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Recently, he feels like the kid’s been looking deader than usual.
That in itself is no small feat. There’s always been a suggestion of other to him, smudged in the corner of his downturned mouth, a careful, practiced detachment not at all like the brattish sureness he’s come to associate with children. He certainly doesn’t possess any of what’d characterised Colin’s own childhood: confidence and curiosity, casual sadism and the specific kind of attractively boyish poise worn by heirs and kings, dismissed by Piper as arrogance whenever he cared to bring it up.
Well. Arrogant. Her specific words had been desperately annoying. He doesn’t think the kid’s –Adam’s– ever managed to annoy Piper. He doesn’t think Piper has the capacity to be annoyed by the kid.
For what it’s worth, he’s not sure if he does either. Annoyed, no; unsettled, certainly: there’s a disconnect between Adam and his surroundings that bears on Colin most heavily in Piper’s absence, when there’s really nothing but whatever illegal something-or-other he’d chosen to acquire for himself this time to distract from Adam’s sullen, dead-eyed stare. For what it’s worth, the kid’s a delight, polite-not-quite-verging-on-subordinate, regarding Colin in half-reverent silence when he tosses a “Hey, kid,” his way, miraculously unbothered by his quite frankly startling lack of appeal to the both of them. On weekdays he works for some mechanic or other where he puts his big, skinny, alien-ish hands to work doing something other than unnerving Colin; on weekends he sits on the patio while handymen tear down the kitchen and tends to the garden that’d come with the house and had had the misfortune of falling under Piper’s responsibility, curling shy scions ‘round his deft-and-callous, slippery-looking, hands.
“He’s a good kid,” insists Colin one shitty, sweltering, Henrietta afternoon, more to himself than anyone else– though maybe a little bit to Piper as well. (Colin isn’t unsettled by Piper’s unspoken, unacknowledged, fondness for the kid. Really, he isn’t.) (He’s had dogs, he’s had cats, –he had a snake, once– he can respect the appeal of something just– simple. Obedient.) (Never mind that the moment he’s got the kid pinned down to something calculable, he pulls something else on him, something like– this.) Adam’s crouched on the last step, like he always is when he’s not expressly needed, noiselessly fretting over a spiky leaf of one of Piper’s aloe vera.
Unsurprisingly, Piper makes no attempt to entertain either of them. She's sitting on the porch, long hair in a bun and long legs crossed in a way that just obscures his view of Adam’s head, buried in an arcane-looking hardcover book. He hadn't cared to ask her what it was about, and she hadn't cared to tell him. Around Adam, she seems a little less herself, and Adam, a little less dead.
But only a little. Not quite enough to distract Colin from the brief flashes of foliage ‘round Adam’s wrist: heat-withered leaves trembling in the nonexistent breeze.
“He just needs– maintenance,” he continues, aware of the maybe-uncertainty that pulls taut his vowels, even more so of the flickering outline of Adam’s shoulders and knees, an insubstantiality that threatens to envelop him entirely– snatch him away from Colin for real, even. There is, as always, something unearthly and sinister to the rightness of his place in the garden, like the ground could open up and swallow him whole, and he’d be alright with it. At home, even. “That’s children, right?” He glances at Piper. “A mother’s touch?”
Piper doesn’t respond; neither does Adam, even if there’s no way he should be able to hear Colin from where he is. Dead-looking as he may be, Colin feels as if its an aptitude of his: the ability to look and listen and fold himself away. If Adam were any other kid, he’d respect that.
As it is, it’s just supremely creepy, and in the way that Colin knows shouldn't phase him but manages to anyways no less.
“He needs to be pruned.” Is what he decides, eventually.
Turning the page of her book with one manicured hand, Piper says: “I don’t prune.”
Colin pauses. “Well. I’m not doing it.”
As a result, the kid (–Adam. For some reason, Piper doesn’t like it when he calls him the kid; for some reason, he doesn’t like calling him Adam.) grows and flourishes unfettered and untaught, only meeting Colin’s eyes in brief flashes, and probably only then to flaunt the intense dark of the bags under his eyes. He’s studious, industrious, well-spoken, not at all like Colin in his youth, and, miraculously, manages to occasionally coax from Piper some strange approximation of fathomable affection, not at all like Colin currently.
After a brief period of angst and mulling it over, he manages to tell her this one night over pinot gris and the shattered head of a Balinese effigy he’d had Dean Allen fetch for him for the express purpose of bowling it across the carpet. In his head, he is suave, and charming, and Piper falls girlishly into his arms; in reality, he waits until she has started poking at her tilapia to tell her: “I think you’re starting to like the kid more than me.”
“Which is not something I’d anticipated,” he adds when she doesn’t immediately respond, preoccupied as she is with the separation of one of the tilapia’s eyes from its skull. “I know we didn’t want children, but I’ll be honest, I didn’t anticipate it detracting from our relationship quite this much.” He sips from his glass of wine, then, on second thought and to at least appear considerate, pours her another. Piper snorts.
“Whatever,” is her response. She pries the eye out of its socket, peering disdainfully at her too-full glass of wine before swallowing it with uncharacteristic relish. “Take him to school, then. Keep him out of the house. Just don’t touch his plants.”
“Your plants.”
“Same thing.”
She spears the effigy through its eye socket with one heel as she leaves the table, kicking it to him. Adam gets home an hour later, nodding to Colin in greeting before padding off to tend to his– Piper’s– their plants and most likely approximate life. His cheeks are gaunt, the smattering of freckles over them like oil, like dried blood, like dirt, aesthetically pleasing in similar fashion to the deer skull hung over Colin’s desk in his office.
“Kid,” Colin starts.
When Adam turns around, every plant in the house opens its buds; when Adam turns around, the garden erupts, thickening the evening with heat and crickets and cicadas and other. He doesn’t just look but feel dead in a way that Colin can appreciate– he can relate to Piper in that, at least.
He stops. “Never mind.” he finishes, not lamely, not uncertainly, just stiffly. If Adam notices, he doesn’t respond, silhouette cutting sharply into the shadowy corners of the unlit porch and its darker garden. Colin watches him vanish into his room, and does his level best to ignore the smell of dirt and new beginnings as he gets up to grind the rest of the effigy into the carpet, and pour himself a third glass of wine.
He drives the kid to Aglionby the next day at six-thirty sharp, when the buds of Piper’s daisies haven’t opened yet, when the grass is still dew-damp and the air not-yet sticky with unnatural swelter. Piper’d gotten up early to see Adam off, long nails pressing into the worn collar of his shirt, lingering just long enough to offset the disturbingly obvious lack of life in his eyes if only by a fraction.
“Make sure he makes friends with the right people,” she’d told Colin before they’d left. “Not your people. He’s like a lamb. They’ll eat him alive.”
Watching Adam head into reception, his stride noiseless and purposeful, he feels a little bit like she’d got it the wrong way round.