Joyce Carol Oates - Feral

1.

Joyce Carol Oates is one of the most celebrated women of letters in the U.S. Among her dozens of novels and story collections are them, BlackWater, and most recently My Heart Laid Bare. Man Crazy, and We Were the Mulvaneys. Much of her fiction has explored the darker regions of the soul, and in the past decade she has contributed to many horror anthologies as well as having edited the anthology American Gothic Tales. Many of her horror stories are collected in Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque. She lives in Princetown, New Jersey, where she has taught for many yeats.

This new story explores that dark realm known as suburbia. What it finds there is harrowing. The eyes. His eyes. What was human is gone from them. What was ours is gone from them. Where?

2.

THE CHILD WAS SIX YEARS, three months old when what happened to him, happened. Derek was healthy, big-boned and inclined to fleshiness, with a soft-rubbery feel to his fair skin that had given him the look, when younger, of a large, animated doll. His hair was silky brown and his moist warm brown eyes blinked frequently. His smile was sweet, tentative. He'd been named Derek (for his mother's nowdeceased father) which didn't at all suit him, so his parents began calling him "Derrie" from the start-- "Derrie-darling," "Derrie-berry," "Derrie-sweet." He had the petted, slightly febrile look of an only child whose development, weekly, if not daily, is being lovingly recorded in a series of albums. Yet, surprisingly, he wasn't at all spoiled. His mother had had several miscarriages preceding his birth and by the age of thirty-nine when he was finally born, she joked of being physically exhausted, emptied out, "eviscerated." It was a startling, extreme figure of speech but she spoke with a wan smile, not in complaint so much as in simple admission; and her husband kissed and comforted her as they lay together in their bed by lamplight, reluctant to switch off the light because then they wouldn't be able to see their baby sleeping peacefully in his crib close by. "God, yes, I feel the same way," her husband said. "Our one big beautiful baby is more than enough, isn't he?"

And so, for more than six years, he was.

3.

If he would see me again. If his eyes would see me.

If he would recognize me: I am your child, born of your body, of the love of you and Daddy.

If he would tell me: Mommy, I love you!

They were devoted parents, not-young but certainly youthful, vigorous. They were Kate and Stephen Knight and they lived in the Village of Hudson Ridge, an hour's drive north from New York City on the Palisades Parkway. Hudson Ridge, like other suburban communities along the river, was an oasis of tranquil tree-lined residential streets, customdesigned houses set in luxuriously deep, spacious wooded lots. At the core of the village was a "downtown" of several blocks and a small train depot built to resemble a gazebo. The Hudson River was visible from the Ridge, reflecting a steely blue on even overcast days. But there were few overcast days in Hudson Ridge. This was an idyllic community, resolutely nonurban: its most prestigious roads, lanes, "circles" were unpaved. Black swans with red bills paddled languidly on its mirror-smooth lake amid a larger, looser flotilla of white geese and mallard ducks. Kate and Stephen had lived in New York City, where they'd worked for eight years, before Derek was born; determined that this pregnancy wouldn't end in heartbreak like the others, Kate had quit her job with an arts foundation, and she and Stephen had moved to Hudson Ridge -- "Not just to escape the stress of the city, but for the baby's sake. It seems so unfair to subject a child to New York." They laughed at themselves mouthing such pieties in the cadences of those older, status-conscious suburban couples they'd once mocked, and felt so superior to -- yet what they said, what they believed, was true. In the past decade, the city had become impossible. The city had become prohibitively expensive, and the city had become prohibitively dangerous. Their child would be spared apartment living in a virtual fortress, being shuttled by van to private schools, being deprived of the freedom to roam a back yard, a grassy park, neighborhood playgrounds. So ironic, so bitter! -- that it should happen to him here. In Hudson Ridge, where children are safe. In the members-only Hudson Ridge Community Center.

4.

Had there been any premonition, any forewarning? The Knights were certain there had been none.

Derek, "Derrie," was very well liked by his first-grade classmates, particularly the little girls. He was the most mild-mannered and cheerful of children. At an age when some boys begin to be rowdy, prone to shouting and rough-housing, Derek was inclined to shyness with strangers and most adults, even with certain of his classmates, and older children. As a student he wasn't outstanding, but "so eager, optimistic" as his teacher described him, "he's a joy to have in the classroom." Derek was never high-strung or moody like his more precocious classmates, nor restless and rebellious like the less gifted. He was never jealous. Despite his size, he wasn't pushy or aggressive. If at recess on the playground other, older boys were cruel to weaker children, Derek sometimes tried to intervene. At such times he was stammering, tremulous, clumsy, his skin rosily mottled and his eyelashes bright with tears. Yet he was usually effective-- if pushed, shoved, punched, jeered at, he wouldn't back down. His flushed face might shine with tears but he rarely cried and would insist afterward that he hadn't done anything special, really. Nor would he tattle on the troublemakers. Almost inaudibly he'd murmur, ducking his head, "I don't know who it was, I didn't see." His first-grade teacher told Kate that Derek possessed, rare among children his age, and among boys of any age, a "natural instinct" for justice and empathy. "His face shines so, sometimes -- he's like a Baby Buddha."

