Dark Things I Adore

by Katie Lattari

  Now, laughing is the furthest thing from my mind.

  Audra suddenly turns her head and looks behind us out the rear windshield. I turn my head to follow her gaze but see only the empty dirt road slithering off into the darkened tree line. She keeps looking, her eyes squinting.

  “What is it?” The silence all around us feels material, like my eardrums have burst. She looks this way and that behind us for another moment or two.

  “You ever get the feeling you’re being watched?” She turns her brown eyes on me. I look out the rear windshield, seeing nothing but trees, grass, a potholed dirt road. But there is so much darkness out there, so much density. I feel surrounded by the unseen. By that which wishes to remain concealed. By that which I wish to remain concealed. “Probably just some animal. I can sense them sometimes,” she says, turning back around. “Hunter’s instincts.”

  “Do you really think something’s there?”

  “Hard to say.” She shrugs. “Unless you want to go look.” That hinky Colfax smile breaks on her lips; a dare.

  “Not particularly,” I reply, her beauty and magnetism distracting me from my low-level paranoia, my tender ankle. We are so alone out here. No one, it seems, for miles. Just the sunset. The blank forest. “I’d rather stay right here. With you. In your car.”

  “Suit yourself.” Audra laughs. Her eyes fall upon the open marsh. They rest on the landscape lightly, as if the whole scene might be in soft focus for her. Quiet gathers between us. We’re both eased back in our seats, looking out onto the cragged, spooky land. She, perhaps, really is looking for moose, deer, bear, rabbits, foxes. All I am doing is looking out into the rough landscape, the scene registering as an indiscriminate wash of colors and shapes, a melted watercolor, aware that I was a player on just such a stage before. But not inside of a Volvo. On the hood of a truck. But a woman, yes. A sunset, yes.

  I feel Audra’s body heat, hear her quiet breaths, smell her faint perfume. The rosemary from her kitchen. I want nothing more than to take her, to feel grounded in her. She is a vitalizing violet shock in the near dark. I have been holding my prayer for so long, for too long.

  “Audra—”

  “Do you hear that?” Audra’s eyes are suddenly keen on me. My eyes search her face, wanting to see a flicker of desire for me, but instead I find she is simply alert, ear tilted up.

  “Maybe we could—” I slip my hand on top her hers.

  “Shh,” she says, but she does not pull her hand away. We are both quiet. I listen with her, the sun all but gone now. Then I hear it. “There!” she whispers, her fingers intertwining with mine, squeezing. It comes again, a low, bass sound, fading from blaring to weak. It comes again, lasting for four solid seconds.

  “It—it sounds like a moan,” I whisper. She bites her lip in mild anxiety and looks at me, nods her head a little. She turns the key in the ignition, flicks the headlights on. The road illuminates before us. Low brush borders the narrow dirt road ribboned out, bog on the left, dense tree line on the right. The insistent moaning sound—a lowing almost—is more urgent now.

  “It’s ahead of us, I think, whatever it is,” she whispers, leaning toward the glass of the windshield, straining to pin down the source of the noise.

  “Perhaps we should head back.”

  “I’ll pull forward, slowly, a few yards at a time,” she says, ignoring me.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.” She laughs gently. “Are you scared?” The knowing smile, the closing darkness, the mystery of the desperate sound, the centerless sense of kinship with this road, this view—I feel myself growing aroused.

  “Never. I’m with my local.”

  She smiles bigger and eases us ahead cautiously, dipping through a few potholes, weaving slowly around some errant rocks. We scan the road and the ditches alongside as we inch forward, the sound lower, more tired. Our tension and my growing desire for Audra are almost unbearable to me now, as if the two are linked, intertwined; they are muddled up, the moaning out there somehow my own moaning: desperate, pathetic, visceral, iris mulberry. These desolate woods are manifesting my need for her, drawing us on, haunting us. A sudden, short gasp-shriek from Audra, a sudden, unsteady shape in the road. She hits the brakes, the red taillights flaring behind us.

  An impossibly gangly, young moose calf has stumbled into the road. Its improbably long legs shake. It stands there dumbly, before us, not knowing what to do.

