Typically, at the end of a school day, Benno would walk from the high school building down the hill to the elementary school to pick up Nick, and together they would walk to the faculty parking lot and drive home together. Sometimes they’d talk about their days, sometimes they’d listen to music—Benno so badly wanted Nick to appreciate 90s rock—and sometimes they’d just sit in silence. However it went, Benno cherished these windows with his son, all to himself.

On a Tuesday afternoon in May—two and a half months after the Close Call, as Benno had come to think of it—he made the usual walk down the hill to fetch Nick. He passed a few of his students, all piling into a car, who nodded at him and then laughed loudly once he’d passed. A terrace of silver nimbostratus clouds gathered over the hills to the east, reaching down in long columns like an upside down city.

Nick was usually waiting for Benno outside the elementary school entrance. But today he was not. Benno walked inside and scanned the hall. A handful of children loitered by the lockers, and Mrs. Oswold, Nick’s history teacher, waved to Benno on her way from a classroom to the faculty lounge. No sign of Nick. Benno glanced at his watch. It was 3:15pm, precisely at the usual time. Maybe he’d gone to the bathroom.

Benno paced along the wall opposite the lockers, where a wall-length mural depicted autumnal woods below a setting sun, and mountains in the distance, and a lake in the foreground along the shore of which a simplified version of the school building stood, a pink neon sign on its eave, styled like the marquee over an old casino:

SHRINEKILL ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

Benno had never really looked at the mural before. It had been there for years—painted, if he recalled correctly, by an art teacher who retired before Nick was even born—and Benno had seen it so many times he’d stopped seeing it. Now, peering at it, he noticed a curious shape standing at one of the school building’s second-story windows. A figure, silhouetted, with an elongated head that might have been a tall hat. But the craftsmanship was imperfect—done by an elementary school art teacher after all—and it was likely that in painting the head they had simply erred, and smudged it, and made it look longer than intended.

After several minutes, Benno poked his head into the bathroom. The lights were already off, and the smell of bleach overwhelmed him. He backed out, then stood in the hall. Had he forgotten something? Did Nick have a playdate he’d space on? Was Kay picking him up today? He had after school piano lessons in the music room on Wednesdays. Did it get rescheduled?

The music teacher, Brooke Stern, was alone in the music room stacking chairs. When Benno entered she looked up, frowned for a moment, then smiled and covered her mouth, self-conscious, Benno assumed, about food in her teeth.

“Hey,” she said.

Benno drummed his fingers on the door. “Sorry to bother you. I’m looking for Nick.”

Brooke frowned. “Wait. What day is it?”

“No it’s Tuesday. I just figured maybe he was here.”

“Oh.” Brooke stacked another chair, then leaned on the piano and closed one eye. “I saw his friends, Danny and Luca, heading toward the gym a little bit ago. I don’t think he was with them, but you can check.”

“Yeah, I’ll do that.”

Brooke smiled, again covering her mouth. Benno hadn’t really noticed before, but she looked a bit like Kay. Almost ten years younger, not quite as pretty, but undeniable. His eyes wandered to her hand, and her bare ring finger.

“Everything else okay?” she asked, drawing his eyes back up.

“Everything else is great.” Benno drummed his fingers on the door again, nodded, and backed into the hall.

He glanced out front again to confirm Nick was not waiting for him, then headed toward the gym. He should call Kay. She might know where Nick was. At the very least she should know he was missing. Though he wasn’t missing. He just wasn’t where he was supposed to be. A missing child was something different. A missing child was a crisis, a nightmare. This was neither of those. This was just a moment.

Basketball practice was underway in the gym, junior varsity. Again, Nick was nowhere to be seen. Benno passed through along the wall and into the locker room. There were clothes scattered about, backpacks and sneakers piled on benches and outside lockers. No sign of Nick or Nick’s friends. But there was a sound. From deeper in the locker room, toward the showers. A strained, wet sound. Gagging. And hushed voices.

Benno’s sneakers squeaked on the tiles. The nearer he got, the clearer the voices became. He recognized one—Danny Meldmann’s—by its distinct lisp. Danny and Nick had been friends since kindergarten. The two of them, along with Luca Allen, were essentially inseparable.

As Benno stepped into the showers, he saw Danny first, standing with his hands drawn to his chin, his skinny body tensed, his eyes rapt with fear. Luca’s back was pressed against the wall. His eyes were also wide—bulging—but not with fear. With panic. A gurgling sound rolled through his open mouth, and his hands clenched the forearms attached to the hands that squeezed his throat.

Nick choked Luca so hard he shook. His teeth gritted, the nib of his tongue protruding through the gap where he’d recently lost two teeth side-by-side. His little brow was bent steeply over his eyes. It was an expression of focus and rage Benno had never seen his son’s face make. He looked like someone Benno had never met in his life.

For a moment, Benno was stricken still and silent. Then Danny saw him, and his wide eyes widened further.

“Nick…” he said, patting Nick’s back.

Nick ignored him. His hands flexed around his friend’s throat.

