Shattered

Alex think of the surgeon's scalpel worrying at the hard surface of a bone.
        “Who's there?” Doyle finally asked. He was surprised at the strength and self-possession so evident in his voice. Indeed, he was surprised that he could even speak at all.
        The wire stopped moving.
        “Who's there?” Doyle demanded once more, louder this time but with less genuine courage and more false bravado than before.
        Rapid footsteps-certainly those of a large man-sounded on the concrete promenade floor and were quickly swallowed up in the steady roar of the storm.
        They waited, listening intently. But the man was gone.
        Alex fumbled for the light switch by the door, found it.
        For a moment they were both blinded by the sudden glare. Then the familiar lines of the tritely designed motel room filtered back to them.
        “He'll return,” Colin said.
        The boy was standing by the desk, wearing only his skivvies and his Coke-bottle glasses. His thin brown legs were trembling uncontrollably, the bony knees nearly knocking together. Doyle, also standing there in his underwear, wondered if his own body was betraying his state of mind.
        “Maybe not,” he said. “Now that he knows we're up and around, he might not risk coming back.”
        Colin was adamant. “He will.”
        Doyle knew what the situation demanded, but he did not want to face up to it. He did not want to go out there in the rain, looking for the man who had tried to pick the room lock.
        “We could call the police,” Colin said.
        “Oh? We still haven't anything to tell them, any proof. We'd sound like a couple of raving lunatics.”
        Colin went back to his bed and sat down, pulled the blanket around himself, so that he looked like a miniature American Indian.
        In the bathroom, Doyle drew a glass of tap water and drank it slowly, swallowing with some difficulty.
        As he rinsed the glass and put it on the fake-marble shelf beside the porcelain sink, he caught sight of his face in the mirror. He was pale and haggard. The fear was etched in painfully obvious lines at the corners of his bloodless mouth and all around his eyes. He did not like what he saw, and he could barely meet his own gaze.
        Christ, he thought, doesn't the frightened little boy ever fade away and let the man come through? Won't you ever outgrow it, Alex? Are you going to be so easily terrified all the rest of your life? Now that you have a wife to protect? Do you think that maybe Colin will grow up fast enough so that he will be able to look after both you and Courtney?
        Angry with himself, half ashamed, but still undeniably frightened, he turned away from the mirror and his own accusing countenance, and went back into the main room.
        Colin had not moved from the bed or dropped the blanket from his shoulders. He looked at Doyle, his large eyes magnified by the eyeglasses, the speck of fear magnified as well. “What would he have done if he'd been able to pick the lock without waking us?”
        Doyle stood there in the middle of the room, unable to answer.
        “When he got in here with us,” the boy said, “what would he have done? Like you said when all this started-we don't have anything worth stealing.”
        Doyle nodded stupidly.
        “I think he's just what you said,” Colin went on. “I think he's like one of those people you read about in the papers. I think he's a maniac.” His voice had become almost inaudible.
        Though he knew that it was no real answer and was probably even untrue, Alex said, “Well… he's gone now.”
        Colin just looked at him.
        The boy's expression might have meant anything, or nothing at all. But Alex saw in it the beginnings of doubt and a subtle shift of judgment. The boy, he felt certain, was reevaluating him just as surely as the rain pattered on the roof overhead. And although Colin was far too intelligent to sum up anyone in an absolute term or category, too clever to think in blacks and whites, his opinion of Doyle was this minute changing for the worse, no matter how minimally.
        But, Doyle asked himself, did one child's opinion mean all that much to him? And he knew immediately that when it was this child, the answer was yes. All of his life Doyle had been afraid of people, too timid to let himself be close to anyone. He had been too unsure of himself to risk loving. Until he had met