Fear Collector

CHAPTER 39

There were a lot of things Jeremy Howell would like to forget. For a time, he really tried. He thought that if he took prescription drugs from his mother’s stash in the kitchen cupboard (behind the iodine and bandages-no matter how many times he’d hurt himself, she’d never seemed to be able to find those first-aid supplies). He’d once read that electroshock therapy had been used to literally jolt the memories from those haunted by things they could not escape. One time in the basement, he cut the cord off of an old desk lamp, thinking that he could attach the loose wires to his temple and somehow get relief. He didn’t go that far. He was too afraid that if there was anything good inside him, that, too, would be obliterated. In time, Jeremy came to understand that there were things that were etched so deeply in his memory that he could not erase them no matter how hard he tried.

He was only twelve the first time.

It was autumn and the chill of the tail end of October came at him like a thousand tiny pins stabbing his body. His mother had always insisted that it was healthier for her son to sleep with the windows open, but Jeremy, who always felt cold, didn’t agree. No matter how many times he told her, she insisted she knew best. She was like that. Always right. Always the first one to say that she was the expert and that he was her student. Over time he acquiesced. One night when the temperature outside had dipped below freezing, Jeremy got up, shivering, and went to secure the window, open as usual. He shut it as quietly as he could and he dropped the shades to the windowsill and returned to his bed. He wore no clothes, a habit that Peggy had forced on him when he wet the bed in first grade. It had only been one time, but Peggy raged at him as if he’d been the greatest disappointment that any mother on the planet could have.

He was weak.

He was a failure.

“Only a big baby wets the bed. I won’t be cleaning up after you again. Strip. Take off your wet PJs. You’re never going to do this to me again,” she had said in her harsh, gravelly voice. She never soothed. She just didn’t have it in her.

Jeremy, as always, did as he was told. He’d learned long before that morning to fear his mother when she yelled at him. To disobey her was to be sent to the basement, to the bunker-like space that she’d created for him. She called it the “Time Out” room. Whenever he was been sent there to reflect on how much of a disappointment he was to her, he felt his hate for her swell. Hate and fear. With his mother, those emotions went hand in hand.

But that night, when he was twelve, Peggy Howell crossed the line-albeit a squiggly line, because she was never exactly consistent with her edicts. Her rules and admonishments fluctuated like the Northwest weather. All of her warnings, rules, and edicts raced around Jeremy’s head as he slipped between the sheets and the heavy dark wool army surplus blanket.

What happened next, he never told anyone. He didn’t want anyone to make a big deal out of it. He had plenty of reasons to want to destroy his mother, but what she did that night was not one of them.

It was late and he was asleep, curled up on the edge of the bed, lying on his side. The mattress moved a little and Jeremy opened his eyes. Someone was with him. He could feel the presence of another person. His heartbeat amplified. He noticed a beam of light under the covers, piercing the darkness.

It was his mother. She was under the blanket with a flashlight.

What was she doing?

He inched away. She didn’t touch him. She was looking at his naked body. It was wrong. Sick. Creepy. And though it was all of those things, Jeremy didn’t say a word. It was as if he were wrapped in flypaper, unable to move, to speak.

He thought she was going to touch him, there. But she didn’t. Not that time. She simply turned off the flashlight, put her feet on the floor, and left the bedroom. A sliver of light flashed from the hallway.

Although not yet a teenager, Jeremy had no doubts whatsoever something was very, very wrong with his mother.

He just didn’t know what it was.

The next time Peggy Howell cozied up to her son, he was fifteen. Again, it was very late at night. It was spring and the smell of lilacs blooming outside wafted from the open window. After that night, Jeremy would never to be able to smell that sweet, heady fragrance without gagging. This time, Peggy dropped her robe before climbing into his bed. She pushed her naked body next to the teenager, close, but again, not touching.

“Ted, tell me you love me,” she said, her breath caressing his exposed ear.

What?

Her voice smelled of alcohol and cigarettes, a mix of odors that Jeremy knew only too well. Every night before bedtime, she begged him, ordered him to give her, a kiss on her dry and wrinkled lips.

The lilacs wafted more, weighing him down. Pinning him so he couldn’t move.

“Tell me, baby. Whisper in my ear,” she said. “Love will keep us together.”

At first, that night when there was no doubt that he was old enough to know better, he pretended not to hear. She wasn’t really touching him, so he thought that it wasn’t abuse. Not in the way that men abuse children. He told himself that it was not sexual. That his mother was lonely. Sad. Depressed.

“I’m not Ted,” he said, finally. In his head, he was screaming it at her, but in reality his voice was but a whisper. “Mom, please go away.”

Silence. Just the sound of the breeze blowing through the blinds.

“Go, Mom,” he repeated, his voice full of fear, but still low.

The bed moved. She inched closer. “You are my Teddy,” she said, ignoring the fear in his voice.

Jeremy inched farther away. “No, I’m Jeremy,” he said.