  “Ah, shit,” Audra sighs. “Look. In the ditch.” Audra points down and to the left. At the very edge of the range of the headlights lies a hulking brown mass, fur thick and bristly. A full-grown moose. It groans and snorts and moves its lanky front legs, agitated, unable to stand, its back legs seemingly still, dead. Audra turns the wheel as far left as she can and inches forward as slowly as she dares so she can set the headlights more squarely on the injured animal. It is huge. Monstrous. Eyes watery and exhausted. Audra puts her window down. The pained lowing of the moose in the ditch is loud now, aggressive.

  “Audra, maybe we should go.” We sit there for a moment, transfixed. I look at the calf. I can feel Audra thinking hard beside me. She leans over me, her hand reaching down between my legs. My breath catches in my throat, but my eyes stay trained. I hear her pull the glovebox open in front of me, and her door opens a moment later.

  “Stay here.” She gets out of the car, holding something, and shuts the door behind her.

  “Audra—Jesus—” I lean over her seat, grasping the now-driverless wheel. “What are you doing? Where are you going?” A spike of genuine fear flashes through me.

  That giant, brown animal. The empty black road. Her squall of copper hair. The jagged red line on her young palm. The bog, mocking me, welcoming me back.

  She approaches the calf, who chirps and squonk-squonks like a wooden door creaking open and closed. It stumbles dumbly backward into the ditch beside its mother, who emits guttural groans and honks angry, chapped, chesty noises. “Fuck. Fuck,” I whisper. Though I fear for Audra, I do not get out of the car. I do not go to pull her back to safety. It is beyond me. She is beyond me.

  All of this is.

  I can see Audra speaking gently to the animals, but I can’t make out what she’s saying over the squonks of the baby and the frantic groaning of the mother. The sounds assault my ears nearly nonstop now. Audra is looking down hard at the grown moose, who keeps trying to use its front legs to stand, but the effort is horrific and desperate to behold. It digs and collapses, digs and collapses. The beast is full of pain and fear. Terror.

  It’s so quick, what happens. It’s unfolding already before I understand that Audra has even raised her arm.

  BANG.

  BANG.

  BANG.

  BANG.

  BANG.

  My hands fly to my ears. I am cowering.

  Audra’s arm still raised. A powerful black pistol in her hand. Her body steady as a stone totem. The moose in the ditch is silent. Still. Dark-red blood soaks the area around the ear and eye facing us. The calf has scrambled frantically down the side of the road. It picks its way down into the ditch. Audra fluidly lowers the gun, flicks the safety on. She approaches the edge of the road and the shape of her name starts to form in my throat, but it never arrives. I just watch. She carefully takes the slope down into the ditch, standing not three feet from the enormous animal. She looks at it with fondness. With sadness. I look at it, too. Its once heaving chest is still. I watch Audra swipe her hand under one of her eyes. She takes a deep breath and puffs out her cheeks in release.

  At the edge of audibility, the calf cries out half-heartedly. Once, then twice. Audra turns to face it, sees it is just standing in the ditch down the road twenty yards or so. It doesn’t know what to do. Audra stands there and looks at it, her back to me, for a long minute. I imagine she and the orphaned baby are looking at each other, but it’s too dark to see clearly.
>
  Audra climbs up the embankment, her face completely composed now. She makes her way to the car. With her gun. She gets in and closes the door, opens the glovebox. She places the gun in a case, closes the case, then closes the glovebox. It’s been there this whole time, I realize. From the time she picked me up in Bangor to this very moment. Audra has had a gun.

  “My guess is a logging truck clipped it.” Audra sniffs, then takes a deep breath, gathering herself. “The hip, the back legs. To do that kind of damage on an animal that big—had to be a huge truck. One leg was completely snapped. The other was covered in blood. God knows how long it was there suffering.” We sit in the car, heat on, headlights grotesquely bright on the dead moose. The baby has come a few yards closer but still stands in the darkened ditch. It makes no sound.

  I want to shut my eyes tight against this, as if that might obliterate what I’ve just seen. I want to remember the bog as it was, as I had known it. Not like this. Not this place, too. Christ.

