stare at the real thing.
“Snowing,” he said in a gleeful tone, but Jack Peter did not so much as turn his head.
*
For the rest of the morning, Tim puttered downstairs in the little workroom beneath the kitchen, sorting through a jumble of lobster pots that he had long planned on fixing and selling that coming summer to the tourists. Repair on the traps proved a mindless distraction, reworking tangled mesh, cutting slats on the table saw and tacking them to replace the broken pieces. He figured he would haul them all outside and by June they would be weathered gray. Tucked beneath the house in the small space behind the dune, the workshop was his sanctuary. No windows let in the light, so he toiled shut off from the world. In his workshop he often thought of those city folk who lived year-round in windowless cubicles, yearning for their two weeks, three if they were lucky, on the summer beaches. They would arrive, blinking moles, washed out from their artificial days, just to have a taste of sun and salt and wind on their faces. He, on the other hand, was outdoors every day of the year, and in the peak tourist season, often from dawn to past dusk. An outside man with an inside boy.
He pounded a nail into the wood, resolving again to fix his son. Once these strange days had passed, he would figure out some new tactics for getting Jip over his phobia. Reintroduce him to the fresh air, give him something to do with his hands. She was wrong about Jip, dead wrong. He could be reached, he could be mended. The son Tim had always wanted. The son that should be his.
When his work on the pots was finished, he climbed the stairs to the kitchen and saw, as he opened the door, how the light had changed, and at once he knew that snow was falling, and felt just like a kid again, waking on a school day to the spectacular white of a blizzard. He called upstairs to the boys with the news. “It’s snowing!”
“We know!” Nick shouted from the top of the stairs.
Tim thought at once that Nick would want to go outside, and later, perhaps after Holly came home and could stay with Jip, he could have a real winter’s day again and take Nick on a sled or build a snowman. Along with that delight came a pang of regret that Jip would not agree to join them. Nick hopped down the stairs and slid across the wooden floor in his stocking feet. Together they hurried to the picture window to watch the first real storm of the season. A thin palimpsest of white covered the ground, and the snow was now falling in waves, flakes hissing into the sea, painting the cold rocks, and still melting against the patches of sand.
“Maybe we’ll go out later,” Tim said. “Just the two of us, when Mrs. Keenan comes home.”
The boy beside him nodded with joy.
“Nothing better,” Tim said, “than a snowy day.”
*