This story was inspired by the Kate Bush song, "Mother Stands For Comfort."
It’s always the mother’s fault.
That’s what they always say. “What kind of childhood must he have had, to turn out like that?” I see it now, when I go shopping. Their faces say it all. She must be worse than Joan Crawford. She must be a real sicko.
Years from now, some hotshot psychiatrist will use my son as a case study. A profiler will say, “He must have really hated his mother, like that Winthorpe kid.” I’ve become the new Medea, the apotheosis of maternal failure.
Looking at the evidence, I can hardly blame them. All those dead girls, decorated with glitter, body paint, and feathers. There’s the silver girl, her skin metallic, her lips dark blue, with crushed shells on her skin and on her eyelids. Her nipples pierced with crystal gems. She was, perhaps, his homage to sea nymphs. And the harlequin girl, dressed in motley, with black and white diamonds meticulously painted on her body. Faux pearl teardrops rest on her cheeks. And no one can forget the bead girl, with every pore and surface covered with glass beads and marbles. How long did he work on her dead body, as she rotted, as her fluids oozed? The blood, mucus and shit became apart of the glue. Then, the spice girl (ha, ha), every bit of her slim body pierced with cloves, so as she liquefied, the air around her was perfumed like a grandmother’s autumn kitchen. Ornamented dead girls, each one an avatar of me, his mother, the art teacher. My son, the artist, seeking approval from his mommy. The girls never suffered, I’ll give that to him. There was only one stabbing, one of the last ones who probably fought back as soon as she realized who my son was. Most of them died with overdoses of the cheap heroin and liquid coke my son pumped them up with. My darling boy was sick, but at least he wasn’t a sadist. They died ensnared in beautiful dreams. At least, I’d like to think so.
I suppose I knew that something was different about him for a long time. There was nothing unusual about his first years. It’s the same old sad story. Young, idealistic couple gets married, has child. A year later, the husband has some sort of vague crisis, leaves the family ‘to find himself’ in Japan. Divorce papers, three years spent living at home with the parents, news of the ex-husband’s remarriage… I sound bitter, don’t I? But really wasn’t. To tell the truth, I viewed those years as a challenge. Holding down a job, getting my teacher’s license, moving to a new apartment, and raising a child gave me, I don’t know, a kind of energy. I looked at each day with excitement, and a sense of purpose. ‘What else do you have to throw at me, God?’ That’s how I thought.
Lyle was my angel in those days. He was a perfect child. Brown hair, clear blue eyes, and a crooked grin that could melt your heart. As a baby, he didn’t cry unnecessarily. He was like an old man—stoic and patient, waiting for milk or a diaper change with a minimum of fuss. As a toddler, he passed right over the Terrible Two stage. My little crocodile was very aloof. He was almost Zen—that’s what one of my girlfriends called him. One time, he fell off his tricycle on the sidewalk in front of the apartment building. I was grading assignments that day, when I saw him come inside. I didn’t look up until I heard the faucet running. He had moved the stepstool over there, and was calmly running cool water over a bleeding gash. The blood of children is a surreal thing to see. It’s hyperreal, a bright, fairytale red against unblemished, poreless skin. It looked as if someone had pasted a piece of red velvet onto his forearm. Except, that it flowed. Needless to say, I was terrified. But he said, as calm as a bodhisattva, “Mommy, get the stingy stuff.” He meant the iodine. I did, and when I put it on the now clean wound, all he did was flinch. A tear squeezed itself out of the corner of his eye, like a pearl. That was all. When I asked him about where the woman was who said she’d watch him, he told me, in not so many words, to calm down. I was livid. He was calm. I was the one who had a migraine; my wounded crocodile gave me aspirin, and told me to lie down. I realized, that day, that I’d been blessed with an angel.
I remember the day when I realized that maybe he wasn't an angel after all.
At five years old, Lyle had been tested and classified as a gifted child. However, being a single mom with sporadic child support and a teacher's salary, I couldn't afford to send him to private school for gifted kids. I guess that's why I thought he never fit in with the other kids at school—that he was too advanced, and therefore, isolated. He went to the private school where I taught art for free, and I saw him every Wednesday at 2 PM for art class. Kindergartners got their pick of glue, glitter and construction paper. Sometimes popsicle sticks, sometimes clay. I supervised unintelligible drawings, lopsided castles and deformed ashtrays. Lyle would sit in the back of the classroom, silently constructing something or other. His work was always the best. I don't say that as a doting mother. I say that as a trained art teacher. His drawings were representational and showed control. You could see that cat was a cat. His ashtrays had solid geometric forms, and he had innate understanding of color theory. The subject matter was initially disturbing. Almost all of his drawings showed an obsession with viscera. Men and women, boys and girls, animals all with wormy guts exploding from them, in lovely colors. But this, I took to be normal. Most children love cartoon violence, particularly boys. I made sure never to single him out during 'share' time.
