The Well Page 2

  “How do you know that?”

  I wheeled around and faced him, feeling a lot older right in that moment than fourteen. Older, in fact, than Faulkner, whose voice had taken on a little boy kind of sound. The kind that said, “Please don’t destroy my perfect sitcom world with this attempted murder crap.”

  I knew the feeling.

  “I just know.” I didn’t, not really, but Faulkner looked about as freaked out as I felt. Maybe if I told him the truth, he could even help me. “Because …” I drew in another breath, then confronted the truth that no son wants to tackle, the gut-twisting, soul-sucking truth that was smacking me in the face. Ignoring it had landed me at the bottom of the well with something that had briefly considered me an appetizer. “Because this isn’t the first time Mom has tried to kill me.”

  I made it as far as the washing machine.

  She found me in the basement next to the Maytag, standing in my underwear, with the dirty clothes in one hand, the other hand reaching for the metal lid. “Cooper. What are you doing?”

  I froze. Cursed. Goose bumps danced up my spine and my guts twisted like a pretzel. It wasn’t just that I was a teenage boy caught doing laundry. In an ordinary home, that would be suspicious. Ordinary mothers would suspect stealing, snorting coke, hosting orgies in the afternoon, or something equally illegal or weird, like the world suddenly coming to an end. But this wasn’t an ordinary house and she was no ordinary mother. I had to grip the edge of the washer before I could force a word past my lips. “Nothing.”

  She reached past me and I could smell her perfume, the one she’d worn for as long as I could remember. Something that reminded me of fruit. I forgot the name of it, but it came in a red box and cost, like, sixty bucks. I remember because my stepfather had bought some last Christmas and groaned about how he could have gotten a chain saw or a leaf blower for that amount of money. Even though he could well afford two hundred boxes of the stuff. My stepfather came from generations of wealth, worked two days a week as an OB/GYN, owned a vineyard that practically poured money into his pockets, yet was as tight with his money as a lunch lady with seconds on pizza day. In the year and a half they’d been married, I’d never understood what my mother saw in him, other than maybe a checkbook. Faulkner and I worked on staying out of his way and counting down the days until we turned eighteen.

  My mother’s arm brushed against my shoulder. Her perfume no longer smelled like her, or like my childhood.

  It smelled like fear.

  Everything inside me turned to ice. A part of me didn’t want to believe it. That stupid part that kept believing in accidents and chalking the whole thing up to one intense case of PMS.

  “Cooper, you can’t do that.”

  I waited. Waited for her to yank me out of there with some excuse about looking for the dog, lying to me about him being lost, and then when we got near the well, she’d grab me again by the back of the neck and drag me to the edge, and before I could think, react, dig in my heels, stop her, she would throw me down, down into that deep dark hole.

  And this time, this time, I wouldn’t get out.

  But no, I told myself, remembering to breathe, to hold on to control, this time Faulkner was waiting outside, and I knew, even though I was never numero uno on his friends list, he’d stop her. Two against one. Better odds.

  “You can’t do that,” she repeated. “You have to use this stuff first.” My mother handed me a bottle of something called OxiClean. “It’ll get those grass stains out of your clothes. What were you doing, anyway? Playing baseball in the mud or something? And my Lord, what happened to your arms? You’re all scratched up. Did you get in a fight?” She looked me over, her nose wrinkling up. “God, your clothes stink, too, Cooper. Take a shower, honey, before you change.”

  She really didn’t know? Didn’t remember? Had no idea how I had gotten those scratches? That slime? That smell?

  Dude, I wanted to scream, you did this.

  I dared to look at her. She was a normal-looking, American-pie, carpooling, cookie-baking mother. Wearing jeans, an untucked and neatly pressed blue cotton buttondown, her blond hair no longer a mess and up in a ponytail. The crazy glassiness was gone from her green eyes. Whatever had possessed her had passed.

  Like it always did.

  She’d forgotten everything that had happened earlier and had gone back to being Mom again. For now.

  My breath escaped in a whoosh. “Thanks, Mom. I’ll, ah, do that.”

