Seed
: Chapter 10

On a regular summer afternoon, while Jack sat slumped on the couch watching Scooby Doo on the cheap JVC, a rage slithered into his blood just as it had in the cemetery. Gilda was in the kitchen frying up cheap skirt steaks she’d picked up at the Thriftway. The Winters didn’t often have steak for dinner unless they were on manager’s special, and Gilda had been lucky enough to walk by the meat counter at just the right time. They were the last ones left, and she reflected on her good fortune while standing over the stove, cheap vegetable oil casting a thin veil of smoke across the interior of the trailer. She was singing the Happy Days theme song, except she didn’t know the words somehow—it was like, what, ten words plus the days of the fucking week?—and it was driving Jack crazy.

“Sunday, Monday, happy days,” she sang—right over an important part of Scooby Doo dialogue. Shaggy had always been Jack’s favorite. Jack loved the way he called Scooby ‘Scoob’ and swore that one day, when he finally had his own dog, he’d name him Scoob even if it was some girly poodle.

“Tuesday, Wednesday, happy days.”

He grimaced at his mother’s singing and snatched the remote off the couch, mashing the volume button to drown her out, but the volume didn’t go up. The batteries were dead again—that or the remote itself was fried. It was a cheap piece of crap Stephen had picked up at a random yard sale along the side of the road. He insisted it worked on the same frequency, and maybe he was right because it worked half the time. But the other half, it was nothing but an ugly paperweight taking up room on their scuffed up coffee table.

“Thursday, Friday, happy days.”

Scooby and the gang finally cornered the ghost they’d been chasing through the entire episode. Fred looked sure of himself, holding the phantom by its sheeted shoulders while Velma revealed its true identity.

“Saturday and Sunday too, all happy days for you!”

Right over the name of the bad guy. Jack narrowed his eyes at the TV. He clenched the remote as hard as he could, imagining the stupid thing exploding into pieces in his hands. Gilda kept singing and Jack twisted his head toward the kitchen. He could see her standing over the stove, her silhouette faint and hazy through the smoke. If she had been quiet, Jack would have known who the ghost had been. If she’d just stop singing, he could enjoy the Smurfs in peace as soon as Scooby was over. They’d be on in a matter of seconds. Jack knew this because it was part of his regular scheduled programming; he knew this because during summer vacation, when it was too hot to go outside, he’d watch Hanna-Barbera all day long. But his mom just kept singing.

The Smurfs’ theme filled the living room and Jack’s frustration skyrocketed. He glared at his mother, boring a hole into the back of her head.

And then she started to scream.

At first Jack thought that maybe he really did stare a hole right through her skull, that maybe she was screaming because her brains were oozing out of her head and into the frying pan. But then his mother moved, and he saw that wasn’t the case: Gilda jumped away from the stove, revealing a plume of fire as tall and deadly as the Devil’s finger. The pan was on fire.

“Oh my God!” she yelled. She grabbed for a dish towel, tossing it onto the pan in an attempt to suppress the flames—but the fire was too big for the likes of a cheap scrap of fabric. As soon as it hit the pan the flames spiked higher, and for a second they burned blue.

“Oh my God!” she kept screaming, scrambling around the kitchen, searching for something to douse the flames. In a panic, she grabbed the handle of the pan and moved it from the stove to the sink. Something twisted in the pit of Jack’s stomach—a pang that told him what his mom was about to do was a bad idea; maybe a lesson he’d half-listened to at school, or something he’d seen on PBS. He opened his mouth to protest. Gilda twisted the kitchen faucet open. Her screams shifted from panic to terror.

As soon as the water hit the boiling oil, there was a hiss of steam. The oil jumped out of the pan and onto the counter, onto the kitchen floor, and onto her cooking apron and bare arms. That fire kept burning. Jack’s eyes widened as he watched his mother spin around, her arms outspread like Jesus, her skin blistering before his eyes, like a vampire standing in the hot Georgia sun. She screamed in pain while the Smurfs skipped and sang through their village.

She didn’t sing.

She wailed.

It was Jack’s turn to give Charlie her bath while Aimee caught up on a few of her favorite shows. Jack listened to Agent Dana Scully talk about alien invasions through the open bathroom door while Charlie piled suds atop her head, turning herself into a giant soft-serve cone. When she wasn’t piling bubbles onto her head, she was squeezing them out of a sponge and into an old plastic Big Gulp cup which she’d then serve to her father as a milkshake. And if milkshakes weren’t in season, she’d spend her time arranging foam letters along the bathtub wall.

