Hush (21 page)

could run in, like the basketball players wore. If he had a pair of those he'd

run and run and never stop.
He'd woken up early that morning and slipped out of Chet's bed. He'd moved as

quietly as he could because he hadn't wanted to disturb him. No telling what

he'd do...or want.
Davy had gone to the bathroom and felt the soreness deep inside. Every day he

felt the soreness. He tried and tried to get the pain out, but couldn't. He

didn't flush cause of the noise, and headed back to his bed, scared the whole

time Chet would wake up. He liked being alone in his own bed, though it wasn't

safe either. He had plenty of reasons to know that, over-and-over-again reasons.

But it was still safer than being with Chet, so he tiptoed over to it. As his

feet pressed down on the cool linoleum he tried not to think about all the dark

cracks touching his skin, the stains on the floor, Chet saying, "Your mama made

them, you clean it up."
Your mama made them. What did she make that was so dark? Try as he might, he

could not remember. Only that she was gone, left him just like his daddy. Except

his daddy was up in heaven, and he didn't know where his mom was. He thought

about this a lot, like he thought about those stumps by the side of the road,

the ones that didn't have any bark, just sitting out there with nothing on. Just

like him. Chet wouldn't ever let him put on pajamas.
You don't need them. Come on over here. I'll keep you warm.
But it wasn't warm with Chet. It was cold, like ice melt, and hurt. Never one

time it didn't.
Davy had slipped into bed and pulled the covers up around his neck and felt his

breath warm on his hands. It was Friday. After today he wouldn't get to draw

with Mrs. Griswold till Monday. He liked to draw, especially when he was all

alone with her. He liked it better than anything in the whole world, how there

was nothing but paper and then his hand moved and he could make a picture. He

had all these pictures in his head, thousands and thousands of them, like the

pages in a big book, each one with a different story.
He had just picked up a stick to draw in the dust when Chet's truck rolled out

of the woods. The chain saw clattered in the back. Chet had come to get him, he

could tell. He wanted something from him, maybe more. Sometimes he did,

sometimes in the morning even.
Davy tightened all over, like a chain that goes to rust. He stared at his shoes.

He wished he had those soft ones that could run and run and never stop.
Chet pulled up with his arm hanging down over the door. He smacked it to get

Davy's attention, but the boy just kept looking down.
"Hey, you okay? Out awful early today."
Davy's eyes never strayed from his ugly shoes.
"You want a ride to school?"
No, Davy thought, no! But he couldn't say it, and if he didn't say it Chet might

open the door. He could hear him like he'd heard him before, Get in, Davy. Get

in NOW. So he concentrated as hard as he could and made his head move from side

to side.
"Hey, look at that, he's talking to me like a regular guy. Better than those

pictures, right, Davy boy?"
Davy moved the stick in the dust, first one line, then another and another, all

connected. After the letter N he drew a circle. It was a secret answer. Chet

would never know.
"All right, catch you later, you little alligator."
He smacked the door, softer this time, and drove off. Davy took his foot and

wiped away the letters. When he had it smooth as a chalkboard he began to draw.
31
Celia dried her hands and glanced in the mirror. She almost laughed when her

reflection reminded her of how little she had to fuss with: short hair; no

earrings, none today anyway; and a minimum of makeup, certainly nothing that

needed touching up. Even so, she stepped back and looked herself over, and

decided for the umpteenth time that she'd dressed appropriately: simple blue

blouse, relaxed slacks; nothing snug or clingy, nothing provocative, though she

knew a diseased mind could find provocation in a fingernail.
She had almost ten minutes before Mr. Boyce was due to arrive, and as she

unlocked the bathroom door she searched for a pat response she could offer the

man. These kinds of non-answers never came to her easily, and she'd found that

they sometimes led to a verbal Bake-Off in which both parties turned up the heat

and tried like hell to make whatever they concocted— usually lies— palatable.