Other than that, Lyle was a model student. His aloofness, though, unsettled many people. One of his teachers remarked in her report card, "While Lyle Winthorpe is technically proficient, he lacks basic social skill and his detachment might point to psychological, possibly physiological factors." (I approached the teacher and told her that I did not appreciate the armchair analysis; her report was re-written). At home, he would dutifully do his homework—such wonderful block letters and beautiful cursive—then retire to his room, where he would play computer games until bedtime. He was ensconced in one of those when there was a knock on the door.
Bruce, my next-door neighbor, was at the door. He had a kind of frantic look on his face. "Hey, Lydia, I was wondering… You didn't happen to see Eva? Cause she's missing."
Eva was Bruce and his partner Wyatt's cat. Eva was a silver and white Norwegian Forest cat. She would sometimes come into our yard. Lyle was quite fond of her.
"Sorry, Bruce. I haven't. But I'll let you know if I do."
Bruce nodded. "She's been gone for a day. She's never been gone for that long. Wyatt's a wreck."
I touched him on the shoulder. Bruce walked away, headed to another house. I walked by Lyle's room. He was focused on a game of computer solitaire. I watched the cards move across the screen for a moment, mesmerized by his concentration. He won the game, and the cards flew across the screen in animated celebration.
"Honey," I said.
He turned around. His glasses almost glowed in the light cast by the computer. He waited expectantly, hands steepled in front of his chest.
"Honey, that was Br—Mr. Pandecki. He says that Eva is missing. You didn't see her recently, did you?"
He seemed to consider something. "No, Mommy. The last I saw her was a couple of days ago."
I nodded, and went back to making dinner for the two of us. After I put him to bed, I tackled the next day's lesson plan. I'd bought art supplies last weekend, and began amassing them, to take to school with me. I noticed that one of the bottles of shellac I'd purchased was missing. I swore I'd gotten 4 bottles, but there were only three left in the bag. I did a cursory sweep of the house before turning in.
The next morning, as Lyle and I were getting into the car, we saw Wyatt stapling something to the phone pole across the street from us. He was taping a sign to the transformer box down the street when I pulled up next to him. I rolled down the window.
"Wyatt," I said, "Bruce told me."
He turned to me. His hair was the same silver color as Eva's fur. Her plush face gazed at me from the Xeroxed copy on the flyer Wyatt held.
"Both Lyle and I will be on the lookout for her."
"I appreciate it, Lydia. I know that she loves you both." Wyatt looked resigned, and suddenly old.
I looked at Lyle from reflection in the rearview mirror. He was in shadow. But his eyes—they glittered. A stray beam of early morning sunlight, maybe. Lyle's eyes are his father's eyes. Grey, the color of mist. But I saw a flaw in the left one. A speck, a dot. Small. It was brown or red, a spot of rust. His face was expressionless—my android child.
The only thing of note that day was that I found the missing bottle of shellac. It was in the car trunk, rolling around. It must have fallen out of the bag when I took it inside. It had leaked a little—I could see a puddle forming around the lid. But most of the shellac was there.
A week passed. Bruce and Wyatt never did find Eva. One night, I saw them carrying lighted candles in their backyard. They laid a wreath of white flowers at the base of the tree in their yard.
"What are they doing?" Lyle had snuck up on me, quietly as a cat. I jumped a little, and put my hand over my heart, to quell its racing.
When I had calmed myself, I told him, "I think they're having a funeral for Eva."
He nodded stoically, and walked away. I was sitting at the kitchen table, organizing student work for grading, when Lyle came downstairs in his pajamas. He had that freshly washed smell, of mouthwash and wet hair. He solemnly handed me a folded piece of paper.
"Can you give this to Mr. Pandecki and Mr. Burlington?" He put the paper next to my piles of work.
"Sure, honey," I said. In the kitchen light, I no longer saw the rust-colored flaw in his left eye. Only grey was there, and the black hole of his pupil. He gave me a kiss on the cheek and went to bed.
I picked up the paper—it was a homemade card. 'For Eva,' it said, in his perfect block letters. I opened the card and saw that Lyle had drawn a portrait of Eva in crayon. He'd captured her green eyes, the wild tufts of her fur in crude colored wax crayon. Crayon-Eva stalked something in the grass, and a lopsided yellow sun shone on her. In the sun, he had written his initials, LW, in a rusty red-brown color. He'd also written 'I miss Eva,' in this same weird color. The 'e' in Eva was backwards. That melted my heart.
My eyes misted over. I was blessed with an angel. The wreath glimmered beneath Bruce and Wyatt's tree in the darkness. It inspired me to do a reckless act of kindness. I walked outside, passing through the backyard. The motion sensor light didn't come on—one more thing to look after. But I didn't care. I went into their backyard, quietly, making sure their gate didn't squeak, and tiptoed to the tree. I lay Lyle's card at the base of the tree, in the center of the wreath, and crept back to our backyard.