Tonight was milkshake night. Charlie carefully squeezed a foamy stream of suds into her plastic cup while singing something Jack didn’t recognize beneath her breath—probably off of a new cartoon he had yet to catch. He lathered up her hair with apple-scented shampoo while she worked on a shake. Scully fired her gun in the other room. Charlie served Jack his soapy confection, tilted her head to the side as if seeing her father for the first time, and posed a question Jack hadn’t expected.

“Daddy, why did you run away from home?”

Poised to rinse the shampoo from his daughter’s hair, he stared at the little girl before him with alarm. It was something nobody knew—he hadn’t told a soul. To hear it questioned so plainly, so innocently, as though she was asking whether tomorrow would be rainy or sunny, all but bowled him over.

“What do you mean?” he staggered, trying to shift his surprise to something resembling confusion, but he did a lousy job. Charlie squinted at him, lifted a wet hand to rub at one of her eyes, then let it fall back into the water with a splash.

“You ran away from home when you were little,” she told him. “Didn’t you love your mommy and daddy?”

Jack felt his heart palpitate in his throat. He was found out. Exposed. Naked. Ready to deny it, the fact Charlie knew his darkest secret, seemingly out of the blue, assured him that she hadn’t simply pulled it out of thin air; she hadn’t just dreamed it up. No, someone had told her.

“Where did you hear that?” he asked as nonchalantly as he could, tipping her head back and rinsing the shampoo from her hair. But Charlie didn’t reply. She sat quietly while he rinsed, and once he was done she went back to making her milkshakes, squeezing the sponge with pruny fingers.

“Charlie, honey?”

Charlotte avoided his gaze, purposefully busying herself the way kids did when they didn’t want to answer a question. But Jack wasn’t about to let it rest; he wasn’t about to let his secret walk out of that bathroom and, potentially, into Aimee’s lap. To tell Aimee that he’d run away from home when he was just shy of fifteen was to tell her everything, and that wasn’t something he was prepared to do.

“Charlie.” Jack caught her hands in his. “I asked you a question.”

She frowned and mumbled under her breath. “What?”

“Where did you hear that?”

Jutting her bottom lip out like a dock over a lake, she huffed.

“That’s too bad,” Jack told her. “You brought it up, so now you answer my question.”

“No,” she muttered. “I don’t want to.”

“I’m not giving you a choice. Now, you tell me where you heard that before you get yourself into trouble.”

Charlie shook her head.

“Why not?”

“Because he’ll be mad,” Charlie murmured.

Jack’s mouth went sour. He tasted blood.

“Who?” he asked.

Again, Charlie shook her head in denial. Jack dropped the rinse cup into the water.

“Fine. No more ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’.”

Charlie’s mouth fell open in an O-shape. Her eyes went wide in disbelief. Jack pulled the stopper to the tub and the water began to drain, swirling into a siphoning whirlpool of soap and shampoo. He grabbed Charlie’s Spongebob towel off of its holder, dropped it onto the toilet and caught Charlie beneath her soapy armpits. As soon as her wet feet hit the bathmat her eyes were welling up with tears.

“Not ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’?” she asked in a whisper. Her bottom lip trembled.

Jack stuck to his threat and said nothing more about it, toweling Charlie off with silent discipline.

“Fine!” she yelled. “It was Mr. Scratch. He’s the one who told me. He knows everything, and now he knows I told you and he’s not going to let me sleep ever again.”

Jack wrapped the towel around her and paused, trying to read her expression. She was upset with herself, as though asking her dad about his running away had been against the rules in the first place, whatever those rules may have been.

“Who’s Mr. Scratch?” Jack asked, but he already knew the answer. He’d seen Mr. Scratch the night he had popped his head into the girls’ room to make sure all was well—he’d seen that shadow perched in the corner of the room. It was the same shadow that balanced at the foot of his bed when he was a kid—the shadow with needle-point teeth and a jagged smile.

“He says he knows you,” she whispered. “He says you guys are friends.”

A shiver shot down Jack’s spine. He felt his skin crawl with the memory of pulling his sheets over his head, hiding from the demon that watched him while he slept.

