Afterlife - Douglas Clegg [28]
Then, she remembered a detail about the dream: the dead man in them, who she could not completely think of as Hut, had those carvings on him.
11
Julie flicked up the light in Matt’s room. He rolled over, pushing back the sheet. The bedroom window was open wide. The room smelled like dirty gym clothes. Poster over his bed of Eminem. The place was a dump, but she never pushed him on it. “I’ll have to handle him,” Hut had told her after an early battle of wills between Matt and Julie. “He’s always going to be like this, and it’s up to me to do this. It’s his mind, Julie. He has some kind of block that won’t allow him to handle conflict well. You shouldn’t be in the middle of this.” Hut had even told her just to let Matt do what he wanted sometimes. She was the stepmother, and she had never felt completely comfortable stepping in and making him do things—even as simple as picking up the clothes he dropped on his bedroom floor.
“Julie?” he asked, shielding his eyes from the overhead light at first.
Julie went to sit on the edge of his bed. “Tell me about the drawings you made. On your skin.”
He squinted at her. “I’m sleepy.”
“It can’t wait.”
He looked over at his clock-radio. “It’s four a.m.”
“You’re not going to school. You can sleep in.”
He turned back over, his arms covering the back of his head as if defending himself. “Just let me go to sleep.”
“I’ve been up half the night,” she said. “It’s important, Matt.”
“Why?” he turned around violently, shooting her a nasty look, his face a scowl. “Why is it so goddamn important?”
“Do not use that kind of language with me, young man,” she said, feeling infinitely old as she heard the words come out of her mouth.
“You think I go around scaring Liv, and you wake me up when it’s still dark out. God. You just go around sticking your nose in places where you shouldn’t, Julie. You’re not my mother. You want to see the drawings? Okay. Okay, Julie,” he said, sitting up. He drew the longsleeved T-shirt up over his head. His chest seemed scrawny and inward-turning as if he had been emotionally beaten into submission. She winced when she thought of his mother—Amanda—and how she’d hurt him badly. How she’d tried to do terrible things to him.
She wondered if she was like Amanda now. If she was going to do something terrible.
He showed her his arm, his chest. The carvings had faded, leaving only slight striations on his arm and shoulder.
“Seen enough?” he asked.
She tried to remember the patterns carved into the dead person’s back from the photograph the detective had shown her.
She didn’t know what to say. She felt like crying but worked to hold back her tears. “I guess I’m a wreck right now,” she said.
When he spoke again, after nearly a minute had passed, his voice was gentler than it had been. “Poor you. You think I’m like my mother and I’m going to end up going crazy and hurting Livy or something.”
“Matty,” she whispered, touching his arm. “I don’t think that.”
“I’m not stupid,” he said. “She’s where they send crazy people. And I’ll end up there, too, because I see things sometimes. I just don’t tell you about them. You’ll never understand.”
“Do you want to visit your mother?” Julie asked, grasping for something hopeful to say. “I can drive you down there.”
Then he turned over, facing the wall, drawing the sheet back up to cover himself. “Turn out the light,” he said, his voice a monotone. “Go to bed. I’m sorry Dad’s dead. I’m sorry you’re stuck with me. I wish you weren’t falling apart every five minutes. I wish everything was different. But it’s not. And no, I don’t want to see my mother. Ever.”
She left his bedroom, soon after, and sat on the stairs in the hall, wondering if the pain and the pressure she felt in her head would ever go away.
12
Some nights, she stared at the wall of her bedroom and began imagining things, thinking that she heard Hut in the hallway. Livy had put the idea in her head—her bad dream about a ghost of a man.
His footsteps, heavy, coming toward her.
The bedroom door, open. Darkness in the hall