Kate reported this to Stephen and they laughed together, though somewhat uneasily. Baby Buddha? Their little Derrie, only six years old? Kate shivered, there was something about this she didn't like. But Stephen said, "It's remarkable praise. No teacher of mine would have said such a thing about me, ever. Our sweet little Derrie who had so much trouble learning to tie his Shoelaces -- an incarnation of the Buddha!" They joked about whose genetic lineage must have been responsible, his or hers.

Yet it worried Kate sometimes that Derek was in fact so placid, amenable, good-natured. Just as he'd begun to sleep through an entire night of six, seven, eight hours while in his first months, so he seemed, at times, dreamy, precociously indifferent to other children taking advantage of him. "It doesn't matter, Mommy, I don't care," Derek insisted, and clearly this was so, but was it normal? At games, Derek didn't care much about winning, and so he rarely won. If he ran and shouted, it seemed to be in mimicry of other boys. Watching him trot after them, eager as a puppy, Kate felt her heart swoon with love of her sweet, vulnerable child. My own heart, exposed. My baby-love. She perceived that Derek would require protection through his life and it was her innocent maternal vanity to believe that so good, so radiant, so special, so blessed a being would naturally draw love to him; and this love, like a mantle of the gods, shimmering-gold, would be his protection.

5.

Yet what happened to Derek happened so swiftly and mysteriously that no one, it seemed, could have protected him. Not even Kate who was less than thirty feet away.

"The accident" -- it would be called.

"The accident in the pool" -- as if amplication were needed.

How many times Kate would repeat in her numbed, disbelieving voice, "I'd been watching Derek, of course. Without staring at him every moment --of course. And then, when I looked -- he was floating face down in the water."

Kate had brought Derek to swim in the children's pool at the Hudson Ridge Community Center as she did frequently during the summer. The warm, sunny July morning had been like any other, she'd had no premonition that anything out of the ordinary would be happening, and the "accident" itself would never have happened if there hadn't been, purely by chance, another commotion in the pool at the same time: a nervous, tearful ten-year-old girl, the daughter of friends of the Knights, had jumped off the end of the diving board and gotten water up her nose and was crying and thrashing about and the lifeguard had hurried into the water to comfort her, though she wasn't in any danger of drowning; Kate, too, had hurried to the edge of the pool, to watch, her attention was focussed on this minor incident, and the attention of other mothers at poolside; whatever happened to Derek, at the opposite end of the po01, had passed unnoticed. Derek had been swimming, or rather paddling, in his not-verycoordinated way, in water to his waist, and (this might have happened: it was a theory Kate would not wish to explore, lacking proof) an older boy, or boys (who'd bullied Derek in the past, in the pool) might have pushed him under, not meaning to seriously injure him (of course, Kate had to believe this: how could she face the boys' mothers otherwise?) and he'd panicked and swallowed water, flailed about desperately and swallowed more water, and (in theory, it hurt too much to wish to believe this) the boy, or boys, had continued to hold his head under water until (how many hellish seconds might have passed? ten? fifteen? ) he'd lost consciousness. His lungs filled with chlorine-treated water, he began to sink, taking in more water, breathing in water, beginning to drown, beginning to die.

The boy, or boys, who'd done this to Derek, if they'd done it (Kate had no proof, no one would offer proof, Derek would never make any accusation), were at least ten feet away from him when Kate saw him floating face down in the glittering aqua water, his pale brown hair lifting like seaweed, shoulders and back several inches below the surface. "Derek! Derek!" -- she ran blindly to leap into the pool and pull at his limp body, desperately lifting his head so that he could breathe: but he wasn't breathing. His eyes were partly open but unfocussed, his little body was strangely heavy. She was hearing a woman's screams--hysterical, crazed. At once the lifeguard blew his whistle, came to haul the unconscious child up onto the tile and began immediately to apply mouth-to-mouth resuscitation; but Derek didn't begin to breathe, and didn't begin to breathe; Kate stood, dripping wet, staring down at the pale, unresisting body that was her son, her Derek, uncomprehending as if she'd been struck a violent blow on the head yet hadn't yet fallen, her eyes open, stricken with disbelief. This can't be happening. This is not happening. This is not real. Then she was being helped stumbling and sobbing into the rear of an ambulance. One of the paramedics, a red-haired girl who looked hardly older than sixteen, was comforting her, calling her Mrs. Knight. They were speeding to a hospital in the next suburb, and Derek died, in the ambulance he died, heart ceased to beat yet in the emergency room Derek was resuscitated, heart galvanized into beating again, and he began again to breathe, it would be said He was saved! Brought back to life.

