Devoted(34)
She didn’t pressure him about what was wrong, because nothing could be gained either by insistence or gentle probing. When he was in this mood, he turned further inward on himself, and he would come out of it only when whatever issue caused it—some fear or sadness or confusion—had resolved itself.
At times like this, she didn’t know if holding him made any difference in his emotional state. She had never seen evidence that it did. Holding him, however, made a difference for her, made her feel that she was doing something essential.
When you loved someone as much as she loved Woody, and when you were helpless to console him when he seemed to need consolation the most, you could at times feel miserably inadequate. She had known that feeling.
Now she counseled herself to remember that Woody always came out of these funks sooner than later. He didn’t lie stricken like this for days or even for longer than an hour or two. Whatever might cause these withdrawals, he was resilient enough to overcome it. And when he did return from emotional isolation to mere detachment, he would find her and, in that shy way of his, touch her and smile to let her know that whatever had devastated him had now relented.
As she held him and smoothed his thick black hair with one hand, she sang to him—softly, softly—one of those songs that he would sometimes play over and over for hours on his iPod while he read or used his computer. “When you’re weary, feelin’ small . . .”
She heard Verna Brickit’s car leaving the driveway and turning onto the state route. The housekeeper had a key; she would have locked the back door. She was reliable.
“. . . when tears are in your eyes, I will dry them all . . .”
30
Lee Shacket stands at the window at the end of the side hall, watching as the older woman in the Toyota follows the driveway to the two-lane blacktop, turns south toward Pinehaven, and quickly cruises out of sight.
Ravens appear again in the sky, as they had just before he shot to death the owner of the Shelby Super Snake. They wheel through the air less like ravens than like seagulls. For such usually solemn birds, they appear to be celebrating.
Previously, there were three ravens. This time, seven engage in this aerial ballet. Throughout history and across all cultures, the numbers three and seven have had supernatural meaning. The ravens are for him, to encourage him in his becoming.
He jams the pistol under his belt and takes from a pocket of his jeans the feather that had fallen to his hand as he’d pursued Justine. The soft barbs sprouting from the shaft to form the vane are glossy black, inky yet with a hint of midnight blue, as if the bird that shed it was an emissary of some ancient god of darkness and, in the name of its master, had stolen the color of the daytime sky to ensure eternal night.
After returning the feather to his pocket, he draws the pistol.
He steps to the door on the right and eases it open and enters a room where the only illumination issues through tall windows in the north wall. Because the overcast is thicker, because the false twilight is becoming the real thing, and perhaps because rain is impending, the quality of light suggests an underwater realm, as though he is not in a house but rather in a submerged vessel.
And yet he has no need to turn on a lamp. When he moves from the brighter hallway into this room, his eyes adjust as they never would have before. His vision has been improving. Now his eyes take what light is available and somehow multiply it, so that he sees at once that he is in Megan’s studio.
A large canvas appears near completion, and he is drawn to it. This is yet another of her works that, in spite of the photorealism with which it’s rendered, is incomprehensible to Lee Shacket. What is it supposed to mean? What feelings is it intended to evoke?
In the foreground stand three deer and a boy. The boy is Woody. He’s feeding slices of an apple to the deer. The pale moonlight is eerily diffuse, strangely reflected, in counterpoint to the realism of all else.
For reasons that he can’t explain, he is profoundly irritated by this image. He wants to go to the kitchen and find a sharp knife and slash the canvas to ribbons.
Not yet. In time, he will destroy every one of her paintings in this house. Once she has submitted to him, once she has been reduced to the essence of what she is and understands her place, Megan will destroy them herself, at his direction.
The only meaning, the only truth, he can see in this painting is that the deer and the mentally deficient boy are weak, nothing but prey that are destined to be taken by a predator.
31
After she sang to Woody and thought she felt him relax slightly in her arms, Megan said, “Meat loaf, potato-and-cheese casserole, one of your favorite dinners. And for dessert, Verna’s best muffins with ice cream. I’ll be in the kitchen, whenever you’re ready. Take your time, honey.”
She got off the bed and stood over him and smiled and bent down and kissed his cheek. The boy still stared at nothing, as though in a state of shock, but she was pretty sure that he was coming around.
His computer and desk lamp were off. A thick sheaf of papers, held together by a spring clip, lay to the right of the keyboard.
Megan wondered what he had printed, but she didn’t take a look at it. Every child needed privacy and trust, but that was especially true of Woody, who had an extreme aversion to his personal space being invaded. For all of his limitations, he was a good kid, and whatever he’d been doing, he would sooner or later share it with her.