Free Stranglehold by Jack Ketchum Page B

.
    And how to tell him that he wasn't bad without—just by discussing it—humiliating him further? Without admitting that any kid who did this all the time at his age had a pretty good reason to feel screwed up and different?
    He was the only kid in his class who was seeing a psychologist.
    He was aware of that too.
    She was afraid to say anything to him at the moment, to call any more attention to his problems. Afraid to give them any more undue weight and substance.
    Instead as she handed him his pyjamas she asked him about the other thing.
    She smiled. "So what was that all about?"
    "Huh?"
    "Your cute little butt in the air. What was that stuff?" She thought he'd laugh but he didn't. He only shrugged. "Well, it's a whole lot easier on me when you're lying on your back, don't you think?"
    He nodded.
    She pulled the covers up over him and leaned over and kissed him on the forehead.
    "Night, honey," she said. "You sleep well."
    "Night, mom."
    His voice sounded so small to her. Like the voice of a child half his age.
    She turned off his light and went downstairs and hours later fell asleep on the couch wondering what to do for him or if there was anything she could do at all.

    She thought that night that she'd seen the last of what she came to think of as the butt-in-the-air, knee-chest position. She hadn't.
    It happened over and over. Irrationally and to no purpose. She'd walk into the bedroom with the diaper and there he'd be.
    Like it was some sort of strange compulsion.
    She tried to get him to explain what it was about. He would talk to her about plenty of other things but not about that.
    All she got was an eerie silence.
    And she was beginning to be afraid that her little boy was truly going crazy on her.
    That something inside him was surfacing, something she'd been blind to. Some basic mistake of her own or something she'd overlooked—which would mean she'd failed as a mother to a stunning degree—or maybe that some resonance of their problems with the marriage was rising up inside him to take a terrible toll.
    She told Bromberg and Bromberg tried to dig it out of him, the reasons for it, but Robert wouldn't speak to him either. Only shrugged like it was nothing.
    When it was eating her up inside with worry.
    It wasn't normal .
    She knew she wasn't responding well at all. She was afraid of this behavior! And being afraid led her straight to a kind of irrational anger. He was scaring her.
    A couple of nights she lost it, started yelling at him— what's wrong with you? you know I can't put this on you when you do that! where's your head , Robert? —and then hearing her own voice use the same words on him that her father had used on her so long ago, felt so guilty that she felt like crying.
    Sometimes she thought that she was going crazy too. This was straining her sense of control, her feeling of being able to handle her life.
    "Kids do lots of weird stuff," Arthur said. "It'll pass. You'll see. It's just some stage he's going through."
    He was trying to be reassuring but what he was actually being was infuriating.
    It was not some stage.
    Her son was in trouble. Trouble right across the board. And this compulsion of his. This meant something.

Party Talk
     
    November 10, 1994

    "Okay," he said, once they'd taken off their coats and paid the sitter and she had gone outside into the cold night air. "What the hell did you think you were doing back there? I mean, who do you think you are , Lydia?"
    It was the first he'd spoken to her since they'd left the party.
    Since she'd told him what she'd done.
    "Cindy's my friend," she said. "I think she has a right to know that that man is lying to her."
    She wanted a cold drink of water. There was a taste of wine growing more and more sour in her mouth. She headed for the kitchen. He followed her.
    "How do you know he's lying? What makes you so sure?"
    "He tells you he's definitely decided he's staying with his wife? And then tells Cindy that he's madly in love with her ?