“What does he want?” he asked, suddenly ten again. Tell him to get out of here, he wanted to tell her. Tell him to leave me alone.

Charlie shifted her weight from foot to foot, weighing her options, considering her answer. Finally, she looked up at her dad with a sad sort of smile.

“He’s here to play,” she told him. “He said he isn’t leaving until someone wins.”

Jack had suffered for four years. The afternoon he saw those eyes beyond the branches of cemetery trees had changed everything: his youth, his mind, his family. Had he known what lay in store while sitting among the headstones that day, he’d never have set foot beyond that rusty wrought iron fence. Had he had the slightest hint of the distant future—of his own family, his own children and the curse he’d put upon them—he would have done more than just run away. How a ten-year-old went about suicide was a mystery, but Jack was a resourceful boy. If he could have glimpsed the future, he would have found a way.

After Gilda’s cooking accident, she kept a wide berth when it came to her son. Even though Jack had been in the living room when the fire started, she knew it had been him. She saw something lingering behind the gray of Jack’s eyes. It swirled beneath that stormy hue, like ink coiling through water, like fog crawling across the marsh. Her insistence that doctors diagnose his condition faded into silent defeat. And when she dared tell Stephen that she was afraid of their only child, she was sure she appeared insane. Strange things never happened around Stephen. Gilda was the one who saw the darkness, who battled fires and found cats swinging in trees. Stephen only heard the stories, and there was only so much he was willing to believe.

By the time Jack turned fourteen, his mother hardly spoke to him. The woman who had once been content to stay home and watch soaps between loads of laundry and batches of Hamburger Helper was now working sixty hours a week just to keep herself out of the house. She couldn’t bear spending time at home, especially when Stephen was at work and Jack was home.

Thrust into solitary confinement, isolation didn’t do much to cure Jack. He spent hours laying on his bed, staring up at the ceiling until his eyes blurred. He’d zone out on the couch only to find himself in a different part of the house hours later. The longer he spent alone the less he could remember.

During one of Gilda’s late night waitressing shifts, she looked out the window while refilling a customer’s cup of coffee and saw her son standing in the parking lot. Staring at the diner, he was waiting for her to finish her shift, waiting for her to walk outside so he could finally do away with her. At least that’s what she told herself. She snuck into the stock room and tried to call Stephen. When she couldn’t reach him, she peeked back out into that lot. Jack was gone.

Stephen insisted she hallucinated the whole thing. It was the only logical explanation. The diner was a good dozen miles from the house. Jack didn’t have access to a car, let alone have a license. But she just about had a heart attack when she spotted him standing under the same light post the next night. To assure herself she wasn’t losing her mind, she asked a big guy in a John Deere cap if he saw the kid in the parking lot too.

“Yep,” the trucker said. “Looks like a loon to me.”

And he was right: Jack looked insane. He stood in that sickly yellow lamplight with his arms straight down his sides. His chin was tucked against his chest, and the ridges above his eyes cast an eerie shadow across his face—more like a skull than a boy.

Jack appeared the night after that as well. One of the girls nearly called the police before being stopped by a fellow waitress.

“Better not call the cops,” she said. “That’s Gilda’s boy.”

“Well what’s he doing just standing there like that?” asked the other. “He looks like he’s thinking about shooting up the place.”

If Jack could stash a gun in a pair of drawstring pajama pants, he very well might have shot up the place, just like they said.

The cops eventually got called, but not by the girls at the diner. The Winters received the call at three AM on a Sunday. Jack had been found standing on the town pastor’s lawn looking like he ready to slit someone’s throat. Worried for his wife and kids, the pastor called the police. Jack lashed out at them when they finally arrived. The sheriff had explained to a groggy Stephen that his son had been ‘acting crazy’. Like a wild animal, he had said. Like nothing I’d seen in all my days.

Stephen arrived at the police station and found his son in a cell all his own. They’d locked him up by himself to protect the few town drunks, afraid he would have twisted their necks the wrong way round.

“I know it sounds crazy,” the sheriff told Stephen, “but that boy didn’t seem human. He looked like the Devil had gone ahead and eaten his soul right out of his body.”

When Gilda caught wind of what happened, she refused to sleep under the same roof.

“I don’t care what you do with him,” she told him. “That isn’t my son. Look at his eyes, Steve. That isn’t Jack. That’s something else.”