Kate had had no time to assimilate either of these facts. The first, that Derek had died, she would see (she would be made to see, by Stephen) was absurd and illogical; he'd ceased breathing temporarily, and his heart had ceased beating temporarily, but he hadn't died. It was the second, that he'd been saved by medical technology, "brought back to life" she would focus upon; everyone would focus upon. Her husband, their families, relatives, friends; for this was the truer of the two facts, the more logical, reasonable.

6.

"Your son will assimilate the accident into his life, as healthy children do. He's made a complete physical recovery and he'll begin to forget the trauma if you don't give him cause to remember" -- so Kate and Stephen were advised by the emergency room physician who'd saved Derek's life, and whose special practice was, in fact, crisis medicine. Of course they saw the wisdom in what the man said.

Stephen believed they shouldn't speak of the accident to Derek at all unless he brought up the subject. Kate wondered if that might be too extreme -- "What if he dreams about it? Has nightmares? We can't pretend it didn't happen." Stephen said, "We won't pretend anything. We'll let Derek lead the way."

Since the accident, Kate noticed that Stephen called the boy "Derek," in a faltering voice, as if the very name hurt him to utter. Kate, by contrast, had to suppress emotion when she spoke of "Derrie," and when she spoke to him; she was always being surprised when she saw him, for she'd somehow imagined him much younger, frailer. It was an effort for her to realize that he wasn't four years old any longer, or three-- he was six, and husky for his age. She didn't dare hug him as desperately as she wished, a dozen times a day, for the doctor had counseled against this, and Derek himself gave no sign of welcoming it; since coming home from the hospital, he was quiet, subdued, withdrawn. "I'm okay, Mommy," he told her, not meeting her anxious gaze. And, "Mommy, I hated that water anyway."

When Stephen was home, Kate managed quite well with Derek, she believed. But when they were alone together, as they frequently were, she had to resist the almost physical craving to grasp him in her arms and burst into tears. My baby. My darling. I love you. I would die in your place. Oh forgive me! For she couldn't shake off the conviction that the boy knew very well how his mother was responsible, however indirectly, for what had happened in the pool.

What had almost happened in the pool.

It was a jarring surprise to Kate to learn, belatedly, that Derek hadn't liked the pool -- he'd "hated" it. Naively she'd believed he'd loved it, as the other children did; though, looking back, she recalled how shy he'd been at first of wading out into water that came to his knees, how slow to play in it, splashing like other, younger children, as if in imitation of "having fun." He'd tried to like the pool, the Community Center, for my sake. That's it. A wave of shame swept over Kate. She would never tell Stephen this. How she'd been blind to her own son's dislike for the water, for the rowdy companionship of other boys in the water; how selfish she'd been, basking in the privileged atmosphere of the Hudson Ridge Community Center which was easily the equivalent of an affluent suburban country club where she could swim herself if she wished, play tennis, visit with her women friends. Not seeing how her six-year-old son was vulnerable to hurt as an exposed heart.

She told Derek he didn't have to go back -- "Not ever, honey."

Stooping to kiss his forehead. (He didn't seem to want to be kissed on, or near, his mouth.)

Recalling with horror that crazed scream. A woman's scream-- hers. Echoing continuously in her ears, when she paused to listen. She wondered if Derek, though unconscious, lying on his back on wet tiles, had heard it. Yes of course. He heard. He knows. For that was what death must be: raw, shrieking, confused, violent. Not peaceful at all.

7.

DAYS PASSED. A week. Two weeks. Since what had almost happened hadn't happened.

