“Are you okay?” she asked. “You seem so distant and…” She paused for a moment, like she was considering her words. “Angry.”
“I’m not angry,” Jonathan said. “I just have a lot on my mind.” He anticipated her follow-up question and answered it before she could ask. “You know, just with Gene and everything.”
“I don’t think that’s it,” she said.
“Well, then I don’t know what to tell you,” he said.
“You’re using Gene to hide something else. It’s like a ghost haunting this place. Or maybe it’s just haunting you. There are only three people in this family, Jonathan, but I swear the house feels crowded.”
She was right. The house was crowded and they were haunted. It was suffocating. Mary could take Jacob and leave, but he had to live with it. He hoped that if they could all just tough it out for a few more weeks, it could finally be over. That somehow returning to Coombs’ Gulch and confronting the past, burying it forever, would stop the decay because it was seeping poison into the rest of them. It was infecting Jacob.
It began with the night terrors. The doctors said it was normal for children, but there was nothing that could convince Jonathan that what he saw and heard when his son was in the throes of this nightmare was normal. He and Mary would be seated on the couch, watching a television program, and suddenly a scream would burst forth from his son’s bedroom. A scream in the dark and then more screaming and crying, and by the time they reached his room he was up wandering around his room, completely unconscious, but his eyes looking everywhere as if he were lost. Jacob never actually saw his parents standing in front of him. Instead, he looked through them, seeing whatever terrors existed in his mind. No amount of consoling and hugging and petting made the crying and trembling stop. Nothing about that seemed normal to Jonathan. What could a child possibly dream that would cause such terror? Jacob’s life was devoid of anything frightening. He knew only his small, sheltered life, his parents and his school.
Perhaps some vestigial memories from his time in the womb, Jonathan thought. Or maybe his memories were even older.
One night Jonathan yelled at the boy more than he should have, more than would otherwise be acceptable. Mary wasn’t home. She was out with one of her girlfriends. They went to a gym together at night sometimes, after the friend’s children had gone to bed, though he believed she was just trying to escape him for a time, to limit the one-on-one time they spent together between Jacob falling asleep and him retiring to bed after a couple of tumblers of scotch. Mary had always been in fair shape, although she never exercised much. But she found solace in this new friend and Jonathan pretended he was unaware of her true motives.
Jacob woke screaming and crying earlier than usual, but Jonathan was exhausted after the day and just wanted some quiet time to himself. Jonathan dragged himself up the stairs toward Jacob’s room, cursing that he couldn’t have a single moment of peace.
By the time he reached Jacob’s room, the boy had already sleepwalked into his closet and peed all over his clothes and shoes.
Jonathan snapped. He screamed and cursed at the small, terrified boy and threw the wet clothes out of his closet into the center of the room. Jonathan’s initial roar shocked Jacob from his sleep, and suddenly he was looking at his father – truly looking at him – his eyes wet in sheer terror, his small body trembling, newly awoken to a raging, giant figure in his room.
Jonathan saw it all happening. Somewhere in his mind, in another part of his consciousness that makes calm, compassionate decisions, he saw Jacob’s fear and terror and knew it was an accident, that it wasn’t the boy’s fault, that he had been sleepwalking, and Jonathan felt so desperately sorry for his son, that this awful moment should become one of those earliest memories of his father, never forgotten.
Jonathan knew all this. But still some other part of himself – a more violent and frightening part – moved forward with his verbal abuse until he had run himself hoarse and breathless. Jonathan turned around in the room, now strewn with urine-soaked clothes, and looked down at Jacob, who was still trembling in shock. He took Jacob, put him back to bed and shut off the light. Jonathan went downstairs and took a long, long pull from a bottle of scotch. He hoped with all his heart that his son would not remember any of it in the morning. He took another drink, hoping it would erase the memory from his own mind. It was another terrible moment of his life, the number of which kept racking up, but he felt it inextricably tied to the other mortal guilt on his soul.
It was all a darkness, raging, reaching fingers out to affect his boy, his wife, everything he saw or felt or touched or thought. He would do anything and everything to end it. Somewhere in his mind he suspected that returning to Coombs’ Gulch and sending the boy’s body to the bottom of a lost lake would not ease his soul. But any chance, no matter how slim, was worth it to avoid this blooming disaster in his small family. He would move forward, just like Conner and Michael. It was worth the risk.
“I’m sorry,” he said to Mary, but he was fresh out of ideas and there was a wall that would never let the truth out. “I’ll work on it. I’m trying to be a good person, I really am.”
She touched the side of his face. “You are a good person, Jonathan. I don’t know why you
