Will was thirteen the night his father died.
His mother had practically ran into the kitchen when he’d stumbled in from outside through the back door, returning from the dream which was not a dream. Will’s face and feet were scratched and dirty, stained from a return trip out of the impossible woods behind the house, a trip he could not remember because the time between losing the necklace and suddenly looking up from a crouch in his back yard was instantaneous, no different than coming out of a dream. There had to have been a return to the house, no other explanation, but in his mind there had been none between the moment he’d been certain his fate would be like that of the other boy, and seeing his house looming in front of him, every light blazing.
In the kitchen, after an initial flood of relief, Lucy Pallasso’s face had tightened and locked in an expressionless mask. Except her eyes, still wide-eyed with relief and a rage Will hadn’t recognized until much later, so alien was it on his mother’s face until that moment. They faced each other for a full minute, neither speaking, not that he had any idea what he could say, still fighting to remember how he’d gotten home. She finally reached out and ran her soft fingers across his streaked tears and nodded, very slightly. In that moment, Will guessed that she knew what he’d seen, maybe had known this secret for some time. Like the rest of her face, her eyes hardened, cold blue even in the murk of the night. They told him she’d had enough.
“Go to bed, William,” she’d said softly. “Everything will be all right.”
He was in his bedroom a long time with the door closed, something his mother did not ordinarily permit, trying to shake the image of what he’d seen in the woods. The boy tied to the tree with Will’s father dancing around him, yellow-white clown suit glowing in the moonlight. Shafts of light breaking through the trees into the clearing, highlighting the man toying with his prey before the kill.
The knife, the blood.
The clown dancing toward him and lifting the ringed necklace from around his neck.
Will kept shaking, curled under the covers. He just wanted to disappear, to get sucked into the mattress and the sheets and the pillows, pulled into oblivion. Sleep was a lost hope, unable as he was to shut off the movie reels that played over and over in his mind.
He had no idea how many hours went by. As he replayed every moment, every image in his head from beneath the sheets, a hand touched him, gently pulled the sheets away to expose his head. His mother, breathing in the dark with ragged breaths like she might be crying. She leaned in, whispered into his ear, “It’s time.”
Without fully realizing what would happen next, he found the courage and strength to pull himself out of bed and follow his mother into the kitchen. Every sound as he tiptoed past the closed door of his parents’ bedroom, the slightest creak of the floor was a gunshot. His father, if he was in there, did not wake up.
Dressed in a thick, flowered bathrobe and white socks on her feet, Lucy Pallasso opened the silverware drawer, reached far into the back and produced a black zippered bag. Will watched in silence as she unzipped it, took out the syringe pieces. She put it together with the confident touch of her profession, the cold precision of a nurse doing something she’d done a thousand times before, pressing the needle through the membrane at the end of a small bottle of clear liquid. Will’s heart raced, wondering what kind of shot he would get, what he’d done wrong to deserve it. His stomach hurt, but that was because he was scared. He wasn’t sick. He wanted to say this to her, stop her before she stuck him in the arm, but the silence between them was too urgent. Will watched with quiet fascination and dread as she pulled back the plunger, filled the hypodermic with fluid.
“Your father came back. He’s sleeping now,” she whispered, pushing out the air bubbles. “It’s now or never.”
Will nodded, understanding nothing except that his mother knew what she was doing.
“I need you to be my strong boy.”
Will nodded again, and began to roll up his left sleeve but his mother didn’t notice. She turned and walked with quick but silent steps in her socks back through the living room, down the hallway to her bedroom. Grateful that the darkness hid his embarrassed face, Will followed like a faithful dog. He waited in the open doorway listening to his father snore. The lamp was on, muted by one of his father’s handkerchiefs draped over the top of the shade. Beside this, the necklace with the sphere and rings lay curled like a sleeping snake. The sight of it sent a renewed sense of horror, of unreality, filling Will’s stomach. He looked away from it, toward the man on the bed. Even in the dim light, the remnants of white greasepaint were visible along Jacob’s jaw. Will stepped completely into the room, stopping on the opposite side of the bed from his mother. His parents kept separate twin beds the past few years, a choice which Will hadn’t thought much about when made, but now he wondered if it had something to do with his mother’s suspicions that something awful was going on.
“Hold him down,” she said softly. The light from the hallway did not disturb his father’s sleep, nor did her soft voice.
Will stared with a mix of fear and confusion at the man under the tangle of sheets, stained with the make-up he hadn’t completely cleaned from his neck and forehead. How could someone so close be so alien to him? How could he be able to do such horrible things?
A flash of his father in the clown outfit, and it had been his father (there was no questioning that now), face painted over, that strange, inhuman glee dancing beneath. How many more victims had there been?
