“Well, Mommy is. Mommy doesn’t want you to get hurt. I’m here to protect you. Okay?”
Nathan lowered his eyes. “Okay.”
“I’m taking him out.”
“Samuel, no!”
“He can do whatever he wants today.” Samuel looked at Nathan across the dinner table. “Nathan, what did you say you wanted to do for your sixth birthday?”
“Go someplace.”
“It’s unconscionable to keep him locked away like this. I’m not going to let it happen anymore. Nathan, show Mommy how you smile when you’re not at home.”
Nathan looked at Ellen and gave her a smile, keeping his lips together.
“Show her how you talk.”
“Hi, Mommy,” said Nathan, speaking so that his lips barely moved. “You look nice today.”
“Nobody will ever know,” Samuel insisted.
“He’s only six,” said Ellen. “He can’t completely control his smiles.”
“You can’t tell him what to do on his birthday. We’re just going to go down to the store and buy a huge bag of candy. I promise that nothing will happen to him.”
Ellen continued to protest, but Samuel didn’t listen. The way they raised their son was appalling. Nathan had to be able to leave the house once in a while. Ellen would see; they’d go to the store, come back without incident, and she’d realize that there was no reason to worry so much.
“If you give me a night to sleep on it, I’m sure I’ll be fine with the idea. I know you’re right. I just need a little more time.”
Samuel sighed. His concern was that in the morning Ellen would decide that this was the worst idea imaginable, and she’d beg to wait until Nathan’s seventh birthday before letting him interact with other people. Samuel wasn’t going to wait another year. He was going to do this even if he had to sneak Nathan out of the house under the cover of night.
However, one more day couldn’t hurt. “Okay,” he said.
“Do I still get candy?” Nathan asked.
“Yes indeed,” said Samuel. “First thing tomorrow.”
It is important to note that what happened next was not suicide. Ellen Pepper was not a depressed woman. She was actually a very cheerful, upbeat woman, who was simply insanely overprotective and concerned about her son being subjected to harm. She would never use the word “freak,” but others would, and the idea of other kids (or even adults) staring at Nathan, or pointing at him and laughing, or—God forbid—trying to hurt him because of his frightening appearance was more than she could bear.
But Samuel was right. They couldn’t hide him away forever.
Tomorrow she’d come with them and keep a watchful eye on anybody who approached. Maybe everything would be fine.
Ellen did not go to bed unhappy. She was merely distracted.
She turned on the gas stove with the intention of boiling some water for a cup of tea to help her sleep. The flame didn’t ignite, and she decided that she didn’t feel like having the tea. She remembered—distinctly but incorrectly—shutting off the gas. She’d turned it off most of the way, but the knob hadn’t quite clicked.
She even thought about it right before she fell asleep.
The gas seeped throughout the night.
When Nathan woke up, in his room on the other side of the house from his parents, he felt different. He really hadn’t felt any different yesterday when he woke up and was six years old, but at six years and one day, he almost felt like a completely new person.
Today was candy day!
He yawned, stretched, and then got out of bed and hurried over to wake up his parents.
THREE
“Mom? Dad?”
Nathan understood death as a vague concept. He knew, for example, that when he crushed a beetle its guts came out and it stopped moving. This had made him sad, and he’d made it a point not to crush any more beetles.
Dad had read him a book about a little boy with two dogs, great dogs, hunting dogs, and at the end of the book both of the dogs had died. Dad was crying while he read it—not sobbing, but several tears trickled down his cheek—and Nathan had found the book overwhelmingly depressing, even if he didn’t quite get it.
He knew immediately that his parents were dead.
Still there, but gone.
Nathan poked Mom on the arm, trying to get her to come back to life. “Mom…?”
He didn’t know what to do.
He cried for a while.
Then he got scared. He knew he shouldn’t be frightened of his own mom and dad, even though they were dead, but he couldn’t help it. He went outside and sat in his front yard and cried some more.
He didn’t want the candy anymore. In fact, Nathan Pepper would never again eat candy of any sort. Licorice sticks, lemon drops, chocolate bars—the idea of all of them would be forever repulsive to him.
Nathan sat outside for five hours. He only cried for about two of those hours, off and on, but fortunately he was weeping when the postman arrived with the day’s mail. Though Kirk Keller heard plenty of bawling kids on his route, this sounded different. He knocked on the door to the wooden fence, got no answer, briefly considered continuing with his route as if nothing happened, and then decided to go inside.
Kirk would become something of a hero at the Hammer’s Lost post office for the next couple of weeks. After all, none of the other carriers had ever discovered a pair of corpses while en route. He would retell the story countless times throughout his life, gradually exaggerating the level of decomposition until it became a tale of his discovery of two human-shaped piles of goo.
The police came to investigate. They asked Nathan many questions, but he kept his mouth tightly closed and never said a word.
“Perhaps we should adopt the boy,” said Dr. Thompson, lying in bed with his wife.
“Is it because you want to do experiments on him?” asked Mrs. Thompson.
Dr. Thompson was silent for a long moment.
“Perhaps,” he finally admitted.
“Then no,” Mrs. Thompson said.
The Bernard Steamspell Home For Unfortunate Orphans was run by Bernard Steamspell, a man who was very impressed by his own accomplishments, despite their scarcity. Over the past thirty years, he had engaged in thirty- two different business ventures, all of which had failed. He’d won the Our Lady of The Weeping Statue Orphanage in a bar bet over who could inhale the most black pepper. He’d renamed it after himself, as he had all of his other businesses, and immediately sought to figure out how he could make this non-profit establishment more profitable.
There were plenty of expenses that could be cut. The Our Lady of the Weeping Statue Orphanage had never exactly served gourmet meals, but under Steamspell’s leadership, its dining experience only rose above the level of “vile slop” on Thursdays, which he reluctantly allowed to become Taco Night. He sold the current twenty-eight