Derek was pale, quiet, subdued -- not "himself" yet. The slightest noise from outdoors or in the house made him jump like a startled animal, his eyelids fluttering, his small body going rigid. His eyes were continually moving, shifting in their sockets. His breathing was quick and shallow, his skin appeared hot. He couldn't settle down to read, to play with one of his games, to watch a video -- if Kate entered a room, he soon slipped from it noiselessly. He didn't seem to be hiding in the house yet -- where was he? Kate was forever trailing about calling, "Derrie? Sweetie?" in a calm, cheery voice that betrayed none of the anxiety she felt. Fortunately, Stephen knew little of this. Stephen was away most of the day, didn't return home until early evening weekdays, when Derek made an effort, or so it seemed to Kate, to be more normal. Yet even at these times, he didn't like to be touched. As if being touched hurt his sensitive skin. As if being kissed was repugnant. Kate had an idea, a wild and unsubstantiated idea, that Derek feared his parents' mouths -- he stared at them, at their mouths, or so it seemed to her, with a look of apprehension. "Honey? What's wrong?" she asked, in her most matter-of-fact voice. Invariably, Derek would shrug and shake his head. He might mumble, "Nothing." Or, irritably, "Mommy, I'm okay."

Kate's heart ached, regarding her son. Whatever had happened to him. Wherever, in those few minutes his heart had stopped, he'd gone. That place he'd gone to, no one else could follow him. She heard again that terrified and terrifying scream-- her own. Sometimes, alone in the house, when Derek was in the back yard, Kate jammed a towel against her mouth and screamed, screamed. No! no! Don't let my son die. She believed that this initial response, raw, anguished, primitive, was the natural response; behaving "normally" -- as if nothing had happened, or almost happened was unnatural. Of course, she told Stephen nothing of this. He wasn't one to dwell upon the past in any negative way.

He'd never reproached Kate for not having seen Derek slipping, or being pushed, underwater. He'd never reproached Kate for almost allowing their son to drown in three feet of water.

We'll let Derek lead the way.

Kate understood that this was wisdom. A vigorous, healthy-minded male wisdom. Yet sometimes, as Derek's mother, she couldn't resist feeling such emotion, she was left shaken, bereft. For she'd lost her little boy, after all. Where Derek had been so warm, spontaneous, quivering with energy before the accident, pushing himself into her arms to be hugged and kissed, affectionate as a puppy, now he was stiff, watchful, unsmiling. Had he forgotten how to smile.: Was it too much effort to smile? The very posture of his little body communicated Don't! Don't touch. He'd lost weight, those extra ounces that had filled out his face, now his face was angular, his jaw more pronounced. And those restless, shifting eyes. "Won't you look at me, Derrie? Is something wrong?" Kate spoke with innocent maternal concern, smiling. If she was frightened she gave no sign. Gently, she grasped Derek's shoulders and squatted before him as she'd done hundreds of times in the past and she saw that he was staring at her now, as if without recognition; his eyes were so dilated, the pupils so starkly black, bleeding out into the iris, she shuddered, thinking These are an animal's eyes.

As if reading her thoughts, Derek shrugged out of her grasp. He was breathing quickly, shallowly. He muttered, his lips curling back from his teeth, "I'm okay, I said."

He ran out of the kitchen, and out of the house. One of his hiding places was somewhere beyond the garage, in a tangle of briars and wild shrubs that bled out, unfenced, into a wooded area owned by the township, where there was no path. Kate was left behind in her awkward squat, legs aching, eyes stinging with tears. But I'm your mother. I'm Mommy. I love you. You love me. You've always loved me. You have to love me!

8.

After the initial flurry of concerned calls from family, friends, neighbors, the Knights' telephone was silent. Nor did Kate, who'd always been sociable, have the energy to call women friends. For she would have had to rehearse her words to get them just right. "Yes, what a shock it was! But it's over now, Derek is fine. He'll be back swimming before long, you know how boys are, he'd only just swallowed some water, thank God we live where we do and the ambulance arrived within minutes and there was never any real danger." No, she hadn't the energy.

When Kate asked Derek which of his friends he'd like to play with so that she could make arrangements with their mothers, as she usually had, Derek shrugged and said he didn't want to play with anyone. Kate said, "Not even with Molly? Sam? Susan?" -- naming his closest little friends, but Derek impatiently shook his head, no. He turned to walk away from Kate without a backward glance and she would have called after him except she feared rejection.

Except she feared his eyes: so dilated, a glassy impersonal black.

He doesn't recognize me, really. Unless I speak to him, touch him. Force myself upon him as his keeper.

Unbelievable that, only a few weeks ago, that child had so often run laughing into her arms, saying, "I love you, Mommy! I love you, Mommy!" It was as if in fact he'd died, the child-Derrie had died, and this other being had taken his place, a stranger.

But this was nonsense of course. Wasn't it?