She let out a laugh. If his voice was soft, hers was loud. She didn’t care who heard her. She never cared about what anyone else thought. Occasionally, he’d admired her for that. There was a fierceness about his mother that made her different from the other moms.

“You are what I say you are,” she said. Her tone was flat. It was as if she was feeding on his anxiety, sucking in every drop of his fear. As he lay there, he couldn’t help but wonder if his mother got off on the fear that she induced wherever she could.

Threatening a clerk she felt had slighted her at the grocery store: “You’ll be eating cat food once I get finished with you. No job. No place to live. Just Little Friskies.”

“I’ll make a wallet out of your scrotum and I’ll give it to the Goodwill,” she’d once screamed at the paperboy when a copy of the News Tribune arrived wet on their doorstep. “Don’t think I won’t. Only a fool would underestimate me and what I will do when I’m pushed. Got that, you little prick? I want my paper dry next time.”

There was no next time. Despite declining subscription rolls, the paper’s circulation director dropped the Howells from home delivery. It wasn’t just the boy’s complaint. Jeremy watched his mother as she tried to wriggle out of a problem of her own making when the police came by. She was good. Very good. Somehow, Peggy Howell managed to convince them that the kid was overreacting.

“He was smoking pot on my front steps two weeks ago. You should be arresting him. The little creep scares the crap out of me. Other neighbors have complained.”

“What neighbors?” the officer asked.

“Look, I’m not a gossipmonger. I’m a truth teller. I’m not going to give you names of anyone. If they don’t have the balls to tell you when they’re being messed with, then too bad for them.”

“I see,” the officer said, though Jeremy, who was listening from the hallway, doubted anyone could see what his mother said. She was tough. She didn’t suffer any fools. But she didn’t always make sense.

Jeremy was always on edge and Peggy liked it that way.

One time she read him the riot act after he’d set the table with the forks and knives transposed in the place setting.

“Who’s to say I won’t poison you tonight, you little piece of garbage? Maybe you shouldn’t eat. I don’t think I would.”

“Sorry, Mom,” he said.

“Sorry is an excuse for the weak and stupid. You are neither. At least you shouldn’t be. I’m not. Your father certainly wasn’t,” she said. “Stay put.”

She picked up his plate of macaroni and cheese and disappeared into the kitchen.

A moment later she returned, a satisfied look on her face.

“You love me, don’t you?” she asked, setting the plate down.

“Yeah. What did you do with my food?”

“You have to trust me,” she said. “You have to eat it. Whatever happens will be a surprise.”

“Did you put something on my macaroni and cheese?”

She balled up her fist. “What did I tell you about questioning me?”

He looked at his plate, his eyes scanning the pasta for something, he wasn’t sure just what.

“That I never, ever should do that. Question you.”

“Eat your dinner, Jeremy.”

She put a forkful of food in her mouth and grinned. “So delicious. Potato chips on top, just the way you love it.”

He looked at his plate.

“We have nothing if not trust,” she said. It was her game. It was always her game. Later, he would read about people like his mother, those who enjoyed inflicting pain and fear on others.

“I’m scared,” he said.

“Then you are a little bitch and if you don’t eat that special macaroni and cheese, I’ll make you wear my dirty panties to school again. And, this time, I’ll call the school and tell the principal that you are stealing my clothes and that I want them to examine you in the nurse’s office.”

Jeremy’s eyes welled up with tears, but he willed himself to stop the deluge. He put the macaroni in his mouth and swallowed.

“Sometimes, Jeremy, I wonder what will become of you. You’re nothing like your father. In fact, you’re nothing at all.”

After the time Peggy came into his room and made her “love me like Ted” come-on, Jeremy stopped thinking of her as his mother. A mother wouldn’t do that. He vowed never again would he let her come into his room like some kind of pervert freak. He didn’t care if loneliness was her motivator. That was her problem.

Before he climbed into bed at night, Jeremy arranged a trio of empty Dr. Pepper bottles in front of his closed bedroom door. It was the only thing he could think to do. When Peggy swung the door open-drunk or high as she frequently seemed to be-the bottles fell and clattered on the hardwood floor. It was both an alarm and a deterrent. No more “midnight specials” with her son. No, no. No more of the cuddling that she desperately wanted. No more of her pretending that her son was her precious Teddy.

One Saturday afternoon Jeremy went outside with a handsaw and cut down the lilac bush. At the time, his mom was engrossed in a true crime book about mothers who kill their children. She had fanned the book at him as he exited the back door. Everything she did was an implied threat, a promise to be kept. He bundled up the limbs and put them in the trash. Before closing the lid to the garbage can, Jeremy threw up all over the branches. He studied his vomit like it was some kind of a work of art. Masticated particles of a ham sandwich stuck to the cut twigs and heart-shaped leaves of the remains of the lilac bush.

It was the prettiest thing he’d seen in a long, long time.