He’s trying to kill him, Benno thought.

“Nick.” Danny repeated.

Nick let out a groan of exertion, his knuckles white. Luca’s eyes fluttered, and his knees started to buckle.

Benno’s shock finally shattered. “Nick!” he roared, charging up to his son.

Nick startled, and his hands released.

Luca stumbled, caught himself against the wall, and took a raspy, shuttering breath.

“What are you doing!?” Benno seized Nick by the arm.

Nick let out a yelp.

Danny had retreated to the other side of the room, his hands still clasped at his chin.

Luca lurched along the wall, blinking deeply as if to retrieve his vision.

“Answer me!” Benno shook Nick by the arm, feeling the soft bone jounce in his grasp. “What are you thinking!?”

Nick gawped up at his father. For a moment it seemed he might cry, his lower lip protruded, his eyes overwhelmed. But then his lips tightened, and his eyes hardened, and he swatted at Benno’s hand. “Get off of me!” His voice cracked. “You’re hurting me!”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Benno gripped harder, half out of anger, half out of reflex as the thing in his grasp tried to wrestle free. A decomposed memory rose up from the soil of his mind: his own father, stinking of whiskey, toppled from his wheelchair, seething and clutching Benno’s ankle as Benno, no older than eighteen, kicked his anemic grip free, effortlessly, as one might kick away a dried, fallen leaf from one’s shoe.

“Help!” Nick screamed at the top of his lungs. “Help me!!!”

Benno released his son’s arm, and the boy fell backward onto the shower’s tile.

Help me up… Benno’s father had hissed, his chapped lips scraping together.

Benno reached down and took ahold of his son, this time by the shoulders, and hauled him to his feet.

Help me up…

“What is wrong with you?”

Nick blinked, obstinate and scared. “We were playing.” His voice was barely audible.

“You could have fucking killed him!”

Danny made a noise, a precursor to some statement that never came.

Benno looked over at Luca, who now appeared, more-or-less, fine. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Luca said, his voice hoarse. “We really were just playing.”

Nick laughed. It was a sound Benno had never heard him make. Tinny, arrogant, flippant. It was not a sound his child made.

“Come on.” Benno led Nick by the shoulder out of the locker room, through the gym, back down the hall—where Mrs. Oswold, now returning from the faculty lounge to her classroom, gave them wide berth—and outside to the faculty parking lot. He guided Nick into the backseat and slammed the door. On his way to the drivers side he looked up, where the silver nimbostratus clouds had climbed high into the sky.

“Do you know how dangerous that was?” Benno asked once they were on the road. “Do you know what could have happened?”

Nick’s face was just outside the frame of the rearview mirror.“Please,” he said finally, his voice small—normal again—the voice of a child Benno recognized. “Don’t tell mom.”

Benno saw his father crawling, gaunt and tremulous, across the floor. His knurled fingers pawed at the carpet. Someday, Benno would look like him.

Help me up.

#

The next day, Sasha Allen—Luca’s mother—called Kay. Benno hadn’t had a chance yet to decide what or whether to tell her had happened. He was of two minds: One understood that he should not keep secrets with his eight-year-old son from his son’s mother. The other acknowledged that the situation might sound worse than it was, and he didn’t want to cause Kay—or by extension Nick—any needless anxiety. Benno remembered when he was a child, rough housing with his friends, exploring one another’s strength and influence. Benno had been a little boy. Kay had not. She would panic. The situation did not call for panic. Everything, ultimately, was fine.

But the phone call from Sasha threw all this internal debate out the window. Kay stepped into the kitchen doorway while Benno loaded the dishwasher, her expression a terrible blankness. From the other room: the sound of Nick’s video games.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Kay asked softly.

Benno shut the dishwasher door and dried his hands. He could have said a million things: He could have played dumb and asked what she was talking about, bought himself some time; he could have brushed it off—I didn’t want to worry you—or blamed the other boys; he could have disarmed her with a profuse apology—I should have told you, I’m sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking. He could have said any of these thing. But instead he just shrugged.

“We have a big problem,” Kay said.

“It was just boys rough housing,” Benno said, opting to brush it off, feeling his heart kick up preemptively in anticipation of an argument.

“Maybe,” Kay said, still soft, her face still blank. “But that’s not what I’m talking about.”

From the other room, the volume on Nick’s video games crackled with a spate of gunfire. At their wedding, Kay and Benno had gotten so drunk that neither remembered the end of the night. In the photos, they’d both been smiling so broadly that their eyes were barely open. For years afterward it was a running joke; they’d open the photo album and laugh at themselves, at their youthfulness, at their glee. Back then, in love, there was negative space between them. Benno hadn’t been able to distinguish where he ended and Kay began.

Now—Benno by the dishwasher, Kay in the doorway—Nick cursed loudly from the other room, a word he knew better than to say.

#

In August of the same year, Benno had a strange dream.

A pair of eyes looked up at him, illuminated by a low, flickering candle. They were round—perfectly round—and lidless, and the whites were swollen severely around the constricted pupils. Nothing else could be seen in the dark.