  Her palm warmed my forehead. I felt five again, and for one second, my guts untwisted. “Are you feeling okay? You look pale. And you’re doing laundry.” She laughed, just a little. Enough that a window opened inside me and I wanted to trust her.

  “I’m fine.” I swallowed hard. “Really.”

  “Okay. Be sure to do your homework. And call Megan. She called here looking for you a while ago and didn’t sound happy. I thought you liked her?”

  I didn’t answer that question. Didn’t bother telling my mother that she was the whole reason Megan wasn’t happy. Yeah, Megan, sorry I stood you up but my mother was trying to kill me. I was a little busy trying to escape from something that was trying to eat me and climb out of a freakin’ well. Next time, before I ask you out on our first fancy date, I’ll check to see if my mother’s got any murder plans on the menu.

  I shuffled to the side. Was Mom really normal? Or was she just pretending again?

  “Sam doesn’t want me going out with Megan,” I said instead of the real answer.

  My mother pursed her lips. “Maybe he’s concerned dating will distract you from school and getting good grades.”

  Sam had never given a crap about my grades. He just wanted to keep me home, under his thumb. Either way, it wasn’t as though an A in algebra was the most important thing going on in my life right now. I didn’t reply to that one either.

  “Megan is a nice girl. I’ll keep talking to Sam. And you,” my mother said, her face curving up into a smile, “should ask Megan to the Freshman Fall Dance in a few weeks. If you haven’t already. I’m sure she’s expecting to go with you.”

  Now my mother was giving me dating advice? It was as if she’d been switched by aliens, from the psycho in the woods to this one, the mom I remembered from before. The one I had trusted. Loved. The one I wanted to believe still existed.

  “Yeah. I will.”

  “Good.” She looked me over one more time. “Do you want me to get you the antibiotic cream and some BandAids for those scratches? They really do look nasty. I’d hate them to get infected.”

  “No, Mom, I’m … ah, I’m okay.”

  She almost looked … disappointed, like I’d let her down by not allowing her do the mom thing with Neosporin. “All right, if you’re sure.” Her voice sounded like a sitcom mom’s. I could almost believe everything was normal in this house. And could almost fool myself into thinking the afternoon had been a figment of my imagination. “Oh, Cooper? Your birthday is next week. Did you want to do anything special?”

  “No, that’s okay. Let’s keep it quiet.”

  She reached out to ruffle my hair and it took everything I had not to flinch. “Yeah, maybe you’re getting too big for the family thing, huh?”

  “Yeah. Maybe.”

  “Either way, I’ll make sure you have a nice birthday. Every birthday should be great, Cooper. Because you’re a special child to me.” Then she smiled and walked away, looking back at me one more time over her shoulder.

  Something scary glittered in her eyes for a second, then disappeared.

  I bit my lip so hard, I tasted blood. Then I did as she had said, taking a shower that nearly burned my skin in the basement bathroom until the slime was gone. For once, I didn’t worry about how much water I used or whether my stepfather would freak about all the gallons going down the drain.

  It barely made a difference. I could have emptied the entire hot-water tank, and still the smell lingered, as if the well were some kind of blackhead in my pores. I did a heavy Axe spr
ay, then pulled on clean clothes and left the basement by the back door. When I got outside, I expected Whipple to run onto the stone terrace and jump up on me again. I’d never gone outside without finding him there, a tennis ball in his mouth.

  But no dog. I called him, but he didn’t come. Maybe he was still pouting from earlier.

  But another part of me knew there was more. He’d gotten a whiff of whatever was in the well and it had scared him, too.

  I wasn’t going back there. Wasn’t going within five hundred feet of the well. Ever again.

  “She’s all right now,” I said when I met up with Faulkner on the deck.

  “What do you mean, `all right’? You said she tried to kill you earlier.” Faulkner waved toward the house, his movements panicked. He ran a hand through his hair, paced a few steps around me. “This is Mom we’re talking about, Coop. Our mother, not some serial killer who just got paroled. Maybe she’s demented or doing crystal meth or something. What the hell is going on? When did this start?”

  What answer did he want from me? The whole thing was way too Jerry Springer. I needed time to think, to get my head around it all.

