The Bargaining (27 page)

Jack is waiting for me on the edge of consciousness.

“Please,” I beg him, but I know it won't do any good. “Please, just a few hours. I can hardly breathe I'm so tired.”

But my hand is already on the mural as I say it, and his smile, too knowing for his young years, deepens grooves into his soft face. His eyes glow bright green under the shadows of the room.

“You're already here,” he says. “Just a few more steps and you'll see.”

“I don't want to see any more,” I tell him, but he's walking away, and I know I have to follow. The painting pulls me in, the dried dust of greens and midnight blues and the fire red of his hair blowing in a gust that reaches my face, watering my eyes.

“You'll see,” I hear him say, and I believe him, though I don't want to.

We're back in the house—in Miller's house, when he had one. This time, I don't see anyone. This time, I only see a closed door. And behind the door, I hear the inescapable sound of a man crying. It comes out in stunted gasps that sound like choking at first.

The little boy Miller wanders from his room, eyes shaded in freshly disturbed sleep. He approaches the closed door with caution, holding a shaking hand to the knob before dropping it to his side and turning toward the basement door instead, opening it with an almost imperceptible creak and slipping down the stairs on socked feet.

He finds the same corner as before and sits on the cold concrete, tucking his legs under his chin and pulling his thermal shirt over the
thin fabric of his pajama pants. The whole of him looks so small, it seems he could fit into one of the boxes he's now unpacking. And by the look on his face—the one that desperately seems to be searching for something—he might just choose to curl himself up and hide in one of those boxes for the rest of the night.

But he's searching for something else, setting aside the same Christmas decorations and old tissue that's long since lost its padding for precious ornaments. He once again finds the purple Huskies cap that must have been restored to the box at some point. He pulls it snugly over his head and bends the tops of his ears down. I can hardly see his face under the bill, but his chin stiffens in fixed determination. He pulls out a partially finished model of a 1955 Cadillac El Dorado, or so the box it comes in says. There's a smooth, flat stone perfect for skipping. There's an early model iPod, its thick white body bound by a pair of white earbud wires, its jack still plugged in, its screen probably long since black and chargeless.

And this time he pulls something new from the box: a sketchpad. Handling each page gingerly, as though it contains holy documents, Miller turns page after page to reveal detailed, shadowed drawings of castles. One has a moat that winds around the back and all the way into the deepest point in the woods surrounding the spires. Upon closer examination, the moat depicts reflections in its water, rippling trees and towering structures twinkling back up at the massive ­castle drawn above it.

And something different happens this time. Instead of receding to the background as he has in the past, Jack emerges from behind me now, standing at first next to the younger version of Miller, then crouching, leaning against the boy's ear that pokes out from his hat.

“You know, one day you'll be bigger than Pop,” he says to Miller.

Miller jumps, and he looks at Jack with the kind of anxiety no boy that age should know how to feel.

He's crying again,” Miller tells his brother.

“He should be doing a lot more than crying,” Jack says with an anger that surpasses Miller's anxiety. “We were all supposed to be his sons.”

Jack traces a finger along the cracks drawn across a picture of a cement wall, a looming obstruction made mostly of shadow and lead shading. But every inch of space across the page is branded with graffiti so lifelike I'd swear it was a photograph.

“I know,” Miller tells him.

“You'll never be Jack, and he knows it,” the boy from the mural says. “That's why he won't ever look at you the right way. Just stop expecting him to. It gets easier when you stop expecting him to.”

I take a step forward, knowing I can't be a part of the scene like they are, but now I feel like I need to be. Because I can't make sense of what I just heard the boy from the mural say.

The boy who is supposed to be Jack.

Young Miller nods and turns the page of the sketchbook, the older
boy looking at the pages protectively, his hand inches from jerking the sketch from the small hands of Miller.

“This one's my favorite,” Miller says, finding a page with a face.

It's actually just eyes. There's a face there—at least you're supposed to think there is—but it's only implied. I have to walk even closer to see, but up this close, I don't like the eyes staring back at me. Even upside down, they make me uncomfortable. And maybe it's because they evoke the eyes of too many stares I've seen over the past nine months.

The boy from the mural holds the corner of the page so he doesn't smear the pencil lead across his fingertips. The shadow shading looks like ash left over from a fire. The eyes rage against the darkness that practically swallows them.

“I never got to finish it,” the boy from the mural says, anger spilling from his voice at a rapid boil.

“I didn't know,” Miller says, his voice so childlike he could be three years old. “I didn't know what they would do to get him back.”

The boy from the mural snatches the page with the eyes from Miller, the edge of the paper slicing a cut deep enough to make Miller cry out and jerk his hand back.

He sucks blood from the cut and spits it on the floor, but the page in the sketchbook still bears the mark of what he's done.

“So you finish it then,” the boy from the mural says to Miller, snapping the sketchbook shut with a crack.