No, not possible. Will had imagined it all. He was just a kid, barely a teenager. His father wouldn’t do something so bad. Now Mom was going to do something bad, too, and it would be Will’s fault.
“Now,” she said. When he hesitated, she looked into his face for what seemed like a long time. Will stared back, mouth slightly open, silently begging her to stop whatever she was doing. As if reading his mind, she whispered, “You didn’t imagine what you saw, William. I promise you, this is not your fault. Hold him, please.” The hardened expression softened, for just a moment, at her final word. She needed him. His father hardly knew he existed, but his mother needed him more than ever.
Will leaned forward and pressed down upon his father’s shoulders, gently at first, so afraid of waking him. He had to lean over to do this until his face hovered only an inch above the large man’s chest. Smell of sweat and dirty clothes. He was so close that, with every breath his father took, his chest touched the tip of Will’s nose. There was no way he could overpower such a large man, but once contact had been made, he pressed harder, waiting for the eyes to open above him. His father’s sudden snore turned into a near-cough as he surfaced from sleep, but Will’s mother had already jabbed the syringe into his throat and pressed the plunger.
Jacob Pallasso struggled for no more than a few seconds, in that time his eyes rolled in a half-drunken, half-drugged haze, looking down and connecting momentarily with Will’s upturned face. His lips, bright red in a couple of spots, formed his name, Billy, then the head sank deeper against the pillow and Jacob surrendered to whatever he’d been injected with. His breathing was labored as his body fought to stay alive, losing the battle with every rapid blink.
Then he was still. At his mother’s light touch against his back Will straightened and stepped away from the bed.
Something had changed in her then, as if strings long holding her upright and strong were suddenly cut loose. She bent over, almost draping herself across the dead man in the bed, before she caught herself with fists on either side of him, one hand still holding the syringe which poked into the mattress. She sobbed quietly but without ceasing, even as she rose and covered the needle with a plastic tip and set it down on the night table beside Jacob’s strange necklace. She slid down onto her knees beside the bed, folded both hands together and rested her forehead against them.
“Hail Mary,” she whispered. “Full of grace. The Lord is with thee…” She stopped, raised her wet face to Will who only stood on the other side of the bed, not sure what to do.
“Pray,” his mother said. “Pray for forgiveness.” Her voice was hard.
He got down on his knees on his side of the bed and together they prayed the same prayer, over and over, until his mother felt they had done enough. She took in a deep breath as she stood up and began disassembling the syringe.
“He was a bad man,” she said as she worked. “A horrible man. We had to stop him. It was God’s will, so that no more children would suffer.”
Will nodded, staring in fascinated horror as she opened his father’s mouth and pressed the empty vial far down in the back of the throat, then worked the needle and syringe side by side into his mouth. The plunger and the screw-end of the needle poked out like candles on a birthday cake. Will felt his throat constrict, tried to tell himself that his father was already dead and—
Too much. He had time only to turn so his back was to the bed before vomiting the remnants of the spaghetti and meatballs he’d had for dinner against the wall, grateful that his mother’s bed was on the opposite side of the room. The woman was shouting at him, but he ignored her, focusing everything he had on trying to stop throwing up and get a breath of air into his lungs.
He leaned one hand ahead of him, spitting out the constant saliva which pooled under his tongue, vaguely aware of thumps and groans behind him.
When he finally stood up, hoping he could wait a little bit before cleaning up the mess, she was standing near the door. The rug which had once ran along the feet of both beds had been pulled almost into the hallway. His father lay on top, birthday candle syringe still sticking out of his mouth, hands folded across his chest.
All of this was bad enough, but what sent the boy to shivering was the sight of the clown suit—he was still wearing the stupid thing, splashes of red across the shirt and pants, at least in the places the hall light spilled over him where his mother’s shadow hadn’t concealed.
No pretending it had been a dream, now or ever. He hadn’t imagined it.
His mother waited. Finally, Will looked around the room, vision finally resting on her cold, shadowed face. “We are absolved,” she said. “I know we are, but we can never tell anyone about this. Not even a priest in the confessional. This is just between God and me. God and you. Me and you.”
Will stared at the unmoving body of his father, mouth full, eyes squinted closed. The body seemed coiled, ready to spring back to life.
“Now go to bed,” his mother said. “We’ll take care of the rest in the morning.”
Will said nothing, stepped past the body, waiting for hands to reach out and grab his ankles. They didn’t. He made it into the hall, then his bed. His mouth was sour from the vomit, but he dared do nothing except what he’d been told to do. Go to bed. Go to sleep. The latter took a while, as he lay in bed listening to his mother putter around the kitchen, echoes of her footsteps descending into the basement, then nothing. An occasional scritch of something he almost recognized, but in the context of the night could not place it. At last he tumbled off into the deepest sleep. One without dreams.