This time, however, home had provided no solace.
Marie had been angry, waiting at the door with one hand at the small of her back and the other on top of her basketball-sized belly. “Why didn’t you come home last night? Honestly, Eric, I told you yesterday morning that the boys would be home from camp and I was making a welcome-home dinner.”
He blinked. The boys. Baseball camp. They’d been gone all summer. Hell. “I’m sorry. I got busy at work and—”
“You left your cell phone home. Again. I called the garage three times last night.”
“You know the garage phone switches over to the service at five whether we stay late or not. This guy needed his car finished, and the boss asked if I could stay late and get it done. It got so late I just slept on the cot in the storeroom. I just forgot about the boys is all.”
“You forgot?” She’d stared at him for a second there as if she knew. Or suspected. As if she was trying to get a visual of the rat inside him.
Don’t let her see, don’t let her see, don’t let her see. Spackle. Plaster. Shhh. No scratching!
“Are they already asleep?” he asked. He’d stayed late. It was hard to face the family too soon after...
“It’s 2:00 a.m., Eric. What do you think?”
He sighed heavily. Then, unable to bear the way she was looking at him any longer, he went to the boys’ shared bedroom and closed the door behind him. He heard Marie huff and stomp off into the kitchen. He imagined her waddling and stomping at the same time and smiled. She was beautiful when she was pregnant. All the time, really. A blue-eyed blonde just like Mother. But pregnant, she was at her best.
He didn’t deserve her.
Joshua was sound asleep. His curly carrot mop had grown longer, and his freckles had undergone a summertime explosion. How did kids change so much over a single season? He hoped sixth grade would be a good one for Josh. He hated sending his kids to school. School had been nothing but hell for him. He’d suggested homeschooling, but Marie had insisted she had no time, and the boys had hated the idea. And really, the more they were out of the house, away from him, the better.
Besides, the boys weren’t like him. They fit in. They weren’t freaks.
He’d wondered, back then, if everyone would always be able to see the rat inside him as clearly as the kids in middle school seemed to. Because they saw it. He had no doubt that they saw it. Even when he could keep it mostly silent and sleeping for months at a time, and only had to feed it a neighbor’s cat here and there, they saw it. Kids homed in on shit like that and tried to kill it. You know, like a litter of healthy animals, mom and all, will push the one sick one right out of the nest and leave it to die? He’d seen it on the Discovery Channel. Lions did it. Wolves did it. Birds did it. Kids were just like that. A weak one, a different one, a broken one, or even an especially gifted one—anything different—was to be shunned, banished, destroyed. It was probably a matter of self-preservation left over from the caveman days. You didn’t want anyone evolving faster than the norm or they’d be unfair competition. And you didn’t want anyone evolving slower than the norm, or they’d drag you down with them. And you sure as shit didn’t want predators—the kind who would prey on their own—because they’d eat you.
Kids always knew. Adults, not so much. Adults were mostly blind. Not his mother, though. His real one. She must have taken one look at him and seen that he was broken.
Eric smoothed Josh’s hair and turned toward Jeremy’s bed, then stopped where he was, shocked by how much more of the bed Jeremy took up. He couldn’t possibly have grown that much taller since May. Could he?
He moved closer, surprised when Jeremy rolled over and opened his eyes. They were brown and accusing. “You forgot, didn’t you?”
But it wasn’t his words that made Eric’s blood chill in his veins. It was his look. He didn’t look like a kid anymore. He looked like a young man. Tall, lean, lanky, with brown hair he’d let grow all summer long, and deep brown eyes with heavy brows and thick eyelashes.
He looks just like they all look.
And that hot scratching began deep inside Eric’s brain.
“No,” he whispered. “No.”
Scratch, scratch, scratch.
“No? Well then, where were you?”
Eric backed away from his son.
Jeremy rolled his eyes and gave an exaggerated sigh. “Come on, Dad, can’t you even talk to me?”
But he couldn’t. The rat was coming out. He felt it scratching, clawing, gnawing. The plaster hadn’t even had time to dry, and already the rat was breaking through. Its twitching nose was sniffing through the first tiny hole.
Eric backed out and closed the bedroom door. The digging intensified. That scratching rat inside his brain had caught the scent, and it was demanding to be fed. And the meal it wanted this time was Eric’s own son.
He couldn’t stay at the house. Not once that feeling had begun. It never went away once it started. Nothing would stop it, nothing but killing.
He heard Marie banging pans in the kitchen, warming up leftovers for him. She was always worrying about what he ate, his cholesterol, his weight, shit like that, shit that didn’t even matter. His body wasn’t diseased, his brain was.
He walked quietly back through the house. It wasn’t a bad house. Small, only three bedrooms. The boys each had their own, but Josh had given his up to be a nursery, so they were sharing now. The living room was a mess. The boys’ sneakers scattered randomly all across the rug, jackets flung over chairs, backpacks spilling out onto the floor. He looked at the clutter, at the out-of-place sofa pillows and the TV, turned on, volume muted, running an infomercial about an electronic gadget you plugged into the wall to drive away pests. Mice and ants and spiders...
Not rats, though. Once you’ve got a rat, you’ve got a rat, that’s all there is to that that that.
He went out the front door, barely making a sound. He knew how to move in silence. He was a predator, after all. A hunter.
He got into his ’03 F-150, and drove back the way he’d come, over the bridge onto 81, and twenty minutes south to Binghamton. To his brother’s apartment. Mason let him in, groggy, only a little curious, but too tired to stay up long enough to grill him. Just pointed at the couch and scuffed back to his bedroom. A minute later he brought out a pillow and a blanket. “You need to talk, bro?”
“No. Maybe tomorrow.”
“All right. Get some sleep, okay?” Mason handed him the bedding, and went back to his room.
Eric hadn’t slept, though. He’d thought. All night long, he’d paced and he’d thought.
He guessed he’d probably been hoping to stumble onto another solution. A different answer. But he knew down deep that there wasn’t one.
And now it was morning. He’d pretended to be asleep while Mason was getting ready to go to work, knowing his brother wouldn’t wake him. Better that way. If he spoke to Mason first, his detective instincts would tell him something was wrong. So he faked sleep and waited until Mason left.
And now he was alone, and he was ready. Everything was done. He’d showered, and he’d gone down to his pickup to get his stuff out of the locked toolbox where he kept it. A man’s toolbox was sacred. Like a woman’s purse, according to Marie. People didn’t snoop in a man’s toolbox. Not without a damn good reason, anyway, and he’d always been careful never to provide one.
So he was ready. His duffel bag was on the floor, up against the wall on the far side of the room. He’d returned the blanket and pillow to Mason’s bedroom, and unrolled a sheet of plastic on the sofa and out across the floor for several feet all around it, because this was his brother’s place, after all. He didn’t want to ruin it entirely. And