400 Boys and 50 More Read Free Page B

mother’s.”
    “What?”
    “And the chin, there, is my sister’s. That’s my brother’s . . forehead, I think, yeah—and that’s his nose, too. The clothes, I—I’m not sure.”
    “And the eyes?”
    “My father’s.”
    “Daniel, what is this? I mean, why?”
    His hands tightened on the steering wheel. Paula found herself staring at his left hand. The one from the picture.
    “Daniel, why?”
    He shook his head. “My father’s a madman, that’s why. No reason for it, he’s just. . . Well, yeah, to him there’s a reason. This, to him, shows us as a group—close-knit. “One optimally functioning individual organism,” he used to say.
    Paula looked at the picture with distaste, then slid it back into the briefcase from which Daniel had taken it.
    “It’s grotesque,” she said, rubbing dust from her hands.
    “He sent that to me three years ago, when I had just moved away from home. Made it out of old photographs, begging me to come back. God, he must have worked on that thing for weeks—the joins are almost invisible.”
    He fell silent, perhaps watching the road for their turn-off, perhaps just thinking. After a while he sighed, shook his head.
    “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know why I”m doing this—why I’m giving in and going back after all this time.”
    Paula moved closer and put her hand on his arm. “He’s human—he’s alone. Your mother just died. You didn’t even go to the funeral, Daniel—I think this is the least you can do. It’s only for a few days.”
    Daniel looked resentfully thoughtful. “Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe that started the whole thing.”
    “What?”
    “Loneliness. He must be awfully lonely, though, to have come up with his obsessions. He used to play with a jigsaw puzzle, Paula, made entirely out of a shattered pane of glass. For hours. And then that . . thing.” He gestured towards the briefcase, but Paula knew he meant what was in it.
    “You’ll survive,” she said.
    “Yeah. To survive. That’s the whole thing.”
    There was another silence as he considered this.
    “Funny,” he said presently. “That’s exactly what my father was always saying.”
    * * *
    The shadows had swallowed the old farmhouse by the time they found it, trapped in ancient trees at the end of a rough dirt road. The sun was gone, only a pale wash of orange light marking the direction in which it had sunk. Paula looked for a sign of light or life around the weathered building, but found only flooding blackness, shining where it was a window, splintered and peeling where it was the front door.
    Daniel stopped the car and stretched back in his seat, yawning. “I feel like I’ve been driving for a month.”
    “You look it, too,” said Paula. “I offered to drive . . .”
    He shrugged. “I”ll get to sleep early tonight,” he said, pushing open the door. They got out of the car, into the quiet grey evening.
    “Is anyone home?” Paula asked as Daniel came around the car.
    “With my luck, yes. Come on.”
    They walked through a fringe of dead grass, then carefully up the rotten steps. Daniel paused at the top, stepping back on the step beneath him. It creaked and thumped. Creaked and thumped. Daniel smiled nostalgically. Paula reminded herself that he had grown up in this house, out here in the middle of nowhere, far from the city and the campus where she had met him, where they were now living together. Daniel never spoke of his childhood or family, for reasons Paula was unsure of. He seemed bothered by his past, and perhaps somewhat afraid of it.
    Across the porch, the door was a panel of emptiness, suddenly creaking as it opened. Paula tried to look through the widening gap; she jerked back as something pale came into view.
    “Dad?”
    The voice that replied was as worn and weathered as the house: “Daniel, son, you’ve come. I knew you would.” The dim pale head bobbed and nodded in the darkness, coarse grey hair stirring. Something white fluttered