The alternative was to be wholly truthful, but she no longer trusted Mr. Boyce

enough for that.
She hurried down the hallway to her office, poking her head into the reception

area long enough to determine that he hadn't shown up yet. As she settled behind

her desk she opened Davy's folder and studied the picture he'd drawn yesterday

of where he felt safest, the barbed wire and guns, the obvious attempt to

insulate himself from a world he perceived as teeming with danger. The boy's

other drawings didn't exactly inspire confidence in his well-being either.

Though she'd had no time to analyze them thoroughly, she had glimpsed disturbing

elements in each of them; and the "creepiness" she'd mentioned to Tony had

become even more pronounced when the boy drew his stepfather.
Just as she began to leaf through his file for one of those drawings, Mr. Boyce

himself strode into her office, startling her with his sudden appearance.
"Hi," she stammered. She looked at her watch. "You're a few minutes early."

Mostly, she was thinking of how she hadn't expected him simply to appear. There

was an order to these things: her intercom would buzz, and she'd come out to

greet him. Then they'd walk back to her office and get started. But here he was

already grabbing a chair roughly by the back and pushing it forward until he

could comfortably prop his arms on her desk. And he peered so intensely at her

that his eyes seemed to loom from only inches away.
"I hate to be late," Chet replied. He knew what really bothered her, the way

he'd walked in, sailed right past where that German bitch with all the hair

usually sat. You got to take command, let them know you can't be pushed around.

If there's any pushing to be done, then —
Celia interrupted his thoughts: "I always try to be early too, but punctuality

is turning into a lost art nowadays." She was talking just to talk, killing time

until he told her why he'd called for an appointment, though she figured he

wanted to know how the evaluation was going. When she first met him she would

have been encouraged by this, but after seeing Davy's artwork, and going through

that horrible business with the snake, Mr. Boyce's interest only made her

uneasy. This was the first time she'd seen him since he'd frightened her half to

death, and she could still feel a shadow of that fear as he leaned across her

desk and reached for Davy's drawing of where he felt safest. For a second she

almost stopped him, had felt an urgent need to hold the paper back from him, but

his fingers slipped it away before she could react, and then it was in his

hands, filling up those eyes as they moved over the drawing like a pair of dark

sponges, soaking up the elements so intently that she wouldn't have been wholly

surprised if the boy's pencil lines had disappeared entirely from the page by

the time he was done.
"What is this?" His first question proved as abrupt as his arrival. She heard

belligerence as well, and saw arrogance in his refusal to look at her when he

spoke. And then he did, and she wished he hadn't. Those eyes again. So dark and

nearly opaque they could have had a layer of skin growing over them, onion paper

for the eyes that left only a palimpsest of pupil to study. What had he seen,

what had registered there, and what had he blinked away?
She felt an urge to lie, to tell him that she'd asked Davy to draw a fort, but

she also wanted to gauge his reaction to the truth. So she told him.
Chet looked up, and an increasingly uncomfortable physical presence seeped

through the brief space that separated them.
"This is where he feels safest? Where is it?"
"Here. He drew the Center, or"— her hands danced above the desk for a

moment—"his idea of it anyway."
"This place?" As Mr. Boyce spoke those two words he moved his head back and

forth dismissively.
"Yes, it is a drawing of the Center." She would not let the unstated go

unchallenged.
"How do you figure that?" Chet's eyes sank to the page.
Celia told him to look at how Davy had drawn the porch that wrapped around the

Center, and the distinctively oval shape of the attic window, but Mr. Boyce

ignored all this when he spoke again.
"I take good care of him." The belligerence was gone, and Celia heard those

words as they might have come from an honest man, a man who goes to work each

day and makes the best of a difficult life, which was precisely what Chet had

wanted to convey. He'd learned long ago that simple expressions of fact worked

for him, linked his appearance and his words in a compelling manner. The same,

he'd come to understand, was true of simple lies.
"I'm sure you do."
But Chet knew she was lying too. They were both liars, sitting there like card

players tossing chips to the center of the table, raising stakes with empty

hands.
"What about the others?" He handed back the picture and reached for the folder,

but Celia deftly put it aside as she thanked him for Davy's drawing. She didn't

want him to see anything else just yet, especially the rosebush picture, which

Davy had turned in yesterday.
"I haven't had a chance to go over them. I expect I will this weekend, and then