Kate dared not speak of such a notion to Stephen, who continued stubbornly to behave as if what had almost happened hadn't happened. That was Stephen's way: he wouldn't have succeeded so definitively, and at so relatively young an age, in his Wall Street brokerage house, if he'd been less decisive, ambivalent. When he returned home from New York in the early evening he wanted peace, he wanted domestic family happiness of the kind to which he, like Kate, had become unknowingly addicted; in his expensive wool-silk suit he'd drop to one knee, arms outstretched, and cry to Derek, "How's my boy? How's my big boy?" Stephen's face crinkled in fatherly ebullience and his voice was loud, like a TV turned up high. From an adjoining room, Kate flinched to see how Derek stiffened at his greeting, where once he'd rushed to throw himself into his Daddy's arms and be lifted into the air like a Ferris wheel. Now Derek looked not at Stephen exactly but in Stephen's direction, head turned away, eyes shifting in their sockets, with the wariness of a cornered wild animal. Yet Stephen persisted, "How's my Derrie-boy?" The quieter and more reluctant Derek was to be wooed, the more determined was Stephen to behave as if nothing was wrong, seeking out the boy to hug, forcibly if need be, and kiss, and fuss over, like any loving daddy returning home eager to see his little boy. Until one evening, Kate in the kitchen heard what sounded like a scuffle, a child's cry and Stephen's louder, sharper cry, and when she ran to investigate, Derek had fled outside and Stephen, white-faced, incredulous, still squatting, was staring at his right forefinger, which was oozing blood-- "He bit me. He bit me to the bone."

9.

"He isn't the same child. He isn't Derrie."

"Don't be absurd. You're becoming morbid-minded. He's still in a state of shock."

"He isn't. You've seen his eyes. He bit you."

"He reacted without thinking. It was a reflex."

"An animal reflex."

Stephen was silent. Of course, he'd seen those eyes. It was all they saw now, in the child's presence, or in his absence: those eyes.

Staring, implacable, unreadable, unhuman eyes. Grotesquely dilated, even in daylight. A horror in such eyes.

I don't know you. I don't love you. You are nothing to me.

10.

That Saturday they took Derek to the Hudson Ridge pediatrician who'd been treating him for years, since babyhood, and the man examined Derek and could find nothing wrong with him, and it did seem, in the examining room, that Derek was more cooperative than usual. Though he shrank from being touched, and resisted looking into the doctor's eyes, and responded only laconically to the man's friendly queries. But his eyes appeared less dilated and his pulse and blood pressure, the doctor said, were normal. The Knights didn't tell him about Stephan's bitten finger, about which Stephen in particular felt shame, nor did they tell him what a difficult time they'd had that morning getting Derek into the car.

Like bringing an anxious dog or cat to the vet, Kate thought.

Stephen's bitten finger, which had given him a good deal of stabbing, worrisome pain, had been treated by another doctor, a stranger, to whom he'd explained the circumstances of the biting with some embarrassment. After a week of antibiotics, Stephen's finger was healing and Stephen refused to discuss it with Kate but, as Derek's daddy, he'd learned not to forcibly embrace his son and smother him with kisses as in the old days.

In private, Derek's pediatrician asked his parents if Derek ever spoke of almost drowning, and they said no, never; and if he dreamt of it, or had nightmares, they weren't aware. Kate said, with a brave smile, "He's changed, as you can see. He seems older. More self-contained. Not a little boy anymore." Stephen said quickly, edging out Kate, as if fearing she might say too much, and too emotionally, "My impression is, he's forgotten. Children don't dwell upon the past. He seems to have outgrown lots of things this summer -- games we used to play together, habits of speaking, behaving. Of course, he's growing. He'll soon be seven. He isn't a baby any longer." Stephen spoke with the air of one confirming a principle: Derek's strange coolness toward his parents was to be interpreted as something positive, a sign of health, growth. Kate listened, and made no comment. She suspected that the pediatrician knew more, or suspected more, than he was willing to say; but he wasn't willing to say it; nor were Derek's parents willing to hear it; the visit would end with friendly handshakes, as always. Two days later a nurse called from the pediatrician's office to report cheerfully that Derek's lab tests were all negative, and Kate said brightly, "What good news. Thanks!"

Perhaps that was all it required, then, to be a happy, normal mother: to behave as if one were a happy, normal mother. As if there were no reason to behave otherwise.

11.

Stephen conceded: "When Derek returns to school, he'll be more himself, I'm sure. The summer has just been too long for him."