And a stench, like sick and unwashed flesh.

Benno was suspended. Somehow. And naked. Recipient padded along below him, his long body essing like a sea monster through the black surface of a lake.

Then, behind the terrible gaping eyes, a door shook.

Thd-thud…

Benno could not move. His feet dangled off the floor.

Thd-thud…

Recipient fled into the dark.

Wait. Benno followed him with his eyes until he couldn’t any longer. Wait.

Thd-thud…

Thd-thud.

Thd-thud. Thd-thud. Thd-thud thd-thud thd-thud-thd-thud—

Benno awoke without opening his eyes.

I’m in a shed, he thought, though the thought dissolved into nothing as he awoke further.

His breath was stale and his head ached. He wanted to sleep more, but after several minutes he found he was wide awake. He opened his eyes, and for a moment he didn’t know where he was. A room that was not his room, unfamiliar smells and sharp-angled shadows. He sat up, and it all came back to him.

The guest room. Where he’d been sleeping for the last six weeks. The digital clock on the bedside table read 4:51a.m. It was a Saturday. It was August. He didn’t have to work. He had no reason to be out of bed.

Downstairs he found Recipient sitting on the windowsill looking out into the backyard, his orange eyes reflected in the glass, his long tail pendulating. The glass triangle on the cat’s collar, also reflected in the glass, seemed to cast a faint, flickering light. Like a candle.

There was a sound in the kitchen, which at first Benno mistook for a chain dragging on the floor but which he quickly realized was the ice maker. There were some papers scattered across the kitchen table, and Benno sorted through them while the coffee brewed, his hands shaking faintly—just faintly: opened and unpaid bills, a catalogue for swimwear, a menu for the Chinese restaurant they ordered from once a week, a permission slip for a field trip to the Natural History Museum, a thick envelope from Amnesty International, a packet of stapled papers from an attorney’s office.

He frowned at the packet. The Law Office of Jonathan F. Vetrano. To the Attention of Katherine Altabeth Haim. This legal services retainer Agreement…to represent you in family law related matters…Client gives Attorney the right to take all steps in this case…including the attempt to negotiate a resolution of the matter…to resolve some or all…custody…alimony…child support…division of property…

Benno covered the packet with the permission slip, the menu, the catalogue and the bills, poured a splash of whiskey into his coffee, and left through the back door to stand among the copse in the warm predawn.

#

Nick got in a fight his first week of fifth grade.

The details were murky, but it was serious enough that Benno and Kay—along with the other boy’s parents—were called into Principal Clavell’s office in the middle of the day. This meant Kay was forced to leave work, and Benno was forced to ask Frank Talib to sub his fourth period Bio class. The disruption was alarming on its own, but upon entering Clavell’s office and seeing Nick with a black eye and a busted lip—and the other boy, who Benno didn’t know, with a bloody nose and scratch marks on his cheek—both sitting side-by-side against the office’s wall and glowering at the floor, Benno’s palms broke out in cold sweat, Kay stiffened visibly, and the other boy’s parents let out matching sounds of disdain.

“It doesn’t matter who started it,” Clavell said mostly to Benno. He’d met her a handful of times at faculty meetings and school-wide functions, and considered her kind and reasonable. But today, for reasons he couldn’t process in the moment, he hated her. “We’re going to issue suspensions for both boys, for the remainder of the week.”

“That’s ridiculous,” said the other boy’s father. “We need to know the details about what happened. It isn’t fair to penalize them both if one of them is more at fault.”

“I agree,” said the other boy’s mother.

Kay shifted in her seat. Benno could not stop his leg from jouncing.

Principal Clavell tapped one long fingernail on her desk thrice, then sat back. She turned to the far wall, where the two boys continued to stare at the floor. “Matthew? Do you want to tell us what happened?”

The other boy—Matthew—looked up at Clavell, then from his father to his mother, and his eyes filled with tears. His nose was starting to swell across his face like a slow spill. “I didn’t do anything,” he said, his voice small and earnest. “Nick pushed me outside the bathroom. I don’t know why. We never talk. We’re not even in any classes together.”

Clavell glanced at Benno, then looked at Nick. “Is this true?”

Nick’s own leg began to jounce, in near perfect sync with his father’s. “I don’t know.”

“Nick!” Kay sat forward, one hand gripping the chair’s arm. “You need to explain yourself this instant.”

Nick looked up. For the first time in his life—behind his swollen eye and his scabbing lips—he looked more like Benno than Kay. It was undeniable. A scale had tipped. Benno had wondered when, if ever, it might happen, and secretly feared it wouldn’t. But now—and why here and in these circumstances this transformation insisted on occurring—it felt suddenly cruel and regretful. Kay had enjoyed a resemblance to their son for eight years while he was sweet and small and perfect. Why should Benno have to inherit him now once he’d already outgrown the best version of himself…

He shut his thoughts off, realizing he was touching his stomach, which throbbed, and looked around the room, surprised to find five and a half pairs of eyes all watching him, expectant, as if there was something he was supposed to be doing.