“Okay, now you’re gonna do it on your own,” Evan said, letting go of Shaun’s hand.
The boy’s head bent closer to the book, and his fingers began to slip off the marker before he could trace a row of figure eights. Shaun grunted in frustration and tried to re-grip the marker, but it fell from his hand and rolled off the table.
“It’s okay, buddy, it’s okay,” Evan said, kneeling to retrieve the fallen writing utensil. He placed it back between his son’s fingers. “Try again.”
Shaun started the eight and made it only inches before the marker spun away, this time to the opposite side of the porch.
“No,” Shaun yelled, and banged both his hands against the table.
“Hey, hey, it’s all right, you did good. We just need more practice,” Evan said, and wrapped his arms around Shaun.
The boy strained against him, anger fueling his motions. A hot burning filled the back of Evan’s eyes. What terrible karmic atrocity had he committed that made the universe glance his family’s way and shake its head? In response, he heard the same answer he received each time he asked the question, spoken by the voice he hated inside his own mind.
Because this is your life, this is what it is.
“It’s okay, it’s okay, we can be done for tonight. You did really good.” Slowly Shaun calmed, and Evan released him, repeating the words in his mind, it’s okay, it’s okay. “Do you want to watch trains?”
Shaun whimpered one more time and then stilled, his breathing slowing, skin sweaty from his exertions. “Tains?”
“Okay, buddy, we’ll watch some trains.”
He centered Shaun in the couch and sought out the DVD from the duffel in his room. After a few moments of fussing with the unfamiliar player, Thomas the Train began to race across the screen. Evan adjusted the volume and returned to the couch, putting an arm around Shaun’s slight shoulders. The sun fell completely out of sight as they watched, replaced by an inky darkness that crept closer until the lake sat in gloom, the open windows no longer admitting birdsong.
Evan glanced to the left, his eyes straying from the episode playing out on the screen, and found himself staring at the basement door. Shaun giggled at one of the train’s antics, and Evan focused again on the TV. Minutes later, his eyes rested once more on the door. He watched it. He studied the knob like prey looking for a predator, waiting, not willing to glance away, afraid that if he did, it would ... turn.
Shaun’s sharp snore tore him out of his trance, and he jerked with the sound. Evan shifted, sliding his arm from beneath the boy’s back. He breathed even and deep, his eyes shut, mouth open.
“Tired guy,” Evan whispered. “Long day.”
With gentle movements, he laid Shaun on his side, nestling him into the couch. Evan unfurled a folded comforter that hung from the arm of an easy chair, and spread it over his sleeping son. He listened to Shaun’s soft inhalations for a long time in the faint glow of the only lamp burning in the room. Gradually his attention returned to the basement door.
In a few strides he crossed the room, and flipped on two of the kitchen lights, chasing the shadows from beneath the long table and behind the breakfast bar. He paused, listening for what? Sounds from below? Evan huffed and walked to the door, throwing it wide.
Darkness greeted him, deeper than earlier that afternoon, thicker. It swallowed the treads and gave nothing in return, rebuffing the cheerful light of the kitchen. His earlier desire for exploring the basement wilted, and he nearly slammed the door shut, the muscles in his arm already tensing to do so.
However, he reached out and found the switch once again, knowing the outcome but having to flip it on and off several times without effect before he was satisfied. The overwhelming urge to step back and close the door came again. Revolting against the warnings sounding within him, he took the first step. The wooden stair emitted a short shriek beneath his weight. He swallowed, looked over his shoulder at the rounded shape of Shaun on the couch, then continued down.
The light at his back died within the dark. In all his years, the only other experience he could compare it to was at a lock-in party at his high school. Several other boys in his grade had snuck out of the locker room in which they’d been changing, knowing full well Evan was sitting on the toilet. He’d been lost in thought about how to ask Kimberly Shell to the dance later that evening when the fluorescents winked out, the silence broken only by the retreating laughter of the other boys. He’d sat there, petrified on the toilet, frozen in the cold darkness of a place that held no malice in the light, but without it, became something else.
Memories of staggering out of the windowless locker room and into the hall full of giggling teenagers left him as he stepped down again, the shadows rising ever upward as though he were dropping deeper and deeper into a subterranean sea.
His left hand brushed against the smooth wall, the only sound above his hushed breathing. Five steps, six, seven. The eighth tread wasn’t where it should have been, and he almost fell headlong, the surface under his foot remaining level instead of dropping away—a landing.
Evan slid his hand forward and found that the wall turned, and he pivoted with it, his opposite arm now out before him, stretched into the black maw. The next step edge met his foot, and he went down. One, two, three. At the fourth stair his arm brushed something, and he nearly cried out before realizing it was a pillar near the foot of the stairway.