For the first time in years, the Knights hadn't traveled in August to either Colorado or Maine, to stay with relatives. They'd reasoned that the commotion of travel, the busy, bustling atmosphere of households including other children, would have been upsetting for Derek just then. Neither wished to think that Derek's presence, in the midst of other, normal children, would have been deeply distressing to everyone. Neither wished to think that Derek would have resisted their efforts to travel together, as he resisted their efforts to interest him in brief outings and excursions close to home. He preferred to be alone, in his room with the door shut (but not locked: Derek's door had no lock) or, more often, outside. Where he might wander back into the woods, increasingly out of the range of Kate's strained voice. "Derrie? Derrie? Derek?"

In time, Derek drifted home of his own accord, when he wished. Wherever Kate might search for him, he wasn't; where Kate didn't think to look, he'd suddenly appear. Often he came up behind her in the house, noiselessly, and she gave a cry of alarm, turning to see him. He almost smiled, at Mommy's alarm. Those eyes. Fetal eyes. He doesn't know me. It seemed to Kate that Derek's teeth were more pronounced, his lower jaw longer and more angular, like a dog's snout; he sniffed the air, conspicuously; his very eyeballs had grown tawny, as if with jaundice, and the dilation was often so severe as to comprise the entire iris. The surface of his eyes was slick and glassy, reflecting light. Once, Kate came upon the child in his darkened room on the second floor of the house, crouched by a window, in a kind of trance. Was he staring at the moon? At the night sky churning with shreds of cloud, vaporous tendrils of light? She could hear his quick, panting breath; she saw that his mouth was moving, his jaws spasming as if he were very cold, or very excited. She would have gone to him to touch him, to comfort him, except something warned her Don't! Don't touch and she backed away, in silence.

Stephen stayed later and later in the city. Often didn't return home until 9 P.M. when, in theory at least, Derek was in bed, asleep.

Rarely did the three of them eat meals together now. Derek preferred to eat by himself, hungrily, lowering his head to his plate, eating with his fingers. Hamburgers, near-raw at their centers, oozing blood. He drank milk greedily, from the container, hunched inside the opened refrigerator door. Kate thought It's good, he has his appetite back. It must be good. How difficult for her, offering this strange child food at arm's length, to recall how once she'd fed him lovingly by hand, spooning baby food into his bird-like, yearning little mouth; how ecstatic she'd felt, nursing him. Her milk-swollen breasts, her tender nipples, and the infant blindly locating the nipple, sucking with unfocussed eyes -- how happy she'd been. How addicted she'd become, without knowing it. Love, baby-love. What hunger. Now, remembering, she felt a stab of revulsion. Her breasts that were no longer warmly taut and swollen with milk, ached; the nipples burned as if Derek had bitten and chewed them. Almost, Kate could remember blood trickling from her cracked nipples, tinged with milk....

I can't. Can't let myself. Must stay sane. I am the child's mother.

Like Stephen, Kate had been hoping that when Derek returned to school in September he'd change for the better, but that wasn't the case. Where Derek had loved school, now he seemed to hate it. Where he'd run about excitedly in the morning, eager for Kate to drive him, now he hung back in his room, or disappeared (where? -- into the basement, behind the furnace) so that Kate had to hunt him down, calling his name, pleading with him. Where once he'd come home from school chattering with enthusiasm about his teacher, his classmates, his studies, now he was sullen, and refused to talk at all. Suddenly, in second grade, he seemed to have no friends.

Kate was called in to speak with Derek's teacher and with an assistant principal to discuss Derek's poor grades, his poor deportment in class, his boredom, his listlessness, his defiance, his "antisocial" behavior. All this was new, stunningly new to Kate who'd taken for granted, since Montessori school where her Derrie had been one of the sweetest, most well-liked children, that she was a mother blessed by good fortune; a woman late to motherhood, conspicuously older than virtually all of the other mothers, but blessed. Even envied. Now, all that was changed. Did I want to think it might be my imagination. Mine, and Stephen's. Our haunted-eyed fetal son. In early October there was a "threatening" incident at school, Derek baring his teeth as if to bite another child, and in mid-October there was a "biting" incident, Derek actually biting another boy, sinking his small but surprisingly sharp teeth into the other's hand and drawing blood. For this, Derek was suspended from school for two weeks. (At the school, Kate professed shock, utter shock; her son had never done anything like that before; the other boy had been bullying him, he'd said; the other boy had in fact threatened him; that must be the explanation. Derek sullenly refused to discuss the incident. He didn't at all mind being suspended from school. When Kate and Stephen asked him how he could do such a "terrible, animal" thing, Derek merely shrugged and muttered what sounded like "Hate 'em.") It was advised that the Knights arrange for Derek to see a child therapist immediately, as well as hire a tutor for him; and of course they agreed, of course they would do all they could. They were American parents of a moneyed, educated class, they would do everything humanly possible to help their child, to return him to the normalcy of the species. He's our only son. We love him so. We don't understand. We are innocent. It's just a phase. A phase of growth. He isn't a baby any longer. What can we do. He drowned, what was human in him drowned. What is human is gone. What was ours is gone. Where?

