Lullaby

Chapter 21

This wasn't just one night. It just feels that way. This was every night, through Texas and Arizona, on into Nevada, cutting through California and up through Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana. Every night, driving in a car is the same. Wherever.

Every place is the same place in the dark.

«My son, Patrick, isn't dead,» Helen Hoover Boyle says.

He's dead in the county medical records, but I don't say anything.

With Helen driving, Mona and Oyster are asleep in the backseat. Asleep or listening. I sit in the passenger side of the front seat. Leaning against my door, I'm as far from Helen as I can get. With my head pillowed on my arm, I'm where I can listen without looking at her.

And Helen talks to me without looking back. This is both of us looking straight ahead at the road in the headlights rushing under the hood of the car.

«Patrick's at the New Continuum Medical Center,» she says. «And I fully believe that someday he'll make a complete recovery.»

Her daily planner book, bound in red leather, is on the front seat between us.

Driving through North Dakota and Minnesota, I ask, how did she find the culling spell?

And with one pink fingernail, she pushes a button somewhere in the dark and puts the car in cruise control. With something else in the dark, she turns on the high-beam headlights.

«I used to be a client representative for Skin Tone Cosmetics,» she says. «The trailer we lived in wasn't very nice.» She says, «My husband and I.»

His name is John Boyle in the county medical records.

«You know how it is with your first,» she says. «People give you so many toys and books. I don't even know who actually brought the book. It was just a book in a pile of books.»

According to the county, this must've been twenty years ago.

«You don't need me to tell you what happened,» she says. «But John always thought it was my fault.»

According to police records, there were six domestic disturbance calls to the Boyle home, lot 175 at the Buena Noche Mobile Home Park, in the weeks following the death of Patrick Raymond Boyle, aged six months.

Driving through Wisconsin and Nebraska, Helen says, «I was going door-to-door, cold-calling for Skin Tone.» She says, «I didn't go back to work right away. It must've been, God, a year and a half after Patrick's … after the morning we found Patrick.»

She was walking around the trailer development where they lived, Helen tells me, and she met a young woman just like the woman wearing the apron patterned with little chickens. The same dead funeral flowers brought home from the mortuary. The same empty crib.

«I could make a lot of money just selling heavy foundation and cover-up,» Helen says, smiling, «especially toward the end of the month, when money was tight.»

Twenty years ago, this other woman was the same age as Helen, and while they talked, she showed Helen the nursery, the baby pictures. The woman's name was Cynthia Moore. She had a black eye.

«And I saw they had a copy of our same book,» Helen says. «Poems and Rhymes from Around the World.»

These other people kept it open to the same page it was the night their child died. The book, the bedding in the crib, they were trying to keep everything the same.

«Of course it was the same page as our book,» Helen says.

At home John Boyle was drinking a lot of beer every night. He said he didn't want to have another child because he didn't trust her. If she didn't know what she'd done wrong, it was too much of a risk.

With my hand on her heated leather seats, it feels as if I'm touching another person.

Driving through Colorado, Kansas, and Missouri, she says, «The other mother in the trailer park, one day there was a yard sale at their place. All their baby things, all folded in piles on the lawn, marked a quarter apiece. There was the book, and I bought it.» Helen says, «I asked the man inside why Cindy was selling everything, and he just shrugged.»

According to county medical records, Cynthia Moore drank liquid drain cleaner and died of esophageal hemorrhaging and asphyxiation three months after her child had died of no apparent cause.

«John was worried about germs so he'd burned all of Patrick's things,» she says. «I bought the book of poems for ten cents. I remember it was a beautiful day outside.»

Police records show three more domestic disturbance calls to lot 175 at the Buena Noche Mobile Home Park. A week after Cynthia Moore's suicide, John Boyle was found dead of no apparent cause. According to the county, his high blood alcohol concentration might've caused sleep apnea. Another likely cause was positional asphyxiation. He may have been so drunk that he fell unconscious in a position that kept him from breathing. Either way, there were no marks on the body. There was no apparent cause of death on the death certificate.

Driving through Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, Helen says, «Killing John wasn't anything I did on purpose.» She says, «I was just curious.»

The same as me and Duncan.

«I was just testing a theory,» she says. «John kept saying that Patrick's ghost was with us. And I kept telling him that Patrick was still alive in the hospital.»

Twenty years later, baby Patrick's still in the hospital, she says.

Crazy as this sounds, I don't say anything. How a baby must look after twenty years in a coma or on life support or whatever, I can't imagine.

Picture Oyster on a feeding tube and a catheter for most of his life.

There are worse things you can do to the people you love than kill them.

In the backseat, Mona sits up and stretches her arms. She says, «In ancient Greece, people wrote their strongest curses with the nails from shipwrecks.» She says, «Sailors who died at sea weren't given a proper funeral. The Greeks knew that dead people who aren't buried are the most restless and destructive spirits.»

And Helen says, «Shut up.»

Driving through West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York, Helen says, «I hate people who claim they can see ghosts.» She says, «There are no ghosts. When you die, you're dead. There's no afterlife. People who claim they can see ghosts are just looking for attention. People who believe in reincarnation are just postponing their lives.»

She smiles. «Fortunately for me,» she says, «I've found a way to punish those people and make a great deal of money.»

Her cell phone rings.

She says, «If you don't believe me about Patrick, I can show you this month's hospital bill.»

Her phone rings again.

We're driving across Vermont when she says this. She says part of it while we're crossing Louisiana in the dark, then Arkansas and Mississippi. All those little eastern states, some nights, we'd cross two or three.

Flipping her phone open, she says, «This is Helen.» She rolls her eyes at me and says, «An invisible baby sealed inside your bedroom wall? And it cries all night? Really?»

Other parts of this story, I didn't know until we got home and I did some research.

Pressing the phone against her chest, Helen tells me, «Everything I'm telling you is strictly off the record.» She says, «Until we find the Book of Shadows, we can't change what's happened. Using a spell from that book, I'll make sure Patrick makes a full recovery.»