I gasp awake, the awkwardness of my sleep on the couch making every joint in my body creak as I stagger toward consciousness again.

My mind is swirling with paint and lead and blood-red streaks, and I fight against every instinct racing through me to slow down, to concentrate, to try to make sense of it all. But the pieces are chasing one another, rabbits through a dark forest.

We gave the woods what it wanted. Company.

My uncle, he's the one who always encouraged us to do the creative stuff, even though Jack never really got into it.

If you had a chance to right a wrong, something truly awful. Just paint over it and start fresh. You'd do it, wouldn't you?

The price for that decision was too high. The Doris I know would never have paid it.

We were all supposed to be his sons.

He'll need a jacket. There was a cold snap.

A gasp launches me from thought, my hand covering my mouth, but not before the sudden intake echoes throughout the downstairs, waking a new horror somewhere deep inside the recesses of my mind.

I rush to the jacket on the wall, the one April left despite its incongruence with the room. The one I'd been assuming
this whole time belonged to Jack after the first scene the boy in the mural showed to me.

“He'll need a jacket,” I say, the words of the mother on my lips almost as horrific as the realization they bring. “Which means Jack didn't have . . .”

I dig into one of the pockets and find nothing but the slippery synthetic lining. But in the other, I feel the round plastic button, the thread still dangling from the tiny holes poked through the middle, the same one I found that first day we arrived at the Carver House. Then I pull out the tiniest stub of a dark lead pencil.

The kind used for sketching.

Jack was the oldest. Then Danny. Then Miller.

“Oh my God,” is all I can mutter under the shallow breath that finds its way into my lungs.

I hear the softest thud above me, and I know right away that it came from the room at the end of the hall.

I look to the ceiling above me. “You're not Jack. You're Danny.”

April mumbles something in her sleep from the next room. I want to wake her, to tell her the horrible truth I just learned. But she's sleeping for the first time in a century, and besides, where would I even begin?

Another soft thud from upstairs.

I approach the stairs cautiously, trying to remember which steps creak the most so I can avoid them.

A third soft thud. I climb the stairs, determined to be done with this.

A cursory glance at the first two rooms reveals nothing but indeed a cleaner, more put-together upstairs. The pictures on Linda's screen told me that much. But nothing to indicate where the thumping might have come from. Except that upon closer examination, the neatly made beds are missing. Or rather, part of the beds—the mattress and the frilly linens dressing them.

The second two rooms—the one that used to be mine and the first of the twin rooms—reveal a similar picture. Their mattresses are also missing, the remainder of each room undisturbed but for Troy the unicorn lying on his side in the middle of the floor.

I don't even need to look in the second twin room to know what's missing. The last bedroom is almost in view, the only wall visible from my place in the hallway the one with the mural.

There's the painted boy—Danny—his hair angry purple in the harsh moonlight. I scan the rest of the mural for clues to what I'll find once I approach the doorway, as though that might stop my heart from thrashing behind my ribs. I follow
his thin arms down to his hands, palms open and exposed, adolescence frozen.

I take a few more steps toward the room, emboldened by the absence of the thudding for several minutes now.

But what I see once I approach the doorway drains me of every ounce of bravery.

The mattresses from each room form a tunnel from the open window straight to the black, open space of the closet.

I struggle to find my breath, but it's buried somewhere under my knocking heart.

And when the humming of that same indecipherable tune begins, even my rabid heart stops to listen, every system in my body slowing to a muddy pace while I search the darkness for the source of the sound.

But I already know where it's coming from. The mouth of the tunnel, where it starts at the window.

I shift my focus to the boy in the mural and am horrified to find him staring wide-eyed at the same window.

The humming grows louder until the sound of it vibrates the depths of the throat it comes from, grating before dwindling to a murky stop.

And then the laughing starts, that horrible, high laugh that sounds too old to be a child's giggle but too high to come from anything else.

I look to Danny for help. I look to him to tell me what to do next. But he's no longer looking at what I'm looking at. His eyes are squeezed so tightly shut the top of his face looks like it might fold over the bottom.

The wind picks up outside so suddenly it scatters the neat piles of papers across the room. A crack of lightning splits the sky violently, and the trees part long enough to let in a sheet of fresh rain, a gift the clouds have been hanging onto for days.

But even through the chaos of wind and rain, I know that whatever was making that sound from the mouth of the tunnel is still in there. I feel the spray of rain reach me all the way from the window to the doorway, but I can't move my hand to swipe away the wetness.

As suddenly as it burst in, the wind and rain draw back on the intake of a breath, leaving the room floating through a void of sound.

That's when I hear sliding, the sound of something heavy but determined, easing its way through the tunnel toward the closet. I can't fathom anything that could make a sound like that, something so heavy it labors, but trails with a fine scratching that sets my entire body shaking, my only movement completely out of my control.