That night, Stephen boarded up Jack’s bedroom window from the outside. He secured the door with two-by-fours and kept vigil by sleeping in an old recliner he’d dragged into the hall. Gilda tried to sleep across the house, but all she could do was cry. They had decided it would be the last night their son would be in the house, and she couldn’t even spend it with him the way a mother should.

Jack slept in the next morning. It had taken him hours to slip into a fitful and restless sleep, battling demons even in unconsciousness. He pulled the sheets over his head when the sunlight crept across his pillow through the blinds, but the smell of sizzling bacon yanked him out of bed like a fish on a hook.

Aimee was standing at the stove, humming under her breath. It should have comforted him, but her humming did little more than shoot a chill down his back. He pictured her turning to say good morning only to see his mother’s face—red and scorched and melting, torched by boiling oil. Jack grimaced, and Aimee turned at the perfect moment to catch his expression.

“What?” she asked. “You don’t want breakfast?”

Jack forced a tired smile and slouched in one of the kitchen chairs. “Breakfast sounds good,” he told her, pressing his face into his hands as exhaustion crept in.

“You were tossing and turning all night,” Aimee said. “Did you get any sleep?”

“Hardly.”

“Maybe you should call in,” she suggested, and Jack found himself considering it. He never missed work. Skipping out on the shop sounded far more appealing than welding on zero sleep.

“I was thinking…” Aimee set his breakfast in front of him before taking her usual seat. “Maybe we can do some grown-up stuff today, just the two of us. You know, like normal people.”

Jack plucked his fork off the table and dug into his breakfast.

“I thought that maybe we could go to some dealerships, check out a few cars.”

Jack hated using Arnold’s Olds and Aimee knew it. Yet, amid the recent chaos, visiting the car salesman had been put off indefinitely. Letting someone try to swindle them out of their money would be a refreshing change of pace.

“And then we could go get lunch in town somewhere,” she suggested. “Maybe Bijou?”

It all sounded fantastic. They’d be a childless, worry-free couple for a handful of hours. For half a day their problems would be pushed to the background, and maybe that’s all it would take—half a day to reestablish their sanity, to regroup and refresh and find their way back to the life they used to have.

But chaos had a way of finding them.

Before they had a chance to leave the house, the phone rang and their plans changed.

“That was the school.” Aimee cocked a hip against the bathroom door while Jack rinsed shaving cream from his face. “Charlie’s in trouble.”

Instead of the car lot, they ended up in the principal’s office. She was a stern-looking woman—the kind of woman who was born to discipline small children. Mrs. Hutchins sat at her desk with her hands folded in front of her. She eyed Charlie’s parents with ferocious curiosity—a gaze heavy with judgment—before she finally spoke.

“Mr. and Mrs. Winter, we’ve had an incident.”

Incident: Jack hated that word. It made him think of worst-case scenarios. He pictured Charlie burying school children in the sand beneath the monkey bars, or poisoning the school lunch by sprinkling rat poison into the mashed potatoes.

“What kind of an incident?” Aimee asked, tugging on her bottom lip.

“Charlotte interrupted an exam this morning,” Mrs. Hutchins explained. “The children were in the middle of taking a vocabulary test when Charlie began to shake her desk.”

Jack and Aimee glanced at one another.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Mrs. Hutchins continued. “And I’ll admit, the idea of a child as small as Charlotte being able to shake her desk while sitting in it is, well, a bit like a magic trick. But her teacher insists it happened. She said the desk was shaking like an old washer on its spin cycle.”

“How can that be possible?” Aimee asked. Mrs. Hutchins shook her head, unfolding her hands to show Aimee that she didn’t have a solid answer.

“Mrs. Winter, I’m not a physicist, I’m an elementary school principal. All I know is that Charlotte disrupted an entire class, and when she was asked to stop she continued, which resulted in my calling you here today.”

“Did anything else happen?” Jack asked after a moment. “Other than the desk?” Like spinning heads and homicide?

Mrs. Hutchins cleared her throat and raised an eyebrow. “Funny you should ask,” she said. “Shortly after Charlotte was told to come see me she had an outburst.”

“An outburst,” Jack repeated.

“She called her teacher a name,” Mrs. Hutchins explained. “A vulgar name… one that I’d rather not imagine her learning at home.”

“What did she say?” he asked, but Hutchins snorted at his question.

“Mr. Winter, I’m not about to repeat profanity, even if it came from a six-year-old girl.”

