John Hart - Iron House

Three days of doubt and uncertainty.

Three days of hell.

She crossed the threshold and closed the door. Inside, the dark was a shock to her eyes, a blackness that was nearly complete. Heavy curtains hung over windows that opened to the lakes below. No lamps burned. Warm air pressed her skin as she put her back to the door and dug deep for the courage to force a smile before turning on the lights. She was a mother first, and found the weight of Julian’s collapse nearly unbearable. Wounded and unsure, he’d been a delicate child from the first, a boy prone to night terrors and doubt. Yet, she’d worked hard to make him whole, first for months and then years, until fixing the broken parts of Julian had become her resolve and her religion. She’d given all she could: education and activity, love and patience and strength, and in many ways it had worked, for as weak as he was, as scarred and bereft, Julian had always found the will to endure. He’d overcome the trauma of his childhood, the loss of his brother, and the mark of long years at Iron Mountain. He’d become an artist and a poet, a children’s author, successful in his own right. To the world at large, he was a man of deep feeling and nuance, but in his heart, Abigail knew, Julian remained little more than a shattered boy, the brittle precipitate of the things he’d endured. It was a secret they kept, dark matter buried deep.

“Julian?”

Her eyes began to adjust. To her right, the bed was dark and flat and empty. Furniture made vague, humped shapes in the room, while from somewhere deeper, a dull, rapping sound made itself heard.

“Julian?”

There were two more thumps, and then the sound stopped. Something moved in a far corner.

“I’m going to turn on a light. You might want to cover your eyes.”

She shuffled to the bedside table and clicked on a small lamp, a Tiffany piece whose soft light touched a pale yellow rug and cream-colored baseboards beneath walls papered French blue with gold fleur-de-lis. Shadows gathered under furniture, and she saw Julian, hunched in the corner beyond the bed. His hair was unwashed, his face buried in knees drawn to his chest. His pants were stained with mud and grass, his shirt untucked and greasy at the collar. Clean clothes sat in neat piles, but he refused to touch them. He refused to eat. Refused to drink.

“Good morning, sweetheart.” Abigail moved closer, and Julian pushed into the corner. He clenched his arms more tightly, and in the light she saw that gauze wrapped his hands. The fabric extended from his wrists to the tips of his fingers, tightly wrapped except at the edges, where it had begun to tear and fray. Blood soaked through at the knuckles, red stains on white, and on the walls around him-on all the walls-blood discolored the fine, blue paper. Where Julian huddled, the blood was fresh and wet, while farther away it had dried to thin smears of rust-colored ink.

Abigail froze when she saw how wet the bandages were, how stained the walls. This was something terrible and new: damaged hands and bloodstained walls. She asked why, but had no answer; looked for reason and saw only madness. She turned a circle, barbs of fear hooked in the walls of her chest, the strings of her will simply cut. The marks went as high as the ceiling, as low as the floor. The walls were dashed with red and rust and questions she could not bear.

She sank to her knees and put her hands on those of her son. “Julian.”

The bandages were warm and wet.

My baby…

Ten minutes later, Abigail found her husband in the study, reading the Washington Post , half-glasses on his nose, mouth slightly open. Behind him, French doors showcased the formal gardens and the pool house beyond.

Randall Vane looked good under his silver hair. He was sixty-nine, wide-shouldered and tall enough to carry some extra weight. He had a strong nose and green eyes that worked well with the silver hair. Leonine, he’d once been called; it was a word he favored.

Leonine.

Lion-like.

Abigail entered without knocking. She felt nothing physical as she walked, neither her feet nor the smears of blood that her son’s bandages had left on her cheeks. She felt the ache of Julian’s eyes and the memory of heat in his wounded hands. She stopped at the desk’s edge, her fingers pressed white on the wood. “Julian needs a doctor.” Her voice shook, and she thought she might be in shock. Randall lowered the paper, took off his glasses. He considered her appearance: the fine nose chiseled white at the nostrils, the large eyes, and the once-plump lips drawn tight. His gaze traveled to the man’s coat she wore and the muddy pants beneath it. “It’s getting worse,” she said.

“Whose coat are you wearing?”

“It’s getting worse.”

She put the force of her will behind her words, and, hearing that force, Senator Randall Vane leaned back in his chair, folded the newspaper, and dropped it on the desk. The shirt pulled across his broad chest, the swell of his stomach. His face was ruddy, his teeth impossibly white. The cuffs of his shirt were monogrammed with pale, blue thread. “What do you mean?”

“Julian is harming himself.”

The senator laced thick fingers and rested them on his stomach. His voice came smoothly. “It started last night. I don’t know when.”

“Where is Mrs. Hamilton? Julian should be with someone he knows and loves.”

“I found Mrs. Hamilton asleep in the hall.”

“She helped raise him, Randall. If I’m not there, she is. That was our deal. How could you send her away without bringing me there first?”

“She was sleeping on the job while Julian beat his hands bloody. I sent her to bed and brought in someone I can trust.”

“What happened to my son, Randall?”

The senator rocked forward in his chair, big elbows landing on the desk. “He started hitting the walls. What else can I tell you? We don’t know why. He just did it. He was already bleeding when I went to check on him. He could have been doing it for hours.”

“And you didn’t come get me?”

“Come get you where, exactly?” His eyes drove the knife home, and Abigail looked away, angry and ashamed. “You ran out in the middle of our discussion.”

“Our argument.”

“Argument. Discussion. No matter. You were not to be found and I was left to deal with Julian. We bandaged his hands, sedated him. The injuries are minor. We’re watching him.”

“He needs a doctor.”

“I disagree.”

“He hasn’t spoken since he came home. We don’t know where he’s been, what happened to him…”

“It’s only been a few days. We agreed-”

“We did not.”

“We agreed to give him time to come out of this on his own. He’s upset about something. Fine. It happens to all of us. There’s no point in blowing this out of proportion. It’s probably just a girl, some sweet young thing that broke his heart.”

“He’s injuring himself.”

“Doctors keep records, Abigail. And records can be leaked.”

“Please don’t make this about you.”

“He’s a political liability.”

“He’s your son.”

It was an old argument, the line drawn when Julian was a boy. He had trouble looking people in the eyes, and rarely shook hands or allowed himself to be touched. Even now, he was painfully shy, so reticent he did poorly with people he did not know well. To complicate matters further, the books he wrote were as dark as could be and still be for children. They dealt with difficult themes: death and betrayal and fear, the pain of childhood’s end. Critics often remarked that a distinct godlessness characterized his stories, and because of that, some conservative communities had banned his books, even burned them. The power of his artistry and storytelling, however, was undeniable, so powerful, in fact, that few could read them without being emotionally challenged in some meaningful way. So, while in some circles he was demonized, in others he was celebrated as an artist of the highest order. His own explanation was simple: The world is cruel and children can be stronger than they know . Yet, his books, like life, did not always end well. Children died. Parents failed. Telling children less, he’d often said, would be cruelty of a different sort .