Page 24 of Cook

Unfurling my fingers, I released my grip when it was apparent that she wouldn’t take the book from me. She wasn’t angry that I had found it and looked through it without permission. I should’ve felt bad about invading his privacy, but I just wanted to see Cook’s face again.

I wanted to know everything about him.

“Those were hard days,” said Vivi on a small sigh. “Do you see the smudges on his hands?”

I squinted at the photo. “I thought it was just the angle. Shadows.”

“No. Morris was a great artist. Wait here.” Vivi left the bedroom quickly, and I refocused on the picture before my eyes.

I looked at Cook’s juvenile hands covered in darkened smudges. I flipped through a few more pictures, catching sight of those dirty hands.

Cook, an artist? It was a talent I hadn’t considered him having. But I didn’t know him.

Vivi walked back into Cook’s bedroom, carrying an old camera—even I knew it was old when everyone had cell phones. There had been plenty of pictures taken of me in compromised positions, and all of them in the later years had been taken with a phone. One bastard made me look through all the photos he’d taken, one for every time he purchased my services from Signora.

Vivi also carried a couple of notebooks. The edges of the paper were gray. Even the top of the notebook had black ink and gray lead upon them. Anything else was probably more expensive. Even the camera looked older than what would have been new twenty years ago.

I remembered the clothes in the photos too. Cook’s jeans had holes in the knees, and I wondered about their ability to afford new ones. When I’d been a kid, things had been new, fresh, and large. Our house had been large enough that no one reached the room I shared with Mel before the masked man leaped out the window with me in tow.

A shudder ripped through my body, bringing me back to the now.

Cook’s mom flipped to the first page of the notebook on top and extended it to me. I took it and studied the first sketch. The scratched gray lines were mostly doodles, like he was drawing when he should have been paying attention in class. His math work and social studies were off in the corner. He had written over the numbers and places with black ink and gray lead from his doodles, which were really good. Animals and places and landscapes, like whatever he saw at the moment. He had even done portraits of other kids in a classroom setting.

“These are really good.” I turned to the next page. “Cook is really talented.”

Vivi smiled proudly her lips turned down at the edges sadly. “In another life, Morris would’ve gone off to art school or maybe would’ve been architect or a curator at a museum. Something important to keep art and beauty alive in such a corrupt world.” She dragged her finger down one of the doodles done over—what appeared to be—notes on algebraic theory. Her finger came away with a lead smudge.

I flipped over the next few pages of homework and then to more doodles. They were good, but darker.

Vivi suddenly leaned closer. “Go back a page.”

I flipped back to a portrait of a man who looked a lot like Cook does now without the beard and long hair. There was something twisted in the lines of this man’s face, a ghost of something that showed how tainted he was. The sense was subtle, but definitely there, and it made me feel like ants were crawling all over my skin.

“That’s Morris’s dad,” said Vivi with a hint of regret in her voice.

She lifted her hand, placing it under her nose, then closed her eyes and turned her head away.

Confused, I studied the man closer until I could see how the shadows moved across his face. The lines where this man scowled andwore his anger. There weren’t lines that shared a history of laughs and smiles, and the scars combined with the hollowed cheeks and deep shadows around his eyes to reveal something evil in this man.

I turned the page. More images of that man in different poses floated across the lined pages, and there was one with him standing over someone else—a boy curled in a corner. The evil man had his fist raised and a grimace on his eye-less face. From there, the beings Cook had drawn had no faces, only darkened limbs, like a monster.

It reminded me of the one I imagined under my bed or in the closet. After the first few times I saw them, I asked my father to put a lock on my closet door. Mel had thought I was being ridiculous, but Daddy protected me and gave me that lock. Daddy made me safe again, and Cook could do that for me now. At least then, I had somewhere to lock away the phantoms that haunted me.

It looked like Cook poured his monsters onto this page. I didn’t quite understand, but something told me Cook had the same monsters as me? I didn’t think so. His monster seemed to be one, and not interested in sexually depraved things.

Cook had one monster—his father.

My heart broke for him and for Vivi too.

I blinked at her as she still focused on anything else in the room but the notebook. When I closed it, she jolted and then sighed as though it locked away something no one should have to face.

And the change in her was too drastic. Like I had just watched her transform into another person and back to the woman I met yesterday.

“I got you this too,” said Vivi, smiling and holding out the ancient camera.

I stared at it, unsure what she wanted me to do with it.

“You can take pictures,” she added after a few long and awkward seconds. “If you want.”

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