I felt warm inside. I practically tingled with goodwill. I almost wanted to spin around in my yard, like I was a little girl again. I headed for the sliding doors, but something caught my eye.
A corner of our pathetic garden—mostly tulips and daffodils that died way too soon—was disturbed, as if some animal had started digging there. There was a hastily piled mound of dirt on the corner near the house. A tulip stalk drooped. I approached the slight mound. I didn't see an opening, so it probably wasn't moles or rats. It was just odd. Probably nothing at all. Still, curiosity got the better of me. I put my foot on the mound, and gently pressed down.
And down my slippered foot went, in to muddy moistness. I almost screamed, but somehow managed not to. I lifted my foot up out of the hole I'd made. My slipper was dripping, covered in mud. And white, wriggling things that curled and swarmed. Maggots. I shook my slipper off, and watched the maggots surround it, a wriggling constellation. That was when the smell hit me: bleach, tinged with a deep, rotten meat smell. It made me gag.
I limped back into the house. In the kitchen light, I saw that the left cuff of my pajama bottoms where covered in brown mud and reddish clay. A couple of maggots clung stubbornly, along with a few stray hairs…white and silver grey hairs. Hairs the color of Eva's coat, and my Lyle's eyes. I pulled off my pajamas and went into the basement to dump my dirty pj bottoms into the washing machine. I tried not to think about what the dead thing underneath my garden was. But I couldn't help it. I saw a mangled cat corpse, eaten by flies and worms, feeding my awful garden. The smell and the taste didn't leave my mouth. Who would do such a sick thing? But, of course, I knew. A mother always knows. I poured in a bunch of detergent into the machine, too much. And I saw Lyle's pictures of destroyed animals and people, their guts exploding from their bellies in childish abandon. Those weren't the macabre imagination of a little boy in the age of violent video games; they were plans.
I slammed shut the machine, and noticed the bleach bottle on the shelf. I picked it up and shook it. It was almost empty. Had it been that way before Eva had gone missing? I wasn't sure.
I cursed silently. I won't think about it, I told myself. Maybe the dead creature wasn't Eva—I was just jumping to conclusions. I turned the light off. An afterimage of the white wreath burned in my eyes. It superimposed itself over the door that led into the junk room. Before I knew what I was doing, I opened the door and stepped inside.
The smell of musty concrete and dust added to the flavor of rotted meat in my mouth. I pulled the string that lit the single bulb for the room. In wan yellow light, I saw: a couple of my grandmother's old quilts in a metal shelving unit; records from when I was a child; a stack of paintings from my art school days, when I fancied myself the new Georgia O'Keefe; my ex's ancient Apple computer. Underneath a couple of rolled up rugs, there was my hope chest. I can't explain it, but I knew what I was looking for was in the hope chest. It almost called to me, if you can believe that.
I moved the rugs from the top of the chest, and opened it, my heart thudding wildly in my chest. I prepared myself for what I would see. Maybe more animals, or bloodied instruments.
I opened the lid, expecting to see darkness.
This is what I saw instead.
The cedar box was lined with the tulle from my wedding dress. On this gauzy cloud there rested two of Lyle's discarded toys—a stuffed bear and a lion. The bear's eyes were ripped out and replaced with fake rubies. The lion's mane had been dyed blue and threaded with silver. Both of these creatures flanked—guarded—the queen in the center. Eva, or what was left of her, rested in elegant repose. Her skeleton was denuded of meat and viscera. She'd been meticulously preserved and reconstructed, as if my boy were an expert in feline anatomy. Furthermore, every bone, from foot to rib, had been covered in silver glitter. Each joint had a jewel-pinned hinge, all of material pilfered from my art supplies. The skull was decorated with the seed pearls from my wedding dress. All of the glitter was covered in shellac, so that shone. A heart, made of silk, rested beneath the ribs of the cat. Oddly, the scent of lavender tickled my nose. It was a stunningly beautiful tribute to Eva. She was a bone sphinx, floating on a silver cloud.
I stared at Lyle's project in silence for a few minutes before closing the hope chest. I carefully placed the rugs on the lid, and left the junk room.
Before turning in, I stopped by Lyle's room. I saw him asleep in some soft blue light. I watched his little chest rise and fall. My sweet, damaged angel dreamed sweet, damaged dreams. Tears flowed down my eyes. I knew what would follow. He'd get other animals, and eventually, probably, move on to people. Dead creatures were his medium, and he would get more elaborate. His technique would be refined. I knew this. I could have gotten him some help. I should have.
And yet—what mother wants admit that their child is a monster? And if he was a monster, he was my monster. It was my job to nurture and love him as best as I could. I bent down and kissed his cheek that night. He stirred.
Sweet, dark dreams, my crocodile.