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” I said for the second time that day.

  “You know, you’re a real pain in the ass.” He shook his head. “Why won’t you just tell me why our mother was throwing you down that well, like you were a quarter she was making a wish on?”

  I didn’t want to talk about this. Talking about it meant all of this was real. I didn’t want it to be real, because then I would have to believe that thing was real, too. “I’m going to deal with this myself, Faulkner.”

  Faulkner snorted. “Right. Now you’re going to go all Clint Eastwood? If there’s something I should know, dude, spill it.”

  I inhaled and caught the scent of the well still on me, like bad B.O. No amount of Axe could cover it up.

  What the hell was down there?

  My throat choked up again. Suddenly I wasn’t the high school freshman who had felt like he could have conquered the world twenty-four hours ago. I was a scared kid who needed someone to come along and slay the dragon.

  Preferably someone bigger who would believe me-

  And not tell me I was crazy.

  If Faulkner believed me, well, it sucked and it helped, all at once. It helped, because it meant I didn’t need to go see Dr. Feelgood and get the extra-long armed jacket and a lifetime supply of Haldol. But it sucked because it meant I wasn’t nuts and my mother was, indeed, trying to kill me.

  Normal teenage boys had trouble with zits. Asking girls out. Bad grades. Not homicide.

  Rotten disappointment rode in my stomach like school cafeteria fish nuggets, telling me that the same woman who had given birth to me, changed my diapers, walked me into first grade, and sat through every one of my screeching clarinet recitals wanted me dead.

  Not exactly good for the old self-esteem levels.

  I stopped breathing through my nose. No more smelling that thing. That was too much for now. One thing at a time.

  I met my brother’s blue eyes and nodded. “I don’t know much,” I said as we walked away from the house and down our street. Into normal American-pie land. It got easier to talk the farther we were from Mom and my stepfather’s eighteenroom palace. “She started acting weird a few years ago.”

  “Weird how?”

  “Like … she stopped hugging me.” My face got hot. “I know, but I had just turned thirteen and I still cared about that kind of thing. Not now, though. I’m older now.”

  “Yeah,” Faulkner said, grinning. “And just so cool.”

  “Shut up, dork.”

  He laughed. “All right, I won’t make fun of your ongoing need for Mommy to tuck you in at night. What else was odd?”

  “Then she started following me. Watching me.”

  He waved it off. “Overprotective.”

  “Into the bathroom? When I mowed the lawn? Sitting outside my friends’ houses? It got … creepy. But she didn’t do it all the time. Just once in a while, she’d go on these … binges. Then it would stop.” I shrugged. As if it didn’t matter. As though it had been a small thing.

  But it hadn’t been. And it still wasn’t. The weirdness had grown even bigger.

  Into something with really bad breath.

  “That could be baby-of-the-family crap,” Faulkner said. “Mom doesn’t want to let you out of her sight and all that.”

  “I don’t think so. It was more than that.”

  Faulkner raised and dropped a shoulder. No commitment from him. “You said she tried to kill you before. How?”

  My face got even hotter.

  What kind of kid did that make me? My own mother trying to kill me? Maybe I was some evil devil spawn and I didn’t know it. Maybe she hated me. Maybe she wished she’d never had me. Maybe-

  Maybe she was just crazy. Maybe there wasn’t anything in that well. Nothing at all.

  I swallowed. “Dude, there’s a reason I don’t swim in the pool anymore.”

  Faulkner stared at me, his jaw slack. I saw him do the mental math. “Oh. Man. Really?”

  “Do I look like I’m lying?” Suddenly I wanted to explode, to punch him, to force him into my head, to let him know I wasn’t rebelling because I wanted a later curfew. “God, Faulkner, believe me for once.”

  “Calm down.” Faulkner put up his hands. “I mean, dude, she’s never done anything like that to me. Are you sure? I mean, you didn’t just, like, lose at Marco Polo or something?” He laughed.

  He didn’t believe me. After all that, he didn’t believe me?