I'll be happy to talk to you about them."
Chet's hand hung in the air between them, arrested by the withdrawal of the

folder; and he felt a powerful impulse to keep going anyway, to grab her blouse

and shake her till she understood that you don't do that to him. You don't deny

him his desires.
"Mr. Boyce, how can I help you? You said you wanted to see me."
He let his hand fall to the desk. It reached almost halfway to her. She looked

at it lying there— big veins, dark nails, scraped up knuckles and sun-stained

skin— the kind of hand that wrings a living from its finely scarred flesh. A

hand, she suddenly realized, that looked just like an animal as it began to

crawl back to its owner.
He sat up as he answered. "I wanted to know how Davy's doing. It's been a week

now. You learning anything?"
He slipped it in as an afterthought, you learning anything? Not with any

emphasis, and she caught that, the way he'd tried to squirrel it past her

nonchalantly.
"I think Davy's doing well, all things considered. He's drawing for me,

following directions, and at this point I couldn't reasonably ask for much

more." She had ignored his question, sidestepped it as neatly as he'd presented

it. But no more effectively, for he saw right through this.
"Great, but when do you think you'll know something, you know, about the boy's

problems?"
"I think I'll have the initial evaluation done by the first of the week. I know

it might seem time-consuming, Mr. Boyce, but I have to go over these drawings

carefully. There is one thing I wanted to ask you." She paused to weigh his

reaction but met only those umbral eyes. "Has the boy been abused?"
Celia had carefully calculated the possible effects of her question before

asking it. She wanted Mr. Boyce to know that she thought Davy had been abused.

If her suspicion proved correct, and Mr. Boyce was the perpetrator, she hoped

that signaling her concern so clearly would force him to back off, though her

experience told her that any attempt at abstinence by an abuser would be brief

at best. Better that than nothing; it would buy her time. Davy, too.
"Abused?" Chet fired back. "What do you mean?" he demanded.
"Physical abuse, possibly sexual abuse. As you might have noticed from the

picture you just saw, personal safety is a major concern of Davy's."
All he'd seen were guns and a prison. But he guessed she was seeing a lot more,

seeing things he couldn't see. And he guessed the boy was talking to her with

these goddamn pictures after all. But there was no guessing about the most

important thing: she hadn't straightened out her thinking, not one little bit.

She might as well have said, Mr. Boyce, you fucking the kid? He smiled to

himself and shrugged for her.
"I don't know what things were like for him before I came along. I know his mom

hated his dad, said he was awful to the boy, didn't miss him when he left. But I

figured he was just rough with him. Maybe he got to the boy. I don't know. I

can't"— Chet shook his head and tried to look disgusted—"I just can't feature

that kind of thing. Davy, no kid should have to put up with anything like that."
"Was that the end of the abuse, or could there still be abuse occurring?"
"No, that was it, whatever his dad did to him, as much as I can figure from what

his mom told me." Chet's eyes strayed to the folder by Celia's side. "So he's

talking to you with those pictures."
"Like I said, I haven't had a chance to go over them thoroughly yet."
"He was a real talker before his mom died. He was a good one for a story.

Sometimes we had to tell him that some of his tales were just like telling lies,

but then she died and he stopped talking altogether."
"How odd."
"I know. I keep thinking he might start talking any day."
"No, I mean how odd that he told tall tales."
"Couldn't break him of it."
"Because these pictures come straight from the heart."
"Is that right? How can you tell?"
"Because a child doesn't know how to draw a lie. And besides, most of them don't