  “And the calf?” My voice sounds separate from myself. Audra is quiet. We look at the calf, which looks at us, too afraid of the car and the lights to come nearer to its dead mother. How long had they been there like that, together? “You did what you had to do. It was a kindness, Audra.” My eyes feast on the stark, horrible form of the moose. The brown coat, the blood, the emptiness of it now. Then the calf, down the road, so vulnerable, alone, already nearly consumed by the dark, by its fate.

  Four

  She Can Speak for Herself

  Juniper

  June 9, 1988

  “So, gang—what did you think of Old Gus’s annual scavenger hunt?” I look around at Moss, Zephyr, Ash, Barley, Trillium, Coral, and Mantis. I hear grumbles. I see scowls or the sheepish rolling of eyes. We’re sitting around a campfire in an idyllic clearing deep in the uninhabited part of the Lupine Valley property. Coral’s pick. She showed us this spot, which sits about halfway between the Lupine Valley Village and the lake, with such pride the first time she brought us all down here. She was beaming, veritably twirling around the clearing as she pointed out the arcing birch trees and scattered boulders left behind from when Ice Age glaciers dragged, melted, and scored the earth. She asked us if we thought it was beautiful. We told her we did. She asked us didn’t we think it would be a great place to paint, sketch, carve—make art of any kind? We told her we did. And this seemed to make her so happy, to have that genuine approval, to be giving something so beautiful to us.

  Right now the clearing is crowded with wild, jumping shadows in the firelight. Dusk is falling, and we are back to our core group, away from the other artists and instructors we’ve spent the better part of the day with. I get the sense that most of the group prefers it this way, just us. I’m always saying how much like a family we feel. Mantis always jokes that we’re more of a cult.

  “Oh, come on,” Trillium says. “It wasn’t that bad! I thought it was kind of fun. And clever, too—asking us to focus on our senses, which are so important to our art. See a spider web. Smell a blooming flower. Touch a muddy rock. Hear splashing water.” She genially nudges Moss, who shakes his head like a true grouch.

  “Wasn’t a big fan of my partner,” Moss jabs.

  “Toad is a nice person.” I sigh, tired of his day-long pout. “And thank you, Trill. Bless you, Trill,” I say, appreciative, exasperated, trying to hold on to the positivity. “Gus only puts one together for the summer session, so you should really all consider yourselves lucky.”

  “What I’m taking from this is only come in fall or winter. Got it,” Barley jokes as he lets his stick-skewered marshmallow brown over the flames.

  “Sticks. In. The. Mud.” Trillium points at each of them in turn. I look around at the group, all of whom are animated with begrudging smiles except for Coral and Mantis. Who did not participate in the scavenger hunt. Staff usually doesn’t.

  I am stilled when I look at Coral as she sits hunched and small, apart from the rest of us just a little. Blank. Everyone else is sitting right next to at least one other person. But Coral is a small island, alone on the forest floor. She looks…miserable. But at least she’s up and about. It had taken some real doing to get her to come with us for even this little get-together. I wasn’t sure she would. She could barely muster the will to join Mantis on the front steps of Focus earlier to watch the scavenger hunt unfold.

  When I went to Focus to gather Moss for the day’s activities early this morning, Coral was in his bed, fast asleep, in layers of clothing and blankets. Her little oval face had looked spectral hanging in the relative dark of his cabin. It seemed like Moss had been awake for a while. Wired, hair disheveled. When I looked over his shoulder, the painting on his easel was of a woman. Dark shades of maroon, ochre, brown. Drooped. Deflated. Her face a wash of tear tracks. I was struck by how good it was, despite my horror. He grudgingly let me in when he saw the concern in my face.

  “She’s in one of her bad ways,” Moss whispered to me as we hovered over the bed. “She’s usually fine, you know. But she gets like this sometimes.” He shrugged. “She drove out here at, like, three this morning.”

  “Is she hurt?” I whispered, brimming with worry. I’d never seen her like this. Most of the time Coral is a busy-brained hummingbird, intense in her cleaning work, intense in her art, intense in her revelry with us, teeth and beer bottles gleaming in the summer sun.

