Baby Boy

They’d dressed Jake in a high-collared tuxedo, and even wrapped his neck in a white scarf, nearly up to his chin, but you could still see the stitches on the left side of his neck where the animal that got him had been at his throat. Christine had asked for a closed casket funeral, but they’d somehow convinced her that the beautiful boy looked so peaceful, lying there like he was merely asleep. The animal had been at his neck but had left his face intact. Let’s enjoy it one last time.

Console, console, console. They all blathered at her incessantly about how they understood, how they would be there for her if there was anything she needed. But she heard the whispers too.

“Honestly! Who lets a five year old wander around alone in the woods?”

“It wasn’t the woods. It was a park.”

“He was found in the woods near the park. They think he was dragged there after he was… killed.”

“It gets dark early in October. He should have been home.”

“Shhhh. She’ll hear you.”

“He loved that park… The poor dear.”

She’d let him play in the park a little late, while she was preparing supper. She’d assumed he was with friends. All his friends had gone home though, leaving him there alone to ride the slide a few more times, to swing on the swings a little while longer, to climb, to run, to be alive.

By the time she’d gone out looking for him, it was after dark. The park was deserted. She’d felt sick with worry, but even then, she’d assumed he’d just gone over to a friend’s house. She tried all his friend’s houses though, and nobody knew where he was. Then she went back to the park, calling for him, and eventually screaming for him. Then she’d called the police.

Now she was at his funeral. Now they were going to bury her baby. She felt the screams rising again from deep inside her, but they were buried somehow. They had her on so many tranquilizers she could barely walk, and the screams were still rising from deep down inside her. The pain wasn’t gone. The pain hadn’t been killed. It had just been buried. She could still hear the screams, very deep down. The pain was a monster that would live forever.

Console, console, and more console. And then it was over. She was in a limousine again, driving to the cemetery, near the woods where he’d been found, near the park where he had loved to play. It seemed appropriate they whispered, that he be buried near the park he loved so much. But Christine couldn’t imagine he’d want to be anywhere near where the thing had got him. She kept this thought buried though, just like the screams.

The police never did find the thing that had gotten him. Some of them had even suggested he’d fallen and torn his throat open on a branch, or a jagged stone. Nobody had seen or heard anything. There were no footprints, fingerprints, defensive wounds, or DNA of any kind to suggest he’d been attacked by a human. There weren’t even any recent animal tracks, just the body of a boy with half his throat torn away. He’d bled to death, but they hadn’t found very much blood at the scene, which led them to believe that he was moved from where he’d been killed, possibly by an animal. The evidence just didn’t add up. The clothes weren’t muddied or scratched as they would have been if the boy had been dragged. It was almost as if something had torn his throat out, exactly where it had killed him, and then simply taken the blood away somewhere.

The police had vowed to get to the bottom of it. But Jake was still being lowered into the ground. What difference did it make who or what had killed him?

---

The screaming resumed later that afternoon, when the tranquilizers wore off. She refused to take any more of them. She didn’t like dodging the pain of her boy’s death. It felt wrong. It felt like betrayal. She would bear the pain of his death, just as she’d borne the pain of his birth. She would wait in agony, screaming as she allowed the pain to ravish through her soul, tearing pieces of it away as the minutes passed into hours. She re-lived every moment of his life, from the first time she’d held him, feeling him softly suckling at her breast, to the last time she’d kissed him goodnight, and everything in between. And she remembered every single time she’d ever scolded and screamed at him too, and the times she’d let him cry all alone because she was too busy to worry about every little issue he had. The what- ifs and if-onlys, stabbed at her like a sadistic mob, blaming her, accusing her, trying to murder her for her guilt, but somehow her soul refused to die. All she could do was lie there screaming, hating her own soul for not dying like it deserved to.

She woke on the floor of his bedroom, not even realizing she’d gone in there, or when she had fallen asleep. It was night now. The October wind moaned through the trees outside his window. His little nightlight glowed for no one. His fish swam aimlessly in the aquarium on the dresser beside his bed. A board game was set up but not played on the floor in the middle of the room—Chutes and Ladders. The blue token was on square four and the red one was on square one. One die was on a number one, and the other had rolled a three.

