Free The Boy Who Drew Monsters: A Novel by Keith Donohue Page B

Jip, your mother said we’ve got to get rid of it. Don’t want it running loose in the house.”
    “You’re not going to kill it.”
    He put a hand on his son’s shoulder to steady himself. “Well … no, not if I can help it, I guess. We’ll just stun the critter and then I’ll take it outside and let it go, if you want. Now, slowly open the drawer while I get ready. One, two—”
    “I don’t want to. You’ll kill it.”
    “Never.” He pulled on the handle and yanked open the drawer with a start. There was no startling flash of brown, no tail zipping like a pulled string. No evidence that there had ever been a mouse at all, no seedy droppings, no chewed paper. Tim rooted around in the clutter and found nothing, and only as he was about to close it and admit defeat did he spy the scroll of paper. As he unrolled it, the drawing took shape, a picture of a boy alone on the shore, emerging from the sea, behind him the lines of waves breaking in the distance. Half unfurled, the picture amazed him, and had he bothered to open it all the way, Tim would have seen the legs of the other figure running off the page.
    “When did you do this?”
    But Jack Peter would not answer. His eyelids fluttered, and his eyes rolled back into his head, the whites showing as blank as clouds. He fainted onto the bed, and he remembered nothing more till the sound of his father’s voice gently calling his name brought him back fully into the world.

 
    viii.
    “Did you get rid of it?” Holly leaned across him and spat in the sink. Bits of foam stuck to the corners of her mouth. In the mirror, Tim was startled by his own reflection and his frown of disgust. He uncurled his lip and considered his appearance, the deepening lines across his forehead and the crow’s-feet radiating from his eyes. The outside man in the mirror looked back at the inside man, both thinking the same thoughts, just a second apart. He tried to remember his wife’s question.
    She rinsed the toothpaste from her mouth and checked her teeth, running her tongue over the enamel. “Well, did you get rid of it?”
    The mouse, right. He had nearly forgotten the mouse given their son’s peculiar reaction to the hidden drawing. “I put down some traps.”
    Moving on in her preparations for bed, Holly took up the brush and ran it through her hair, counting the strokes, the numbers passing stealthily through her lips. “Not where Jack can hurt himself?”
    “Of course not. One in the back of the closet and one between his desk and his old toy box.”
    Like a marionette on a string, she tilted her head so that her long hair spilled to one side, and she brushed the flow of it. “Make sure you check on those traps. I can’t imagine anything worse than a dead mouse in the room for a couple of days.”
    He had stopped looking at himself and now squeezed behind her on his way out of the bathroom. “Not that there was any sign of it. No droppings, no shredded tissues on the floor.”
    “I didn’t see it,” Holly said, “but I sure heard it in the desk drawer. Jack’s not going to step on a trap in the middle of the night?” She turned and followed him into the bedroom. The small table lamp was the last one on in the house, and Tim imagined how it might appear to those out on the sea, a tiny pinprick of illumination against the blackness of the night, one small star upon the shore. If there were a man out there in the cold, he would be drawn, surely, to any sign of life.
    “No way he can step on the one in the closet, and I’m sure he doesn’t go near that toy box anymore. Why do we keep it, anyhow? It’s probably full of nothing but baby things and stuff he’s outgrown.”
    Holly folded back a triangle of the covers and bedsheet, but rather than climb in, she sat on the edge of the mattress as though trying to remember some unfinished task before going to sleep. “How was he at the psychiatrist’s?”
    “Same as ever. Lots of questions, few good