  “No, nothing like that. Just—sad.” I looked over at his easel then at the messy bunches of paper and canvases on his desk. Fractions of Coral visible. “She just came here and cried and went to sleep.” Moss looked at her intensely as she rested. I studied my friend, thinking about him painting her in these moments that had clearly been so full of difficulty. The canvas was her, evocative of her even though there was something …ghastly and mashed about it. I didn’t know how to feel. But I did have to concede, it was striking.

  When it was time to leave for the scavenger hunt, Coral was awake but not talking. She just looked at us with tired, empty eyes. Tracking back and forth slowly between the two of us. It had been startling for me. Then Mantis arrived and took over. Told us to get on with our stupid fucking game. Moss and I checked in on her throughout the day, tried to get her to have some water or eat some crackers. She just shook her head no. I tried. Moss tried. Mantis tried.

  At the end of the day, she and Mantis were still sitting outside on the front steps of Focus, Coral looking out of it, Mantis looking stony. We convinced her to come hang with us. We told her she could even pick the spot. And so here we are.

  “I had a nice time, too,” Zephyr admits. I swallow and look away from Coral, catch eyes with Zephyr. She smiles at me slyly. We were, fortuitously, paired together by the luck of the draw. Out of the view of others, while I worried over a scavenger item, she kissed me down by the lake. I’d looked at her, stunned at my luck, grateful that she was not the coward I am. And then kissing was about all we did the rest of the afternoon.

  “And Barley, you’re such a liar.” Trillium laughs, pulling her curly hair up in a bun. “You were loving ticking the little boxes off! I saw you dragging your poor partner all over creation, for Christ’s sake.” She snorts, which gets almost all of us laughing. Coral even smiles a little.

  “Fine, fine.” Barley holds his hands up in defeat.

  We soon start talking about our various painting projects, and Mantis, clearly bored, gets up to gather some more downed brush for the fire. I keep an eye on Coral, and relief floods me as the artsy chatter seems to bring her back into herself bit by bit. Twenty minutes in, she still looks tired, but her eyes are alert, and she’s leaning in toward the circle as everyone talks through their progress.

  “And Coral,” I say, “what about you?” Mantis grows still at the fire’s edge, only his hands breaking small branches in half and tossing them into the pit. He’s listening. Intently. Moss looks at Coral gently but with concentration. If she speaks now, it would be th
e first time all day. Coral blushes under the group’s gaze. She swallows then clears her throat. We wait for several long moments, and I worry she isn’t going to speak after all.

  “Well, I—I wouldn’t say that I have a project, exactly.” Her low voice sounds scratchy, like smoked cardboard. Less than confident. But still, I feel like I can breathe again when I hear it.

  “Sure you do,” Moss encourages her. “You’ve organically been circling around birds. Drawings of birds. Sketches of birds.”

  “Birds are fantastic subjects,” Ash affirms, jumping in quickly to try to help. Coral looks strengthened by their words. She has a small twig in her hands and is gently tracing the top of her foot with it.

  “Oh, well—then, yeah. I—I’ve been drawing a lot of birds.” She nods, lifting her eyes to us and then dropping them again. “Pencil and charcoal mostly.”

  “Blackbirds. Crows. Lots of dark-shaded birds, right, Cor?” Moss says. She nods. “She’s a real natural and can draw on anything, with anything. And wings—I would say the wings—”

  “Yes, with a special focus on the wings,” Coral picks up the thread gratefully, her voice slow and methodical, like someone relearning how to hold a conversation. “Very…fine-tuned things, wings. So, I’m…playing with the idea of, like—what do you call them? Schematics. Engineering schematics in some of them.” She swallows, a dreaminess to her voice. “While still working to—to show the delicate natural textures. Moss has been helping me so much.” She smiles over at him, her eyes lifting with confidence to his. Moss smiles back an earnest, unjaded, unironic smile. Rare for him.

  “We have fun in old Focus,” he says. I think of the state of her this morning, the types of drawings that fill Focus as we speak, and I feel a stone in my stomach. “Coral will bring these great big sketch pads—thick—like portfolio size, but she’ll also bring small little notebooks, like the kind you see detectives in movies carry around—” Moss is energized.