“Play with me, momma! It’s your turn!”

“I’m busy now, Jake. Why don’t you go play with your friends at the park instead?”

Christine picked up the dice and rolled a seven. She moved the red token to the seven square and then lay sobbing on the floor while she waited for Jake to take his turn. Then her sister Pam was there, trying to hug her, to console her again, trying to lead her from the room, but she refused.

“No! I will not leave this room! I will not! I will stay in here until the pain kills me! I need it to kill me!”

And then Pam was crying, and Christine didn’t know why. Pam had never had a son ripped from her soul. What could possibly be upsetting her?

“I won’t let this grief kill you, Chrissy. I loved Jakey too, and he wouldn’t want his momma dead.”

She got up, and left. Christine rolled the dice for Jake. Jake got a nine. She moved the blue token to thirteen, wondering what Jake would have been like as a teenager. And then she wept some more. She grabbed Mr. Brownbear off his little bed and hugged it until she passed out from the exhaustion of sobbing.

“Come back to me, Jakey! Oh God, please make this all just a dream!”

The only reply was the cold October wind moaning through the trees outside the window.

---

She didn’t take a jacket when she snuck out of the house at 1 am. Pam was asleep on the couch. The TV was blathering quietly to itself about a miracle mop that could wipe up a whole carton of spilled milk in one swipe. Christine walked past the happily smiling memory of her boy watching his favourite shows on that TV and went quietly out the front door, holding Mr. Brownbear’s hand. Pam shivered for a moment as the chilly night air billowed into the living room when the door opened, but she pulled the blanket closer to her chin and did not awaken. Christine was as silent as the night.

The walk to the park was cold and dark, but she had never been so unafraid. If any assailant lunged from the shadows to murder her, she would welcome it. Stab me, slice me, rip me up, she thought. Nothing you can do is worse than the pain I’m already in.

She got to the park and sat alone on a swing, holding Mr. Brownbear. The merry-go-round creaked, waving gently back and forth in the wind. The wind moaned through the trees. Leaves rustled, glowing yellow under the single street lamp that lit the playground from the street. Beyond was the woods where they’d found him. Beyond the woods was the cemetery where they’d buried him. Somewhere in the cemetery was his grave.

“Push me, Momma! Push me higher!”

“No more, baby. Momma’s too tired. Just kick your feet. You can do it.”

There’s no way a mop can clean an entire carton of milk in one swipe. That’s impossible. Almost as impossible as an entire body’s worth of blood simply vanishing…

She took Mr. Brownbear by the hand and walked with him into the woods. “Baby needs his bear,” she told herself. And she was completely unafraid.

---

Someone was standing on the path in the woods. She thought it was a branch at first, leaning way out from the bushes, but when she took a few more steps she saw it was a figure standing there. She just stopped and stared. An old tree moaned above her, its branches creaking and clicking in the wind. The figure, whoever it was, hadn’t seen her yet. It was facing into the woods, just staring. It was dressed in black, a mere silhouette in the near total darkness. She stood watching it, wondering if it would walk away into the night and let her pass. It did not. It just stared into the night, as though lost, confused. She waited, wondering if she should cut into the thicket, off the path, and try to go around.

An especially cold gust of wind blew through her, and she began to awaken from the trance she’d been in since she ‘d gotten up off her son’s bedroom floor and decided to come out here. Suddenly she wasn’t so sure she wanted to wander into the cemetery at 1:30 in the morning just to lay a teddybear on a grave. Her son would still be there in the morning, wouldn’t he?

And then the figure on the path turned and looked in her direction. She saw the pale white of his face, like an unlit moon in the darkness. She saw two darker spots on its face where its eyes should have been. She couldn’t see its eyes though. His eyes, if they were there at all, appeared to be hiding in two caves set in the chalky white cliff of his face. She saw that he was a teenage boy. She saw that he was eating something, something dark and furry, with hind legs and a tail. He was eating it, and staring at her with caves instead of eyes. Her legs felt like jello, and her torso felt twisted around with fear. She backed up a step. Whoever this boy was, he didn’t seem to even see her. He wasn’t looking at her. He was looking through her. And he was chewing. And then he lowered his hands and dropped the furry thing. It fell like a stone, thudding to the earth. In the dark, it looked like the boy had no mouth or jaw. The lower half of his face was as black as the clothing he wore. And then Christine realized that it was not that his jaw had been ripped away. It was merely covered in blood so dark in the night that it looked black. She backed up another step, but the figure did not step forward. He just stood, staring through her. Then she turned to flee but she stopped dead in her tracks before taking a single step. There was another figure behind her as well.

