Whisper Down the Lane, Clay Chapman [best short books to read txt] 📗

Before—

“What are you doing?” Jenna pulls the wheel in the other direction. The two of us struggle for control over the car. Her foot presses on the accelerator. The engine heaves from the sudden thrust. The speedometer quickly climbs to sixty-five miles an hour, seventy.

Someone screams. The sound of it fills the car, singing along with the screeching tires.

A boy.

It sounds like Sean, like me, but it’s coming from over my shoulder. From the back seat. Eli has woken up. He lets out a single cry before the car smashes into the bridge abutment.

To bear witness to the water.

DAMNED IF YOU DO

  SEAN: 1983

“Keep your seatbelt on,” Mom instructed. “No matter what happens, don’t take it off.”

Taking his head in her hands, she firmly pressed her lips against his brow. She examined him closely, combing his hair with her fingers. She took him in, all of him. She patted his head. Fussed with his clothes one last time. Making him look perfect. She had packed his Sunday best before they abandoned their home in the middle of the night, a lifetime ago. He had his fancy shoes on, polished until they shimmered, even in the dark. Obsidian black. Just like the gray boy from Miss Betty’s picture.

“There. That’s good. That’s good. Now, how about some music?”

Before Sean could answer, Mom flipped the stereo on. Static seeped through the speakers as she surfed from station to station, sonic waves crashing against their car. She eventually settled on the pulsing chords of The Police’s “Every Breath You Take.”

“I love this song.” She bobbed her head along, searching for the rhythm with her neck. She turned the volume up until it was difficult for Sean to talk over the music. “This is nice. Isn’t this nice? You can sing along, even if you don’t know the words.”

She shifted the car into drive, humming along to the song. Her rhythm was off. Mom couldn’t keep up, distracted by some more prominent thought. She was struggling to avoid it, whatever it was. Pretend it wasn’t there. That it didn’t exist.

The song was meant to distract them but it wasn’t working. Mom was lost. Lost in her thoughts, that expansive cloud forming in her head. No one, not even Sean, could reach her.

“Mom?”

Nothing. No answer. Mom continued to hum along to the song, nodding.

Sean tried again. “Mommy?”

Her focus was on every chord, every lyric, every breath, dut-dut, dut-dut, dut-dut, every move, every vow, dut-dut, dut-dut-dut, while turning the car onto the highway.

“Mom!”

Mom cranked the volume even higher. The song stung Sean’s ears. Something about how she was acting behind the wheel compelled him to unbuckle his seatbelt—even though Mom always told him not to—sliding quietly across the sticky leatherette.

Mom was talking to herself now. Even when she spoke, it was as if she were talking to someone else. Not Sean, but some other version of him.

“Almost there,” she said into the rearview mirror. “Everything’s going to be okay now.”

Every time he asked his mother where they were going, she avoided the question. Pretending she didn’t hear him, humming along to the radio instead. She was playing her own game. Without him. Acting as if everything was perfectly normal when nothing was normal at all. As if driving in the middle of the night was normal. As if wearing his Sunday clothes on a Tuesday—it was a Tuesday, right?—was normal. As if leaving everything behind, their house, Miss Kinderman, school, was perfectly normal. But it wasn’t. None of this was normal.

Mom wasn’t normal. Not anymore. She had been getting worse and worse. She shielded her son from every passing stranger. Shouted at people who stood too close in line at the rest area. Always grabbing Sean by the arm and tugging him away from anyone who said hello.

Always driving. Sleeping in the back seat. Waking up somewhere else. A different back road. A different town.

The engine heaved. Sean could hear the strain just under the music, pushing the car further along. It pushed him deeper into his seat.

Sean wanted to take it back. Take it all back. He wanted to tell his mom he had lied. That it wasn’t Mr. Woodhouse. It was never Mr. Woodhouse or any of the other teachers at school.

A game. It was just a game. Just for the two of them to play together.

All for you, Mom, he thought. I did it all for you.

“It’s not true,” he managed. The words were barely there, but he’d said it. He had been so scared of the truth. What would happen if it were to finally come out that he’d been lying all along? They would take him away, wouldn’t they? Just like Mom said? The adults in their neckties would finally swoop in and separate their family? “I made it all up, Mommy…”

The car was moving faster. He couldn’t tell for sure, but he sensed the momentum all around him, thrusting him against the door as the station wagon propelled itself forward.

“I made it up…” He said it louder now, fighting the music. “I lied, Mommy…”

Mom’s head turned slightly to her right shoulder, as if she’d just heard something in the car. But the moment passed, and her focus drifted back to the windshield and the darkness ahead. Nothing Sean said seemed to penetrate that dense shield of music, so he told her he loved her. It was all he could say anymore, all he could think to do. To help save them.

But she never heard him.

“I love you, Mommy,” he said again from the back seat of the car, trying it once more. Just in case. That these magic words might break the spell his mother was under and bring her back, let her foot off the accelerator, slow the car down to a stop and come back to him.

Mom merely nodded to herself, smiling her pained smile, her eyes focused on the darkened road outside the windshield, humming even louder to the