  “But you saw it happen,” I protested. “You saw what she did to me in the woods …”

  Faulkner shook his head, clearly wanting to erase the image from his mind. “I don’t know, man. I don’t know what I saw. Maybe it was a trick of the light or something.”

  “Forget it. I don’t need your help. I’ll ask someone else.”

  For a minute, I felt like the older one, as if I’d matured ten years in the past five minutes. For someone who didn’t have a license yet and needed to shave only every few days, it was a really strange feeling. “I’ll see you later, Faulkner.” I started to head off to the right.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I just need to get away from here. To have some time to think. This isn’t …” I looked back over my shoulder at the lawn, the shrubs, the flowers and plants that had stupid unpronounceable Latin names and men hired just to take care of them. I couldn’t see the well from here, though I could feel it, could sense it. Could still smell it on me.

  “There’s something about Mom and about everything around here that isn’t right,” I finished. Understatement of the year.

  “What if Mom and StepScrooge Sam ask me where you are?”

  That’s what we’d called Sam from the beginning. He hated it, but we didn’t like him much, so it seemed to be right. In the eighteen months Sam had been married to our mother, Faulkner and I had always felt like squatters in his mansion, me especially. He was hard on Faulkner, but commando on me. I didn’t know why. Maybe it was the extra mouth to feed.

  Every dollar Mom spent on clothes for us, every piece of food we took from the fridge, was subtracted from his mental debit card. We were banned from the vineyard, as if our being there might taint the grapes. Jumel Vineyards was some kind of superduper business success story because it was located in the middle of Maine, where apparently it wasn’t so easy to grow grapes because of the cold.

  Sam reminded us all the time about respecting that Jumel heritage-and staying the hell away from it. Whatever. We weren’t about to breathe on his precious Concords.

  We’d never liked him and gave him only as much respect as we had to. That kept our mother from calling the Dr. Phil show on us, kept Sam off our backs, and kept a roof over our heads. But Sam … he was a hard case, always on us for one thing or another, really anal about keeping stuff clean and picked up, and a pain in the butt about the wat
er bill, as if Faulkner and I alone were responsible for the entire globalwarming problem. The only reason the pool had even been opened was because my mother had sweet-talked him into it, so that she could work out after she hurt her knee last summer. Even then, Sam’s face took on this constipated look every time he walked past the Olympic-size waste of natural resources.

  The man had money-yet pinched a penny until Lincoln screamed for mercy. Some days I wished my mother had married Hannibal Lecter instead.

  So we tolerated Sam, Faulkner and I, to keep the peace and took extra-long showers whenever he was at work. Just because we could.

  But right now, there were bigger problems on my plate than Sam and his water-bill fetish.

  “Tell them …” I thought for a minute. “Tell them I’m spending the night at Joey Deluca’s. Tell them we have a big research project due and I’m working on it with him. Tell them it’s for English.”

  My English grade sucked wind. I hated the classics. Hated Shakespeare. Hated Dickens even more. Thought Pip should have been drowned with the convict in the opening scene of Great Expectations and saved us all the torture. I’d turned out to be a total disappointment to my Englishprofessor father and my American-classics-loving mother, who’d named me and Faulkner after their favorite authors, me for the James Fenimore guy who’d written that thing about the Indians.

  “Come on. Who’s going to believe that?” Faulkner said.

  “They will. They’d do anything to have me pass English.”

  Maybe, I hoped, she’d forget I existed for a while. Maybe she’d get into one of those moods where she sort of zoned out. And she wouldn’t come looking for me. I started down the street.

  “Wait.” Faulkner grabbed my sleeve. “You got a cell with you?”

  I shook my head. Failing English meant no perks. A cell phone had been the carrot my father had dangled in front of me for a year. Yet another reason to hate Pip. He had cost me a Motorola.

  For a second, I thought Faulkner might offer me his cell, but he just shrugged. “Well, be careful. Don’t get killed or picked up by some psycho.”

  I looked away. I already lived with a psycho. She’d made my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, reminded me to look both ways before crossing the street, and warned me never to talk to strangers. Strangers, it turned out, weren’t the ones you had to worry about. “Yeah. I will.”