Yet: years later when Derek was lost from them, long disappeared from their lives, when they were in fact no longer married, polite strangers to each other, and this politeness tinged with the melancholy of an old, unspeakable grief -- Kate would recall with a physical stab of pain how, only a few days after Derek had returned sullenly to school, she'd thrown herself into a flurry of enthusiasm trying to arrange a party for his seventh birthday. That dark, windy November afternoon, between sips of red wine, bravely telephoning the mothers of a dozen of Derek's second-grade classmates to invite them to the party; as in a nightmare of rejection and humiliation, no one wished to come; even those mothers Kate considered her friends had no interest in accepting the invitation. Their responses ranged from sympathetic and embarrassed, '"I'm truly sorry, Kate, but Molly is terribly busy now, I'm reluctant to schedule one more thing for her on that Saturday, but thank you," to curt, nearly rude, "Thank you, but I don't think a birthday party for your son is a great idea right now, at least not for Andrew to attend." Yet, grim, smiling, the tart red wine coursing through her tight veins like liquid flame, clamps of panicked pain at her temples, Kate continued to dial numbers. It was hard for her to believe. It's real, then. But how can it be real, he's only a little boy.

At that moment tramping through the woods behind the house in a chill windy drizzle he preferred to the warmth of the house. And to her.

12.

The first tutor hadn't worked out, nor the second. Derek had spat at the first, a nineteen-year-old math major from SUNY-Purchase; the second, a friendly middle-aged woman who taught at the community college, he'd bitten on the back of the hand -- not hard enough to break the skin, but almost. Your son is sick. Disturbed. Needs help. You must know.

Nor had the therapist worked out. Derek had gone berserk when they'd tried to urge him into the car for a second session, he'd guessed where they were taking him though they'd told him with vague smiles that it was nowhere he'd be hurt, only helped, still he'd known instinctively, could sniff the panic lifting from their skins, his darting dilated eyes quick to detect fear in their eyes so he'd pummeled, kicked, raked his sharp broken fingernails across Kate's forearm shouting he hated them, hated them both, as Stephen tried to calm him, "Derek! No! God damn you, Derek! --" but the child wrenched free of his father's awkward hands to escape running in a crouch, like a terrified wild animal, through the back lawn and into the woods where Kate followed him, for Stephen turned away in disgust, Stephen had had enough for that day, it was the child's mother tramping through the unfamiliar woods cupping her hands to her mouth calling, "Derrie? Derrie?" trying not to betray the desperation she felt, telling herself this was a game, this might be interpreted as a game, she had to win back the child's trust, that was it.

But wasn't his mother watching him, a six-year-old. In a swimming pool.

How could it have happened. In a few feet of water. And the child's mother only a few feet away.

Her attention distracted? Imagine!

How can she live with herself, a woman like that. Letting her own child drown.

These cruel gloating voices murmured about her as she stumbled through the wet underbrush, sobbing, her heart beating painfully, in reproach. She was panicked she might become lost in this no-man's-land: the township kept a ten-foot swath for telephone and electrical poles but otherwise the area was overgrown, a virtual jungle. Somewhere beyond a graveled access road there was the Hudson Ridge reservoir, Kate believed; but in which direction? For forty minutes she searched for the fleeing child calling, "Derrie? Honey--" and then, suddenly, there he was: only about fifteen feet away, watching her. His head was oddly lowered and his eyes fixed upon her, his mouth stretched in a strange twisted smile. Or was it simply a grimace of his lips, the muscles in a spasm. Kate cried, "There you are, honey! Please come home with me, we're so sorry. Your Daddy and --" Kate heard her bright ebullient voice, she forced herself to smile for perhaps this was a game after all, hide-and-seek in the woods, and nothing unusual had happened back at the house. She and Stephen were guilty of poor judgment perhaps, they were well-intentioned but blundering` the thing was to win back the child's trust. Smiling Kate reached out happily for Derek's hand but he stood unmoving staring at her with those dark-dilated eyes and the warning passed through her mind as if in the impersonal voice of another Don't.t Don't touch! He will attack and so she knew not to force his hand, but simply to guide him back home, he was surprisingly tractable, though sullen, unresponsive. She was exhausted by this time though as they made their way back to the house Kate chattered nervously, an American-mom voice she'd acquired from TV, unnatural to her, yet a revelation, offered to Derek so that he might believe, if he wished to believe, that, from Mommy's side, nothing had changed -- "Sweetie, you know I love you. You know." It was a secret what he knew, of course. The inanity and futility of her words swept over her. Yet she refused to surrender to silence, for she was the child's mother, and she did love him, or what remained of him, or what she could recall of him, and in the kitchen that surprised, so cheerily lit, clean shining surfaces as in a TV advertisement, she gave the boy his supper, setting a plate before him at the formica-topped table, standing at a little distance to watch in appalled fascination. As he ate. She realized that he'd come home with her, he'd allowed her to find him, because he was hungry; because, in the wild, he hadn't yet found the food he required.