“She’s been having problems,” Aimee explained. “We’ve taken her to a therapist.”

“I see.” Hutchins sounded less than interested. “Mr. and Mrs. Winter, under advice from Charlotte’s teacher, we feel that Charlotte should take a few days off.”

“A few days off?” Aimee shook her head. “Charlie just missed a few days last week. She can’t take any more time off of school. It’s just—”

“Unfortunately, the decision has already been made.”

Aimee’s eyes lit up with defiance. “Are you suspending my daughter?” she challenged.

“We don’t like to call it a suspension,” Hutchins explained. “It’s just a break until Monday.”

Incensed, Aimee stood with a glare. “She needs normalcy,” she said. “Something that you’re about to deny her.” Hutchins opened her mouth to offer a rebuttal, but Aimee cut her off mid-breath. “If my daughter’s condition worsens because of this little ‘break’…” She paused, considering her words carefully. “I’ll hold you personally responsible.”

Again, Hutchins was about to speak, but Aimee persisted.

“We may not have a lot of money, and maybe that’s where you get off,” she said. “I’m sure you have a picture-perfect house built off stolen lunch money, but let’s make one thing perfectly clear.”

Jack blinked at his wife. He was stunned into stillness.

“If this affects Charlotte badly, you’ll be hearing from my lawyer—and I don’t have a lawyer, Mrs. Hutchins, but believe me when I say I’ll hire one. I’ll pay one just to help me dig your grave.”

Aimee turned on the balls of her feet and marched out of the office, leaving Jack to stare at a wide-eyed principal left speechless in Aimee Winter’s wake. Jack slowly rose from his seat, cleared his throat, and offered Hutchins a slight nod.

“Have a nice day,” he told her, then rushed to follow after Aimee, desperate to get out of that office before the laughter burst from his throat.

Aimee was livid, and her anger didn’t stop with the principal. As soon as Charlie was strapped into her seat and the Oldsmobile was rolling along the street, she launched into a tirade that extended to both her husband and daughter.

“What were you thinking?” she snapped at Charlie. “During a test, Charlie? Are you serious?”

“I didn’t do anything!” Charlie insisted, but Aimee was too angry to listen. She turned her attention to Jack instead.

“And you,” she began. “You just sat there and took that woman’s bullshit.”

“You handled the situation like a champ,” he told her, but it just made Aimee more upset.

“That isn’t the point and you know it. The point is that I shouldn’t have had to handle the situation. You’re the man. You’re the one who’s supposed to stand up to that… that tyrant.”

“Charlie interrupted the entire class,” Jack reminded her.

“I didn’t do it!” Charlie yelled from the backseat.

“Are you taking her side?” Aimee looked flabbergasted. “You think this is the right course of action?”

“I’m not saying it’s the right course of action…”

“It certainly sounds like that’s what you’re saying.”

“What’s done is done. Maybe this is a good thing.”

“A good thing? Charlie missing more school is a good thing? Please explain to me how that’s possible.”

“I don’t know how it’s a good thing,” he told her. “I’m just trying to be optimistic.”

“Well thank you for that bit of sunshine, but your optimism isn’t going to fix things,” she told him, and she was right. He could hope for the best, he could convince Aimee and maybe even himself that Charlie was having some sort of mental break, he could even tell himself that it was all in his head, that he was the one who was imagining things, replaying his own childhood nightmare like some TV rerun. But none of that would change anything. Nothing he did would save Charlie from what he knew was torturing her. Nothing would save her because nothing had saved him.

The realization hit him head-on, like a bullet train on a one-way track. Steering the car toward the house, he was suddenly overtaken by a wave of nausea that threatened to choke him. The cabin of the Olds became claustrophobic. He felt a scream claw its way up his throat, threatening to punch its way through his teeth. His heart threw itself against his ribcage, desperately trying to escape the prison of his chest.

He drove the rest of the way home in a fugue state, not sure how he managed to get them there in one piece, not sure how Aimee hadn’t noticed the cold sweat that had bloomed across his forehead. Charlie sprinted across the lawn and into the house. Aimee followed shortly after, leaving Jack alone in the car. He couldn’t bring himself to step outside. Frozen in his seat, he was terrified by his bitter epiphany. He was going to lose his daughter and he couldn’t do anything to stop it. And he knew that because it had already happened twenty years earlier.