Devoted(43)
43
When he finished dessert, Woody got up from his chair and came around to his mother’s side of the kitchen table and stood next to her, his head bowed, waiting expectantly. He could do nothing more to indicate that he wanted to return to his room. Attending to her like this was his way of saying both thank you and good night.
Remaining in her chair, Megan took his right hand, brought it to her lips, and kissed it. She pulled him close and kissed his cheek, his brow.
As always, he was unable to return her kisses, emotionally constrained by his condition, but he liked being kissed. She held fast to the hope that a day would come when Woody’s storehouse of unspent kisses and unspoken words would spring open, that she would hear him say he loved her, would feel his lips press to her cheek.
Holding his hand in both of hers, she said, “You’re the best boy, sweetie. You know that?”
He didn’t always indicate that he heard what she said to him. Some days his responses were rare or nonexistent. But now he shook his head.
“But you are,” she insisted. “You really are. You’re the best boy that you can be, and I appreciate how hard you try. I love you, Woodrow Eugene Bookman.”
His embarrassment was palpable. His eyes remained downcast, and he chewed on his lower lip.
“You brush your teeth and floss. Only two minutes with the Sonicare. No matter how badly you might want to brush for ten or twenty minutes—only two.”
Woody nodded.
“I’ll stop by later to tuck you in and make sure you’re all right.”
When she let go of his hand, he crossed the kitchen and went through the swinging door, not with the exuberance of a young boy, but with the gravity of a little old man. He was not just a small and vulnerable child imprisoned by his developmental disorder. He was also a prodigy with a high IQ, and the chains of his condition thwarted his great promise. For the sake of her own well-being, Megan dared not consider the intensity of Woody’s frustration.
She got up and went to the keypad beside the back door. To allow Woody the freedom of the house, she set the alarm system in the at-home mode, arming the doors and most windows and all the glass-break sensors, but not the motion detectors. The upstairs windows, those that were beyond easy reach from the ground or a porch roof, had not been wired.
44
Woody changed into his pajamas and went into his bathroom and brushed his teeth for precisely two minutes. He flossed especially well around those teeth that were secured by transplanted tissue donated by a dead man.
No, it hadn’t been as spooky as that. The guy hadn’t been dead when he made the donation. He made arrangements while he was living. Or maybe his family had authorized the taking of the tissue after the man had died. If the latter was the case, Woody hoped that the donor’s family wouldn’t show up here someday and want to have their pictures taken with him because their loved one’s gums were in his mouth. He didn’t know the name of the dead guy, so the family had probably not been given Woody’s name, but they could always go to court and try to find out. Courts were unpredictable because judges were people. There were a lot of things in life to worry about, but people were the biggest source of problems, especially when you had a developmental disorder like he did and you found a lot of people embarrassing and you knew they would find you embarrassing, too, if they knew anything about you. Not everyone was simply embarrassing. Some were also scary. The scary ones had a subtle smell. He couldn’t describe it, but he could detect it. He’d done some reading on the subject, and he learned that many dogs could smell extreme cases of schizophrenia and homicidal psychopathology, so maybe he had a bit of dog in him. When he was around too many people who wanted to interact with him, whether they were scary or just embarrassing, he wanted to scream and scream until they went away with their hands over their ears. But he couldn’t scream any more than he could tell them to leave him alone. So instead he got a killer headache, and he grew so nervous that he couldn’t think. Sometimes he was nauseated, his stomach and intestines and everything in his abdomen felt as if it came loose and sloshed around, and he became terrified that he was going to start farting like a machine gun. Nothing was more embarrassing than farting, not even having your dead gum donor’s family show up to take pictures with you.
After he finished in the bathroom, Woody turned out the light and went into his bedroom and stood staring at his computer. After some deliberation, he got on his hands and knees and crawled into the knee space of his desk and plugged everything in again. The bad men at the Tragedy website could not have tracked him. And he was never going back there again.
His report—“The Son’s Revenge: Faithfully Compiled Evidence of Monstrous Evil”—lay on his desk. He’d meant to give it to his mom, but then he’d had an episode and needed to go away to Castle Wyvern.
He would put it on the breakfast table first thing in the morning.
He thought now of the words that had appeared on his screen when he’d been deep in the Dark Web. You again. And then You are not Alexander Gordius. And finally We will find you.
That last one had been a bluff. They couldn’t have tracked his signal to source, not after all the precautions he’d taken.
Nevertheless, he felt pretty sure that he wouldn’t fall asleep right away. He lumped his pillows into a pile and sat up in bed with a novel by Patrick O’Brian, a seafaring adventure set in the eighteenth century. It was a rousing tale about courage and honor and steadfast loyalty, qualities that Woody admired and believed were important, but that he doubted he would ever possess to any significant degree, considering what a mess he was. One way you learned things, however, was by example, which was the reason he read books like this, in addition to the fact that he loved a rattling-good story. For the same reason—that you might become what you read—he avoided novels about vampires, werewolves, and zombies.