Chapter Four

Chapter Four

"The young prince was haughty and full of spite and the great king despaired for his only son and the kingdom he had built. And though the queen loved her son, she too despaired, for she knew the boy was rash and selfish. The two royals spent their days in incessant worry while the prince wasted the coffers on wine and women…"

Christina paused and looked up. She and Jamie were sitting in the backwoods together and she was reading him the first chapter of her latest story. It was a very private practice between the two of them; no one else ever got to hear Christina's stories and Jamie knew he was honored by having her ask for his opinion. 

"So whattdya think?" she said, shuffling her papers and deliberately not meeting his eyes so she could control her facial expression if she heard something she didn't like.

"What's 'incessant' mean?" asked Jamie simply.

"Endless," replied Christina promptly, used to the quick vocabulary lessons before the real critique. 'Coffers' had already been covered in a previous reading.

"Right," said Jamie, storing the word away. "Well," he started, picking out the words of his critique carefully. "I like it -- definitely a good first chapter. You set up your characters well and your exposition wasn't too boring. And that last bit about 'wine and women' -- good alliteration…" After years of hearing Christina's stories, Jamie had picked up some of the more fancy literary terms, sometimes even managing to surprise his English teacher when she called on him to analyze a passage of their current reading material in class.

"It's just…" began Jamie hesitantly, the two words enough to make Christina's smile drop.

"What?" she asked sharply.

"It's just -- don't you want to try something different? You always write about faraway kingdoms with dragons and unicorns and princes and princesses…" It was quite true; Christina's preferred genre was fantasy and she rarely strayed from it. "I mean," clarified Jamie, "all your stories are really good, but they're not real, you know? Don't you ever want to try writing about places like -- places like Catalina?" He immediately knew he made a lame move.

"Places like Catalina?" Christina repeated, raising her eyebrows incredulously. "You're joking, right? Nothing ever happens here to write about. It's booooooring…"

Thinking of his brother's murder, Jamie internally disagreed, but he nodded anyway. He didn't want Christina to get mad at him and stop reading him her stories. Nine times out of ten, she usually agreed with him in the end anyway, and he was sure that the next time she approached him with a new story, it would be about a character who didn't have a royal title before their name. 

Jamie loved the sound of Christina's voice. It was as gentle and as lulling as the sea. She gave her words the perfect intonations and sometimes even did voices, sending Jamie into fits of laughter when trying to capture the rascally hiss of a villain.

"What do you want to be when you grow up?" he asked her languorously. He leaned back against a nearby tree, straightening his spine out against the rough bark. The wind rustled the tree leaves above, the area where they sat shaded by the canopy. Underneath his fingertips, the ground felt rocky and cool. 

Your wife. The answer rang through Christina's head before she could stop it and she blushed at the brashness of her own thoughts. "Uh -- " she cleared her throat quickly. "Uh -- a novelist, I guess." She prayed to a God she didn't believe in that Jamie not notice anything wrong with her.

"Yeah," said Jamie easily, unaware of her sudden discomfort, "I knew you were going to say that."

"What about you?" asked Christina, eager to get the subject off herself.

For a moment there was silence, as if Christina had just asked him to define a word like 'perfidious' or 'sanctification.' "I'm not sure yet," he said finally. "But I know I want to get out of Catalina." Since his brother's death, Jamie had started to hate the town. It felt too small for him now and its familiarity was starting to become claustrophobic. But as to what he would do once he got out of Catalina… well, that remained a mystery.

He didn't have any particular talents, not in academics or in any extracurriculars, and he couldn't really think of anything he wanted to do for a living. He felt uncomfortable sitting next to Christina, whose air of always having everything figured out got to him now.

Jamie thought of the farm and of his father. The destiny he was suppose to have -- a wheat farmer like all the other Hendrick men before him -- lay in Catalina. He loved the farm and its acres of wheat deeply -- it was home. But staying in Catalina seemed so limiting. There had to be more, he knew, and he was already itching to go out and find it.