This second, smaller figure was much closer too. And he was walking, sort of limping toward her, on legs that didn’t seem to want to take the steps. When it tripped over a tree root, its arms didn’t fly out to break the fall. It just collapsed, smacking it’s face into the earth with a thud as dead as the furry thing the teenager had been eating. This second figure turned its face up from the earth and stared at her, and when it did, her mind finally released its grip on her last strand of sanity, like the bladder of a child who could hold the strain no longer and simply let it all go.

“Jakey?” she whispered. “Is that you, baby?”

The thing did not reply. It reached out little fingers toward her and started crawling across the cold damp earth, dragging a body that did not want to move except by massive effort of will. Christine fell to her knees and stretched out her hands toward him.

“Baby, is that you?”

His little tuxedo was ripped and dirty. He was missing one shoe. He still had the scarf on his neck, but it had come unraveled and dragged along behind him in the dirt. He made no sound at all. Not a moan. Not a whimper. Not even a gasp for breath. He just crawled across the dirt, coming toward her. She glanced back and saw the taller figure had vanished into the night. The path behind her was now clear. Then she looked back at the boy in the path in front of her. The dark caves that were his eyes were closer now and she could see that it really was Jakey. He was staring at her, crawling toward her. He did not blink. His jaw hung open in a surprised, pained expression and there were even clumps of dirt in his mouth. His hands were scraped and dirty, nearly black, as though he’d been digging in the earth. There were leaves in his hair.

She wanted to rush toward him. She wanted to grab him up and hold him. She wanted to kiss him, and cry and love him. But something felt wrong. It was her little Jake, but at the same time, it wasn’t. This was a crawling, dirty, staring, silent boy, a boy that looked like Jake, but Jake would have called out to her by now. Momma! Momma! Help me! I’m hurt! I missed you momma! I was so afraid! This thing made no sound at all. Not even breathing. The only noise in the night was the rustling of the leaves he crawled through, and the wind in the trees. Nevertheless, it looked like him, and it was moving. That was all the convincing her delirious mind needed. She held out the teddy to him from where she sat in the puddle of her dead sanity.

“Jakey! It’s momma, baby! I brought Mr. Brownbear!”

Jake didn’t even look at the bear. His eyes were unblinking in his gaze upon her. She sat, watching him come, and then he was there at her knees. She reached down and grabbed his hands. His hands were cold, as cold as the earth. And then she started crying again, realizing he really was dead. This cold crawling thing with leaves in his hair and unblinking eyes was Jake, but he was dead. He smelled of soil and sour meat, and she would have vomited if she’d had anything to eat that day. She would have gotten up to run, except that some horrified part of her brain had convinced her that this was somehow just a dream. It couldn’t be real. She’d watched them lower Jake into the ground.

And now the thing had crawled right up into her lap and collapsed, lying face up, still staring at her with unblinking eyes. Every motion had taken a massive effort of its will, and apparently it had no strength left. Her tears spilled off her cheeks and dripped onto his eyes. Still he did not blink. The tears merely rolled off his eyes and spilled down his cheeks as though they were his own. She stroked his cheek with her hand. It was cold as well. The flesh of his cheek she’d kissed so many times was as stiff as leather, as dead as the arm of their living room chair. A great wracking sob escaped her, a sob that was more of a long agonized scream than piteous weeping. She snatched him up and hugged him to her breast, crying out to the sky. “My baby! My baby!”

With a massive effort of his will, he slid his cold, dead hands up around the back of her neck and pulled himself up to her throat. Moments later her screaming ceased, and there was only the wind in the trees, and soft sucking sounds.