13.

That night, or another. Lying awake. Separate from each other. Not touching.

Their bodies now shrank from touch. The accidental brush of the other's heated skin -- almost, this was repugnant. Indecent.

For of their touch years before, their kisses, their embraces -- what had come into the world? What creature born of their heedless yearning? They could not bear to think.

It was a night in mid-winter, no it was a night in early March -- the house quaking with wind and a smell of rain and winter-rotted leaves. It was not a night Kate could identify for she'd endured similar nights so many times, nights of fitful sleep, heart-pounding sleep and hours of wakefulness protruding like bleached, misshapen boulders out of eddying dark water, and now Stephen was nudging her asking if she heard? -- the stealthy sound of footsteps in the hall outside their room, Derek was prowling by night, slipping away as he'd been forbidden yet to barricade him in his room, lock the door with a padlock, nail the windows shut, would be to admit he had to be penned in, a captive animal, so Stephen was nudging her shoulder as if to wake her in the pretense he didn't know she was already awake, as he'd been, "Do you hear, Kate? It's him." As if it could be anyone else.

And Kate whose solace was now in sleep, groggy hours of day-sleep when she was alone in the house, fitful patches of night-sleep, where the fetal eyes were strangely absent and it was the lost baby -- Derrie, the plump-cheeked little boy gazing at her with eyes of love, rose immediately with her husband, yes she would go with him, to follow Derek and bring him back, as she'd done herself, not once but a number of times, they fumbled with their clothes and on the stairs vertigo lifted from the darkness below but Kate refused to give in, Kate was going to be brave, strong, stubborn, she was the child's mother, she must take responsibility and would take responsibility, and at the back door as they hurried they saw a small lithe fleeing figure dart from the shadow of the house toward the woods -- "There he is!" It was a night of high, wind-blown shreds of cloud passing the moon's bulbous face, a pocked lewd face it seemed, a winking face, and no stars surrounding it, oddly, and there Derek ran in a crouch like a wild animal familiar with the terrain and they ran in his wake already breathless, panting, for they were in their forties, middleaged and too old for parenthood, this was their punishment for daring to bring life into the world, raw unheeded life not theirs to protect. They cried, "Derek! Derek --" but the March wind blew away their cries in mockery. The fat-faced moon leered down at them in mockery. In the marshy woods smelling of rot, in the sink-holes that wetted their feet within seconds, through underbrush tearing at their clothes, pricking their skins, through briars, thorns, branches whipping against their faces, they stumbled a half-mile, or was it a mile, to the muddy graveled access road, across this road sighting Derek, or a figure they believed to be Derek, scuttling crouched close to the ground, sharp eyes penetrating the darkness as theirs could not, except as the sky opened to marmoreal brightness as the moon glared through webs of broken cloud and they were panting, shivering, desperate to follow the fleeing child, now losing him, now sighting him, and at last they emerged in a grassy space seeing him a distance ahead, Kate recognized with difficulty the eastern edge of the reservoir, a body of water commonly seen only from the road, and only from her car as she drove to and from the village -- but now she and Stephen found themselves there, at what hour of the night they couldn't know, long past midnight, yet hours from dawn, they saw the water's surface ripple with wind like the skin of a nervous animal and in it filmy, rushing puzzle-pieces of sky and the winking moon, and on the farther side amid tall whipping cattails -- Derek wasn't alone.

There were others with him. Small lithe figures like his, and several taller figures. Who these were, male, female, what their faces, what their eyes, they could not see, were fearful of seeing, they heard low murmurous voices unless it was the wind, they heard-- was it laughter? They dared not venture forward. They shrank into the shadows, clutching hands, in terror of being seen.

The End