Behind him the leaves rustled and something clicked in the back of Jamie's mind: he realized they were being watched. He could feel a pair of eyes resting on him. He turned around abruptly, Christina following his gaze with a gasp. Isaiah Grimm was standing timidly behind a tree, his animal eyes unblinking. How long had he been there? Jamie wondered apprehensively.

"Go away!" Jamie told him. Instinctively, he got up and stood in front of Christina who remained sitting, looking up at him bewildered. "Go away!" he repeated more loudly when the man didn't move. Isaiah Grimm blinked at him and then put a hand to his mouth. For a moment, he looked uncertain, glancing from Christina to Jamie to the house in the distance. Finally, though, he turned around and walked off, his shoes crunching the baby grass beneath him.

"Jeez, that was scary," breathed Christina, getting up off the ground, clutching her papers tightly to her chest. "I can't believe your father just lets him hang around here." Jack Hendrick let Isaiah Grimm live in the backwoods of his land out of charity. Grimm lived in a one-room cabin Jack had built for him years ago and once a month Jack took him out a brown bag of groceries and a bit of cash. Isaiah was Catalina's resident nutter. Nobody knew the past behind the man and Jamie wondered if he could even speak. At times, he seemed more animal than human.

"Do you think he killed Lucas?" asked Christina softly. The way her voice tinged the question, he knew she had thought of the possibility before. 

Jamie considered. "I don't know -- that's what everybody else seems to think." Isaiah was the police's number one suspect in his brother's murder and Jamie had overheard whispered conversations where people had said they thought "that f**k-up Grimm" had repaid Jack Hendrick's kindness by slaughtering his youngest son. Lucas' body was found in Isaiah's part of the woods, but there just wasn't enough evidence for conviction.

As the sun was setting, the late afternoon air cooled and Jamie felt an unexpected shiver run through him. Lucas' dead body was found in these woods. Why was he here now? He could've been standing next to his brother's killer, who could've at that very moment been deciding whether or not to kill him too. 

"Let's go inside," he told Christina in a quiet voice.

"Yeah, let's…" she replied fervently.

***

The alarm clock at Jamie's bedside read one thirty-two am. Jamie hadn't fallen asleep yet, his mind too busy whirring with the strange events of the day. Grimm's haunted face kept coming back to him each time he closed his eyes and the repeated image was starting to get to him. Was that face the last thing Lucas had ever seen?

Jamie threw the covers off of him, feeling restless and hot. His bare feet padded down the cool wood floors of the hallway until he reached the door sporting the label LUKE'S ROOM in big blue block letters. For a second, Jamie stared at his brother's name. In his thoughts, it now was always "Lucas," never "Luke" or, more commonly, "The Lukester," as it was in life. Odd. 

Taking a deep breath, Jamie pushed the door open and walked inside.

The room was peaceful and unnaturally neat. In the dead of night, everything was shrouded in shades of grey and blue -- the cartoon bedspread, the nightlight, the box of blocks their grandfather had made for him back when they had both still been alive. 

It felt as if someone was pressing a pillow to Jamie's face, suffocating him through memory. Sometimes, late at night like this, Lucas would sneak into Jamie's room after a bad dream, bringing a book with him which Jamie would have to read to him over and over again until he fell back asleep. He looked at the books on the bookshelf, knowing the words to some of them by heart.

We looked! Then we saw him

Step in on the mat!

We looked! And we saw him!

The Cat in the Hat!

Jamie sat down on the edge of the bed pensively. Lucas felt more real here than at the cemetery. He reached out and picked up Lee the Teddy, who'd been resting on a pillow, watching him. "Hi Lee," said Jamie, running a hand over the bear's downy head. "How y'doing?" The bear stared back at him, silent, the stitched smile on his face unchanged. Suddenly, Jamie felt foolish -- God, I'm talking to a stuffed animal. He threw the bear a tad too carelessly to the side where it tumbled off the other edge of the bed and fell to the floor with a soft plop!

Jamie moved from the bed over to the window. It looked out on the backyard, the wheat and the woods. He didn't see any of it, though, only his reflection, which looked scared and pale in the glass. His hair was sticking up all funny and the too-small Joyland shirt looked ridiculous on him. 

He remembered staring into the mirror on the day of Lucas' funeral. He looked ridiculous then too. He had only one really good suit and he had worn it to his Aunt Liddy's wedding in Missouri a year before. The suit had the disarming effect of making him look younger when he should've looked older for the occasion. And he looked even more ridiculous when compared to his father. In a suit, Jack Hendrick looked like he could've been President.

Jamie loved his father very much, but it was a difficult, restrained love. He had to hold himself back around Jack, whose silent dignity was mighty intimidating. Jamie didn't see any of his father in him, which was strange since he had heard his mother say time and time again that Jack and Jamie were two sides of the same man. 

There was one fact that disturbed Jamie: his father had not cried at Lucas' funeral. Jamie had cried, his mother had practically been in hysterics, but Jack had remained stoic and still throughout. He knew his father was a quiet man, but if there ever was a time for emotion, your six year old son's burial was it. But Jack had not cried then and he never cried after. This emotionlessness frightened Jamie, and for one brief nanosecond of horror -- Oh God -- the thought that Jack might've killed Lucas, or at least been in league with those responsible, ran wildly through his head. But the idea was too horrible to contemplate for long and he stored the deformed thing at the back of his mind to never be brought out again.

Jamie walked out of Lucas' room, and it was like coming up for a breath of fresh air. He still wasn't sleepy so he went down the hall, hoping to raid the kitchen cabinets for the last of the Oreos. But his plan was thwarted when he saw the kitchen light was already on. Mary sat at the table, staring into space, a glass of milk and an empty package of Oreos in front of her. She looked utterly exhausted.

She saw him standing in the doorway and smiled. "You caught me," she said with a little laugh, but he shrugged and sat down beside her. She pushed her glass of milk toward him and said, "Drink. Your bones need the calcium." Jamie did as he was told and downed the entire glass in one swallow, wiping off the milk mustache with the back of his hand. Seeing this, Mary's heart felt an upsurge of affection for her eldest son -- her only son -- and she reached over and kissed his wheat-colored hair tenderly. 

"You're getting so tall. I just know one night I'm going to go up to your room and see your feet sticking out over the edge of that twin bed."

"I'm still shorter than most of the boys in school," Jamie sighed. He was always one of the last to get chosen when they were picking basketball teams in PE.

"All Hendrick men get their growth spurts late," Mary reassured him. "Don't worry, you'll catch up."

Jamie shrugged; the idea of waiting another couple of years for half a foot was depressing, frankly. Seeing his despair and barely repressing her smile, Mary changed the subject. "So what did you do today? School good?" 

"Uh huh," Jamie responded a bit ambiguously. "Me and Christina went out in the woods this afternoon and saw Isaiah Grimm there."

Mary frowned. "I wish you wouldn't go out into those woods alone."

"I'm not alone," replied Jamie with a smirk. "Christina's with me.'

But it was Mary's turn to smirk. "That girl has the biggest crush on you." She let out a "HA!" when Jamie scowled and blushed, and teasingly gave her son a little push. "Too cute," she said with a hiccup.

There was silence for a moment before Jamie spoke again. "Do you think Isaiah Grimm killed Lucas?" he asked, echoing Christina's earlier question in her same soft tone of voice.

The silence in the kitchen deepened. Mary looked down at her hands. "I don't know, Jamie," she responded tiredly. "I try not to think about it anymore."

Jamie felt at a loss. Without the knowledge of his brother's killer, something about Lucas' death felt painfully incorporeal. Was it better to try to forget like his mother or to not acknowledge it at all like his father? He looked at Mary in frustration, her dark beauty muted by the late hour. She looked back at him, studying his face. He looked so much like Lucas… or Lucas had looked so much like him… 

Before the past tense choked her throat, she got up and left the room.

 

Author's Note

that's an excerpt from 'the cat in the hat' by dr. seuss, one of my favorite books growing up :)